They Don’t Make Them Like they Used To

From The Occidental Observer, August 6, 2009

On occasion of my 39th birthday, my wife organized a holiday in the Lake District in Cumbria, in the North East of England. While there we visited England’s Pencil Museum, where we learnt much about the invention and manufacture of the pencil, a tool that spawned a huge industry in the region during the Victorian era. One of the most remarkable exhibits in the museum (aside from all the weirdly-shaped Derwent pencils) was an enlarged photograph of a group of male Victorian pencil factory workers. The photograph was not remarkable because of the antique machinery or the outmoded attire of the men, but because of their faces: these were uniformly stern, grim, serious, and ferocious, to the point where they inspired an exclamation of amazement from my wife. Indeed, as is often the case when one looks at photographs of men from the 19th century – and particularly working class or rural men — the image in the museum provided yet another sample of the hostile frown, ice-cold blue eyes, and troglodytic beards and angrily scowling moustaches that appear to have been common during the days of the Industrial Revolution and the frontiersmen of American Old West.

When my wife and I discussed the photograph afterwards, there was no question in our minds that there had been a pronounced deterioration in the quality of the White male since the days of yore, and that the etiology of this deterioration implicated the comfort and superabundance of modern life. Granite-hard facial surfaces, primitive gurns, and ocular lasers, signaling assertion and social dominance, have given way to doughy flaccidity, placid smiles, and amused festive glances, signaling agreeability, docility, and frolicsome distraction.

I subsequently met with Jonathan Bowden, the Nietzschean British artist and gifted Right wing orator, with whom I once again discussed the contrast between modern and Victorian physiognomy. He mentioned, as one of various eximious examples of physiognomic severity, the early photographs of Shakers, adherents of the ascetic Protestant religious sect otherwise known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.

And the photographs of Shaker assemblies I subsequently examined on the internet were very grim indeed.

Notable in all these images to modern eyes are the sharp gender distinctions, and the harshness of the archetypical male. Since early 1900s the tendency has been for masculinity and femininity increasingly to converge, for distinctions to be blurred, and for transgressions to become socially acceptable and protected by law.

During the Victorian era (1837–1901), conceptions of masculinity were grounded on historically specific power relations among Christianity, science, industrialism, empire, and man.

The Victorians valorized manliness as a restraint on the brutishness of primeval maleness. Thus, by extension, the Victorians, influenced by Christianity, idealized the notion of man as spiritual and a faithful believer. This was tied with the notion of patriarchy: a Victorian man was the head of his household, duty-bound to rule firmly, but also to provide for, and protect, his weaker dependents: his wife and his children. The need to provide, especially in the context of the industrial revolution, caused work — being active in enterprise — to become an essential element of Victorian masculinity, particularly among the middle classes: Work became associated with virtue and strength, whereas being a burden on the public was associated with sin and weakness. And, because being active in enterprise was a way of signaling masculinity in a social climate where work and home were segregated spheres, this in turn caused clubs and taverns to thrive as non-domestic venues of masculine display. . . Read the rest of the article.