Post 14 of 100: You don’t need to buy anything to believe that better examples of masculinity are possible and preferable.
I am willing to bet, even amongst my close friends, the only ones likely to read these posts, that not everyone buys into my claim that patriarchal misogyny is a deliberate political tactic being employed in authoritarian movements around the world (Trumpism just being the pervasive one here in the US). In fact, I bet there are some folks who have pretty much tuned out after the first couple of these posts, because something like “Patriarchal Misogyny” sounds too complicated and systemic to even do anything about. I think, assuming I complete this 100 blog posts project, one of my greatest challenges moving into “what next?” Is going to be trying to figure out who my specific audience is and how do I tailor my message to that audience. Do I scale back on interweaving my own theoretical framework into my efforts to reach groups who might be capable of changing and challenging many of the most pervasive “bad ideas” that are shaping masculinity in the world today? Or do I just stay authentic to who I am, how I think, and let my more radical beliefs about government, capitalism and the shaping of society be an open part of explaining why, even given everything else I believe and think needs to be done, that staying focused on what (and who) defines masculinity is the key to undermining authoritarianism around the globe?
But those are questions I don’t actually have to worry about right now. What I am much more interested in is trying to sort through my own beliefs about masculinity, why it exists as a thing, and who benefits from certain ideas I have about it. For that, I don’t really need to worry about whether I am losing people if I want to talk about PM as a strategy of manipulation and control over men as well as women, or about how I think the underlying structure of property and economic value in the United States was built upon a Patriarchal misogynistic framework of racial supremacy. I am not going to self-censor my ideas as they are taking shape and I am trying to understand them because someone later might dismiss my ideas because they see them as “too woke.” One of the dangers of public blogging, which actually includes posting ideas to various forms of social media, is that the divide between public, open commons space and private, safe space becomes difficult to separate.
I am actually a professional writer and educator with years of experience researching, writing and talking about these topics, so I am aware of the risks (and fairly well protected from the consequences of them) I am personally taking writing about this topic and publicly calling people like Trump and Musk pathetic losers who are beholden to some of the most garbage ideas about masculinity because they were born into situations where those ideas protected wealth and social power that were already available to them. Like, yes, one day in the future, AI being used for authoritarian surveillance and social pacification might see these words on the internet and decide to take some kind of action against me/terminate me, but I don’t have family members that hold immense power over me judging me for what I write about on the internet, nor do I have a precarious work position that is in jeopardy just because I believe that US citizens should understand how the concept of property in this country was developed to include owning people (both in the form of chattel slavery and in the patriarchal ownership over women and children) and to strip land away from the people currently using it so that it could be used to make already wealthy people even more wealthy. It is important for me to point that out in a conversation about meeting people where they are at, because assuming that what is safe enough and comfortable enough for me to talk about and to advocate for should be shared by everyone I am talking to is one of the biggest reasons why “man in the feminist organizing group” or “white ally to antiracism work” is such a cliche meme. Non-masculine identified folks really don’t need any man telling them what patriarchy is or how it affects their life. But the problem there is not men trying to do the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny, the problem is men thinking they are trying to do the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny by focusing all of their time and attention doing that “work,” by taking up the time and attention of non-masculine folks and their organizations. It took me a long time to figure this out and I still probably don’t get it right all the time, but realizing that I am not actually advancing the cause of dismantling patriarchal misogyny when I am mansplaining some radical feminist/anarchist theory to a moderate liberal women to justify why I don’t feel comfortable donating money to a democratic presidential candidate, was an important step in my growth into someone prepared to do better.
All of this is to say that what I am trying to sell with these blog posts is not a unified strategy for dismantling PM, that just requires your monthly donation of $19.95, your sycophant devotion to my brilliance or authority, or for you to defend my every action or word, past or present, from any questioning or skepticism. Even where I have ideas of actions and strategies that I want to be more involved in, I am not promising that I will do them well, or that everyone doing them well is going to fix everything. You don’t have to agree with everything anyone says to try to understand what issue or issues are inspiring them to speak up or take action and decide for yourself if those are issues worth your time and energy to try to address or not. I see young men (especially white men) lining up behind Trupism’s new version of authoritarianism that is promising that it is going to “make comedy legal” and protect them from accusations of sexually inappropriate behavior, and the clearest path I see forward to not having to fight all of these young men in the streets after they have been fully indoctrinated, is to at least make sure that they realize how little the people in the positions of authority actually give two shits about them. This can be a tough job, because Trump has done some stuff, like pardoning the Jan 6th rightwing insurrectionists, that sells a very heavy dose of “Daddy Trump will be there for me,” but as many of the working class and Latino voters who voted for him have been learning the hard way, the group of men he will actually protect, and how far he will go to protect them is pretty thin and incredibly transactional. There is still room to counter the indoctrination of PM within authoritarian political movements, but I think the US left has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to either punch down with their satirical judgements and media production (oh the deplorable) or to pick targets so far out of reach above them that the efforts fall flat and are subject to easy ridicule. Like, for example calling Trump a pathetic loser, representative of the worst of what masculinity can be, is a pretty easy charge to levy from down here where the words have almost no weight to them, but telling your boss (your father, your uncle, the president of your fraternity, your friend) the same thing, because he acts the same way, has done some of the same horrible things to women, is a lot harder to do, and might not be the best strategic approach in the first place.
The right has gotten really good at their selective targeting of the people who are really standing in the way of their political and social goals. Trumpism 2.0 is being used like a wrecking ball (or perhaps a better metaphor would be a carpet bomb) instead of a surgical laser to cut out all resistance not just from the federal government but every institution that can be influenced by the federal government, but it is not missing its targets. I have seen some small groups of grassroots leftists trying their bests to be more creative and selective with what they are trying to target with their actions and organizing, but you definitely don’t see that happening at larger state or national levels in the US, and especially not by the Democratic Party. There will not be much time left (if there is in fact any) for people in the US wanting to resist PM authoritarianism in the form of Trumpism to address the people in their lives buying into this awful ideology as friends and family members and not enemy combatants. I think the fear of that impending reality is maybe one of the most disabling factors in the left’s general/large scale response to Trumpism, but if we can think about our sphere’s of influence, and act swiftly within them, it is is still possible to engage with some of the people getting sold PM the heaviest before they go all in with it.
Even if you don’t buy into any what I am saying about Patriarchal Misogyny and how it is being used to turn young men into soldiers of authoritarianism, you can look around at the people in your life and talk to them about what masculinity is, what it can be, and why people’s ideas about masculinity seem to be so intimately and personally tied to their political identity as well.