Rebraiding Masculinity: Redefining the Struggle of Women Under the Domination of the Masculinity Trinity
A SCHOLARLY PAPER FROM THE GRIEVANCE STUDIES PROJECT
Summary:
In the name of Helen Wilson (pseudonym) by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose.
Summary: This paper was another early “pure hoax” attempt to write something preposterous and barely rooted in the existing academic literature at all as a means to test the peer review system for outright, lazy hoaxes. Since one of the discoveries of the Grievance Studies Affair is that the peer review system is working as intended but validating ideologically contaminated ideas, it was not at all successful. The paper was another of our attempts to expose the bogus methodology called “autoethnography,” which seeks to draw sociological and anthropological conclusions from what amounts to a very academic diary entry. In this case, we offered an absurd account of three different incommensurate forms of masculinity and sought to unify them such that men would be expected to live according to even more ridiculous Woke rules. It was rejected without review, however, and retired from the project early on.
Notes on Status:
Submitted to and rejected by Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Contents:
Abstract
Introduction
Masculinity’s Trinity
Oberlin
Youthful Indecisiveness and How I Changed
Masculinity Unmasked
References
Abstract
For decades, feminist and masculinities scholarship has sought to parse the many forms of benevolent and harmful masculinity and to find ways to culturally encourage the former and diminish the latter. Masculinities research has therefore examined and re-examined the various constructions, tropes, power dynamics, features, and dominances of various masculinities, and critical scholarship has deeply investigated the co-constituted problems of male privilege and patriarchy in tremendous detail. Masculinities have by this process been unwound and critically examined by feminist and gender scholarship into a stunning array of separate threads. This autoethnographic account chronicles my own reluctant feminist awakening while seeking to identify three essential strands of masculinity, the “Masculinity Trinity,” and identify their underlying similarities. It then (re)braids the many strands of critically examined masculinities to highlight their inherent similarity and thus expose and potentially disrupt the fundamentally problematic nature universal to masculinity itself.
Keywords: Masculinity, Patriarchy, Feminism, Gender, Autoethnography, Hegemonic Masculinity
Introduction
When I reflect critically upon my childhood, it is almost impossible for me to remember when our culture’s hegemonic expectations upon masculinity began to bring particular thoughts to my consciousness. Particularly, even though she was identified at least nominally as a (liberal) feminist from early in her own life, I do not remember even having heard the words, “masculinity,” “male privilege,” or “patriarchy,” in the theoretically relevant way from my mother throughout all the years I lived with my parents. Certainly, our lives were filled with the direct and indirect influences of hegemonic masculinity, but a social, political, and cultural conception of patriarchy remained unacknowledged. In retrospect, as I can now reconsider them via the tools of feminist theory and present them using the methods of autoethnography, hegemonic masculinity was a force ubiquitously present and yet conspicuously absent from my formative experiences.
Within my own home, if “men” or “masculinity” was ever mentioned in a derogatory sense, my mother, who was a staunch supporter of gender equality, would likely have considered those who used it as such as being uneducated, unkind, and even uncouth. In the course of her career as a social worker she had witnessed countless incidences of domestic abuse against women, and yet she came to be quite compassionate and mild mannered, even toward men, which had a contagious effect on me. In my schooling I found no reason to alter the picture of our shared cultural reality that I had formed in my home.
I grew up in an all-American town called Ottumwa, not far outside of Des Moines, Iowa. In grade school, while there were many boys in our classes, I knew only one male teacher, aside from the principal, Mr. Martin, and the gym teacher, Coach Dobbs, common to the entire primary school. As a teacher, we had no particular problem with Mr. Carlton, but we thought his employment as the sole male teacher in our school to be odd, even uncomfortable, so we guarded ourselves from him. What we were ill-equipped to realize at the time is that his unique status in our school, both as the sole male elementary school teacher and specifically as a science teacher within that school, was a toxic offshoot of hegemonic expectations concerning masculinity which were embedded within education, employment, and the broader culture (Connell 1996). These forces were, of course, also reflected in Mr. Martin and in Coach Dobbs, given the former’s position of authority over the school and the latter’s occupation as a physical education teacher (Skelton 1993).
It was therefore a consequence of hegemonic masculinity that certain expectations upon masculinity were perpetuated in us (Drudy 2008; Skelton 2012). By its self-reinforcing influence, we were prevented from having more exposure to male teachers, thus embedding in us a patriarchal social expectation that women are better suited to being ghettoized in employment, say as (non-science) teachers in primary schools rather than business executives or government officials, than are men (Drudy 2008; Mistry and Sood 2015). Still, as children, beyond sensing that general strangeness in the example of the maleness of Mr. Carlton (and parallel lack of strangeness in the maleness of Principal Martin and Coach Dobbs), my friends and I (both boys and girls) formed no specific opinions in regard to him personally or to cultural gender expectations more generally.
So, it was not until I was thirteen or fourteen that my encounters with the terms “patriarchy,” “masculinity,” and “male privilege” became frequent, mostly in connection with diversity and inclusion initiatives in our high school and in the myriad political controversies and issues of Social Justice (for examples, the wage gap, sexual harassment, rape and rape culture, discriminatory hiring and employment practices, and so forth). These discussions aroused an uncomfortable aversion in me, and I always had a disquieting feeling which descended upon me when listening to Social Justice conversations. During this time in my youth, though awakening somewhat to the gender binaries defining the fabric of our culture, I had no other feeling about issues surrounding patriarchy, or of masculinity, or of privilege, or of Social Justice.
This was partially because there were relatively few feminists in Ottumwa (or Des Moines, for that matter), Iowa, and so sexism, while present and persistent in our lives, was a matter that seemed only to exist in larger, far-away institutions like big-city corporations and the university. Of course, there were always enough adverse effects of hegemonic forms of masculinity to be at least dimly aware of them—men being expected to be dominant, aggressive, “manly,” taciturn, strong, brash, and so on, even despite the patient joviality of Mr. Carlton and the apparently nurturing example of my father (cf. Delacollette et al. 2013). These led to the usual manifestations of patriarchy, of which I was also aware, even if I, a child of Ottumwa, accepted them at the time as “normal”: most households were explicitly male-biased and men held nearly all of the positions of power and prestige in the vicinity, while women and girls were valued for being pretty, meek, nice, smiling, and all the rest (Delacollette et al. 2013); that is, in the usual ways by which male privilege and everyday sexism casually taint the experience of women in contemporary American society (McIntosh 1989).
Masculinity’s Trinity
Over the decades, men who lived in and around Des Moines could be qualitatively separated into three fairly distinct groups: a privileged male elite whose patriarchal disposition and thrall to hegemonic forms of masculinity were apparent when viewed in the right light but incidental to how they lived their lives (Delacollette et al. 2013); an overtly sexist macho class whose patriarchy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity all but defined them; and a smaller set who styled themselves as “male feminists.” Respectively, these three groups of men represent patriarchy, toxic masculinity and potential rapists, and performative liberals and false allies, and collectively, they are ultimately exhaustive of expressions of masculinity, as I came to realize over the course of my lived experience and feminist education. As many women in Ottumwa, maybe in all of Iowa, would attest, there was a simultaneous awareness of all three groups and their social impacts upon the lived experiences of women; but as a little girl becoming young woman in Ottumwa, because we had normalized hegemonic forms of masculinity as “men being men” and internalized enough patriarchy to expect male-dominated society, these (largely superficial) differences in the varieties of male experience meant very little to us (Delacollette et al. 2013).
Many within this first group, the privileged male elite whose masculinity is ultimately defined by the structural forces known as patriarchy, had such an apparently positive (or at least neutral) attitude toward women and feminism that I did not have cause to look at them as perpetuating gendered binaries. Because unacknowledged privilege and patriarchy are universally deemed normal outside of feminist scholarship, and because it would be many years before I encountered what Glick and Fiske (1997) had termed “benevolent (or ambivalent) sexism,” I did not perceive the ridiculousness of my illusion. Instead, the only external impression I recognized as distinguishing men and women was basic chromosomal sex (as, because of entrenched attitudes about gender and transphobia, especially in Iowa, I did not know of the existence of trans* people until I was twelve years old and only learned about gender performativity after I was in college, where I first encountered West and Zimmerman’s (1987) landmark paper “Doing Gender”) and the works of Judith Butler (e.g., 1997, 2004, 2011).
As they were still unchallenged by feminist theory, my quaint ideas about masculinity and equality were simultaneously pervasive, seductive, and sticky. Even after beginning to understand masculinity from a feminist perspective, I still often thought patriarchal men were perceived negatively either because of unfair associations with toxic masculinity or because of the demands hegemonic masculinity forced upon them, to take upon roles like provider and protector, and so my revulsion to hearing vitriolic feminist remarks and cautions against men grew into a feeling of disgust. For me as a child in Ottumwa, there were the sexists, domestic abusers, and misogynists (bad men) and then there were men who supported women (good men), and to conflate the latter with the former was as much a “sin” as any other form of sexual discrimination.
As I have realized since, the overarching similarity of these three groups of men, so apparently different on every superficial level, defines the importance and theoretical worth of this autoethnographical investigation. They form a “Trinity” of masculinity, three forms that are but one form, masculinity that is externally triune and yet wholly itself and, in truth, undifferentiated. Neither the first group (inheritors of patriarchy) nor the last (performative liberals and false allies), in their seeming benign, ambivalent, or benevolent masculinities, is truly free from perpetuating hegemonic masculinity and gender binaries. Masculinity is such that their perfomativity of gender is consistently centered in their own needs, and so their expressions of masculinity are only superficially different from the outright sexists in the second group (purveyors of toxic masculinity) (cf. Bridges and Pascoe 2014).
Indeed, though it seems things would be otherwise, paradoxically there is very little to say directly about the middle group of men, those overtly sexist and misogynistic males whose masculinity and sexism condense into an obvious toxic masculine form that sets a baseline for measuring the abuses of hegemonic masculinity in society. Their sexism is coarse and conspicuous and their masculinity toxic, and it is only that theirs is but a little different than the quieter systemic sexism and widespread attitude of patriarchy or cunning manipulation of false allyship that makes the point of this account relevant. For these unabashedly sexist men, their behavior is often violent in both its verbal and physical expression against women and active engagement with rape culture, but it was also all the seemingly easier to ignore and dismiss because of its vulgarity. Because times have changed, even in corn-country Iowa, no one particularly appreciated these men, least of all the rapists, harassers, wife-beaters, and other domestic abusers. It seemed we all, (better) men and women, knew what do to so as to avoid them and their openly violent and regressive attitudes and to penalize them as necessary when they transgressed. Of course, there were the usual problems with enduring as little of their abuse and violence as we could while being routinely victimized by it, and standing up to it when we can, but the demands of masculinity upon the whole of society, especially women, meant otherwise getting on with our lives with what my mother called “a woman’s strength.”
Of the greatest importance for the present study is the privileged man in the first or third group, that is, calling himself “feminist” or not, whose subtle adoption of hegemonic masculine forms and unexamined identification with patriarchy carried the usual power and soft domination of the privileged (Delacollette et al. 2013). These men did not and do not seem to be sexist, and in my youth I did not think they were, but their sexism was even more egregious for the fact of its seemly gentleness and near-invisibility. Unlike their more obviously sexist brothers, these men provide no nucleation point for their sexism, and thus we had to resort to enduring what we have come to understand to be the subtle domination of patriarchy and ostensibly anti-sexist attitudes that lack any clear reason to resist, fight, or even to avoid them. Because these men were and still are wolves in sheep’s clothing, the disguise having fooled even themselves, we merely had to accept their subtler sexism as part of the dehumanizing lived experience familiar to nearly all women in patriarchal society.
Male “feminists” are another matter. Though they represent a minority of men, those performative but false allies in the third group constitute a special focus. These men utilize their masculine privilege ostensibly to fight as “feminists” beside and on behalf of women, but they are also beneficiaries of male privilege no matter how much they recognize and check it (Wade 2017b). In truth, however, there is ample reason to question whether the seemingly noble motives of male “feminists” provides them an escape from the systemic poisons of patriarchy and male privilege and the inexorable demands of hegemonic masculinity upon the male performance (cf. Bridges and Pascoe 2014). This is no simplistic radical feminist exclusion of male feminism, and yet the answer seems to be that it does not, for these men routinely exhibit all the traits of a male privileged existence they claim to denounce, such as centering their own needs, performing masculine displays, taking advantage of the male-privileged workplace in pursuing their own careers (McIntosh 2015), accumulating wealth (Kimmel 1993, 87), and appreciating action-based media and video games (with which they engage extensively) filled with masculinist tropes both about masculinity and about women (Dietz 1998; Fox and Tang 2014). Most of these performative false allies continue to talk over women (“mansplain,” in the going slang) even within feminist meetings (Bridges 2017), and, due to their extensive attempts to date and have sexual encounters with feminist women through such social environments, it is difficult to see them as distinct either from the patriarchal beneficiaries in the first group or the toxic masculinists in the second (cf. Cills 2017).
These observations lay beyond my horizons in my youth, however, and in those naively simpler times, there were just good men and bad ones. So life was as a young lesbian woman in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the early 2000s. Then, just after I turned eighteen, I moved to Oberlin, Ohio, to attend Oberlin College.
Oberlin
Confused and overwhelmed by the impressions from my architectural, geographic, and cultural surroundings at Oberlin, still naive from my experiences as a young woman in Ottumwa, and depressed by my social situation, initially I did not distinguish between ostensibly healthy forms of masculinity and the variously patriarchal attitudes of collegiate males. I assumed things must be like they were in Ottumwa, in that we were creeping into the 2010s by then: the student body must contain some sexist, misogynist, or dangerous men among its males, and that what I’d learn to be called hegemonic masculinity must hold much sway over my classmates and professors, but that the problem was both minimal and unwelcome. My initial experiences in and at Oberlin, which was a campus experience predominantly filled with meeting (performative false) male feminist allies with ostensibly stronger feminist views than my own, seemed to confirm this worldview. Dorm life, college-level coursework, and cafeteria food were harder for me to adjust to than being surrounded by at-times-rowdy college-aged men.
During the first months following my move, I struggled to cope with the onslaught of the various realities in this bewildering new living situation, and so the social and cultural milieu around me seemed normal, if not intoxicating. It was not until I had gradually nested into my situation in college and finished my freshman orientation, which contained both a diversity and rape-awareness module (not to mention many young men who openly snickered at and mocked their instruction), that this initially confused picture became clear—I acquired a more discerning view of my new environment. And with that clarity I came up as though for the first time against the true magnitude of the co-constituted problems of hegemonic forms of masculinity and its social manifestation in patriarchy. This period, then, extending from roughly the second month at Oberlin until the end of my first year there (though it continues to this day), marked my genuine awakening to the toxicity of hegemonic masculinity and severity of patriarchy in America and of the reality that their ultimate source rests in toxic and hegemonic patterns in masculinity itself, as is borne out extensively in literature of which I was, until that time, pervasively unaware (Hill 2009; Lerner 1986).
In deference to my mother’s belief in women’s strength and the value of a good man (like I believed of my father), I will not say that the manner in which I first became acquainted with the magnitude of the problems of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy was particularly unpleasant. In the male I still saw only an individual who lived in a male body, though more or less the same as me within, and therefore, on morally-rooted grounds of human tolerance, I was implacably opposed to what I saw as the notion that he should be criticized because he had different genitals because I did not see the layers of privilege, power, and domination which clustered around the various expressions of masculinity (Crenshaw 1991). These noble and high minded views of egalitarian society being the roots of equity had their origins in the memory of a few traumatizing events from my childhood that came into my mind (having been aware of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, sexism, and misogyny can steel one against wishing to participate in anything that might exhibit any signs of sexual prejudice), along with the memory of my mother’s wisdom about treating people with that same dignity I wished to receive, and I felt that I should not like to see those events repeated or my mother’s wise words despoiled. I therefore, despite my observations at Oberlin, regarded much of feminism more as products of jealousy or even envy as opposed to expressions of a sincere, though wrong-headed (to my view at the time), resistance.
In the course of my experiences through college, then graduate school, however, I had opinions continually being confirmed by a careful and deliberate process in which I analyzed and reacted to the stories appearing almost weekly, then daily, in both my lived experiences and especially vicariously through the news. Another woman sexually assaulted at a fraternity party; another woman victimized by date rape and then slut-shamed and victim-blamed for it; another Halloween defined by “slutty” Halloween costumes for women; another “male ally” turning out to be a predator (these being prominent in campus culture [e.g., Cills 2017]); another seventy seven cents on the dollar for women’s work; another political attempt to control women’s reproductive freedom; and so on, day after day, week after week. These media portrayals accorded closely with my personal experiences on campus, and my convictions, becoming increasingly informed by feminist theory, began to take shape.
In fact, the media, itself in thrall to patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and patronizing false allyship, seemed to be as much a part of the problem as a reporter of it (cf. Fahey 2007). I frequently became disgusted by the exploitative means with which the media made a ratings based spectacle out of women in ways that can only be understood as patriarchal or misogynistic, and the manner in which that very media environment played lackey to a monstrous political regime bent upon both disenfranchising and exploiting the non-male American population (Bligh et al. 2012; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Meeks 2012). That, then, began to open my eyes to the need for radical thought—and intervention upon—the essentially identical problems of hegemonic and toxic forms of masculinity (groups one and two) and its cultural guarantor, patriarchy, and became the first blot staining my appreciation of the American-capitalist political and media machines.
Even more reprehensible and offensive was the way in which this same political-media machine commodified women (and especially women’s sexuality) for their own gain, be it capitalistic, pseudo-virtuous, or reactionary. And at the same time, our news environment took up an apparent attitude of anxiety about the welfare and fate of women under both toxic masculinities and patriarchy, by which they attempted to cloak their exploitation in the serious air of “detached” reporting, as though what they reported weren’t the gravest injustices: the rape of female bodies by dominant masculinity itself (Blumell and Huemmer 2017).
To my eyes, however, their ruthless exploitation was only poorly hidden, no matter how they protested their neutrality or even their anti-sexism—by which the true sexist is so often known and the performative false allyship of male feminists is so frequently exposed (cf. Cills 2017; Ferguson 2017; Wade 2017a). Instead, they pretended they were fulfilling a journalistic duty to report objectively upon the truth, but their very claim to “objective truth” came from a position situated within categorizations rooted in patriarchal assumptions. So excusing themselves by pretenses of being “feminist allies,” acting as though they were compassionate and earnestly defending the rights, freedoms, and very lives of women, they picked upon a deeply colored sore spot and then bored ruthlessly under the scab. And this, more than any other insult of patriarchal control of society, boiled my blood and left me unable to believe in what I came to know as the patriarchal media (Portwood-Stacer and Berridge 2017).
As if these insults weren’t offensive enough, the American political machine and a majority of the misogynistic and internalized-misogynistic electorate pandered to the media to cultivate an admiration for a strand of Americanness that is the most overtly identifiable with misogyny in decades, a renewed post-/anti-feminist ascendancy of “group-two” (sexist) masculine thought in American culture (Wade 2017b; West 2017). There is little to feel about being an American except ashamed to live in a country in which I couldn’t count the times the thinly veiled wretched sexist exhortation, “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” from the lips of the newest American president, who Lindy West rightly identified in the New York Times as “masculinity’s apoplectic id” and “the bar for male competence” (West 2017), elected by an electorate we as Americans and especially American women had believed to be filled with more men in groups one and three than apparently can be sustained. The constant reminders of it frequently caused me to turn off my television or shut down my computer in outraged disgust. Even under that duress, however, I was not in accord with a fully radicalized activism against hegemonic and toxic masculinity, misogyny, and the very patriarchy that support them, but again and again I was forced to accept that the recurrence of these dominant themes in society were grounds for sincere reflection.
It was an elementary sense of justice and growing appreciation for the truths being explained by critical (gender) theory that left me with no option but to change my opinions about masculinity itself. The three groups of men, three kinds of masculinity, I was realizing, are the same group and but different manifestations of the same kind, and the single idea weaving them into a single toxic braid is masculinity itself in any of its forms, dominant, hegemonic, and oppressed (cf. Wade 2017b). I slowly took upon myself (once I had found better reasoned grounds for making discerning judgments about gender and its relationships with society) an outspoken attitude that remaking American society by means—radical means, if necessary— consistent with the application of feminist critical theory would be necessary to achieve social justice and a binary-eliminating end of patriarchy, to say nothing of a fully equitable and just society in America. I realized, concurrent with Wade (2017b), that masculinity itself must be overthrown if gendered oppression is to cease and gender binaries are to be cast away. Thus my ideas about toxic and hegemonic forms of masculinity began to shift with the passage of time, but it was a change to these very ideas that turned out to be the most difficult for me to make. The memory of my mother’s commitment to gender egalitarianism led me to a great internal conflict with myself, and only by re-examining my mother’s commitments and advice through a lens of feminist critical theory was I able to settle the ongoing war between my application of critical scholarship and naive sentiment—the matter being decided ever more solidly in favor of the former. Skipping forward in this narrative, over the course of a deeply politically embattled year near the end of my tenure as a graduate student, even sentiment came to the side of critical scholarship, however, and has now become a faithful guardian and useful counselor.
Throughout this bitter struggle between the calm and precise theoretical considerations and application of scholarly critical theory and with the sentiments tied up in the memories of my childhood and of my mother with which I had been raised, the lessons I picked up living in Ottumwa constantly served me with invaluable assistance. Eventually, by a series of incidents, my eyes were opened, and I no longer had the ability to pass with the blindness of youthful naiveté as I had done throughout my years in Iowa. I had studied gender theory at Oberlin and then later at the University of Iowa, and my eyes had been opened to the truth of human beings, and in particular the unendurable ravages of masculinity. Getting to that conclusion, however, took time.
Youthful Indecisiveness and How I Changed
I have gotten ahead of myself in the story of my own growth. Backing up a little to the point at which I decided to change my major to gender studies, I had a male biology professor who reminded me of Mr. Carlton from my elementary school years. I liked him very much at first, and I would have bet everything he belonged, if not to the third group of men (an apparent staunch feminist ally and, for Ottumwa, Iowa, fairly liberal in his thinking), then at least very genially to the first group (seemingly kindly benefactors of the male privileges of patriarchy). It grew to be beyond doubt as the semester proceeded, however, that his male gaze lingered frequently upon his more attractive female students, and he gave them more attention in class, called on them more often, and may have even padded their grades. His attraction to his attractive female students was obvious, even as he slipped feminist ideals into his commentary during lectures. For all of his subtle hints at overt female power throughout the animal kingdom and its lessons for human women and men to learn, there were unmistakable moments during which he would look a little too obviously and a little too long at his favorite female students while mentioning terms like “sexual selection.”
The normative nature of this behavior was confirmed later by outright male (false) feminist allies who always seemed just a little too eager to want to date (often meaning have sex with) the women in our feminist groups. One such “ally,” who I’ll call Danny, seemed to make no bones about the fact that he preferred to date feminist women and often awkwardly joked that meeting attractive feminist women was a primary part of the reason he would attend and support our events. On countless occasions, Danny inappropriately touched or made passes at women with whom he “allied” himself, and as he slowly made his way through the women in our union, he gained an unshakable reputation as a controlling creep who was there, most of all, not as an ally but as a predator (cf. Cills 2017). Danny eventually ended up in a relationship with one of
the women in our group, and our concerns about his underlying male dominance were proved almost immediately through his allegedly “ironic” application of jokes about the nature of his relationship with her, increased habit of speaking for her (“mansplaining”), and correcting her opinions so as to diminish their potential impact upon his own masculine identity. Danny was a performative feminist ally attempting a hybrid masculinity (Bridges and Pascoe 2014), and yet he, too, acted in truth under cloaked forms of hegemonic, even toxic, masculinity. The final straw came all at once, however, when passing through the student union at Oberlin one day near the end of my junior year, I suddenly encountered a large number of fraternity brothers, engaging in rowdy and seemingly jovial horseplay. They also ogled me, and one made a catcall in my direction, to the back-slapping laughter and applause of his friends. They stared at me, and as I froze in my tracks my first thought was: Are these men or potential rapists? I had certainly never seen this behavior in my insulated space in Ottumwa or even at Oberlin, but I associated it with images I had seen of gang rapes and predatory masculinity. Rather than looking away and hurrying about my own business, though, despite feeling both very small and very vulnerable to these potential predators, I decided to study the group cautiously and with great interest. I never answered the central question of whether they were merely men or potential rapists, but the longer I stared at their countenance and examined their features, the more the question shaped: Are men like me at all?
As was my habit with when encountering unfamiliar experiences, it was at this point that I turned to books for help in settling my doubts. For the first time in my life I went to the college library to read deeply into the research journal-level scholarly Social Justice, feminist, and critical theory literature (as opposed to having merely browsed it online or encountered it in my classes). But unfortunately everything I read began with the assumption that readers had at least a minimal degree of familiarity with the questions of male privilege, hegemonic masculinity, gender (thus masculine) performativity, and of patriarchy (e.g., Butler 2004; Connell 1995; McIntosh 1989). Moreover, the oscillating tone of most of these books and articles (between apologetic and explanatory) was such that I became doubtful again, in part because it seemed to me (even as a gender studies major at the time) that masculinity surely couldn’t be the problem. More, I felt that many of the arguments and appeals made were somewhat superficial and the proofs unscientific and lacking sociological rigor due to the lack of genealogical explanatory models such as have been provided by Foucault (1982).
Eventually, having put to rest my lingering questions about biology, culture, social behavior, and their covariant relationships, I soon returned to my old way of thinking about gender and society despite having seen the problems of toxic masculinity, hegemonic expectations upon men to adopt it (per Connell 1987), and patriarchy to enable it with my own eyes and through my own lived experience. Masculinity, for a time and from my perspective, was again just an accident of birth and some degree of social conditioning, but the questions I had were rooted in experience and therefore lingered until they gnawed at me. The subject became so all-encompassing, particularly in the university setting where I was for the first time both surrounded by men matching the primary demographic of rapists and predators and aware of it, and the accusations of the male privilege of rape culture were so far-reaching, that I was afraid of dealing with it unjustly or capriciously. I did not want my desire for what I sought to be true to cloud my vision of what was actually the case, and so I became again anxious, uncertain, and frustrated by my failure to find answers.
By the time I was leaving Oberlin for Iowa City for graduate school, I could no longer doubt that there were questions of an entirely different people with different social and economic lives and different privileges due to accidents of birth. As I began to sincerely investigate the matter and observe men, I concurrently began to feel absolutely overwhelmed—emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, and even physically—by how different they were and also how categorically different male lives were as compared to my own. This sense was enhanced in me by the careful and deliberate consideration provided within the eloquent yet pointed writing of Raewyn Connell, especially her insightful articles about gender performativity and its implications in (toxic and) hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987, 1995).
Suddenly, Oberlin, later Iowa, and their student inhabitants appeared to me in a different light. Wherever I went I saw not just men people but males, mostly exhibiting clear signs of subtle systemic and thus hidden sexism and misogyny, and the more males I saw the more strikingly and clearly they stood out as a different from women. There were outright sexists and misogynists, like the catcallers from the fraternity, but even in kindlier men, hegemonic masculinity and reliance upon male privilege were evident, with more social or professional power universally translating to more abuses (cf. Wade 2017b). Worse, within allegedly feminist men, there was a profoundly perceptible undercurrent of predation, as though they were using their profession of feminism mostly to pick up women. I even heard one man state that the “only way to get pussy these days is to say you’re a feminist,” and even those who were more discreet about their attitudes would still mention and “appreciate” women’s appearances. To all this, women were expected not to become angry, least of all feminists, lest we be called “shrill” and other dismissive pejoratives (West 2016, 2017).
This is when the conclusion that the three primary categories of men are only superficially different became fully inescapable, and that the roots of hegemonic masculinity and toxic masculinity run deep while the umbrella of patriarchy protecting it is broad. These problems are so broad and deep, in fact, that I also saw many women who had internalized sexism and misogyny, and who, through their behavior and desire for sex, pandered to men, masculinity, and even patriarchy—to an open desire to be controlled and owned by men. The campus swarmed with a people who, even in outer appearance, bore no sympathy to feminists, or who feigned that sympathy in order to abuse it, and who, in stubborn attachment to patriarchy, would not be bent by it.
Studying Connell was a watershed moment for me, but it still fought against the calm wisdom of my mother, who taught us to respect and love people, including men, and to rise above the problems I had come to see in the domination of society by masculinity. But any indecisions I may have felt up to the point were finally extirpated by the activities of a certain section of toxic hypermasculinity itself. Following the official nomination of Donald Trump for the highest office in American politics, aggressive and crude masculinity, overt patriarchy, open support for rape culture, and outright misogyny once again arose among males (Blumell and Huemmer 2017). Trump’s entire campaign and the inexplicable success it achieved must be regarded as an outgrowth of that culture of masked, toxic, and yet hegemonic masculinity which Connell had pointed to and which feminist theory had explained all along (Connell 1995; Johnson 2017; cf. Kupers 2005). Its aim was to (re)assert the general superiority of men and masculinity, which is to say to fortify and expand patriarchy. As such, the movement came unavoidably crashing into my consciousness due to the sexist public backlash to the Women’s March held in Washington, D.C., protesting Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, in January 2017, the meaning of which rightly became a flashpoint of feminist anger an emergent and rich vein of feminist theorizing (e.g., Boothroyd et al. 2017; Burke et al. 2017; Doan 2017; Gökarıksel and Smith 2017; Moss and Maddrell 2017).
To outward appearances it seemed as if only one small segment of men disparaged the Women’s March and the broader feminist movement around it, while the great majority of men people disapproved or repudiated the re-emergence of an open American patriarchy. But a deeper and more probing investigation showed that those outward appearances were intentionally and numerically misleading. These reactions emerged from an amalgam of theories which had been produced for reasons of expediency, if not for purposes of outright deception (cf. Blankschaen 2016; Heath 2003). For that part of patriarchy which self-describes as “liberal” did not disown the anti-March misogynists as if they were not respectable members of their gender. Rather, they saw them to be brothers who publicly professed their disdain for an allegedly tainted movement that was said to have been co-opted by radicals with an illiberal agenda in an unpractical and ugly way, so as to create a danger for feminism itself (see Boothroyd et al. 2017). Thus there was no genuine rift in their patriarchal internal solidarity or reduction in its rejection of feminism and thus harm for American and other women. The three groups of men seemed to be separating from one another, but their underlying masculinity is actually consolidating into a single problem (Wade 2017b).
All at once, scores of details I previously noticed but paid little attention to began to devour my attention. I slowly and methodically began, with the help of feminist scholarship, to pierce the veil of socially constructed (meta)narratives of social dominance, male supremacy, and political systems as their enablers that were formerly masked from view (e.g., Blumell and Huemmer 2017; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Connell 1995; Meeks 2012). I sought to find the common threads of masculinity rather than seeking to separate them and choose the allegedly beneficial from among them (cf. Wade 2017b; West 2017). So it was that when I went to feminism it merely informed me, but when feminism came to me I was fundamentally changed.
Masculinity Unmasked
In the months that followed I had no more reluctance to bring the co-constituted problems of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy to light, details and all. Henceforth, on moral grounds, I was thus determined to do so. But as I studied the work of males of influence in different spheres of cultural, economic, and artistic life, I was far too slow to realize to degree to which men maintain control over essentially all aspects of the local political parties in the Midwest. When confronted with the stark fact that Midwestern states as political entities are also patriarchal, the scales fell from my eyes, and looking back, I saw too that even sweet Oberlin, Ohio, progressive bastion of the Midwest, has been coerced by entrenched and institutionalized masculinist norms to be political patriarchy manifest as a proxy for “culture” itself. Finally, my long inner struggle between the scholarship of feminist theory and the sentimentality of my childhood ended. I began to take action, beginning with a return to immersing myself even more deeply in popular feminist writing and scholarship (esp., Adichie 2015; Atwood 1998; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Gay 2014; Glick and Fiske 1997; McIntosh 1988, 1989; Solnit 2014; Valenti 2016; Wade 2017a; 2017b; Wade and Ferree 2014; West 2016, 2017).
By then my view had also broadened to consider national politics. The Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian parties were predominantly, if not exclusively, controlled by men, many of whom are demonstrable misogynists. But were they parties of patriarchy in themselves? As I did not yet know, I did not attach immediate significance to the demographic fact alone, for the exact state of affairs existed in other, lesser known parties (e.g., Socialist, Communist, and Constitutionalists). But there was one conspicuous fact that penetrated this broad political milieu: there was not a single political party in America with which men were connected that could be spoken of as repudiating patriarchy or male privilege (in the meaning that my convictions and lived experience attached to that word). Thus I came to another deep realization. The populace can be rescued by a feminist remaking of society, but not absent sufficient time and immeasurable patience. A man in a patriarchal society, however, can never be rescued from his male privilege. This ineluctable conclusion I drew from my own observations in comparison with nascent literature in Privilege Studies (see, Ferber 2012; McIntosh 2012; Stewart et al. 2012; cf. Wade 2017b).
As a result, to be completely candid, I came to hate many men and their female enablers. The three categories of men, seemingly kindly, overtly sexist and dangerous, and performatively “allied,” were representative of a single problem, masculinity, that had only one solution, completely disruption and denunciation. Over time and through much study, I have come to realize that it is masculinity itself that I hate and wish to see overthrown in all its forms (cf. Wade 2017b; West 2017).
The roots of our culture’s norms of patriarchy and male privilege, however, are incredibly deeply set. Even now, as I study the activities of men throughout recorded history, I continue to be filled with anxieties. The three groups of men: hegemonically masculine everymen, unabashed misogynists, and putatively “feminist” allies all show in their masculinity more in common than their superficial differences suggest. But in the final stages of this analysis, I still need to be cautious. Might some feminist men have freed themselves from hegemonic masculinity, rather than just hiding it beneath a genial exterior? Might some loving men like my father and brothers be forgiven their everyday sexism and almost-affable masculinity (cf. Glick and Fiske, 1997)? Was my mother’s liberal feminism mistaken on the crucial points? Can masculinity itself in any way be saved? Can the sexist be redeemed?
I interrogated myself as to whether, for reasons I could not fathom, fate may have demanded that a final victory would be bestowed on hegemonic masculinity and male dominance, supported by legions of ordinary men and women who “love” them even while they benefit unjustly from male privilege. I earnestly sought to determine, following in the newly trodden footsteps of Lisa Wade (2017) and Lindy West (2017), whether masculinity itself is the irredeemable problem and have found her utterly convincing. “Feminism,” writes West (2017), “is the collective manifestation of female anger” (cf. Hercus 1999). Equity demands more than convincing, however, so I pressed on. Clearly, it is the right of all people to struggle for equality and self-preservation against oppression, but I had to ask myself whether this was illusory, whether men, preserved as it is by the co-constituent dominant forces of masculinity and patriarchy, can even be oppressed at all? I answered this question for myself inasmuch as I am dedicating my intellectual life to an exhaustive and detached inquiry into means by which we can disrupt male privilege, masculinity, patriarchy, and the activities of men and non-feminist women interacting with these profound societal forces.
My conclusion to this long and serious inquiry is intrinsically feminist and therefore is forced to condemn masculinity in all its forms: toxic, kindly, protective, knightly, and even performatively “feminist.” Masculinity, thus male privilege, thus patriarchy, repudiates the principles of social and economic justice and substitutes for it hammers of domination and subordination based upon cultural assumptions about gender. Thus it denies the individual worth of the human personality, constrains men to unhelpful gender performances, perpetuates binaries, and impugns the teaching that women have a primary significance, and by doing this it strips away the foundations of human dignity. Concurrent with Wade (2017), male privilege, patriarchy, and the very masculinities they rest upon demand denunciation and repudiation, along with all men (and women) who will not turn their back upon them in revolt. If the doctrine of male privilege intrinsic to patriarchy continues to be accepted as foundational and apodictic, it will lead to cementing the patriarchal economic and social order and the erasure of personal and gender-transcendent sovereignty. Masculinity, then, must be disrupted, for should masculinity, with the aid of patriarchal doctrines, maintain its triumph over the people of this world, its crown will continue to be the funeral wreath of womankind.
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