Author: Benjamin

– or maybe a tangent into ways to fight back against Anti-Trans legislation.

I kinda sorta started writing about this as a random social media post, but it is something I have been thinking about all day and I want to try to delve into the idea a little deeper, so I am going to try to write a blog post about it. The overall premise of this post is going to be that, in the mid 2000s, it used to be fairly common for people to identify as “gender fucked” as a gender identity, specifically meaning that social constructions of gender have left them “fucked” as far a feeling like they were excluded from a society that had such rigidly enforced expectations for the performance of gender. I want to kind of reminisce a little about what that was like, talk about why it kind of went out of favor, and then talk about my concerns about current conversations about gender identity.

Before I dive into this though, I think it is a good idea to get my confessions out of the way:

1. I did strongly identify with the idea of being “Gender Fucked” for many years, so that is something I will talk about from a first person perspective.

2. I still think of gender as an authoritarian social construct and am very worried that all the work trans folks have done to achieve political acceptance, and to reject much of the authoritarianism of gender as it was, is getting burnt to the ground under the current Trump administration.

3. I have a lot of Trans and Non-binary friends for whom battle lines of Trans-inclusion and the right to exist are very personal, very intimate, very embodied battles. Each of them have had very different experiences, many of which, I have only observed from a pretty great distance, so I am going to try very hard not to make a complete ass out of myself by pretending to know or understand exactly what “the trans community” thinks about all of this, or about how it intersects or maybe even crashes into non-binary experiences. I am, in all likelihood, going to fail to be as respectful, thoughtful and understanding as I want to be around all of this, and it might even be the case that this entire post turns into a very sloppy mistake on my part. If you read this post and feel this way, you are only doing me a favor if you call me out on something that feels off or offensive, or ignorant, and if you don’t want to waste your time calling me into conversation about it, I totally understand that too. 

Ok, so let’s fuck with gender. Gender is a social construct. There are a lot of places I could go to with this statement as far as sources for why I don’t just think it is true, but consider it to be the position of scholarly consensus, but instead of going that route, I will just share this link to the World Health Organization’s explanation of gender and how it relates to health.  I choose this one because it states it plainly and it establishes this as the most international perspective on the topic. The US right, especially authoritarian Trumpism, tends to heavily reject the idea that anything is actually socially constructed and not based upon some other trait that is more innate and likely determined by god, but that is mostly because they are trying to stoke and feed malevolent ignorance, and refuse to acknowledge that many things are socially constructed, but that doesn’t make them less real than things that are not. Like money, language, forms of government, even lower stakes things like the rules of sports…these are not things that inherently exist or have been given to us by divine sources, they come to exist because a very large number of people invest their own personal power and resources (mental, physical and even spiritual) into making these social constructs have collective meaning. Tradition, and generational story telling play an absolutely massive role in repeating the generative ideas (memes really, in the academic sense) that give these social constructs power. Some nations and organizations attempt to enforce the “rules” or expectations of some of these constructs more directly and rigidly than others, but influencing or changing any of these social constructs often requires a lot of social and cultural (and often economic) capital to even start to move the needle on, and even then, most of them are too big for any one person to just instantly or intentionally change or control.  

Gender, being a social construct, is not inherently a positive or negative thing, by itself. In a society where people share political and social power, it is entirely possible to imagine genders existing as categories that simply exist to provide a loose and flexible collection of traits that might help some people find a sense of shared identity and purpose. While I am personally skeptical that this idealized version of positive constructions of gender is ever achievable in the real world, I recognize that that positive ideal is incredibly powerful and motivating for very many people. I would even argue that authoritarian gender essentialist (people who believe that gender is a direct projection of biological sex into the social realm) are as invested in the positive idea that gender can help people find a shared sense of identity and purpose, and that is why they are so alarmed and sensitive to anyone questioning traditional constructions of gender, even ones that are pretty obviously harmful to enforce. Gender essentialists are absolutely terrified of losing the power and convenience of being able to divide all of humanity into something as simple as 2 categories that can be used to define purpose, motive, and expected behaviors and abilities within society. 

I think a lot of Gender scholarship over the last 20 to 30 years has been driven by people trying to hold on to the idea that gender can be a positive social force in the world. Even on the radically left, I think it is common to uphold this idea, as long as gender categories can be blown up beyond just a male/female binary and that association with any of these categories can be voluntary and mutable as necessary, according to the needs of the individual. This has been a powerful idea that has largely gained a lot of traction in a relatively short period of time, especially amongst youth in the United States, as it fits in very nicely to a liberal (as in libertarian) world view that each person’s ability to define who they are for themselves is the most fundamental freedom a person can have. It is a beautiful idea, and one very much worth fighting for. It is also one that is going to inherently butt heads with the reality of everything that is socially constructed:

Things that are socially constructed can never actually be defined by an individual. That is why they are social constructs and not simply classified as expressions of the self, or individual. Now, a lot of leftists do understand this, and what they are really talking about with things like “preferred pronouns” is not that every individual gets to just make up their gender on the spot in a way that makes that gender immediately functional as a social category that everyone will understand (which is kind of how the right/“anti-woke” crowd tries to spin it), but that it is possible for society to be compassionate and understanding enough that immediate assessments of other people’s gender identities don’t actually need to be made without giving the person being assessed for “gender” the time and ability to be an active participant in  that process. In other words, gender doesn’t have to be an essential category that needs to be authoritarianly applied and instantly identifiable. This is where the real cultural war battle about “pronouns” and “gender ideology” is being fought, because authoritarians absolutely want every social category that might define one’s power and prestige within that society to be as immediately recognizable and enforceable as possible. Otherwise, the risk of people gaining access to power that is not meant for them becomes to difficult to police and control.

For the record, I do want to live in a world that is compassionate, kind and patient enough to let everyone be part of the process of defining who they are.

However, I think focusing so heavily on that goal, making gender identity as open and participatory as possible, has had a cost in the world of gender politics, in that it has made questioning, critiquing, and even attacking gender as a source of social power and control, look like it is anti-social, hateful behavior towards those who just want to fit into those categories. This is why I have always been lukewarm towards advocating politically for same-sex marriage rights instead of attacking the legal privileges that being married provides, and why I have always identified most strongly with “queer” as a sexual identity instead of something like “bi” or “pan” sexual. When you let bigots turn people’s right to exist into the topic that can be debated, instead of staying on the attack and questioning why we let these socially constructed categories have so much pauthority over people’s lives, the bigots will always choose the path that focuses the light on other people instead of the corrupt basis of their power.  They will still try to make radical attacks on sources of hierarchy and authority sound extremist and impossible when necessary, but most of the time they can let the center or moderate leftists make those attacks for them, while they just keep pushing to expand their power and authority. The centrists and moderates then tend to blame the radicals for not fighting hard enough to protect the most basic rights, while the moderate right is pretty much just completely content to let far-right extremists do whatever they want and just deny that “those people belong to us” unless they can receive a reward for doing so. 

The right has been incredibly successful in accomplishing this in the last 20+ years in regards to gender, and I deeply question whether that is partially because they have been able to claim that the (incredibly moderate) position of “Gender is not binary and Trans People exist,” is the extreme left position on the issue, because the radical and far left critique of gender within a capitalist society has pretty much been pushed out of the conversation entirely. It is really hard to be critical of masculinity or femininity (or a system that encodes and enforces both of those categories) within a capitalist society when you are trying to hold space for people to have the right to have those categories be accessible to anyone (who can afford the costs of fitting into them).  That is a real dilemma, especially because a nuanced critique that says “gender is a social construct that we have to work long term to undermine as a source of social and economic power, but also acknowledge that people living today might have to be able to freely navigate, for their own mental and physical health” is never going to be something that translates effectively into a talking heads sound bite. Also complicating that critique is the fact that people with access to extreme wealth almost always have been able to have more freedom navigating restrictive social constructs ( at least within specific environments) than the general public, and the United States has been a place where the extremely wealthy have been able to very publicly live above the constraints of social and political expectations.

So where does this leave us today, when it feels like more than half the states in the US are attacking Trans People’s fundamental right to exist, attempting to criminalize and demonize Trans folks as perverse predators and pedophiles? Does the need to protect Trans lives require that the whole left unite to adopt the most political expedient methods to create the broadest shield possible? I think that answer can be “Yes!”…“and” also, let’s acknowledge that doesn’t have to mean silencing people who are trying to do more than just lend their own political power over to the the political institutions and organizations that have massively failed thus far to provide that protection. Going soft on social constructs like gender, marriage, family and heterosexuality have paved the way for all of the right’s success in framing basic compassion and decency as far-left ideologies because more radical and leftist ideas are being silenced internally. The right continually makes its greatest strides when it courts and empowers its extremists with as much media attention as possible, while the left keeps acting shocked how effective that has been, even though that same strategy has always worked best for it as well. 

In the face of an authoritarian rejection of the science, the sociology, and the appeal to compassion, I don’t really see any room for trying to negotiate meager protections for only the wealthiest people who fall outside of a patriarchal and misogynistic understanding of the social construction of gender.  For example, if the rules of college sports are so tied up in definitions of gender that can so easily be rewritten in direct reputation to scientific consensus, then it is time for colleges and state politicians to pull the funding out from their sports programs until either new sports not dependent on gendered classifications can be established, or executive orders signed by the president are incapable of infringing upon universities intellectual and scholarly freedom. If gendered bathrooms are going to sites of the policing of people’s bodies, then we have to demand that bathrooms be de-gendered, no matter how costly a process that becomes. If schools and businesses are going to start enforcing gendered codes for clothing and behavior, then students, faculty, workers, and customers have to actively defy and reject those codes. We pretty much have an obligation to make the enforcement of any gendered based laws and policy so impossible to enforce that Trumpism has to constantly defend the expense of this enforcement.  I think even moderate, but consistent disruption to college sports programs that adopt anti-trans measures (not just those specific sports, but the whole college’s athletic programs) alone could scare Trump off from this course of action when the economic and social impact of these ill-thought out choices his administration has made become real and tangible. We have already seen it with his bluster on Tariffs. We know he himself has no spine for confronting actual resistance, especially not on issues that he doesn’t actually care about any more than is inspired by a random talking head on the TV program he was just watching. 

Between loyalty, honesty and now family values, I have a feeling some imaginary folks reading this blog are probably just assuming that I hate goodness and decency and am an antisocial miscreant. Maybe one day this blog will be used to prove my moral ineptitude, but I would counter argue that my willingness to be honest about reservations I have about socially upheld values should prove me to be more honest than many people who claim honesty as a virtue. So why does Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett hate families?

I don’t. I have amazing families. I say “families” because “family” is a more complicated concept than people generally give it credit with ideas like “nuclear family” or even “chosen family.” In fact, I would argue, the idea that each person has only one family, highlights one of the biggest problem I have with the social construction of “family values.”

I think, tell me if I am wrong, that one of the core features of “family values” that even folks who hold it as a central defining value is the idea that the individual should be willing to do anything for their family, and that family comes before nation, or the self, or any identity category. I think that can be a very beautiful idea in the right social context, but within a patriarchal society, I am not sure that it is ever possible for a patriarchal figure to actually mean that they value the individual members of their family (I’ll come back to the families thing) more than they value themselves, because, within a patriarchal society, a family is an extension of the patriarch and his lineage. If the (man’s) family name is the most important generational property handed down from father to son (as is inherently the case within patriarchal society), then conditioning everyone in the family to place the family above themselves is really only a power play at getting everyone in the patriarch’s family to surrender their labor, property and independence over to the patriarch. Patriarchal constructions of family inherently turn the belief in family values over as a tool to keep power in the hands of the patriarch of the family. It is, in essence, a kind of selfishness, when espoused by men at the head of a family,  in the same way that it is for a king to claim the fealty of his people as necessary for the good of the kingdom, or for the head of an organized crime organization saying that they are doing everything for the good of “the organization.” 

That might be a contentious claim to some people, but I think the way we talk about “family” makes it pretty clear that this is how family was intended to work, at least within the rise of the United States as a global cultural powerhouse. The fact that people say “my family” instead of “my families” is a pretty strong example of how a hierarchal authority is supposed to position oneself as the center of their family, as it is only other people’s relationship to the patriarch’s definition of family that matters for their own inclusion in that family. Is a hypothetical cousin or, even more removed, that cousin’s ex-partner a part of my family? Probably only if there is some social or economic benefit for me to claim so, and for them to want me to be a part of their family. The ability to define and control who gets to be a member of “the Family” is at the heart of many current culture war issues, and is an example of how this nation’s patriarchal legal system and definition of property have made it pretty impossible to exist as a person or as a collective group outside of patriarchal definitions of family. 

If society was truly going to value the social unit of families as collective power holders, people wouldn’t talk about “my family.” They might abstractly talk about “family” or they would specifically talk about “my families,” recognizing that “family” shifts based upon each person in the social unit, especially over time, and that any one person can belong to multiple families at once. It is only within a patriarchal definition of family that it is necessary for daughters to be sold off for a dowery, to become a baby factory for another family’s name. 

Modern US society has taken old patriarchal definitions of family even further into the realm of individualist imaginary by defining the “family” unit most prominently as the “nuclear” family. While children and wives might no longer be as directly defined as property as they once were, a nuclear family in a capitalist society is going to pretty inherently become the defacto property of the highest earning member of that family, which in the United States, is still about 69% male dominated. I think the fact that this has come down from 85% since only the 1970s is actually something that is worth looking into more later, and might be where a very big part of the Manosphere-crybaby attitude of “women now run everything” might be coming from, but that is a little tangential to this discussion of family (perhaps in this pew research center study). With older family members pretty much written out of the nuclear family narrative, or perhaps more arguably written down to tangential family member status, likely to be seen as much of a drain of family resources as a contributor, it becomes even easier to essentialize “my family,” down into the category of “the people I am economically responsible for,” and thus allow for people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who have cheated on partners multiple times and treat their children with various levels of contempt or inclusion in “the Family” business, to claim that they respect “family values” when it appears to most outsiders like that is complete bullshit. The reason why they can appear so sincere when they talk about family though is exactly because they are defining their families along lines that run exactly parallel to how much economic responsibility they feel for the people they are defining as family, and thus as long as they are capable of providing for those family members (while they are still worth calling family members), then, in their minds, they are upholding family values. 

This also allows for the richest men to be the laxest in actually doing anything to prioritize their families in their lives and still use “family values” as a bludgeon, especially against people poorer than themselves, because wealth becomes a way to fulfill the contractual obligations of family without actually having those obligations become any kind of meaningful burden or investment. “Family values,” for those rich enough to easily materially provide for a large number of people, becomes a very easy way to present the illusion of caring and compassion, without actually having that mean anything to their sense of self or character.  And this is why I am so skeptical of it on a personal level, and the way it has been pushed onto so many people who lack that wealth. Because sincerely caring about the welfare of others is hardest when you have just enough resources to take care of yourself, or maybe a few other people, and when working class people do form family bonds that stretch their ability to provide for those families (by blood or by choice), it can be harrowing, stressful, backbreaking, and soul crushing…but also amazing and compassionate, and an incredibly beautiful act of mutual aid and solidarity. In other words, it can be the kind of thing that ruins some people’s lives while it gives others a purpose worth pushing through all the risk and danger and difficulty. And it really, really pisses me off that rich people get to somehow make some kind of moral claim on knowing what it means to “value family,” especially when they use that claim to manipulate working people into surrendering their time, energy and collective power over to those lying bastards. 

Could “family values” mean something beautiful and worth fighting for? I think the answer, at least for me is, yes, sometimes, when it becomes about sharing power willingly with others…but not in a political reality where “family” has been used and defined to maintain the power and authority of wealthy elites who are incapable of actually understanding what kind of unit a family could be.

Men who do not have support for handling difficult emotional situations often do terrible things when faced with difficult emotional situations. I don’t really think this is saying anything new or insightful, but it is an important starting place for understanding why men’s emotional support networks are important and worth talking about on a collective level.

It is a pretty common stereotype that Men are bad at feelings. This is often represented in media as men having difficulty talking about things or experiences that they want or desire, as well as tending to avoid conversations or situations where other people expect them to express their feelings. This stereotype typically arises from the idea that men are supposed to portray strength at all times, and strength is often interpreted to mean independence and not needing help from anyone. I think this is a terrible definition of strength, but independence, especially in the United States is seen as core social virtue, and being the opposite, dependent upon others, is not only a sign of weakness, it is a sign of subservience. 

Even as someone that is highly critical of Independence as strength, because people pretending to be independent are just ignoring or deliberately hiding the ways they get help from others, it is very difficult not to let the desire to “handle my own shit,” and not burden others with my problems. One reason for this is experience. Even when your friends and family are amazing people, big problems are difficult to deal with, and there are only so many difficult problems that people have the emotional, mental and physical capacity to deal with at once. Having problems, and sharing those problems with others is undeniably increasing the burden that those people face. (I will come back to this specific idea in just a minute because this is both true, and also often exaggerated, or made worse more by how the sharing occurs than by the sharing of the problems in the first place). 

One time, I was in a relationship that created a lot stressful and difficult situations for me to handle emotionally, which I mention in Post 9 of 100. This was a romantic relationship with a cisgendered woman who had very bad experiences with emotional men acting out violently, and thus she would immediately get incredibly uncomfortable and upset around men expressing difficult emotions. This is a very rational response to the trauma she had experienced, but it also made it really difficult for me to process some of the more challenging emotional experiences of that relationship, especially because I was young, and not as emotionally mature as I imagined myself to be. I also was mistakenly trying to contain all of my difficult feelings in that relationship to that relationship because I was afraid of being judged by others, both for the situations I was creating for myself and how I wasn’t capable of handing myself in them. After one difficult in person conversation, I started crying pretty intensely, and she told me I needed to leave. This wasn’t a relationship ending “get out,” even if it kind of felt like it to me at the time, it was more like “I can’t feel safe talking to you about this while you are having such intense feelings,” which is something that I want all of my partners to be able to say when it is necessary. At the same time, it put me in a real bind as I was not in my home city, and I was broke as shit. So the emotional difficulty and intensity of the situation was really only getting amplified for both of us (and I am now much more sympathetic now to how dangerous it can be for someone to be in a romantic relationship with someone socialized as a man who doesn’t have a strong economic safety net, but that is a little off topic for this conversation). 

It is incredibly dangerous, for everyone, when people socialized as men are afraid to talk to anyone except their romantic partners about difficult emotional experiences, for many reasons, but especially because romantic relationships often become the source of difficult emotional experiences. According to National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men, 18 and older, have been the victims of severe intimate partner violence, and that more than 12 million people in the US experience intimate partner violence each year. Almost half of both men and women have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime, and more than half of women killed by gun violence in the US are killed by family members or intimate partners. It is very unlikely to me that most of the men that end up engaging in intimate partner violence plan on ever having to use physical violence in their relationships, but it does seem incredibly likely to me that men tend to resort to physical violence when they have no other plan for handling difficult emotional situations in their lives, especially when they can point to one person in their life causing the emotional difficulty. This doesn’t excuse any violent behavior, but it strongly indicates to me that there is a large number of men who end up engaging in intimate partner violence that probably wouldn’t, if they had other ways of handling difficult emotional situations and people to help train them to use those other means before the situations escalate.

Cue: Men can’t expect women to do their difficult emotional labor for them. It is not healthy for men, and it is incredibly dangerous for women. This isn’t to say that folks socialized as men shouldn’t have any friends that women, or that they can’t share emotional difficulties with their friends, family and partners who are women, but, especially for straight men, when the women they are close to are the only ones they talk to about their emotions, there is a very real danger of creating a situation of creating a situation where a source of emotional difficulty is the only person the man trusts to talk to about their emotions. 

We, folks socialized as men or in the process of becoming men, really need to step up and supporting each other. It would be great if seeking professional mental health support were normalized, destigmatized and freely available, and that is a worth-while goal to work towards in the future. At the same time, our friends and family members are alive now, in a country that tends to criminalize and scorn anyone presenting any signs of potential mental or emotional distress, and that only increases the risk of the people we care about getting hurt or hurting others when they, or someone in their life can’t handle the emotional difficulties in their life. Men need to stop repeating lies that tend to lead to harm down the road, like “men need to be able to exert control and authority over their families and their partners or they aren’t really men,” but also lies like “real men sacrifice everything for the benefit of their family,” and “having a relationship end before you are ready is a sign of weakness and failure.” Men need, instead, to make sure that their friends know that it is normal to talk to each other about emotional difficult situations from a place of vulnerability and uncertainty without being judged as weak, or just needing to toughen up. If men aren’t sure they can offer that support to each other, it is probably a good idea to make sure that you know what free and low cost resources are available to people struggling with difficult emotional situations in their lives, in their area, and they really should practice getting better at being a supportive friend. It is ok to feel like you are not good at talking to people about emotions or providing support to people struggling with emotional stresses. Being up front about that at the start of conversations, and trying to avoid assuming that providing support requires you to act like you know everything about someone else’s situation or how they should respond is a very, very good place to start getting better at providing emotional support. In fact, most of the time, a person experience intense emotional distress really is not capable of having someone else “solve” the cause of their distress for them, and what they really need is someone to listen to them make sure that they are considering potential actions or reactions that they might be capable of taking to respond to the distressing situation  if they don’t rush into doing something brash, or based off of socialized patriarchal instincts.

It is ok for friends to practice providing emotional support to each other. In fact, if we want to live in a world with much less intimate partner violence, it is probably essential.  Figuring out how to do that is a great idea, but one that each of us is going to have to do together, with the people we want to be able to count on for providing us support, and who want us to be there providing support to them as well.

I have had some people ask me questions about Post 18 of 100: A discussion about loyalty, and while I do want to address those questions, I think I need to better explain why I don’t believe that honesty can be a neutral value that can be equally shared or prioritized within the context of a hierarchal society. This will come back around to patriarchal misogyny (PM), but it might take a bit to get there.

The idea of honesty is very nice. I don’t like having relationships with people who who are dishonest with me, whether they are doing so to manipulate me for their own personal gain, or to “protect my feelings.” This is particularly true of the kinds of social relationships where someone has an immense amount of power over me. When Donald Trump lies as president, for example, everyone (who can) needs to call him out on his dishonesty and hold him accountable for both what he has lied about, and to what purpose he is telling lies from his position of authority. Is he delusional, and so badly misinformed that he really actually believes that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election? Or did he know he was lying and using those lies to foment insurrection? Both are bad things for a leader of a nation that justify removing this person from power, but one probably requires mental health care, and the other probably requires some kind of trial for social justice. So honesty becomes an important value for people placed in positions of authority over others, but does that make it a universally good value?

Perhaps most people would say honesty remains valuable in power-neutral relationships as well. Again, no one likes knowing that other people are lying to them (with an exception we’ll get to later), especially not in situations where you are supposed to be interacting with someone as an equal. It is hard to establish a pattern of trust and mutual aid in a relationship where you don’t know if the person you are working with is really telling you what they want from you, what they are offering in return, or how much they value the relationship. At the same time, in very small stakes interactions and low investment relationships, there are definitely “white lies,” or what I would personally call “lies of social conformity,” that very few people would consider to be an immoral breach of value of honesty. This probably gets into very muddy ethical waters quickly with questions about myth making for children (Santa Clause), creating hope in situations of despair, and just not burdening some random worker at a grocery store who asks you how you are doing when it feels like the world is collapsing around you. Not to mention all the tricksy/philosophical manipulation that occur around rhetorical questions like “what even is ‘the truth?’” So people might like to sign post that they value honesty, because honesty is something that is generally valuable when other people offer it to you, but most people can also find times in their lives where they only value it so far, and in certain circumstances. 

But then there are situations where authority is being exerted over us when we know that the expectation of honesty from us is actually just a tool of control and power, where being honest might mean capitulation to that authority and cause actual harm for ourselves or others underneath the yoke of that authority. People absolutely love stories about tricksters who topple tyrants, and phrases like “snitches get stitches” arise from an understanding that honesty to authority is subservience. But authoritarians and people who want to use their power over others are even worse than to just expect honesty from their subjects. Because fundamentally, the “TRUTH” does end up being subjective, and so the power to make people repeat a lie until it becomes true is a measure of control that can even exceed the power of making people be honest. In other words, the situation of “how truthful should I be in this situation?” is not really a question of individual values and respect, it is an entanglement of power and what truth or reality can be created within the context of a relationship between two or more people. To say that “honesty” stands alone as a value, separate from its place as just a tool that can be used to shape relationships and define how power is shared within them, is almost always a commitment to uphold existing power structures. This is because of a fundamental reality about hierarchy. Values can have an infinite variety of personal meaning and nuance, but shared social values are always enforced most heavily against those with the least amount of power in a society, and their enforcement amongst the most powerful is often so lax as to be nonexistent. Thus the values of a society or nation are almost always directed at controlling the least powerful, not about expressing the actual character of a society or nation. Saying “Murder is a crime punishable by death,” doesn’t make that universally true in the nation where the law allows for capital punishment. It means that being accused of murder is a very serious threat for those without the power or authority to challenge that accusation, and, the more byzantine and expensive the process of challenging that accusation, the more wealth and privilege it takes to succeed in that challenge. This also spills over into interpersonal relationships.

This is why I am actually very sympathetic to anyone who wants a value like honesty (and loyalty) to be important and respected in a relationship. Dishonesty is absolutely a method of exerting power against the interests and desires of another person/group/institution. In an interpersonal relationship, especially one like a romantic partnership, everyone should want power to be so equally distributed that anyone using a tool of power-over would stand out as an abusive, bad partner.But for that to work, all the members of that romantic relationship have to fully and actually believe that it is a relationship of equals, and that exerting power over your partner(s) is wrong.

This is just not the default position of romantic relationships in the United States (the place I am most familiar with). From popular media, to religion, to the pressures of family, friends, and other community influences, there are incredibly gendered expectations (in heterosexual relationships especially, but also in homosexual, pansexual and queer relationships) on how power within romantic relationships develops and is used; power dynamics that often walk hand in hand with class and race, even when those things might otherwise appear homogenous. I recognize that this is a massive claim, and while I think I thought I was going to be able to wrestle with it in this post, I now think that thought was a little naive, and this conversation about gendered (as well as classed and raced) expectations in relationships probably deserves future posts of their own. For this conversation, about whether honesty can be a fair value to universally apprize, I think it is enough to just point out that power within relationships can be very complicated and while honesty can be tool of sharing power equally, it is very often a bludgeon, used by the powerful against those with less power, because only one party can innately know whether it is being fully honest, and testing another person/party for their level of honesty requires the power to invade their privacy without their consent.

Anyone keeping secrets is going to try to keep those secrets in a private and contained space, otherwise, they are not actually secrets. Lies are one thing that people generally tend to keep secret unless there is great compensation for revealing them, but there are many other things that people might not feel comfortable or safe sharing with everyone, or anyone. A demand for honesty within a relationship is essentially a demand for any privacy barriers within that relationship to be removed. Some people might feel comfortable with that idea “ a romantic relation is a place with no privacy,” but that is going to be the most true for people who feel like they have no experiences in their pasts, or aspects about themselves in the present, that they fear being shared with others. And not just the romantic partner(s), because we live in a world where most of our forms of communication are being surveilled. Placing too heavy a burden for honesty on a romantic partner can very much mean placing an expectation on them that they not only have nothing they want to keep secret from you, but that they have no secrets that could place them in jeopardy from anyone, especially forces that have the power to invade their privacy with easy, like powerful corporations and nations. Prioritizing honesty as a value can be much more invasive into some people’s lives than others, and not being aware of that can create the kind of environment that is incredibly exclusionary for people who can’t feel safe in an environment where everyone can gain access to their their most personal and private information. This is a much bigger social issue than just about whether it is generally good to have honesty in a relationship, hence why I realize I haven’t yet put it all together in words all that effectively just yet, and why I understand why prevailing attitudes about honesty as a value tend to be pretty monochromatic about whether honesty is good or bad. Saying, “I want to be a partner with whom my partners can feel safe and comfortable sharing any secret with me,” is a very wonderful attitude to have for anyone entering a romantic relationship. However, I don’t think most people consider how much work that can entail, especially if that partner has things that they absolutely do not feel comfortable sharing with the world at large, or very many people in it, and if they have any experience being hurt by people who made similar promises in the past, it is very reasonable for someone to not actually value honesty in the same way that it often gets presented.

To some up why this all feels like something worth talking about in a blog that is supposed to be about addressing the spread of Patriarchal Misogyny: living in a nation that espouses the value of honesty publicly (even while its leaders completely mock it) while simultaneously creates environments very hostile to very many people, can make valuing honesty to be a tool of oppression and social control. And it can be very easy to say, “well that doesn’t apply to me and my romantic partner(s),” but you can’t really know that, except for yourself. So placing that expectation on someone else might not be as egalitarian and power-sharing of an expectation as you might believe it to be.A better way to enable egalitarian and power-sharing relationships than pushing a value like honesty or loyalty would be to demonstrate a commitment to creating a world where people are not attacked, harassed and judged for being themselves.

Virginia Giuffre is dead. I have very little doubt that in the next couple of months we are going to hear awful things about how mentally ill she is and that her life has been spiraling out of control. I would not be surprised if we see both Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell use this incident and the fall out from it to make all kinds of claims about Giuffre’s character and accusations against them. This might just be the pessimist in me, but there is a reason why Harvey Weinstein is pushing to have his case retried now and why I think most wealthy perpetrators of sexual violence see this moment in time, with Donald Trump as president and a massive backlash against women’s rights and gender equality, as the time to reclaim their freedoms and clear their names. After all, the left is about at their wits end trying to hold on to the idea that courts have power outside of empowering and protecting the executive branch of the government. Democrats in the US have basically just become moderate Libertarians who are hoping to win back mainstream voters by waving around the constitution, as if anyone in history actually valued the ideals of democracy espoused in that document and not just the power they could claim in its name.

Trump and the patriarchal misogynists he has empowered will go on and on about how out of control the Me Too movement got in leveling accusations against innocent rich men to steal their money, while  the reality is that women who have stepped up to call out their perpetrators have been bullied, harassed, doxed, and had their lives ruined while the perpetrators have risen to the highest levels of power and authority in society. Hopelessness and misplaced guilt seem like terrible, sad, and predictable consequences of how badly society has failed believe survivors, support them, and hold perpetrators accountable. But the sadness and anger I feel over learning of Giuffre’s death isn’t just about past crimes or battles. It makes it clear to me that people like Elon Musk, a known sexual predator is using his own social media platform to send unsolicited messages to women trying to manipulate them into having his children, offering obscene amounts of money and manipulation of the visibility of their social media platforms in exchange for signing NDAs and keeping quiet about this plot. 

This really would sound like a supervillain plot, or a bad joke, except fairly rightwing media sources, like the Wall Street Journal have been reporting about it, and yet in the grand scheme of “how are these monsters abusing their power and authority to ruin the lives of others,” I think a lot of people who would/should care about this, are overwhelmed by other events, and perhaps feeling like standing up for right wing social media influencers that are also part of many other problems just isn’t something they can spare energy for. It is really hard to have to fight everything all at once, I am not pointing any blame fingers about this.

However, when people do start looking deeper into the idea of billionaires buying popular social media platforms and using them as a personal sex trafficking service to create a legion of new angry white men with women who might take decades to realize how fucked up Musk’s deranged fantasy of essentially Genghis Khan-ing himself into US right wing politics. In what will probably amount to just about as much incest as European Monarchies, I fully expect generations of Musk-spawn to grow up and dominate the Republican Party for decades to come. I fully recognize how much this sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, but Musk is actually pretty terrible at hiding his secrets and the closer he comes to success, the more he will feel compelled to brag about it. Maybe with groups like the WSJ starting to look into him, and some of the women he has tried to manipulate and coerce into his harem coming forward and sharing these details as they realize just how abusively and uncaringly he treats them, and they start to experience the hatred that the Right will always have for the women who their leaders use as sex  toys, just for existing as evidence of their own hypocrisy and lies, well maybe the budding collapse of his economic empire and his reckless failure to bring efficiency to the government will peel back some of the social armor that has protected him from past accusations, and his whole imperial fantasy will crumble around him!

Or maybe we have to look at the fate of Virginia Giuffre and recognize that patriarchal misogyny is ready to levy an unimaginable amount of violence and threats of violence against anyone that tries to stand up and call out abuse from the powerful elites of society.

It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”

Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant  “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.”  But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find it, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra. I still had stupid ideas about sex and how men had it, until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.

Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”

Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm. 

I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others.  It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having  sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence.  Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations. 

Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.     

Post 32 of 100:  what do boys believe about masturbation?

It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIAA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”

Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant  “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.”  But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra, because this was before the internet was made for porn and this was the material to which I had access. I still had a lot of stupid ideas about sex and how men had it (remind me to talk about “Unrequited Love” in a future post), until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.

Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”

Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm. 

I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others.  It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having  sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence.  Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations. 

Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.     

In post 25 of 100, I began looking at the question of why advocates of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) believe that women currently control every aspect of society, and that is there is no room for boys to be boys and grow up to become “real” men. In that post, I looked pretty specifically at the situation of whether women really do control the educational system, as claimed by Carl Benjamin. However, that only feels like one narrow piece of the puzzle. There seems to be a second, more common argument within the Manosphere about how women control society by controlling access to sex, something that so strongly motivates men, that they/we have no ability to resist women’s will in our pursuit of sex. 

There are a bunch of problems with this claim that I want to talk about either here, or in a future post, depending on how long this goes.

In no order:

1. Sexual violence and harassment statistics would strongly indicate that there is a very hard limit on how much control women collectively have when it comes to controlling access to their bodies. I think PM folks like Men’s Rights Movement types will tend to argue these statistics and claim that false accusations are much more common than the 2-10% they actually are, and other conspiratorial lines of absolute bullshit, but I don’t really want to address that stuff unless someone I care about earnestly asks me to, because it feels like a waste of my time otherwise. No matter what other questions you might have about a person, or their lifestyle or opinions of them, if they tell you they have been sexually assaulted, believe them and help provide them the support they need deal with that horrific and traumatizing experience as much as you are able to, even if that is just telling them you believe them and asking if they have a network of people helping them, or if they need help finding it. You may not physically, emotionally or socially be in a position to be a core part of that network yourself, but you should always be in a position to help point them in the direction of some resources for survivors of sexual violence. 

2. The core premise of the PM claim that women control access to (heterosexual) sex is that all men are implicitly consenting and desiring sex at all times, and thus women have an unlimited buffet of options when it comes to choosing sexual partners, leading to belief in the “80/20 rule” mentioned in the show Adolescence, which is an incel corruption of the “Pareto principle” taken to mean here that 80% of women are attracted to the “top” (whatever that means) 20% of men, meaning that the vast majority of men never get looked at by the vast majority of women.  Having grown up socialized as a man in the very misogynistic 90s, I know that ideas like this, and claims like “nice guys get the shaft, mean guys give the shaft” were commonly shared, even in very left leaning circles, including anarchist spaces and the punk rock scene. This idea that very many men are competing for a very small percentage of desirable women has been common in much of mainstream society (and media) and not just the alt-right or the manosphere. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that comes across as complete bullshit to my lived experience…but the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies based upon entirely subjective opinions about things like attractiveness—there really is no way to disprove this to someone who really believes it.

Like, personally, I know that every person I have ever slept with, hell, ever even made out with, has been HOT AS FUCK (even you, Dru Parish, although you are terrible at making out with boys), and there is no way that I can be in the top 20% of any Incel or PM man’s vision of what are the most attractive men. I probably have to put off deep diving into disproving the 80/20 theorem in a future post, because I can already see that this is something that is going to take a lot of connecting support to make sense of, but even the initial claim that all men are always consenting to have sex is dangerously false. It is one of these stereotypes that I think young boys get told (men want sex, women don’t) that leads to false expectations and can disconnect young men/boys from thinking for themselves about their bodies and desires. Saying “most people have at least one sexual fantasy that they would like to be able to be fulfilled in the right context” feels a lot more true, but is also something that applies as much to people socialized as women as to men. I also think the importance of having sex with another person is such an over-romanticized and heavily enforced expectation for both men and women that it becomes very difficult for people generally to come to terms with themselves as sexual beings and what that means for them. I know that for me, growing up, no one ever talked to me about how masturbation was actually the first act of becoming a sexual being and the place where far too many of my ideas about what it was going to mean to be a sexually active man were beginning to form. I fully intend to write a future blog post about learning about yourself and your body through masturbation, so I will save most of that for the future, but I will say that, even though my first sexual partner was an amazing human being and HOT AS FUCK, I was actually not mature enough to actually be ready to have sex the first time we did it, and that I probably didn’t say anything about that because I thought that, as a man, I must have really wanted to have sex more than I wanted to be able to talk comfortably about things like birth control, and desire, and consent. In the end, I feel very lucky that everything worked out very well for me and that I have no regrets or less than fantastic and amazing memories of any other sexual experience between us, but I am mature enough now to recognize that I wasn’t ready when it first happened. It certainly was not my natural horniness as young man that overrode my brain or self-control, it was expectations in my brain that over-rode my own body’s discomfort and unreadiness.

3. Saying “I believe that women have social, economic and political power over men because I believe that men want to have sex with women so badly that they lose any ability to think or act rationally or be in control of themselves” isn’t saying anything about society, it is saying something incredibly pathetic about yourself as a human being and a man. It is a statement that pretty much invalidates any argument that such a person could possibly try to make about how society is better when men are in charge of things, because it begins with the idea that men are irrational, emotional creatures controlled primarily by their own sex drives, and if they cannot be in control of their own access to women’s bodies to satiate that sex drive, then they can be easily manipulated and controlled. Seriously, making this argument about who is control over society based upon who controls men’s sexual access to women’s bodies is an absolutely pathetic position that completely undermines the entire argument of patriarchy. This ends up being true of most arguments in favor of patriarchy, but the transparent fallacy created by this argument in particular is worth pointing out, mocking, and ridiculing. 

Overall, the logic of Incels, Red Pill-ers, Men’s Rights Morons and other Patriarchal Misogynists tends to be flimsy and asinine, but incredibly dangerous because it doesn’t actually require any logic, facts, or complex understanding of the world. It only requires that a person really internalize gender and sexual insecurities, as well as feelings of rejection, into a state of mind that is desperate to find an external scape goat, instead of having to reevaluate personal romantic and sexual expectations and where those expectations come from. This is why folks really buying into PM ideologies become so dangerous, a fact proven over and over again in mass shootings and acts of anti-social violence, and why the people promoting and exploiting PM ideology have to be confronted specifically for relying on this tactic. Attacking Patriarchy and Patriarchal Misogyny is not attacking men. If someone sees an attack on the ideas of Patriarchal Misogyny and feels like those attacks are about taking power away from men, than that person is mistaking the inherently exploitative and corrupt “power over others” as the authentic and true power that is generated as power with and power from within. They are painting masculinity into a corner where it defines itself not as being in control of itself (in fact, PM ideology tends to claim men cannot control themselves), but as being in control of others, especially women, children, and men who are socially inferior. That is a much greater threat to people who want to identify as men than any offense PM ideologues can fantastically imagine. 

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.  

There is a very common social stereotype that men love cars and that a man’s car represents him in the social world. This men’s health article overflows with examples of men identifying deeply with their cars and even references academic studies about how driving cars make men feel more connected to their masculinity and that men derive measurable increases in self-esteem from gaining access to an automobile. The article goes so far as to state that “Men romanticize things that embody power, fearlessness, speed. But what accounts for the tremendous intimacy between men and cars? Men don’t simply own cars — they have relationships with them.” This is to say that, to the author of this article, and many men who would agree with him, a man’s car is a mechanical representation of his own freedom, power, and social status. As such, cars occupy a place in men’s hearts that is much deeper than just existing as material objects. The article goes on to suggest some reasons why that is problematic, especially focusing on environmental impacts, and then goes on to suggest that the issue won’t really be a problem, because men will adapt to identify with electric cars instead of gasoline fueled ones. 

What is completely missing in this analysis, and missing from the vast majority of conversations I see happening about the automobile generally, and especially in the context of the relationship men have with their vehicles, is that this whole metaphorical connections between automobiles freedom and power are all predicated on massive governmental infrastructure enabling cars to have any value to human beings at all, and I think there actually is a very important and valuable lesson in looking at how that relates to masculinity.

Ok, I don’t intend to write a massive essay here about how expensive car culture is to maintain, in the US or globally. There is actually a whole lot of folks out there writing and making online media content about: how suburbs can’t afford to maintain their own road networks through property taxes and how older suburbs are going broke throughout the US, leading people to move into new ones that fund initial infrastructure spending with grants or worse, loans, and will experience the same problems down the the road (pun intended) when their infrastructure starts needing repair; how cities prioritizing parking and car accessibility into commercial districts over pedestrian access decimate those commercial districts; and how high speed road networks lead to increased fatalities from accidents. There is perhaps no more obvious of a symbol for government dependency for a private industry than the automobile, which has required subsidization of every aspect of its development and evolution to accomplish its place as being the way people move in the United States, and around the world. Without roads, fueling stations, government regulation and enforcement (on everything about cars, from their manufacture to usage to disposal), signage, parking, and complicated international supply chains subsidized by many world governments, automobiles would probably have never become more than novel oddities, like hot air balloons.

So how does this relate to masculinity? Are all men as useless as an automobile in an environment not built up around their every need? Maybe. But even if you don’t take it that far, I think would be pretty easy to see that the there is a disturbing parallel in the way people talk about the necessity of both automobiles, and many unhealthy masculine behaviors that are all dependent upon a massive amount of infrastructure (physical for cars, social for masculinity) to even exist.  It might feel like I am trying to slam on both automobiles and masculinity by making this point of social dependency, but I actually think that seeing negativity in pointing out that dependency is actually representative of the real problem. 

The more invisible the actual cost and labor associated with maintaining massive infrastructure projects, the less value people place on that labor, and the more likely that people take for granted that it will always be there. Movies like Mad Max, and other post-apocalyptic media that feature very unrealistic portrayals of how automobiles will still be useful in a future where no one is building roads or regulating the trade of oil for its refining into gasoline are essentially telling a fantastical narrative that might as well include dragons and wizards. The same can really be said of the patriarchal misogynistic construction of masculinity that is deifying people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Even the UFC tough guy macho guys like Joe Rogan (who I don’t think is intentionally trying to put himself forward as role model of masculinity) and Andrew Tate (who very much is trying to put himself forward as role models of masculinity) are dependent upon massive networks of other people giving them power and authority to sustain any of their accomplishments. Survival is not about individual super men/Tarzans who can do everything for themselves, that is just not how humanity has ever worked. Hunter-gatherer societies are almost always more egalitarian than agricultural or post-agricultural societies in how they distribute labor, including along lines of gender. Hyper violent masculinity has never been about being more capable of protecting one’s self, or keeping one’s self alive, it has always been about seizing control and power from others, usually by trying to be just violent enough to get other people to stop resisting their authority. The freedom and power that PM versions of masculinity seeks is never some uniquely independent vision of the self, it is a self squarely situated at the top of a hierarchy that other people just accept because they don’t have the will to resist it. This is pretty much exactly where the automobile industry sits in the world of transportation today. It is not that cars are just innately and universally the best way of moving people and goods from point A to point B, it is the case that the automobile industry has made it incredibly difficult to develop other methods, because it has monopolized the money, energy and time of public infrastructure projects to make it seem like doing anything else is just going to be impossible…while simultaneously existing in state that is unsustainable for individual communities and for the world as whole. 

So that is why I think there is a real, subversive power behind the metaphor of “automobile as a symbol of (PM) masculinity.” It is really an ironic mockery of reality based upon ignoring the cost of maintaining either. I don’t think I did the best job here of explaining the cost of (PM) masculinity, and the infrastructure required to maintain it. That is really too big of a topic for any one post, and something I will probably have to break up in future posts, but it is also something that I have touched on in many of my past posts already. (PM) masculinity is exhausting, and self-destructive, and something that wears out quickly when actually required to be put into use. The people that idolize (PM) do so in the same way as people who personify and adore an expensive car. It is something they want everyone to respect and ogle, and maybe occasionally take out and put to the test, but they really don’t want everyone to come up and touch it, and the more they have to use it in their actual daily lives, the more quickly it erodes into a valueless hunk of junk.