Or rather, what kind of commodity is masculinity? This question came to me as I saw a headline for a paywalled CNN article that I couldn’t read, about how the character Patrick Bateman, of American Psycho, engaged in an morning self-care routine that was intended to be a parody of “hyper-heterosexual” masculinity by the author Bret Easton Ellis, but has since become something that would be considered rather common amongst many hyper masculinized male media personalities, especially online influencers. As a regular person with no interest in paying for online news media from a glorified cable news channel, I will not be paying to unlock this article, so I am not going to pretend to have a well-informed opinion about the author of that article’s argument or its validity. I think from the headline itself, and the clip of the movie scene I assume the article is addressing, that it is probably saying something like “hey look! Men now use a whole array of beautification products that would have been seen as something feminine, or homosexual 25 years ago.”
I don’t really care that much about the argument whether men using beauty products is a masculine behavior or not. Personally, as a pretty extreme anti-capitalist, I have incredibly strong reservations about the commodification of body image and it’s role on the human psyche, regardless of gender, but I also recognize that people like to feel good, and the stranglehold capitalism has on making people feel good isn’t getting up-ended or challenged by focusing on one particular industry that engages in that, especially by attacking one that is maybe breaking out of the intense gender enforcement that it has long embodied. What is more interesting to me, and what the headline of this article inspires me to want to talk about, is how the physical portrayal of hyper-masculinity has largely become a commodity that is only really accessible to the wealthy.
There is an incredibly irony in the ways men like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and even Donald Trump have spent fortunes physically changing themselves into representations of what they believe to be attractive, masculine men, while US mainstream culture has become obsessed with attacking trans women for wanting to do exactly the same thing (spending much smaller fortunes to better physically embody the gender traits that they feel best represents them), especially as these kind of men have probably been pushing Cis women into doing the exact same thing for even longer. People have pretty effectively pointed this out on the internet in ways that is more compelling and entertaining than I am going to be able to do, but the deeper analysis that keeps getting left out of the memes and conversations I have seen about this irony is whether there is, fundamentally, something different about contemporary patriarchal figures feeling so beholden to commercialized beauty/gender affirming products, procedures, and expensive lifestyle choices, for themselves, than what has typically been expected of patriarchs of the past. The reason why that question feels interesting to me is because it implies the potential for a higher level of insecurity in their belief in Patriarchy as a system of power and control. If the patriarchs of today are feeling like it is necessary to sink millions of dollars into fictionalizing their bodies into fantastical representations of masculinity in order to be accepted as patriarchs, it seems pretty clear that they know they are not actually embodying these masculine ideals, or at least, that creating the facade of masculinity is as important a part of maintain their power and social position as just having wealth in the first place.
Now, patriarchs, powerful men within a society that expects powerful men to assert domination and leadership, have been spending money on facets of their own masculinity for a very long time, and many of those have included aggrandizing their own physical and sexual prowess (in post 28 of 100, I talk about this with cars). But it feels different to me for these patriarchal men to identify their own physical bodies as essentially objects of commodification that must be presented and maintained in very specific ways if they want to retain their patriarchal authority. Maybe it is just wishful thinking on my part, but it feels like any self-awareness of this at all would be a clear indicator that they they fully-well recognize that there is no actual biological, religious, or inherent condition of male supremacy, but that the authority of patriarchy is something that can, and always has been paid for or stolen. Men can only appear stronger, more intelligent, more rational, more capable than women in a world where the tests of strength, intelligence, rationality and capacity themselves are either deliberately manipulated in advance to conform to the traits that men being tested already have, or if the men that patriarchy wants to put forward for these tests can be manipulated, trained and engineered to do better at them…or both scenarios at once.
In other words, I find it really interesting that there appears to be a shift in patriarchal misogynistic portrayals of masculinity that are making it where men that want to assume high positions of authority within this power structure can’t just wave their own wealth around as a symbol of their power and expect to be taken seriously as manly men who deserve to be in power. They can’t just spend a ridiculous amount of that wealth on the people around them to demonstrate that they deserve to have that power, they have to spend a ridiculous amount of that wealth now on the creation and presentation of their own physical form, not just to justify their position of authority to themselves, but to actually keep that power over a world that buys into their patriarchal misogynistic bullshit.
Both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were very largely seen as clowns or at least mega nerds less than 20 years ago, people who might accomplish some absurd levels of economic success, but hardly be people worthy of adoration, emulation, or being entrusted to further socially or politically engineer society. Both of them responded by going way overboard on spending money to physically change themselves into portrayals of men that people seem far more willing to trust with authority. I think one of the things Donald Trump might actually have been ahead of the game on is in identifying this at a pretty young age, so as to avoid nearly as much notice or discussion of his focus on his physical image and how much he has paid to maintain it, even if his physical image is something that comes under public scrutiny.
Does this mean that authority figures within Patriarchal Misogynistic power structures are more vulnerable to attack along lines of their physical image? Does attacking them for their physical failures at representing masculinity even actually attack the underlying structures of their authority? Or does it just pave the way for future patriarchs, who can play the hyper masculinity game better, for longer, to come along and replace the kind of incompetent buffoons we have running things now? I think these are all valuable questions to investigate and consider because I think we have seen, over and over again, that patriarchy, and the misogyny that underpins it, is very good at changing and disguising itself as its structures become more and less tolerated by society as a whole.