Masculinity

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Hello and welcome to Overthink.
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The podcast where we make a man out of you.
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I'm Ellie Anderson.
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And I'm David Pena Guzman.
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Okay, well, Mulan notwithstanding masculinity is in a moment of crisis.
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Maybe that's why we need the Mulan moment, in fact.
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Maybe that's why we need to make a man out of youbecause not clear, I think, to many men today what masculinity looks like and what their relationship to masculinity should be.
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I think this is partly why there's been this rise of right wing influencers and what's known as the manosphere, because I think like when I talk about masculinity with my friends who are, You know, to my knowledge, not caught up in the manosphere discourse.
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Even they, you know, like really well-meaning men often feminist with commitments to leftist politics, maybe even gender abolition.
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They don't know how to relate to masculinity themselves.
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They find that they have a fraught relationship with it, and they're just sort of like, I'd rather ignore it.
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Right?
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Which is not a great way of going about things either, so I think you have this rise of either the explicit adoption of right wing masculine ideals through the manosphere, or you have a sort of fraught.
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I don't know what to do with this, and so I'm just gonna kind of ignore it.
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Relationship with masculinity among many men today.
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Yeah.
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And I, think the grasping at straws that you're getting at is also coupled with a deep sense of loneliness on the part of a lot of men.
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And that loneliness and that grasping at straws sometimes results in really bizarre projects being packaged for young men today as new forms of masculinity that one should embrace.
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So, for instance, I saw a recent study reported that because of some of these developments, there's been a pretty significant rise in the amount of meat eating that happens among young men.
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And you know, like I'm a vegetarian, like that's
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A paleo-trend,
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The paleo masculinity is back in.
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I guess I just by definition, I'm not manly enough.
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You have no masculinity as a male vegetarian, you have no access to maculinity.
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Yeah.
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Hashtag eggplant femininity.
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Well, yeah, I mean, you hear a lot about the male loneliness crisis, and I think one thing you see in some sociological literature is that there's been a real decrease in men's homosocial forms of bonding over the past generation or so.
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There's that book, this isn't technically sociology, but there was that book, bowling Alone that came out a number of decades ago.
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But before that, I mean, there's some sociological research talking about the decline of men's clubs, the decline of other forms of homosocial bonding, especially the workplace.
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Yeah, and with the entry of women into the workplace more and more there has been, you know, less homosocial bonding in the workplace that's happened as well.
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And so obviously like it's great that women have entered the workplace more, and men's social clubs were very often extremely classist and racist.
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But then a void gets created where men don't know how to relate to one another.
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They're often, you know, maybe still watching sports, playing sports, but those traditionally masculine spaces of bonding have been hollowed out.
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And I think that's one place where we can see the connection between the male loneliness crisis or the so-called male loneliness crisis and the crisis of masculinity.
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No, that's right.
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And I think if we think about those two things alongside the pressure that men face not to be seen as homosexual, queer, or gay, it adds another element because on the one hand you have that decrease in spaces that facilitate homosocial relationships, but the places that do remain still are marked by this fear that if you behave in ways that other people might read as not quite masculine enough, you might pay a social price for that.
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And so I think the loneliness epidemic is exacerbated by all these factors that lead to individuals sort of feeling lost and disoriented in a world where they're unsure about what it means to be a man.
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What your all men's Community theater group isn't helping reshape masculinity for you or connect you with other men in a masculine fashion?
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Yeah, and I think, you know, when we're talking about the manosphere here, I assume many of our listeners are familiar with that concept, but the manosphere basically refers to these online spaces that are dominated by men who spew, misogynistic, and often pro masculinity rhetoric.
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It's also often anti woke.
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It's filled with these so-called manfluencers who promote ideas on the superiority of men and this very much praise on vulnerable, often young men and boys who don't have a blueprint for what a more healthier, positive masculinity looks like.
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And also is often associated with a kind of hustle bro culture mentality.
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What I would just call straight up a grifter mentality where there's like these get rich quick schemes.
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You see that a lot with somebody like Andrew Tate, who's the apotheosis of the manosphere.
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We'll come back to him a bit later.
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Yeah.
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Unfortunately we will come back a little bit to him later.
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He's joining us today on the podcast.
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Oh God.
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Oh gosh.
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I'm kidding about that.
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We couldn't get him if we tried.
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We're big for that.
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Not that we tried, not in a million years.
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But I think the intersection of the patriarchal and the capitalist dimensions of the hustle, bro culture are really interesting because they do reveal something about the intersection of those systems of oppression.
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Because when I think about some of the models of masculinity that are floating around the manosphere.
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Obviously they are perpetrating very dangerous stereotypes about what gender roles and gender relations need to look like.
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Perpetuating?
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Or, but maybe also perpetrated.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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They're, well, they're perpetrating crimes for sure.
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Perpetrators is on the brain we're talking about Andrew Tate.
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But they are also trading in this idea that the highest value, especially men can aspire to, is wealth accumulation.
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And so those two things together.
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feed off of one another and make it very difficult for especially young men to know what it is that they should be doing other than following the traditional path laid out for them of I need to be a rich male provider who by virtue of being wealthy and powerful, therefore has access to women's bodies.
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And that particular figure, especially of the hustle bro, I think is the inheritor of a tradition that maybe also includes in the past, like the pickup artist.
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The individual who teaches men how to psychologically manipulate women in order to gain sexual access to them.
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Yeah.
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And I'm thinking here about somebody like Roosh V who was a really famous pickup artist in the 2010s.
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And I mean, he wrote books and published them that people correctly described as rape guides because his message to young men was that they should see themselves as entitled to having unmitigated and unfettered access to women's bodies because that's the function of women.
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Today we're talking about masculinity.
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Why is masculinity associated with homophobia and violence?
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How have evolutionary narratives contributed to the rise of toxic masculinity?
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And what might a healthy model of masculinity look like?
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For most of the 20th century studies of gender and the politics of gender focused on women and femininity as a way of understanding women's symbolic material and political oppression.
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Then in the 1980s, something interesting happened in academic feminist circles, but also more broadly in the feminist movement.
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That is that a number of people started making the argument that we cannot dismantle the current system of gender oppression under which we live if we don't take just as seriously the task of analyzing and deconstructing the concept of masculinity.
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And so that call for thinking about masculinity in theoretically rigorous ways, gave rise to what is now known as masculinity studies, but that in the 1980s was called the Men's studies Subfield of Gender Studies.
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And that field really was conceived originally as an ally or as a partner to, to feminism.
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To feminism and gender studies.
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Well to women's studies because this was pre gender studies.
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Exactly.
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And so as people started taking up this call, they realized that one of the central tasks of masculinity studies was largely definitional.
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What exactly is the meaning of masculinity because we all recognize it.
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We are all raised in a society that prices it extremely highly, and yet it's really difficult to know what behaviors, what comportments, what attitudes are necessary in sufficient conditions for somebody to be considered a masculine man?
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A man's man?
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And so men's studies and later masculinity studies really emerge largely through this attempt to just give a definition of this thing.
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And even a little bit before the establishment of the subfield.
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In the 1980s, scholars started to investigate what was then known as the male sex role and this male sex role, in spite of the use of the term male, wasn't biologically specific.
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Instead, it's trading on the traditional use of the term or the technical use of the term role, which is a pattern of behaviors that somebody is both expected to and encouraged and or trained to perform in a given situation.
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And one important investigation of the male sex role during the mid 1970s comes from the psychologist Robert Brannon and Deborah David in an edited volume called the forty nine percent majority.
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In this text, David and Brannon, I switched the order of their names in the edited volume, not me putting the man first.
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Ellie part of the problem.
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She has not read at the men's studies and masculinity studies literature.
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But so David and Brannon identify four defining features of the male sex role.
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And so this was one influential definition of what we would now call masculinity is.
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The first is, remember we're in technical academic land here.
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The first feature of the male sex role, no sissy stuff.
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The idea there is to be a man means never do anything that remotely suggests femininity.
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So masculinity is defined as a repuditation of the feminine.
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Second be a big wheel.
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What?
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Your masculinity is measured by your power, success, and wealth.
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So to be a big wheel is to be powerful, to like be a mover and a shaker in world.
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I thought it was gonna be about like, you gotta make the world spin around you, like be a wheel.
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I mean, hey, why not add that to the, uh, context here?
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So, yeah, I mean, that seems fair, right?
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Like you're, yeah things people are, I was gonna say orbiting around you, but then we're not in wheel, then we're in like planet, territory, sun territory.
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The third feature, so we've got no sissy stuff and be a big wheel.
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So one pertains to sort of like traditional gender role in terms of repudiation of the feminine.
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The other in terms of traditional gender role of which says, yeah, of
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The acquisition
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being a breadwinner.
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Third is be a sturdy oak, and this is the feature of masculinity that has to do with stoicism remaining calm and stable in crisis and holding your emotions in check so the boys don't cry message has to do with this be a sturdy oak feature of masculinity.
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And then finally, fourth, we have, give them hell, which is the feature of the male sex role that is taken to be associated with risk taking, aggression, like not taking it lying down, raging bull kind of vibe.
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Taking it standing up.
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No.
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fighting back.
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Okay.
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That, I mean, then back to no sissy stuff
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Well, if you take it standing up, it's no sissy.
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Hashtag no sissy.
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So the no homo is- David, I told you, you have to stop making hashtag jokes here.
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It is so, five to 10 years ago.
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I am five to 10 years ago.
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I am resisting being a cringe millennial so hard, even though I'm probably not avoiding it successfully.
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David's just leaning in.
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Yeah.
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I've been leaning in accidentally for years.
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But, okay, let's talk about these criteria.
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Okay, so I really like them.
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So you really like them in the sense that you are encouraged to perform them?
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No, no,
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Or in the sense of diagnostic criteria?
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I like them as diagnostic criteria in the sense that I do think they capture the outlines of masculinity as I understand it.
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And also as I've lifted as somebody who has been policed into masculinity, you know, my whole lif more or less.
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One thing that stands out immediately is just how contradictory and internally inconsistent they actually are.
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Especially the last three that you said.
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Yeah.
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So there is the nosy stuff.
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I'll put that aside.
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Then there was the be a big wheel.
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And so somebody who churns things out, provides, keeps things moving.
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There is a sense of movement and mobility and making things.
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That metaphor of movement and mobility is.
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In weird contrast with the sturdy oak, right?
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The notion of equipoise, stoic self-control.
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And so I think this speaks to something that a number of masculinity studies scholars have pointed out, that masculinity is actually internally contradictory in many ways, and it's impossible even for those men who really seek to embody it to embody it fully, which is why all real men in one way or another, fall short of the standard.
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And I think the same thing is true of the last two.
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So if you think about the sturdy oak, and then the last one was give them hell?
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They're not consistent.
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One is about keeping control of your emotions.
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The other one is about lashing out the moment that your position is threatened, which presupposes a lack of self-control.
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Okay.
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So I'm in agreement with you that give them hell and being a sturdy oak are at odds, the difference between risk taking and aggression versus stoicism.
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And I think that conflict.
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We very frequently see with the off remarked upon fact that the most acceptable emotion for men to express is anger.
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However, I guess I'm not seeing the contradiction between being a big wheel and being a sturdy oak, at least not in terms of the narratives that we get about masculinity.
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It's very common to hear men in the business world say like Okay, well, I don't know, which men in the business world am I talking about?
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Let's say very common narrative is facts don't care about your feelings or like, I'm just focused on the bottom line.
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Definitel emotions have historically been kind of seen as belonging outside the workplace.
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And so I think the idea there would be that in order to be an effective business person businessman is really what we're talking about here.
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You need to disavow your emotions, keep them in check, you know, compartmentalize your life.
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And so I don't see those as contradictory.
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I do think that in practice, they are intention to some degree, like I would say, for instance, the motivating energy of ambition that allows you to be a successful big wheel.
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Very often, not only emotional, but specifically related to anxiety.
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And I think anxiety is something that is definitely at odds with the be a sturdy oak picture, but I guess I don't see there as being much of a conflict on the surface between those two.
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Well, maybe I see the conflict on the surface more so than in depth Maybe it's a question of the metaphors that we use for capturing these dimensions of masculinity.
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I maybe I just don't understand why it's called be a big wheel.
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Like what does a big wheel.
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Why is that the metaphor for a provider?
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Why not be a big basket?
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the notion of the wheel brings to me images of movement, of hustling, of making things happen that evoke that sense of anxiety, stress that you're alluding to, and at least that sense of the hustler Is at odds with the figure of the respectable businessman who is okay.
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Quietly sitting behind a desk controlling things quietly from behind the scenes.
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I'm actually really glad you mentioned this because I think it gives me the opportunity to clarify.
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I think we've been rolling with the metaphor of a big wheel a little bit too intensely.
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It's just a term, I think it's like a bit dated now, but it's just a synonym for big shot.
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So yeah.
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So big wheel, I've definitely never heard it used it in contemporary context.
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But again, this structure was come up with in the seventies, so it was like 50 years old.
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So it's like a big wig or a big shot.
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Yeah.
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So I don't think you need it
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big wig?
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Very masculine, circa 17 hundreds.
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Okay, so in that sense, that's right.
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I think the truth that all of these dimensions of masculinity that you've listed capture is ultimately the anxiety that men feel about violating any of them and thereby being excluded from the domain of the masculine, right?
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Because the thing about them is that they're also exceptionally generic and they can be violated in a number of ways.
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So what exactly is sissy stuff?
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It's something that includes anything from like same sex attraction all the way to potentially sitting with your legs crossed at dinner.
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Not throwing far enough, not hitting hard enough.
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Yeah, sometimes hitting too hard.
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Well, no, actually
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being too nice to your teacher, being too nice to your mommy, being too nice to girls in the class, like
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liking women in a nonsexual way.
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Right?
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Like, just like having friendships with women.
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Oh no, there was that, there was like that thing on social media, a while ago that was making fun of how the manosphere has gone so far that eating pussy was considered gay.
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Yes.
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Well, there's an episode also in the Sopranos that targets this issue.
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okay you know, okay you know never watched that.
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I'm like, so due for a full watch of Sopranos,
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I think it holds up.
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I'm gonna go so deep into it.
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Yeah, you won't see me again.
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But the idea is that the mafioso in this episode does not want other people to find out that he gives oral sex to his wife because in that subculture it is understood that doing so is a submissive act because you're giving pleasure rather than receiving it.
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Yeah.
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So like giving pleasure to women.
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Sissy.
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Gay stuff.
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Okay.
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We'll come back a bit later to the homophobia system.
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Let's talk a bit about the evolutionary biological story here, or evolutionary psychological story here, because that what I would say is like a pseudo evolutionary, or at least a quasi evolutionary narrative has been used to defend this picture of masculinity.
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'cause recall the male sex role, you know, this kind of term that was used in the seventies, the role idea refers to not only the idea that you're like trained to do this, but also that you're encouraged to do it.
00:19:38.392 --> 00:19:46.342
And I think evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology have been enlisted as encouragement for men to lean into these traditionally masculine roles.
00:19:46.497 --> 00:19:54.267
And I mean, as an enterprise, I find evolutionary psychology, really questionable as a philosopher of science.
00:19:54.267 --> 00:20:01.707
I have a lot of questions about the way in which the field has been constituted, the kinds of narratives that it promotes, the evidence for those narratives.
00:20:01.737 --> 00:20:04.797
Uhhuh, especially when it comes to social phenomena,
00:20:04.902 --> 00:20:05.291
Oh yeah.
00:20:05.352 --> 00:20:09.132
It's generally considered pretty sus among social scientists.
00:20:09.132 --> 00:20:09.342
Yeah.
00:20:09.356 --> 00:20:17.307
Yeah, but it comes with the imprimatur of being a science, so it has a lot of cultural and social capital to trade on.
00:20:17.382 --> 00:20:34.692
And I mean, you see this, for example, in the use of primatology for supporting some of these evolutionary psychological narratives that naturalize and biologize these features of masculinity, even though nowadays we associate the term alpha male with the manosphere as we were talking a few minutes ago.
00:20:35.291 --> 00:20:49.876
With people like Andrew Tate, for example, the term alpha male actually comes from primatological research, especially from France de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, which is a book that came out in the early 1980s, 1982.
00:20:50.317 --> 00:21:09.092
There, what he does is he talks about how chimpanzees are not the kind of unintelligent creatures that maybe we assume them to be by virtue of being non-human animals, but that they have a kind of intelligence that he calls a Machiavellian intelligence, where they're constantly playing power games.
00:21:09.092 --> 00:21:12.231
And what is the term up manning?
00:21:12.561 --> 00:21:13.321
Oh, one upping.
00:21:13.321 --> 00:21:13.971
One upping.
00:21:13.971 --> 00:21:14.432
Thank you.
00:21:14.432 --> 00:21:29.352
As you know, as you know by English, expressions always break down in the middle of episodes due to being ESL, but he presents chimpanzees as enacting political moves for creating alliances and accruing power.
00:21:29.832 --> 00:21:36.582
And he draws some parallels between the behavior of captive chimpanzees.
00:21:36.582 --> 00:21:46.291
He was working in the Netherlands at the time, so he's making a direct connection between captive chimpanzee behavior in the Netherlands t o human behavior.
00:21:46.311 --> 00:21:50.422
And suggesting that we kind of are like chimpanzees too.
00:21:50.676 --> 00:21:52.471
We kind of are like chimpanzees, at least that part's indisputable
00:21:52.521 --> 00:21:58.352
Well, like, yeah, genetically of course, but in the sense of our organization around our social dynamics.
00:21:58.352 --> 00:22:02.031
And our search for power in our machiavellianism and.
00:22:02.602 --> 00:22:15.352
What ended up happening as a result of some of this work is that, of course, that book was read very widely among Primatologists and people interested in understanding the behavior of non-human primates.
00:22:15.592 --> 00:22:29.656
But then it got picked up by some people in the conservative movement to the point that in the 1990s, that book appeared in a recommended list of books for Republican politicians to read.
00:22:29.672 --> 00:22:30.122
Oh my God.
00:22:30.346 --> 00:22:35.686
Because presumably it exposed the truth about how it's all power all the way down.
00:22:36.116 --> 00:22:36.356
Yeah.
00:22:36.356 --> 00:22:43.666
And that, you know, very famously also, when Al Gore was running, he got the advice by Naomi Wolf
00:22:45.586 --> 00:22:51.737
I guess taking gender advice from Naomi Wolf was very different in, what was this in the nineties than, than it is today.
00:22:52.582 --> 00:23:02.991
And she basically told him, look, right now you are a beta male as opposed to an alpha male, and you need to be an alpha male if you wanna succeed in the American political landscape.
00:23:02.991 --> 00:23:07.251
And so that term enters political discourse through primatology.
00:23:07.271 --> 00:23:12.791
But it makes it seem as if being an alpha male is literally in our primate DNA.
00:23:12.801 --> 00:23:18.951
This was still a time when it seemed plausible to many Americans to say that a woman couldn't be president because she was too emotional.
00:23:18.951 --> 00:23:19.971
'cause she had a period.
00:23:20.021 --> 00:23:20.321
Yeah.
00:23:20.321 --> 00:23:29.731
And meanwhile, according to this account where just like angry, hysterical chimpanzees fighting for power and ripping off one another's fingers and limbs in the process.
00:23:29.811 --> 00:23:36.622
So it's not just trickling down into, you mentioned initially like sort of conservative politics, but it doesn't sound like it was just among conservative politicians.
00:23:36.622 --> 00:23:38.082
Like it was a pretty mainstream
00:23:38.211 --> 00:23:39.882
It was a public facing book.
00:23:39.902 --> 00:23:40.261
Yeah.
00:23:40.261 --> 00:23:42.727
And so it, it really straddled that line between,
00:23:43.082 --> 00:23:46.942
but public facing, I'm saying not just among like conservative Republican politicians,
00:23:47.102 --> 00:23:47.432
No, yeah.
00:23:47.642 --> 00:23:50.092
Among scientists and a general public.
00:23:50.481 --> 00:24:15.386
And to this, I want to add that all this discourse about men being fundamentally Machiavellian because of our biology is despite the fact that primatology has established and has known for a long time, that these kinds of power moves in chimpanzee communities are not restricted to men, to male Like female chimpanzees also partake in that battle for power.
00:24:15.386 --> 00:24:15.446
Yeah.
00:24:15.477 --> 00:24:17.567
They buy for high ranking positions.
00:24:17.886 --> 00:24:36.122
And succeed and there's been cases where a female chimpanzee will establish itself as a leader of a troop, and then the male primatologists intervene because they want to reestablish the natural order in captive chimpanzees by removing the female that has gained leadership and letting a male take her place.
00:24:36.182 --> 00:24:54.499
And this reminds me of a point that the masculinity study scholar Todd Reeser makes about masculinity, which is that often we think about a lot of these features of masculinity as remaining the same over time, but in fact they're deeply historical so they change.
00:24:54.648 --> 00:25:02.878
What it meant to be a real man in the 1500s, in the 1700s in the 1900s in the 2020s is not the same.
00:25:03.729 --> 00:25:15.909
That means that the concept of masculinity is a shapeshifter that's constantly adapting itself and responding to changes in the material configuration of society.
00:25:16.398 --> 00:25:25.538
And that means in turn, by extension, that masculinity part of its definition is that it's always in a state of crisis.
00:25:25.778 --> 00:25:28.038
Because it has to reinvent itself.
00:25:28.068 --> 00:25:29.209
In order to adapt.
00:25:29.209 --> 00:25:37.189
So if you think about some material changes that happen in society, like women gain more formal legal rights, like the right to vote.
00:25:37.189 --> 00:25:41.328
To own a credit card account, marital rape laws,
00:25:41.358 --> 00:25:42.094
you name it.
00:25:42.094 --> 00:26:00.348
If there are shifts in cultural expectations about romance or about the politics of labor, or about how men and women relate in general, the dominant hegemonic model of masculinity is thrown into a state of crisis, and so it has to find new ways to express itself.
00:26:00.348 --> 00:26:10.624
And that's, I think, what's happening right now with these discourses in the manosphere we're seeing masculinity trying to present a new face of itself.
00:26:10.683 --> 00:26:10.773
Yeah.
00:26:11.013 --> 00:26:13.324
In order to fulfill that hegemonic function
00:26:13.384 --> 00:26:23.233
And evolutionary theory becomes a really attractive source of projection, of fantasies, of what masculinity is, especially those fantasies of masculinity that are threatened by the present moment.
00:26:23.574 --> 00:26:34.864
Such that we find an evolutionary psychology, what we thought were masculine norms all along, but actually that are more projections of our current conception or a waning conception of masculinity.
00:26:55.814 --> 00:27:01.723
We've seen that masculinity is associated with a disavow of anything related to the ladies.
00:27:01.784 --> 00:27:14.854
That's the not being a sissy with masculine emotional norms of stoicism and calm with being a big shot, big wig, big wheel at work, and, with being aggressive.
00:27:15.588 --> 00:27:21.979
I think when we think about those four features of what were called the male sex role might not be called masculinity.
00:27:22.068 --> 00:27:24.199
We might think of them as traits or characteristics.
00:27:24.199 --> 00:27:29.689
And in general, we could often think about masculinity and do often think about masculinity as a trait or a characteristic.
00:27:29.689 --> 00:27:30.979
Are you masculine or not?
00:27:31.548 --> 00:27:38.743
But studies of masculinity show that masculinity is more of a pattern than a trait or even a set of traits.
00:27:39.574 --> 00:27:45.334
It's not just a neutral pattern, it's specifically a pattern of domination that is acted out.
00:27:45.723 --> 00:27:56.284
For instance, the scholar Raewyn Connell develops a series of hegemonic masculinity, which is the pattern of practice that allows men's power over women to continue.
00:27:56.584 --> 00:28:07.054
And Connell suggests that hegemonic masculinity is relational and defines itself over and against emphasized femininity and also lesser masculinities.
00:28:07.314 --> 00:28:12.983
Such as marginalized masculinity, and additionally it has a legitimating function.
00:28:13.253 --> 00:28:15.773
It legitimizes unequal gender relations, right?
00:28:15.773 --> 00:28:19.314
It says that these are natural, they're just the way things are, right?
00:28:19.314 --> 00:28:26.878
It's like the law of evolution or whatever, and it, so it legitimizes these gender relations between men and women.
00:28:27.483 --> 00:28:34.263
and I really like the term hegemony for capturing the social constructed dimension of masculinity.
00:28:34.263 --> 00:28:39.713
Because when we think about hegemony, we think about a social field that is replete with power relations, right?
00:28:39.713 --> 00:28:48.749
So we're not thinking about something that has been passed down through our biology or through our family history, or through our human essence or human nature, rather.
00:28:48.749 --> 00:28:54.868
It's something that we actively construct as a society and maintain through power moves, right?
00:28:55.019 --> 00:29:07.544
that's what masculinity is, and so, we also find a version of this argument in a 1990s book that was written by the French sociologist and philosopher, Pierre Bourdeu.
00:29:07.943 --> 00:29:10.413
It's a book called La domination Feminine.
00:29:10.759 --> 00:29:11.638
La domination masculine
00:29:11.763 --> 00:29:12.423
Masculine.
00:29:13.638 --> 00:29:16.173
funnily enough, la domination is a feminine noun.
00:29:16.263 --> 00:29:18.064
Okay, so masculine domination,
00:29:18.608 --> 00:29:19.419
Masculine.
00:29:19.909 --> 00:29:20.808
Sorry about that
00:29:20.808 --> 00:29:23.074
I would read La domination feminine also.
00:29:23.124 --> 00:29:25.689
Yeah, no, I think that's a scum manifesto.
00:29:26.999 --> 00:29:49.969
But, he wrote this book called Masculine Domination, where he says that the very concept of masculinity is unthinkable without that notion of domination because it is a concept that is not only relational, as you said, to be masculine, it's always to be in a certain relation or position relative to the feminine, but that relationship also has to be hierarchical.
00:29:50.058 --> 00:29:55.679
So it is a top down dominator submission or oppressor.
00:29:55.679 --> 00:29:59.489
a dom-sub kink dynamic that is not consensual.
00:29:59.949 --> 00:30:12.759
And for him, one of the very intriguing aspects of the domination of women by men is that it ultimately dispenses with a need to legitimize itself.
00:30:12.759 --> 00:30:21.388
So it does perform a legitimating function, as you said, it legitimizes the status quo, but it doesn't legitimate itself, and in fact, that is how it expresses its power.
00:30:21.509 --> 00:30:22.048
It just says.
00:30:22.429 --> 00:30:23.479
I'm not doing anything.
00:30:23.509 --> 00:30:24.709
I don't even exist.
00:30:24.769 --> 00:30:29.479
There is no domination of the feminine by the masculine, that's just the way things are.
00:30:29.719 --> 00:30:33.378
And so there's a logic of invisibility that is at work.
00:30:33.378 --> 00:30:44.183
And that according to him, is what ultimately turns what is a historical social phenomenon into an ahistorical eternal truth of the world.
00:30:44.209 --> 00:30:48.439
And I think this is really what we're talking about when we talk about toxic masculinity.
00:30:48.558 --> 00:30:54.469
This idea of masculinity as essentially dominating, but as masking itself as dominating.
00:30:54.709 --> 00:31:00.318
And a question that very often emerges in gender studies is, well, is masculinity itself toxic?
00:31:00.318 --> 00:31:06.949
And so toxic masculinity, is that even a term that we need if masculinity is in and of itself toxic?
00:31:07.189 --> 00:31:14.358
And I wanna think about that here a little bit now in the sense that masculinity is very hard to disentangle.
00:31:15.003 --> 00:31:18.604
From violence and homophobia, at least as we think of masculinity today.
00:31:19.173 --> 00:31:26.074
The men's studies scholar, Michael Kimmel, literally defines masculinity in terms of homophobia, at least in the current context.
00:31:26.074 --> 00:31:44.864
And so he notes, as you mentioned before, David, that manhood and masculinity have highly variable meanings over time, but that our culture associates it with a particular picture of masculinity that is framed by contrasting itself with homosexual desire and with an association with femininity as well.
00:31:44.894 --> 00:31:54.884
And so to be a mama's boy, unless you're Italian, where that's somehow permitted is to be a sissy to like, to do girly things, is to be a sissy.
00:31:54.884 --> 00:32:01.374
You know, these things that we were talking about earlier, and boys, he suggests become gender police of one another.
00:32:01.703 --> 00:32:04.074
They scan each other for signs of effeminancy.
00:32:04.094 --> 00:32:07.634
I mean, you can think about the way this works in the locker room or on the playground.
00:32:08.364 --> 00:32:19.253
When they're scanning each other for these signs of a acy and calling each other out for being sissies or being gay, there are very real social consequences, often violent ones to that kind of behavior.
00:32:19.469 --> 00:32:19.659
Yeah.
00:32:19.659 --> 00:32:42.229
I mean I remember, know, from my childhood scenes, very vivid ones of that policing that span all the way from things that border on violent behavior by boys on boys, all the way to very subtle things like, oh, you like playing with those toys, at a very young that stopped me in my tracks, as a little kid.
00:32:42.499 --> 00:32:48.098
And made me realize that I was under the surveilling eye of a policing peer.
00:32:48.128 --> 00:32:48.818
Which toy were you playing with?
00:32:49.159 --> 00:32:50.868
I mean, I don't know.
00:32:50.868 --> 00:32:51.999
I think it was a sex toy.
00:32:53.318 --> 00:32:53.919
No, I'm kidding.
00:32:54.159 --> 00:32:56.989
I'm sure it was probably something feminine.
00:32:57.028 --> 00:33:01.558
A doll or maybe just like the wrong colored car.
00:33:01.558 --> 00:33:04.594
It was a knife, but it was like a cooking knife rather than
00:33:05.753 --> 00:33:07.919
It was a butter knife rather than a stabbing knife.
00:33:08.463 --> 00:33:09.624
What even Is a cooking knife?
00:33:09.624 --> 00:33:10.709
I mean a kitchen knife.
00:33:11.278 --> 00:33:33.969
And so I mean, I think this speaks to the lived experience of being reared in the logic of masculinity, but I mean, what we're now getting to, in terms of defining masculinity, which is this very slippery concept, and this is an argument that is made by the psychologist Joseph Pleck, in his book, the Myth of Masculinity, which was huge in the men's studies, masculinity studies history.
00:33:34.429 --> 00:33:43.368
He says, straight up masculinity has three features you have violence, physical violence and psychological violence among men that policing function.
00:33:43.878 --> 00:33:46.128
Two, you have dominion over women.
00:33:46.128 --> 00:33:48.048
That's the point that's also from Bourdeu.
00:33:48.489 --> 00:33:51.949
And finally you have the rejection of homophobia.
00:33:52.644 --> 00:33:54.804
I'm sorry, the rejection of homosexual desire.
00:33:54.828 --> 00:33:55.773
like, oh, wow, there's a woke one?
00:33:55.778 --> 00:33:58.628
Yeah, there, there's a woke masculinity from the 1980s.
00:33:58.628 --> 00:34:05.653
So you, if you want to be a man, you need to be homophobic, violent, and domineering towards women.
00:34:05.878 --> 00:34:14.489
Well, this is setting us up perfectly for a discussion of some of the things said by our King of the Manosphere, Andrew Tate.
00:34:15.088 --> 00:34:24.389
So we're gonna read a few things that he said, and yeah, David, let's think about them in terms of these three features that Pleck identifies of the homophobia, the violence, and the dominion over women.
00:34:24.389 --> 00:34:32.838
Because I think we really see each of these in the rhetoric of the manosphere, which is exemplified above all by Andrew Tate.
00:34:33.014 --> 00:34:33.434
Okay.
00:34:33.434 --> 00:34:36.838
Hit me with these probably horrific quotes, of course.
00:34:36.838 --> 00:34:37.349
Okay.
00:34:37.429 --> 00:34:46.219
Let's say the quotes themselves are not as horrific as his sex trafficking and sexual assault behavior, but the quotes, you know, they're not super pleasant to read.
00:34:46.759 --> 00:34:54.858
Okay, so first, I'm not saying they're property, I'm saying they're given to the man and belong to the man.
00:34:55.708 --> 00:34:58.188
So they're property.By definition.
00:34:59.208 --> 00:35:03.429
But also like, okay, yes, and yeah, no, yeah.
00:35:03.458 --> 00:35:04.398
They're given to the man and belong.
00:35:04.518 --> 00:35:04.699
Yeah.
00:35:04.699 --> 00:35:06.528
No, that's literally he needs a basic course.
00:35:06.559 --> 00:35:07.518
It's a definition.
00:35:08.378 --> 00:35:10.579
Andrew Tate, facts don't care about your feelings.
00:35:10.579 --> 00:35:14.059
If you're saying that a woman belongs to man, you are saying that they're property.
00:35:14.358 --> 00:35:18.929
But I mean, this is, it's almost like he read the Joseph Pleck book and was like, dominion over women Check.
00:35:20.298 --> 00:35:21.358
Quick, how to.
00:35:21.358 --> 00:35:24.503
He understood the myth of masculinity as aspirational.
00:35:24.739 --> 00:35:25.518
Oh my God.
00:35:25.548 --> 00:35:26.059
Okay.
00:35:26.139 --> 00:35:27.409
You have anything more to say about that?
00:35:27.409 --> 00:35:28.429
Should I go on to the next one?
00:35:28.704 --> 00:35:29.003
No.
00:35:29.003 --> 00:35:48.958
Other than that, I actually think that that slippage that we just alluded to, that it's not this, it's this other thing that's actually the same thing as the first thing that I disavowed is a really powerful maneuver rhetorically that allows you to distance yourself from criticisms of your view while still expressing it, right?
00:35:48.958 --> 00:35:57.858
And this is what Žižek calls a fetishistic disavowal Where you say, I'm not racist, but, and then you say something straight up racist.
00:35:57.858 --> 00:36:02.869
And so I think that's what's happening here, where we're getting a fetishistic disavowal of a view that he's espousing.
00:36:02.869 --> 00:36:05.659
And this is like almost even more.
00:36:05.748 --> 00:36:12.469
No, it's straight up even more logically egregious because it's not saying like, I'm not sexist, but here's sexist thing.
00:36:12.509 --> 00:36:13.969
It's like literally just definitional.
00:36:14.028 --> 00:36:17.023
I'm not saying they're property, I'm saying they're given to the man and belong to the man.
00:36:17.353 --> 00:36:21.969
It's yeah, that's literally what it means to have property, or to to be property.
00:36:22.219 --> 00:36:22.958
Okay, second.
00:36:23.688 --> 00:36:29.063
Women shouldn't vote because they don't care about issues outside of how they feel.
00:36:29.094 --> 00:36:29.153
Yeah.
00:36:29.153 --> 00:36:33.923
I don't even want to respond to this.
00:36:33.923 --> 00:36:39.684
This is, I mean, also the shocking thing about some of these claims is just how uncreative they are in their misogyny.
00:36:39.684 --> 00:36:42.253
It's like, this is like from the late 1800s.
00:36:42.253 --> 00:36:44.903
I mean, centuries,
00:36:45.039 --> 00:36:45.318
Yeah.
00:36:45.318 --> 00:36:48.204
Like it's before women had the right to vote, you know, like.
00:36:48.818 --> 00:36:56.998
Presumably you would at least come up with new ideas to try to recruit people into your horrible man club.
00:36:57.204 --> 00:37:17.123
Well, so I actually find this one pretty interesting in the sense that there is a wielding of a very stereotypically sexist idea, which is that women are governed by capricious emotion, but there's also a selfishness implied, and I think the masculine disavowal of femininity has an interesting relationship to perceived feminine selfishness.
00:37:17.474 --> 00:37:31.403
And to perceive masculine selfishness, because on the one hand it's very common to see in sexist rhetoric, the idea that women are selfish and that men are magnanimous protectors of other people, especially their family members.
00:37:32.304 --> 00:37:42.114
On the other hand, it's very common to see in sexist rhetoric, an idea that women are too focused on others and that they should be more selfish and independent.
00:37:42.563 --> 00:37:54.298
And so I think you see here this idea that we shouldn't exercise our right as individual citizens because we are narrowly focused on a kind of naval gazing.
00:37:55.018 --> 00:37:56.429
I don't even know if it's introspection.
00:37:56.429 --> 00:37:58.378
It's just like vibe, right?
00:37:58.378 --> 00:37:59.438
It's just like the feeling.
00:37:59.458 --> 00:38:18.349
And so I do think you see there an idea that to be a woman is to be inner directed, and that's a kind of selfishness, but that's very obviously different from the kind of selfishness that Andrew Tate would probably espouse, which is the get rich quick scheme, hustler bro, and also like the sexual domination, selfishness.
00:38:18.349 --> 00:38:26.534
I mean, he's definitely talks about, you know, he definitely spouts rhetoric that's very selfish when it comes to the bedroom his relations with women.
00:38:26.534 --> 00:38:28.153
I mean, as like a literal rapist.
00:38:28.329 --> 00:38:28.539
Yeah.
00:38:28.539 --> 00:38:36.565
And well, and the difference there is that the kind of desire that is p resumed to guide the female psyche versus the male psyche.
00:38:36.804 --> 00:38:37.344
In the case of
00:38:37.344 --> 00:38:38.304
I'll say feminine maybe?
00:38:38.344 --> 00:38:40.704
Well, no, I mean he wouldn't say there's a difference.
00:38:40.704 --> 00:38:42.474
He probably loves calling us females.
00:38:42.655 --> 00:38:42.804
Yeah.
00:38:42.804 --> 00:38:53.440
And so like the, what I get from this is his sense that when women make decisions, they're making them based on a desire that is socially meaningless.
00:38:53.440 --> 00:39:03.630
In other words, it's not just that they care for things, but they just care for their own feelings, which ultimately go nowhere because those feelings are ultimately unimportant because women are what?
00:39:04.230 --> 00:39:04.849
Property.
00:39:05.050 --> 00:39:12.505
Whereas if we were to turn the tables here, men obviously also vote for the things that they care about, based on their feelings.
00:39:12.525 --> 00:39:19.855
But the presumption there is that men's feelings have a meaningful object or a meaningful reference in the real world.
00:39:19.855 --> 00:39:21.985
The things that men care for matter.
00:39:22.324 --> 00:39:23.954
So it's even deeper than that.
00:39:24.224 --> 00:39:29.954
It's ultimately about meaningfulness versus meaninglessness and that distinction being gendered.
00:39:30.094 --> 00:39:30.815
Okay.
00:39:30.815 --> 00:39:32.375
No, that's such a good point.
00:39:32.525 --> 00:39:33.425
You want one more?
00:39:33.849 --> 00:39:34.900
Only one, please.
00:39:35.110 --> 00:39:37.570
Because I am at my limit of Andrew Tate quotes.
00:39:38.974 --> 00:39:42.574
I'm a realist and when you're a realist, you're sexist.
00:39:43.155 --> 00:39:47.385
There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.
00:39:47.594 --> 00:39:52.155
This speaks to exactly what you were talking about earlier, David, which is the Bourdeu point.
00:39:52.215 --> 00:39:56.235
There's a masking of the domination by saying just this is the natural order.
00:39:56.235 --> 00:39:56.534
Right?
00:39:56.594 --> 00:39:58.344
And I think this idea of realism,
00:39:58.344 --> 00:40:00.684
It's so common.
00:40:00.715 --> 00:40:12.679
Yeah and you, and you very often hear it in the evolutionary, quasi, pseudo evolutionary ideas as Right, like, oh, well I'm just, you know, speaking to the fact that like, things are this way and things have always been this way.
00:40:13.289 --> 00:40:16.079
And that's almost always not true.
00:40:16.079 --> 00:40:22.260
So like for instance, the idea that men necessarily wanna dominate women in the bedroom.
00:40:22.260 --> 00:40:34.559
And so that, so something like sexual assault or rape is a natural expression of masculinity that, I mean, obviously that's like morally abhorrent, but it's also just not even true, evolutionarily speaking.
00:40:34.559 --> 00:40:36.570
And it's very historically specific.
00:40:36.570 --> 00:40:48.585
And so for instance, the Association of masculinity with sexual conquest, including rape, is quite recent emerging around 1800, along with the idea that women lack sexual passion.
00:40:48.585 --> 00:40:55.905
And so this idea that women don't have a libido of their own, so they have to be, yeah, they just have to like kind of passively acquiesce or even be forced.
00:40:56.304 --> 00:41:04.635
That only emerges a couple of hundred years ago, and so I don't even think we necessarily need that argument, even in order to talk about something as being morally wrong.
00:41:04.875 --> 00:41:08.625
But if you do wanna play that game of well, things have always been this way.
00:41:08.909 --> 00:41:09.869
It's very easy to show.
00:41:09.869 --> 00:41:11.730
No, things have not always been this way.
00:41:11.760 --> 00:41:14.820
You're not a realist, Andrew Tate, you're a sexist but not a realist.
00:41:14.885 --> 00:41:15.394
Yeah.
00:41:15.394 --> 00:41:19.460
And at the very least there is conflation here of two senses of reality.
00:41:19.489 --> 00:41:19.880
Right?
00:41:19.880 --> 00:41:25.070
Because we can describe reality in terms of social reality, because we're talking about social phenomena.
00:41:25.099 --> 00:41:34.699
Okay, and so there is a social reality to the inferiority of women because that's been encoded into our ways of behaving and ways of living, in the cultures that we live in.
00:41:34.969 --> 00:41:46.704
But that's one conception of reality that very often gets confused with a, kind of metaphysical eternal, the way things are below this surface of social construction behind the veil of history.
00:41:46.945 --> 00:41:49.414
And that's where there is some confusion here.
00:41:49.414 --> 00:42:00.735
And it reminds me, for example, of the argument that the political philosopher Mark Fisher makes in his book Capitalist Realism about the politics of the rhetoric realism.
00:42:00.914 --> 00:42:17.505
That it's a kind of fatalism that allows you to justify the status quo by simply invoking the idea that because things are like this, there is no point in even imagining an alternative future in which things would be otherwise.
00:42:17.505 --> 00:42:29.585
And just like what we talked about in connection to primatology with Frans de Waal, I think we live in a culture that gives very high social standing to appeals to reality, right?
00:42:29.605 --> 00:42:31.405
If you're a realist, you're a pragmatist.
00:42:31.405 --> 00:42:34.344
And there's nothing that we love in America more than a pragmatist
00:42:34.534 --> 00:42:35.914
also associated with masculinity.
00:42:35.965 --> 00:42:36.085
Yeah.
00:42:36.085 --> 00:42:40.119
and so it starts shifting the signifiers very quickly.
00:42:40.250 --> 00:42:49.360
We're saying, I'm a realist, means I'm a pragmatist, means I can get things done, means I can justify my behavior and get away with it.
00:42:49.539 --> 00:42:53.670
Yeah and so we go from descriptive to normative without realizing it.
00:42:57.164 --> 00:42:58.844
Craving more overthink.
00:42:59.114 --> 00:43:05.355
Subscribe to our Substack for an extended version of our episodes, community Chat and Additional Bonus content.
00:43:05.715 --> 00:43:12.704
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00:43:13.065 --> 00:43:18.974
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00:43:21.849 --> 00:43:32.010
David, given your general knowledge or lack thereof of contemporary cultural phenomena on social media in particular, I'm gonna guess that you have not heard of the performative male trend.
00:43:32.815 --> 00:43:38.724
I resent the way you have framed that question, but I'm also sad to report that, no, I don't know what that is.
00:43:39.175 --> 00:43:39.784
Well don't worry.
00:43:39.784 --> 00:43:43.355
You are going to learn, you know, I love you and you're out of touchness.
00:43:43.625 --> 00:43:56.855
So the performative male trend is a trope among younger people of young men, often performing in contests even, where they're basically like play acting this notion of manhood.
00:43:57.485 --> 00:44:00.304
Where you're dressing and acting for the female gaze.
00:44:00.425 --> 00:44:09.005
So like you're carrying a copy of Bell Hook's book The Will to Change and reading it at the coffee shop while drinking a matcha latte.
00:44:09.179 --> 00:44:09.300
Okay.
00:44:09.349 --> 00:44:14.355
Oh my God, now, I need to embody, to imagine the performative male, so matcha in hand
00:44:14.355 --> 00:44:18.304
You're part way there actually, because I mean, I would definitely see you reading Bell Hook.
00:44:18.465 --> 00:44:20.695
His book, the Will to Change at a Coffee shop.
00:44:20.744 --> 00:44:20.945
Yeah.
00:44:21.085 --> 00:44:22.034
I mean, I own that book.
00:44:23.534 --> 00:44:24.835
Yeah, that makes two of us.
00:44:24.855 --> 00:44:27.925
Although I guess I'm not in the running for a performative male.
00:44:28.385 --> 00:44:32.875
So matcha in hand, book in the other hand, maybe a tote bag.
00:44:33.804 --> 00:44:46.284
Yeah, like your cute trendy outfit, maybe you've got like nail polish on and there have even been like performative male lookalike contests to tease this kind of guy.
00:44:46.360 --> 00:44:46.630
Okay.
00:44:46.630 --> 00:44:49.659
And so let me ask a question based on my ignorance about this.
00:44:50.019 --> 00:45:02.965
Is it that this refers to a character who is a truly motivated individual in relation to being liberated from masculinity, like they're really trying to overcome masculinity?
00:45:03.039 --> 00:45:03.159
Oh yeah.
00:45:03.159 --> 00:45:04.449
They're really reading the will to change.
00:45:04.449 --> 00:45:05.284
They're not just turning the pages.
00:45:05.514 --> 00:45:11.905
Or are they doing so in a way that merely conveys that they're that kind of person.
00:45:11.905 --> 00:45:14.244
So is there a fakeness and a phoniness to it?
00:45:14.454 --> 00:45:25.824
it's a bit ambiguous and the lookalike contests are trading on that ambiguity because the idea is that like, you know, when we say performative male, you and I have issues with the use of performative in this non-specific context.
00:45:25.824 --> 00:45:29.105
You can go back to our earlier performativity episode about this.
00:45:29.375 --> 00:45:35.719
But the truth is, the word performative has become a synonym for optical or superficial.
00:45:35.719 --> 00:45:37.880
And so maybe we need to just let that one go.
00:45:37.880 --> 00:45:38.894
We're not gonna win that, Ellie.
00:45:38.894 --> 00:45:39.800
We're not gonna that.
00:45:40.130 --> 00:45:54.125
At least not as of now back in 2021 or so when we did the episode, it seemed like maybe there was still a fight to win, but you know, it's really meant to refer to younger generations of men who are not interested in replicating the toxic masculinity that they have seen modeled for them.
00:45:54.184 --> 00:46:01.730
And so I do think, you know, when we're talking, not about the lookalike contest, but about the people that will look alike contest is sort of gently teasing.
00:46:02.059 --> 00:46:13.099
We are generally talking about people who have good intentions, but I think as we know from studying gender, good intentions very often do not translate into material change.
00:46:13.099 --> 00:46:22.940
And so it's one thing to read the will to change, it's another thing to actually remodel your intimate relationships with women in a way that is genuinely not sexist.
00:46:22.969 --> 00:46:30.340
Yeah, you might be reading the Will to Change, but maybe you're still expecting all the emotional her and hermeneutic labor of your woman partner.
00:46:30.340 --> 00:46:37.179
She's managing your social calendar, maybe buying you the pearl necklace that you're wearing at the coffee shop, painting your nails,
00:46:38.224 --> 00:46:42.414
reading the will to change for you, giving you the cliff notes.
00:46:43.699 --> 00:46:44.400
That too.
00:46:45.059 --> 00:46:45.760
Fair enough.
00:46:45.760 --> 00:46:50.324
And I can honestly, I can visualize this character I've met the character multiple times.
00:46:50.675 --> 00:47:02.534
Maybe I have come close to it, even in my presentation, hopefully not in the phoniness, but the ambiguity that you're pointing to seems really important to me about that character.
00:47:02.534 --> 00:47:27.869
Right, because as a teacher, of course, I interact with students all the time and I can say that a lot of my male students really feel this tension that on the one hand they are deeply dissatisfied with the model of masculinity that they've seen in their families, in their loved ones that they have been trained to aspire to.
00:47:28.360 --> 00:47:31.630
And so they're reaching, and we've talked about this, this grasping at stress.
00:47:31.630 --> 00:47:42.739
They're looking for something else that might organize their gender identity, their sense of self, especially in a culture that puts them under tremendous pressure to be a man.
00:47:42.789 --> 00:47:55.849
And so the ambiguity of the performative male trope or type or character suggests that we live in a culture where that ambiguity is kind of part of the status of masculinity nowadays.
00:47:55.855 --> 00:47:55.985
Yeah, right?
00:47:56.059 --> 00:47:56.119
Yeah.
00:47:56.119 --> 00:48:03.500
That people want something else, but they don't know what it is, and so that might mean that they end up in a position.
00:48:04.119 --> 00:48:09.769
Or in a stance in relation to masculinity that maybe is purely superficial.
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:14.920
Because there is no load star to orient their gender self-discovery.
00:48:14.980 --> 00:48:23.710
Yeah, and there's not a real blueprint for the kind of work that you have to do in order to overcome and unlearn the messages that you've been given.
00:48:23.739 --> 00:48:30.400
And you know, I think this idea of like, what does it mean to be a man is extremely important because it goes to the heart of the issue.
00:48:30.429 --> 00:48:37.614
If masculinity is all of those things that we described earlier in the episode, then it is irredeemable.
00:48:37.614 --> 00:48:41.780
Like if it is based on violent homophobia and the dominion of women, it is irredeemable.
00:48:42.380 --> 00:48:44.340
It's kind of hard to see anyway around it.
00:48:44.755 --> 00:48:51.355
But I think a lot of people wanna say, well, there is a healthy version of masculinity that is consistent with gender equity and gender justice.
00:48:51.355 --> 00:48:53.965
And this is not just a theoretical question, right?
00:48:53.965 --> 00:48:59.994
I think it's one that many of the men that I care about think about a lot, as I mentioned earlier in the episode.
00:49:00.559 --> 00:49:00.800
Yeah.
00:49:00.804 --> 00:49:07.519
And, and there's been a lot of proposals for reinventing or rediscovering or recreating masculinity, right?
00:49:07.519 --> 00:49:25.550
Where maybe we invent an entirely new model of masculinity or maybe we look at the past and on earth old ways of being masculine and revalue them, Like we maybe abandoned them and we realize that we've lost something important along the way.
00:49:25.550 --> 00:49:28.110
The masculinity study scholar Todd Reeser.
00:49:28.570 --> 00:49:39.579
He points out that if you look at the history of masculinity, you see a shift in the virtues and values that get associated with the acne of masculinity.
00:49:39.710 --> 00:49:42.159
And so for example, in the early modern period.
00:49:42.981 --> 00:49:58.902
the value of moderation was seen as quintessentially masculine because it's associated with a kind of equipoise, with judgment, with acumen, with resolve, with a sense of certainty in oneself in judgment.
00:49:59.262 --> 00:50:12.452
And so, for instance, I could imagine somebody saying, maybe we need to reclaim that value, that masculine coded value of moderation for the project of creating a new mythology of masculinity.
00:50:12.842 --> 00:50:18.452
Which might be better than the model of masculinity that we have now, which is the no sissy stuff.
00:50:18.452 --> 00:50:19.641
Be a big wheel.
00:50:19.731 --> 00:50:21.751
You know, like, give them hell.
00:50:22.271 --> 00:50:29.632
There you have an explosive masculinity that we can contrast with something that probably is better, which is one rooted in moderation.
00:50:29.661 --> 00:50:38.242
Well, and the one feature that you didn't just mention is the be a sturdy Oak, which I think would, should be closest to this notion of moderation.
00:50:38.442 --> 00:50:43.822
But I do think it is importantly different from it because moderation is not about stoicism and calmness.
00:50:43.822 --> 00:50:47.672
I mean, maybe calm, but I don't think it's about absence of emotion.
00:50:47.702 --> 00:50:51.331
Arguably socialism is not either, but let's say that's usually how it gets wielded, right?
00:50:51.331 --> 00:50:53.161
Like don't have emotions at all.
00:50:53.521 --> 00:50:56.181
And if you do have them, then suppress them, right?
00:50:56.181 --> 00:51:00.121
That's something that I've studied in my research on masculine norms as well.
00:51:00.362 --> 00:51:11.467
The suppression of emotions is a huge problem among men, and it seems like moderation is not so much about the suppression of emotions as it is about like a more healthy management of them.
00:51:11.527 --> 00:51:15.086
And I think managing emotions, you know, obviously like that's a great thing.
00:51:15.317 --> 00:51:22.117
Not expecting other people to automatically manage your emotions for you is very important.
00:51:22.117 --> 00:51:28.936
But a question would be, is that an inherently masculine trait, or is that just a mark of being a good person?
00:51:28.967 --> 00:51:42.226
And it seems like in order to say that it's the former, we would have to contrast it with immoderation, which would be associated then with what is not masculine, whether it's feminine.
00:51:42.286 --> 00:51:51.376
I mean, obviously that's the oppositional term, or maybe we could even think of other oppositional terms here, like the marginalized masculine as opposed to the hegemonic masculine, and that doesn't seem so good to me.
00:51:51.512 --> 00:51:56.581
Well, since we're talking about healthy masculinity, the opposite would either be femininity in toto.
00:51:57.206 --> 00:51:58.976
Or toxic masculinity.
00:51:58.976 --> 00:52:02.867
So there in moderation could be the trait of the bad masculine.
00:52:02.867 --> 00:52:06.297
Whereas moderation would be the trait of the good masculine.
00:52:07.266 --> 00:52:15.626
But yeah, I think in general you're right, that this would be very different than the stoic suppression of emotions that we often associate with the norms of masculinity.
00:52:15.626 --> 00:52:23.157
Especially because if you think all the way back to Aristotle, who writes a lot about phronesis the art of judgment in moderation.
00:52:23.157 --> 00:52:25.737
Like knowing exactly where to shoot your shot.
00:52:26.427 --> 00:52:36.577
Aristotle is clear that moderation means everything in moderation, and that sometimes includes an excess of an emotion when it is appropriate tocircumstance.
00:52:36.597 --> 00:52:36.836
Right.
00:52:36.836 --> 00:52:40.027
So it's not being cool and collected all the time.
00:52:40.027 --> 00:52:45.686
It means having the appropriate moral reaction to a particular circumstance.
00:52:46.146 --> 00:52:49.617
Now the question that you asked is this.
00:52:50.686 --> 00:52:55.007
A project for masculinity, or is this just what it means to be a good person in general?
00:52:55.007 --> 00:53:06.737
I think that's my view really about a lot of these projects for reclaiming masculinity, and that is that they have nothing to do with masculinity, they just have to do with ethics writ large.
00:53:06.737 --> 00:53:06.797
Yeah.
00:53:06.916 --> 00:53:10.907
And so yeah, emotional management, great for everybody.
00:53:10.907 --> 00:53:21.336
Everybody's included, and I don't see why we would call good emotional management healthy masculinity anymore than we would just call it healthy humanity or healthy self relation.
00:53:21.336 --> 00:53:28.786
And I have the same view about other projects that people have promoted for reinventing masculinity.
00:53:28.786 --> 00:53:35.646
So for example, people have called for the reclaiming of things like honor, or things like chivalry, for example.
00:53:35.896 --> 00:53:42.617
I think the case of chivalry is really revealing in this regard for me, because I see it as it's one way or another.
00:53:42.646 --> 00:53:44.297
Like there's that kind of double bind here.
00:53:44.896 --> 00:53:51.646
Either to be chivalrous means to be in a relation specifically to a feminine object, right?
00:53:51.646 --> 00:53:53.927
Where I'm chivalrous to a woman.
00:53:54.467 --> 00:54:06.782
And so if that's the case, if it requires the relation to a feminine object, then you're still re inscribing an active masculine, passive feminine dichotomy that is that's problematic.
00:54:07.382 --> 00:54:12.152
You know, refer back to the Pierre Bourdeu discussion about masculinity as domination
00:54:12.202 --> 00:54:17.141
Chivalry is like literally compensating for a perceived weakness among women so I don't think that that's a value we should reclaim.
00:54:17.172 --> 00:54:17.351
Yeah.
00:54:17.351 --> 00:54:22.722
But I think the people who reclaim it say that it doesn't have to be, that it can just be kindness to women.
00:54:23.021 --> 00:54:24.702
Andrew Tate, and the definition of property?
00:54:24.702 --> 00:54:25.661
Well, yeah, exactly.
00:54:26.052 --> 00:54:28.902
Like far less toxic than that, but I think it's essentially the same thing.
00:54:29.052 --> 00:54:35.052
And if it's not gendered, if it's just like, oh, be shiver risk toward everybody, then I don't see why we would call it chivalry.
00:54:35.092 --> 00:54:37.311
And we wouldn't call it chivalry in practice, right?
00:54:37.311 --> 00:54:44.601
When a guy opens the door to me when I'm entering the grocery store, we don't say that he's being chivalrous.
00:54:44.692 --> 00:54:49.581
'cause in that relationship, I, as another man, I'm not perceived as a feminine object.
00:54:49.581 --> 00:54:54.711
We just say that he's doing something that's something close to civil kindness or civic duty.
00:54:55.467 --> 00:54:57.617
Or basic human decency.
00:54:57.947 --> 00:55:01.577
Opening the door out of chivalry for a non-binary person, then they're just misgendering them.
00:55:01.996 --> 00:55:02.117
Yeah.
00:55:02.606 --> 00:55:05.456
Yeah, it's, you're like, stay away from acts of kindness folks.
00:55:06.032 --> 00:55:06.422
Okay.
00:55:06.461 --> 00:55:15.242
SoI do think there are some organizations that are trying to establish a more positive approach to masculinity, but I wonder whether they might meet the same criticism that you just made.
00:55:15.242 --> 00:55:24.331
So there's an organization called A Call to Men that educates men on healthy manhood, and specifically helps men address violence against women.
00:55:24.931 --> 00:55:30.061
They wanna help men get out of what they call the man box, which is a traditional picture of masculinity.
00:55:30.061 --> 00:55:32.251
The one that, as we've discussed, is toxic.
00:55:32.637 --> 00:55:45.447
But when you read their description of what healthy, respectful manhood looks like, it means valuing and respecting women, girls and LGBQ, trans and non-binary people, and respecting and valuing oneself by striving to live authentically.
00:55:46.077 --> 00:55:50.266
That doesn't seem to be something that is specific to masculinity.
00:55:50.266 --> 00:55:54.777
That seems to be like respecting yourself and other people regardless of their gender.
00:55:54.942 --> 00:55:59.411
No, I mean, I think that's just like moral, basic, moral principles, right.
00:55:59.411 --> 00:56:07.367
Of respect for the other and authenticity in relation to the self, insofar as authenticity is a moral value, which is a contested issue.
00:56:07.367 --> 00:56:09.137
And I would even probably say no.
00:56:09.137 --> 00:56:10.302
We may have an episode on that,
00:56:10.367 --> 00:56:10.516
Yeah.
00:56:11.322 --> 00:56:12.911
An episode from years ago, you can check out.
00:56:13.097 --> 00:56:17.697
And so I do think it's susceptible to the same kind of criticism.
00:56:17.697 --> 00:56:23.996
And so I want to remain open-minded about the possibility of a healthy model of masculinity.
00:56:24.117 --> 00:56:37.166
And of course there is a lot that is better than the status quo, especially with the rise of the manosphere as a space for the indoctrination of young men into excessively toxic forms of masculinity.
00:56:37.166 --> 00:56:37.226
Yeah.
00:56:37.617 --> 00:56:41.907
But in general, I am of the view that masculinity.
00:56:42.362 --> 00:56:50.431
Is irredeemable because insofar as its masculinity, it must have a relationship to femininity.
00:56:50.822 --> 00:56:55.481
And I am yet to hear an account of that relationship that is not hierarchical.
00:56:55.481 --> 00:56:59.981
And therefore a form of hegemony or domination.
00:57:00.302 --> 00:57:16.782
Yeah, and I think part of the challenge here is even for those of us who might wanna see a gender abolitionist future, I think there is an erotic investment for many men in finding a positive expression of their gender identity and in finding a positive expression of masculinity.
00:57:16.782 --> 00:57:22.871
And I, it's definitely not my place to be like, avoid that altogether if you wanna be a feminist.
00:57:22.871 --> 00:57:23.952
You know, I think for myself.
00:57:24.161 --> 00:57:32.231
There has been a place for embracing some associations of femininity as a way of affirming myself.
00:57:32.262 --> 00:57:47.561
And I think, you know, this idea of an, of a new kind of affirmation is what the Mythopoetic men's movement in the 1990s, which was grounded in Jungian psychological archetypes, was trying to address, and we're gonna talk about that more momentarily in the bonus segment.
00:57:47.942 --> 00:57:56.641
But for now, I'll just say what they were trying to do is give a new focus on communal rituals for men that help them find a positive expression of masculinity.
00:57:56.911 --> 00:58:19.677
A lot of these rituals were problematic in various ways as we'll discuss, but I do think at minimum that finding a healthy masculinity could be a momentary step on a path toward gender abolition, but that this redefinition has to be shaped collectively, and for that we need an anti Andrew Tate to help lead the way.
00:58:22.422 --> 00:58:23.981
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