By Vincent L. Hall
While it mostly goes unnoticed or unknown, the Washington Post carries a banner beneath its masthead. Right under the name of the 146-year-old publication is its mission statement/value statement/tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
So, when I read the latest headline, I was instantly attracted to what has become as controversial as it is convincing.
Opinion: Men are lost! Here’s a map out of the wilderness! Dayyum!! Christina Emba, already famous for a thought-provoking read of America’S current culture, “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” started quickly from the gate.
“I started noticing it a few years ago. Men, especially young men, were getting weird. It might have been the “incels” who first caught my attention, spewing self-pitying venom online, sometimes venturing out to attack the women they believed had done them wrong.
It might have been the complaints from the women around me. “Men are in their flop era,” one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be. It might have been the new ways companies were trying to reach men.
Once my curiosity was piqued, I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.
They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn, or sucked into the altright and the web of misogynistic communities known as the “manosphere.”
Before I go further into the article, let me clarify a few questions you are undoubtedly entertaining. Emba writes far above the sixth-grade level and galaxies above the cultural knowledge of the average Baby Boomer.
After admitting that she began to find young men weird a few years ago, she mentions a group of them that are not readily familiar to most.
“Incels” are self-identifying members of an online subculture based around the inability to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as “seldom” or “celibacy.”
Yeah, that is a real thing. And before venturing deeper, imagine how brutal and ballistic every previous generation of men would be if they lacked intimate relationships and sex. Research infers that most serial/mass killers since the 1960’s had problems wooing women and retaining relationships.
Hell. If you listen to the scope of popular music from 1940-1990, you will rightly conclude that every hit was about looking for love, newfound love, lost love, sex, sexiness, and, in the words of Marvin Gaye, “sexual healing.”
“OOOh, when I get that feeling, I need sexual healing! It’s good for me!”
So, when our young men get that “feeling” these days, how do they “flesh it out?” Have we traded the pulsating strobe lights that attracted men and women to discotheques for a red dot suitable for mass murders?
In the Black community alone, the concept of “rapping” has evolved in meaning. Rapping once meant dialoguing with friends. But if you were a man who had no “rap” in the 1970s, you couldn’t get a phone number, a girl, or a date.
A one-hit wonder by a group called the “Brighter Side of Darkness” in 1973, struck paydirt with a 45 rpm single, “Love Jones.”
“What happening, baby? Did you miss me over the weekend?
If you did, then I’m sorry, but now that I’m here, I don’t wanna bore you with an irrelevant conversation. But you see, darling, it’s about time for me to get real serious about you because if someone was to rip me off you, I couldn’t account for my actions after all. But you see, I not only want you, baby, I need you. And the need is so strong; it’s almost like that of a junkie. In other words, baby, I just got to have you!”
Emba makes the assertion the lack of love, intimacy, and sex among young men is leading us to a dark wilderness. The “Brighter Side of Darkness” explains what a Love Jones is and how it can be presented in a manner that can get you laid (bare).
This writer intends to draw you to the op-ed written by Emba and published in the Washington Post. The publication’s mission is to defend democracy by defeating darkness. I got a Love Jones for all three. Its darkness of love!
Vincent L. Hall is an author, activist, and an award-winning columnist.
