Episode 140 - Masculinity

Transcript

Ellie: 0:16

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:18

The podcast where we make a man out of you.

Ellie: 0:23

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:24

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:26

Okay, well, Mulan notwithstanding masculinity is in a moment of crisis. Maybe that's why we need the Mulan moment, in fact. 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. 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. Even they, you know, like really well-meaning men often feminist with commitments to leftist politics, maybe even gender abolition. They don't know how to relate to masculinity themselves. They find that they have a fraught relationship with it, and they're just sort of like, I'd rather ignore it. Right? 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. I don't know what to do with this, and so I'm just gonna kind of ignore it. Relationship with masculinity among many men today.

David: 1:37

Yeah. 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. 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. 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. And you know, like I'm a vegetarian, like that's

Ellie: 2:11

A paleo-trend,

David: 2:12

The paleo masculinity is back in. I guess I just by definition, I'm not manly enough.

Ellie: 2:18

You have no masculinity as a male vegetarian, you have no access to maculinity.

David: 2:23

Yeah. Hashtag eggplant femininity.

Ellie: 2:28

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. There's that book, this isn't technically sociology, but there was that book, bowling Alone that came out a number of decades ago. 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. 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. 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. But then a void gets created where men don't know how to relate to one another. They're often, you know, maybe still watching sports, playing sports, but those traditionally masculine spaces of bonding have been hollowed out. 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.

David: 3:37

No, that's right. 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. 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.

Ellie: 4:21

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? 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. It's also often anti woke. 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. And also is often associated with a kind of hustle bro culture mentality. What I would just call straight up a grifter mentality where there's like these get rich quick schemes. You see that a lot with somebody like Andrew Tate, who's the apotheosis of the manosphere. We'll come back to him a bit later.

David: 5:20

Yeah. Unfortunately we will come back a little bit to him later. He's joining us today on the podcast.

Ellie: 5:26

Oh God.

David: 5:27

Oh gosh. I'm kidding about that.

Ellie: 5:29

We couldn't get him if we tried. We're big for that.

David: 5:31

Not that we tried, not in a million years. 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. Because when I think about some of the models of masculinity that are floating around the manosphere. Obviously they are perpetrating very dangerous stereotypes about what gender roles and gender relations need to look like.

Ellie: 5:59

Perpetuating? Or, but maybe also perpetrated. Yeah.

David: 6:02

Yeah. Yeah. They're, well, they're perpetrating crimes for sure.

Ellie: 6:05

Perpetrators is on the brain we're talking about Andrew Tate.

David: 6:09

But they are also trading in this idea that the highest value, especially men can aspire to, is wealth accumulation. And so those two things together. 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. 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. The individual who teaches men how to psychologically manipulate women in order to gain sexual access to them. Yeah. And I'm thinking here about somebody like Roosh V who was a really famous pickup artist in the 2010s. 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.

Ellie: 7:31

Today we're talking about masculinity.

David: 7:33

Why is masculinity associated with homophobia and violence?

Ellie: 7:38

How have evolutionary narratives contributed to the rise of toxic masculinity?

David: 7:43

And what might a healthy model of masculinity look like? 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. Then in the 1980s, something interesting happened in academic feminist circles, but also more broadly in the feminist movement. 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. 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. And that field really was conceived originally as an ally or as a partner to, to feminism. To feminism and gender studies.

Ellie: 9:00

Well to women's studies because this was pre gender studies.

David: 9:03

Exactly. And so as people started taking up this call, they realized that one of the central tasks of masculinity studies was largely definitional. What exactly is the meaning of masculinity because we all recognize it. 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? A man's man? And so men's studies and later masculinity studies really emerge largely through this attempt to just give a definition of this thing.

Ellie: 9:47

And even a little bit before the establishment of the subfield. 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. 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. 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. In this text, David and Brannon, I switched the order of their names in the edited volume, not me putting the man first.

David: 10:35

Ellie part of the problem. She has not read at the men's studies and masculinity studies literature.

Ellie: 10:41

But so David and Brannon identify four defining features of the male sex role. And so this was one influential definition of what we would now call masculinity is. The first is, remember we're in technical academic land here. The first feature of the male sex role, no sissy stuff. The idea there is to be a man means never do anything that remotely suggests femininity. So masculinity is defined as a repuditation of the feminine. Second be a big wheel.

David: 11:16

What?

Ellie: 11:17

Your masculinity is measured by your power, success, and wealth. So to be a big wheel is to be powerful, to like be a mover and a shaker in world.

David: 11:28

I thought it was gonna be about like, you gotta make the world spin around you, like be a wheel.

Ellie: 11:33

I mean, hey, why not add that to the, uh, context here? So, yeah, I mean, that seems fair, right? 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. The third feature, so we've got no sissy stuff and be a big wheel. So one pertains to sort of like traditional gender role in terms of repudiation of the feminine. The other in terms of traditional gender role of which says, yeah, of

David: 12:01

The acquisition

Ellie: 12:01

being a breadwinner. 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. 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.

David: 12:38

Taking it standing up.

Ellie: 12:40

No. fighting back. Okay. That, I mean, then back to no sissy stuff

David: 12:47

Well, if you take it standing up, it's no sissy. Hashtag no sissy.

Ellie: 12:52

So the no homo is- David, I told you, you have to stop making hashtag jokes here. It is so, five to 10 years ago.

David: 12:58

I am five to 10 years ago.

Ellie: 13:00

I am resisting being a cringe millennial so hard, even though I'm probably not avoiding it successfully. David's just leaning in.

David: 13:07

Yeah. I've been leaning in accidentally for years.

Ellie: 13:09

But, okay, let's talk about these criteria.

David: 13:11

Okay, so I really like them.

Ellie: 13:14

So you really like them in the sense that you are encouraged to perform them?

David: 13:19

No, no,

Ellie: 13:19

Or in the sense of diagnostic criteria?

David: 13:21

I like them as diagnostic criteria in the sense that I do think they capture the outlines of masculinity as I understand it. And also as I've lifted as somebody who has been policed into masculinity, you know, my whole lif more or less. One thing that stands out immediately is just how contradictory and internally inconsistent they actually are. Especially the last three that you said. Yeah. So there is the nosy stuff. I'll put that aside. Then there was the be a big wheel. And so somebody who churns things out, provides, keeps things moving. There is a sense of movement and mobility and making things. That metaphor of movement and mobility is. In weird contrast with the sturdy oak, right? The notion of equipoise, stoic self-control. 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. And I think the same thing is true of the last two. So if you think about the sturdy oak, and then the last one was give them hell? They're not consistent. One is about keeping control of your emotions. The other one is about lashing out the moment that your position is threatened, which presupposes a lack of self-control.

Ellie: 14:49

Okay. 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. And I think that conflict. We very frequently see with the off remarked upon fact that the most acceptable emotion for men to express is anger. 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. 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? Let's say very common narrative is facts don't care about your feelings or like, I'm just focused on the bottom line. Definitel emotions have historically been kind of seen as belonging outside the workplace. 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. You need to disavow your emotions, keep them in check, you know, compartmentalize your life. And so I don't see those as contradictory. 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. Very often, not only emotional, but specifically related to anxiety. 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.

David: 16:15

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. I maybe I just don't understand why it's called be a big wheel. Like what does a big wheel. Why is that the metaphor for a provider? Why not be a big basket? 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. Quietly sitting behind a desk controlling things quietly from behind the scenes.

Ellie: 16:57

I'm actually really glad you mentioned this because I think it gives me the opportunity to clarify. I think we've been rolling with the metaphor of a big wheel a little bit too intensely. It's just a term, I think it's like a bit dated now, but it's just a synonym for big shot. So yeah. So big wheel, I've definitely never heard it used it in contemporary context. But again, this structure was come up with in the seventies, so it was like 50 years old. So it's like a big wig or a big shot. Yeah. So I don't think you need it

David: 17:24

big wig? Very masculine, circa 17 hundreds. Okay, so in that sense, that's right. 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? Because the thing about them is that they're also exceptionally generic and they can be violated in a number of ways. So what exactly is sissy stuff? It's something that includes anything from like same sex attraction all the way to potentially sitting with your legs crossed at dinner.

Ellie: 18:06

Not throwing far enough, not hitting hard enough.

David: 18:11

Yeah, sometimes hitting too hard. Well, no, actually

Ellie: 18:13

being too nice to your teacher, being too nice to your mommy, being too nice to girls in the class, like

David: 18:17

liking women in a nonsexual way. Right? Like, just like having friendships with women.

Ellie: 18:22

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.

David: 18:32

Yes. Well, there's an episode also in the Sopranos that targets this issue.

Ellie: 18:39

okay you know, okay you know never watched that. I'm like, so due for a full watch of Sopranos,

David: 18:43

I think it holds up.

Ellie: 18:44

I'm gonna go so deep into it. Yeah, you won't see me again.

David: 18:47

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. Yeah. So like giving pleasure to women. Sissy. Gay stuff.

Ellie: 19:06

Okay. We'll come back a bit later to the homophobia system. 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.'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. And I think evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology have been enlisted as encouragement for men to lean into these traditionally masculine roles.

David: 19:46

And I mean, as an enterprise, I find evolutionary psychology, really questionable as a philosopher of science. 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. Uhhuh, especially when it comes to social phenomena,

Ellie: 20:04

Oh yeah. It's generally considered pretty sus among social scientists. Yeah.

David: 20:09

Yeah, but it comes with the imprimatur of being a science, so it has a lot of cultural and social capital to trade on. 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. 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. 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. And what is the term up manning?

Ellie: 21:12

Oh, one upping.

David: 21:13

One upping. Thank you. 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. And he draws some parallels between the behavior of captive chimpanzees. 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. And suggesting that we kind of are like chimpanzees too.

Ellie: 21:50

We kind of are like chimpanzees, at least that part's indisputable

David: 21:52

Well, like, yeah, genetically of course, but in the sense of our organization around our social dynamics. And our search for power in our machiavellianism and. 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. 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.

Ellie: 22:29

Oh my God.

David: 22:30

Because presumably it exposed the truth about how it's all power all the way down. Yeah. And that, you know, very famously also, when Al Gore was running, he got the advice by Naomi Wolf

Ellie: 22:45

I guess taking gender advice from Naomi Wolf was very different in, what was this in the nineties than, than it is today.

David: 22:52

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. And so that term enters political discourse through primatology. But it makes it seem as if being an alpha male is literally in our primate DNA.

Ellie: 23:12

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.'cause she had a period.

David: 23:20

Yeah. 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.

Ellie: 23:29

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. Like it was a pretty mainstream

David: 23:38

It was a public facing book. Yeah. And so it, it really straddled that line between,

Ellie: 23:43

but public facing, I'm saying not just among like conservative Republican politicians,

David: 23:47

No, yeah. Among scientists and a general public. 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. Yeah. They buy for high ranking positions. 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. 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. What it meant to be a real man in the 1500s, in the 1700s in the 1900s in the 2020s is not the same. 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. And that means in turn, by extension, that masculinity part of its definition is that it's always in a state of crisis. Because it has to reinvent itself. In order to adapt. So if you think about some material changes that happen in society, like women gain more formal legal rights, like the right to vote.

Ellie: 25:37

To own a credit card account, marital rape laws,

David: 25:41

you name it. 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. 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. Yeah. In order to fulfill that hegemonic function

Ellie: 26:13

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. 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. We've seen that masculinity is associated with a disavow of anything related to the ladies. 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. I think when we think about those four features of what were called the male sex role might not be called masculinity. We might think of them as traits or characteristics. And in general, we could often think about masculinity and do often think about masculinity as a trait or a characteristic. Are you masculine or not? But studies of masculinity show that masculinity is more of a pattern than a trait or even a set of traits. It's not just a neutral pattern, it's specifically a pattern of domination that is acted out. 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. And Connell suggests that hegemonic masculinity is relational and defines itself over and against emphasized femininity and also lesser masculinities. Such as marginalized masculinity, and additionally it has a legitimating function. It legitimizes unequal gender relations, right? It says that these are natural, they're just the way things are, right? It's like the law of evolution or whatever, and it, so it legitimizes these gender relations between men and women.

David: 28:27

and I really like the term hegemony for capturing the social constructed dimension of masculinity. Because when we think about hegemony, we think about a social field that is replete with power relations, right? 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. It's something that we actively construct as a society and maintain through power moves, right? 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. It's a book called La domination Feminine.

Ellie: 29:10

La domination masculine

David: 29:11

Masculine.

Ellie: 29:13

funnily enough, la domination is a feminine noun. Okay, so masculine domination,

David: 29:18

Masculine. Sorry about that

Ellie: 29:20

I would read La domination feminine also.

David: 29:23

Yeah, no, I think that's a scum manifesto. 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. So it is a top down dominator submission or oppressor. a dom-sub kink dynamic that is not consensual. 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. 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. It just says. I'm not doing anything. I don't even exist. There is no domination of the feminine by the masculine, that's just the way things are. And so there's a logic of invisibility that is at work. And that according to him, is what ultimately turns what is a historical social phenomenon into an ahistorical eternal truth of the world.

Ellie: 30:44

And I think this is really what we're talking about when we talk about toxic masculinity. This idea of masculinity as essentially dominating, but as masking itself as dominating. And a question that very often emerges in gender studies is, well, is masculinity itself toxic? And so toxic masculinity, is that even a term that we need if masculinity is in and of itself toxic? And I wanna think about that here a little bit now in the sense that masculinity is very hard to disentangle. From violence and homophobia, at least as we think of masculinity today. The men's studies scholar, Michael Kimmel, literally defines masculinity in terms of homophobia, at least in the current context. 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. 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. You know, these things that we were talking about earlier, and boys, he suggests become gender police of one another. They scan each other for signs of effeminancy. I mean, you can think about the way this works in the locker room or on the playground. 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.

David: 32:19

Yeah. 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. And made me realize that I was under the surveilling eye of a policing peer.

Ellie: 32:48

Which toy were you playing with?

David: 32:49

I mean, I don't know. I think it was a sex toy. No, I'm kidding. I'm sure it was probably something feminine. A doll or maybe just like the wrong colored car.

Ellie: 33:01

It was a knife, but it was like a cooking knife rather than

David: 33:05

It was a butter knife rather than a stabbing knife.

Ellie: 33:08

What even Is a cooking knife? I mean a kitchen knife.

David: 33:11

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. He says, straight up masculinity has three features you have violence, physical violence and psychological violence among men that policing function. Two, you have dominion over women. That's the point that's also from Bourdeu. And finally you have the rejection of homophobia. I'm sorry, the rejection of homosexual desire.

Ellie: 33:54

like, oh, wow, there's a woke one?

David: 33:55

Yeah, there, there's a woke masculinity from the 1980s. So you, if you want to be a man, you need to be homophobic, violent, and domineering towards women.

Ellie: 34:05

Well, this is setting us up perfectly for a discussion of some of the things said by our King of the Manosphere, Andrew Tate. 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. Because I think we really see each of these in the rhetoric of the manosphere, which is exemplified above all by Andrew Tate.

David: 34:33

Okay. Hit me with these probably horrific quotes, of course. Okay.

Ellie: 34:37

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. Okay, so first, I'm not saying they're property, I'm saying they're given to the man and belong to the man.

David: 34:55

So they're property.By definition.

Ellie: 34:59

But also like, okay, yes, and yeah, no, yeah. They're given to the man and belong. Yeah. No, that's literally he needs a basic course.

David: 35:06

It's a definition.

Ellie: 35:08

Andrew Tate, facts don't care about your feelings. If you're saying that a woman belongs to man, you are saying that they're property. But I mean, this is, it's almost like he read the Joseph Pleck book and was like, dominion over women Check.

David: 35:20

Quick, how to. He understood the myth of masculinity as aspirational.

Ellie: 35:24

Oh my God. Okay. You have anything more to say about that? Should I go on to the next one?

David: 35:28

No. 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? 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. And so I think that's what's happening here, where we're getting a fetishistic disavowal of a view that he's espousing.

Ellie: 36:02

And this is like almost even more. No, it's straight up even more logically egregious because it's not saying like, I'm not sexist, but here's sexist thing. It's like literally just definitional. I'm not saying they're property, I'm saying they're given to the man and belong to the man. It's yeah, that's literally what it means to have property, or to to be property. Okay, second. Women shouldn't vote because they don't care about issues outside of how they feel.

David: 36:29

Yeah. I don't even want to respond to this. This is, I mean, also the shocking thing about some of these claims is just how uncreative they are in their misogyny. It's like, this is like from the late 1800s.

Ellie: 36:42

I mean, centuries,

David: 36:45

Yeah. Like it's before women had the right to vote, you know, like. Presumably you would at least come up with new ideas to try to recruit people into your horrible man club.

Ellie: 36:57

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. 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. 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. 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. I don't even know if it's introspection. It's just like vibe, right? It's just like the feeling. 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. 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. I mean, as like a literal rapist.

David: 38:28

Yeah. 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. In the case of

Ellie: 38:37

I'll say feminine maybe? Well, no, I mean he wouldn't say there's a difference. He probably loves calling us females.

David: 38:42

Yeah. 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. 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? Property. Whereas if we were to turn the tables here, men obviously also vote for the things that they care about, based on their feelings. But the presumption there is that men's feelings have a meaningful object or a meaningful reference in the real world. The things that men care for matter. So it's even deeper than that. It's ultimately about meaningfulness versus meaninglessness and that distinction being gendered.

Ellie: 39:30

Okay. No, that's such a good point. You want one more?

David: 39:33

Only one, please. Because I am at my limit of Andrew Tate quotes.

Ellie: 39:38

I'm a realist and when you're a realist, you're sexist. There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist. This speaks to exactly what you were talking about earlier, David, which is the Bourdeu point. There's a masking of the domination by saying just this is the natural order. Right? And I think this idea of realism,

David: 39:58

It's so common.

Ellie: 40:00

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. And that's almost always not true. So like for instance, the idea that men necessarily wanna dominate women in the bedroom. 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. And it's very historically specific. 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. 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. 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. But if you do wanna play that game of well, things have always been this way. It's very easy to show. No, things have not always been this way. You're not a realist, Andrew Tate, you're a sexist but not a realist.

David: 41:14

Yeah. And at the very least there is conflation here of two senses of reality. Right? Because we can describe reality in terms of social reality, because we're talking about social phenomena. 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. 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. And that's where there is some confusion here. 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. 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. 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? If you're a realist, you're a pragmatist. And there's nothing that we love in America more than a pragmatist

Ellie: 42:34

also associated with masculinity.

David: 42:35

Yeah. and so it starts shifting the signifiers very quickly. 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. Yeah and so we go from descriptive to normative without realizing it. Craving more overthink. Subscribe to our Substack for an extended version of our episodes, community Chat and Additional Bonus content. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage.

Ellie: 43:21

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.

David: 43:32

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.

Ellie: 43:39

Well don't worry. You are going to learn, you know, I love you and you're out of touchness. 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. Where you're dressing and acting for the female gaze. 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.

David: 44:09

Okay. Oh my God, now, I need to embody, to imagine the performative male, so matcha in hand

Ellie: 44:14

You're part way there actually, because I mean, I would definitely see you reading Bell Hook. His book, the Will to Change at a Coffee shop.

David: 44:20

Yeah. I mean, I own that book.

Ellie: 44:23

Yeah, that makes two of us. Although I guess I'm not in the running for a performative male.

David: 44:28

So matcha in hand, book in the other hand, maybe a tote bag.

Ellie: 44:33

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.

David: 44:46

Okay. And so let me ask a question based on my ignorance about this. 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?

Ellie: 45:03

Oh yeah. They're really reading the will to change. They're not just turning the pages.

David: 45:05

Or are they doing so in a way that merely conveys that they're that kind of person. So is there a fakeness and a phoniness to it?

Ellie: 45:14

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. You can go back to our earlier performativity episode about this. But the truth is, the word performative has become a synonym for optical or superficial. And so maybe we need to just let that one go.

David: 45:37

We're not gonna win that, Ellie.

Ellie: 45:38

We're not gonna that. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. She's managing your social calendar, maybe buying you the pearl necklace that you're wearing at the coffee shop, painting your nails,

David: 46:38

reading the will to change for you, giving you the cliff notes.

Ellie: 46:43

That too.

David: 46:45

Fair enough. And I can honestly, I can visualize this character I've met the character multiple times. 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. 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. And so they're reaching, and we've talked about this, this grasping at stress. 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. 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. Yeah, right? Yeah. 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. Or in a stance in relation to masculinity that maybe is purely superficial. Because there is no load star to orient their gender self-discovery.

Ellie: 48:14

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. 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. If masculinity is all of those things that we described earlier in the episode, then it is irredeemable. Like if it is based on violent homophobia and the dominion of women, it is irredeemable.

David: 48:42

It's kind of hard to see anyway around it.

Ellie: 48:44

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. And this is not just a theoretical question, right? 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.

David: 49:00

Yeah. And, and there's been a lot of proposals for reinventing or rediscovering or recreating masculinity, right? 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. The masculinity study scholar Todd Reeser. 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. And so for example, in the early modern period. 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. 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. Which might be better than the model of masculinity that we have now, which is the no sissy stuff. Be a big wheel. You know, like, give them hell. There you have an explosive masculinity that we can contrast with something that probably is better, which is one rooted in moderation.

Ellie: 50:29

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. But I do think it is importantly different from it because moderation is not about stoicism and calmness. I mean, maybe calm, but I don't think it's about absence of emotion. Arguably socialism is not either, but let's say that's usually how it gets wielded, right? Like don't have emotions at all. And if you do have them, then suppress them, right? That's something that I've studied in my research on masculine norms as well. 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. And I think managing emotions, you know, obviously like that's a great thing. Not expecting other people to automatically manage your emotions for you is very important. But a question would be, is that an inherently masculine trait, or is that just a mark of being a good person? 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. 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.

David: 51:51

Well, since we're talking about healthy masculinity, the opposite would either be femininity in toto. Or toxic masculinity. So there in moderation could be the trait of the bad masculine. Whereas moderation would be the trait of the good masculine. 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. Especially because if you think all the way back to Aristotle, who writes a lot about phronesis the art of judgment in moderation. Like knowing exactly where to shoot your shot. Aristotle is clear that moderation means everything in moderation, and that sometimes includes an excess of an emotion when it is appropriate tocircumstance. Right. So it's not being cool and collected all the time. It means having the appropriate moral reaction to a particular circumstance. Now the question that you asked is this. A project for masculinity, or is this just what it means to be a good person in general? 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. Yeah. And so yeah, emotional management, great for everybody. 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. And I have the same view about other projects that people have promoted for reinventing masculinity. So for example, people have called for the reclaiming of things like honor, or things like chivalry, for example. 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. Like there's that kind of double bind here. Either to be chivalrous means to be in a relation specifically to a feminine object, right? Where I'm chivalrous to a woman. 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. You know, refer back to the Pierre Bourdeu discussion about masculinity as domination

Ellie: 54:12

Chivalry is like literally compensating for a perceived weakness among women so I don't think that that's a value we should reclaim.

David: 54:17

Yeah. But I think the people who reclaim it say that it doesn't have to be, that it can just be kindness to women.

Ellie: 54:23

Andrew Tate, and the definition of property?

David: 54:24

Well, yeah, exactly.

Ellie: 54:26

Like far less toxic than that, but I think it's essentially the same thing.

David: 54:29

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. And we wouldn't call it chivalry in practice, right? When a guy opens the door to me when I'm entering the grocery store, we don't say that he's being chivalrous.'cause in that relationship, I, as another man, I'm not perceived as a feminine object. We just say that he's doing something that's something close to civil kindness or civic duty. Or basic human decency.

Ellie: 54:57

Opening the door out of chivalry for a non-binary person, then they're just misgendering them. Yeah.

David: 55:02

Yeah, it's, you're like, stay away from acts of kindness folks.

Ellie: 55:06

Okay. 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. So there's an organization called A Call to Men that educates men on healthy manhood, and specifically helps men address violence against women. They wanna help men get out of what they call the man box, which is a traditional picture of masculinity. The one that, as we've discussed, is toxic. 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. That doesn't seem to be something that is specific to masculinity. That seems to be like respecting yourself and other people regardless of their gender.

David: 55:54

No, I mean, I think that's just like moral, basic, moral principles, right. Of respect for the other and authenticity in relation to the self, insofar as authenticity is a moral value, which is a contested issue. And I would even probably say no.

Ellie: 56:09

We may have an episode on that,

David: 56:10

Yeah.

Ellie: 56:11

An episode from years ago, you can check out.

David: 56:13

And so I do think it's susceptible to the same kind of criticism. And so I want to remain open-minded about the possibility of a healthy model of masculinity. 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. Yeah. But in general, I am of the view that masculinity. Is irredeemable because insofar as its masculinity, it must have a relationship to femininity. And I am yet to hear an account of that relationship that is not hierarchical. And therefore a form of hegemony or domination.

Ellie: 57:00

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. And I, it's definitely not my place to be like, avoid that altogether if you wanna be a feminist. You know, I think for myself. There has been a place for embracing some associations of femininity as a way of affirming myself. 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. 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. 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. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content.

David: 58:31

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts @Overthink_Pod.

Ellie: 58:46

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistants Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.