Category: Blorg Posts

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.

I read this article about politics in Canada, largely because it is about the right wing political shift of young men in other countries, beyond the US, but also because I am curious about whether the new, very centrist head of the Canadian Liberal Party is going to manage to keep Canada from going full on conservative in their next election…and that does seem possible…for now. But, as much as Justin Trudeau always struck me as a bit of clown, he definitely took control of the Liberal party by appealing to a strongly left-leaning progressivism that was very popular with Canada’s youth. His cabinet was the first in Canadian history to include as many women as men, and was very much a shining beacon of Diversity when he was elected. In many ways, it feels to me, as a US citizen, that the “woke” ideology that Trump has had so much success attacking in this country was much more prevalent in the Canadian Liberal Party than it has ever been in the US Democratic Party.

So I find it really interesting that this article reports that 17 percent of folks ages 18 to 35 say that a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man. That might not seem like a lot, but only 13 percent of those between 35 and 49 felt the same way, and only 6% of those 50 to 74 feel the same way. 40% of people under 35 in Canada say that women’s rights have gone far enough. This seems to mirror data I have seen saying that the youth are veering right in Europe, Israel, and the US as well, often largely around issues related to race and gender.

This article claims that much of this shift stems from the growth of right-wing social media platforms, and I think that is probably true, at least for a big part of the story. The authors of that article are convincing in their claim that Right-leaning online shows have almost 5 times the followers and subscribers as left-leaning shows, and that a lot of media that is being labeled as nonpolitical, and focused on topics like comedy, entertainment and sports, were overwhelmingly showing a right-leaning political bent. The article also goes on to claim that people really trust the information they learn on podcasts, with 87 percent of people saying that expect news they hear discussed on a podcast to be true. So it is pretty easy to see that if many of the most prominent podcasters and other online media makers are describing “American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power,” that that is is information that is going to gain a lot of traction. If scroll down that article, you can see a chart of the followers that various online media personalities have, and it is overwhelming how many of the most followed content makers lean heavily to the right, or at least into a camp that is patriarchal and misogynistic. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Theo Von all have more followers than Trever Noah, who has twice the number of followers of any other left leaning online shows. 

Looking at those numbers, it is hard to argue against the role that social media has been playing in shifting young folks political views, especially around topics like family values and gender roles. So while academics like me were starting to feel like our colleges and universities were really starting to get anti-misogynistic, gender egalitarian ideas out to our students, it turns out that students were growing to place less and less faith in anything educational institutions had to say about social issues and had other media sources that were answering their questions in ways they wanted to hear. That all makes sense to me.

At the same time, I think that overall global skepticism for the future is a factor that is getting too often ignored in these conversations. Between Climate catastrophe, war, and economies that youth are told are the best that have ever been, but exclude them from getting jobs that will ever let them own houses, or really any property at all, it is not hard to see that people are desperate for ideologies that offer them a more hopeful future. For now, the right has really managed to monopolize that by scapegoating groups like immigrants for the destruction of economic opportunities and turning Trans rights into the ultimate boogieman of gender ideology that is destroying young men’s social and romantic futures. The left has massively failed to offer any of the large scale social and political solutions that it has in the past, in response to economic and social uncertainty, and instead seems pretty content in just placing its faith in global capitalism to just keep making so much wealth for the richest people in the world that enough excess keeps trickling off the top to keep people in line, then act shocked and outraged when the richest people keep trying to figure out ways to trickle less and less down stream. 

I am very skeptical that more left-leaning online media is going to make a dent in youth political leanings. Right-leaning online media works because it sells insecurity to young people with just enough disposable economic capital available to them to make those young people a marketable audience that will justify advertising and support from larger social media platforms. Their right-wing content will remain free because they are so attractive to advertisers, and they have no issue letting any and all companies use them to sell products. Short of some kind of nationalized social media platform that never allows any kind of advertising incentivization, but remains dedicated enough to free speech and accessibility to let its users post content without concern for censorship or algorithmic manipulation, I just don’t see a left-wing social media presence overtaking the right. It is a win-win situation for the billionaires that run the existing social media platforms to keep running them the way they are running them, and a minefield for governments to try to regulate without looking like fascist censors. I applaud left-leaning content makers who are trying to do the best they can, but the infrastructure of their platforms is leaning heavily against them, even if there were not ideological considerations like worrying about presenting factual information fairly in appropriate contexts, instead of focusing on generating clicks and drawing in advertisers above all other considerations. 

Maybe I am wrong, and would love to be called out for it, but it feels like the last 10-15 years of the left entrenching in colleges and universities, only to place responsibility for enacting change on the backs of their students individually, while focusing all other efforts towards electing elitist politicians who were never fully on board with seeing radical changes to the system…hasn’t worked out very well. The left has to get back into the conversations happening in work places and people’s family homes, and in the coffee shops and bars and streets of the country if it wants its ideas to compete with online media platforms. I don’t think an obscure blog on the fringe of nowhere is the best way to do that, but I will keep trying to solidify my ideas here so that I can share them with others better in the future.

This post was much lighter on the Patriarchal Misogyny talk than I intended it to be. It skated it, and I think the world has to deal with why the internet is such an economically rich environment for patriarchal misogynists to exploit, as well as how to challenge that. But I think that might have to be a topic I address more in a future post.    

I started out today wanting to write a blog post about this news article about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and  how the Trump administration’s dragging of their feet and insistence that his return is out of their hands is both an example of their own use of weaponized incompetence as a political tactic, and another connection between Trumpism and Patriarchal Misogyny, because I assumed it was common knowledge and commonly agreed to that weaponized incompetence was well understood to be a tactic employed by men to shift arduous and difficult labor onto the women in their lives. As I searched for articles to share to provide further reading on this connection, I realized that the vast majority of these conversations have been happening on social media and people’s personal blogs, and that without any academic credentials to use a research library, the free resources available to me to talk about this connection are very thin. 

So in the process of wanting to write that article about how Trumpism combines Elon Musk’s mantra of “move fast and break stuff” with a form of weaponized incompetence focused on avoiding accountability for prioritizing the appearance of accomplishing goals over responsibility for the consequences of acting so recklessly, it seems like I am going to have to write first about weaponized incompetence and misogyny. Firstly, this is very much not my original idea. It blew up on social media about 2 years ago, and you can still find components of reddit threads and social media posts people have made about this topic if you search for it, but any academic takes on it have yet to seep down from sources constrained to academic libraries to the general public. 

I think part of this is because weaponized incompetence is not just a tool men use to make women do work for them, but is actually a deep-seeded tool of social identity construction that includes race, sexuality, gender and class, and might be so deeply imbedded for some people that calling it “weaponized” just feels confusing and misleading. What labor is worth doing, who should do it, and how they should be compensated for it, are questions of critical social analysis that are essential to feminism, socialism, anti-racist activism, anarchism, queer theory, environmentalism…really just most strains of leftism or radical thought. It is almost a given that any form of conservatism is going to make moves to essentialize certain labor divisions as natural or ordained by god, and that this is kind of a question at the heart of all culture war issues. So maybe one reason discussions about “weaponized incompetence,” and the inability of certain groups to complete certain kinds of labor for themselves hasn’t really become topics of common discussion is because that feels like a conversation that can only happen after one side acknowledges that, in a fair system, that labor would be done by everyone. In other words, maybe the idea of “weaponized incompetence” in areas like domestic labor could only become something people could talk about as possible once it became commonly accepted that it is possible for domestic situations to exist where the labor of cleaning, cooking and maintaining the household could be equally shared and not just dumped on one person because of their expected subservient role in the relationship. It is only possible to label something as failure based upon incompetence when someone even bothers to try in the first place…to demonstrate…that, to accomplish…the task…they…just…cannot. 

When the offending party just reacts with hostility to being asked to do the work in the first place, and insists that it is other people’s natural responsibility to do the task, then we can’t really call that weaponized incompetence, just something like misogyny, when it is based on the expectations of men to have free access to the labor of women, or racism or classism, or some other form of discriminatory identity expectation. But this is exactly why I think it is important to call out Trumpism specifically for employing the tool of weaponized incompetence, especially within the same kind of patterns that we it used by patriarchal misogynists that are trying to hide the extent of their misogynistic ideologies.

“Well sure Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported accidentally, but now he is out of the US so there is nothing the US can do about it!” 

***what happened to Abrego Garcia was not deportation. Deportation is the act of expelling a foreigner from a country on grounds of illegal immigration status or for having committed a crime. Abrego Garcia was disappeared from the United States into an incredibly hostile environment from which he had received official guarantee that he would not be subjected to. I really wish US media would stop using the word deportation to describe governmental criminal acts***

This is the same kind of “whoopsies!” logic that has followed most of the actions of D.O.D.G.E, the mishandling of classified documents (all the way back from Trumps first administration through to the Signal app scandal), his handling of tariffs and the world reaction to them, and has become a hallmark of Trumpism past and present. What makes it obviously shallow and transparently weaponized incompetence is how frequently Trump himself will contradict the official statements of his advisors and representatives on social media, making it abundantly clear that he responds first with incompetence to see what the reaction will be, and then steps forward to insist the act was intentional and to take credit for it, after he has tested the water and thinks there is something to gain from his base by appearing to be deliberate in his cruelty instead of just absent-mindedly incompetent. He does it over and over again and it is clearly a weapon in his playbook that he uses personally within his own life, and has mastered using as a political tool. He is paving the way for patriarchal misogynists across the globe to confidently act first, on minimal information, and push accountability off onto others as often as possible when incompetence is the necessary defense against culpability. 

I don’t know if this behavior is new to the fascist authoritarianism of today, but it is an essential part of the “chaos offensive” that has allowed Trump to expertly dodge any consequence for his law breaking, cruelty, and disaster diplomacy. Long term, he is paving the way for future Jeffery Epsteins, Weinsteins, P-Diddys, to delay and prevent being called to task for their crimes, and the authoritarian right around the world is watching and taking notes. 

I tend to say that I was raised by a single mom. My father wasn’t entirely out of the picture especially not in my youth, and my mother remarried and I had a stepdad from the age of eight into my twenties, but I have issues with both that I have written about extensively in my autobiographical anthology I Fucked Up. I don’t have harsh feelings for either my father or my stepfather, even though they have both caused me traumatic pain at various times in my life, but I tend to look at both of them as examples of masculinity that really made me question the value of masculinity as an identity, and the things that “men are supposed to do.” 

One aspect of this that I have thought about for a long time, and have struggled to write down effectively in words before is why I get so upset and uncomfortable with the very common meme that “fathers make sacrifices for their families.” I don’t know if I am going to be able to do better with this blog post than I have with my attempts at story telling and poem writing in the past, but I am going to try, because I think some aspects of this have come up in watching Adolescence, but also, I see the “Father must do anything for the family” to be an absolute root lie of patriarchal misogyny and Trumpism both. Like my aversion to the value of Loyalty, I will acknowledge up front that “A father will do anything  his family” is probably one of the first things people think of when they say “family values” and that there are centuries of media, from around the world that reinforce this idea as one of noble character and high moral value. As a whole, I think my complaint is really more directed at the reality that this value almost never actually means the “I would take a bullet for my child” extreme that a lot of people think of when making a statement about a father sacrificing for their family, but instead that fathers actually very rarely even act in the actual interest of their families, and instead can get wrapped up in a whole lot of bullshit trying to convince themselves and their families that fathers are the ones who best know and speak for the interests of their families. 

This is the situation that I feel like drives so many men who have relationships fall apart into the arms of patriarchal misogyny. I think a very central pillar of socialization as a man is the belief that, as a man, your highest purpose in life is the creation of some kind of family that will come to define your identity, but which also represents your identity into the world. I think this is why so many men are attached to having their partners and children adopt their last name, and where that tradition came from. I think it also underwrites a lot of the laws (both from religious law and secular) that have established property rights into the hands of a father, not only of properties like possessions, land, and titles, but also wives and children. I am arguing that the idea that a man is supposed to see his family as the ultimate representation of himself and his legacy is pretty much the root concept of patriarchy, and it has a deep stranglehold on the construction of a masculine identity.

It is not a difficult value to romanticize, especially if you ever end up a parent, or have dreams or aspirations to become one. In its noblest aspirations it can be a model for many people on how to unselfishly love beyond the boundaries of yourself, or at least it gets spun that way over and over again. But I just don’t believe that learning to see yourself represented in your family, in your partner and your children, is really experiencing a love bigger than yourself, it is just projecting your sense of self beyond the confines of your own body and mind. I especially don’t believe that there is any altruistic selflessness in the projection of valuing family that I see in the most public proponents of patriarchal misogyny, like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, etc.

Even I the nobler projections and fantasies of this story “the father sacrificing some aspect of themselves for their children or family,” these stories of sacrifice almost never include the family collectively coming together to discuss what is best for everyone individually and for that to be what drives the father into action. It is almost always a father acting unilaterally to do what he alone really understands what needs to be done, because it will end up being the best for everyone. This is the fiction and the fantasy that I have personally seen drive many a man into a horrific spiral of feeling exploited and undervalued by their families, their children and especially their romantic partners. Because sharing the labor of figuring out what the family needs is seen as an act of  burdening the family with the often messy and ugly realities not just of survival, but of prosperity. And this is where I really think the idea of “a father must do anything for their family” really gets harmful and dangerous for society, for the family, and every single person in it. Especially because the needs of most families in the United States almost never come down the moments where anyone must do some thing terrible for the family’s safety or survival. Instead, the absolute atrocities that the United States continues to engage in, and that men wanting to be model father who will do anything to support their family continue to condone and support, are almost always about misplaced expectations of sharing wealth and prosperity. When the dirty deeds of “doing anything to support the family” are no longer really justifiable, that is exactly when not revealing them to the family isn’t really about protecting the family from the horrors of the world, but about protecting the acting father/man from potential value judgment from their families. This is the situation that the United States keeps putting itself into, at home and around the world, and is a big part of why I think patriarchal misogyny is such an attractive ideology to people on the right who think they are pushing family values. 

Nothing is actually lost when people value and wish to protect their communities, not just their immediate families. There may be extreme times of hardship where everyone in a community cannot be supported, fed, protected and cared for, where really difficult and ugly choices may have to be made, and where people might decide “my family, not yours.” But those times are so much more rare than the fear mongering rhetoric that the right pushes relentlessly would have us all believe. It only becomes possible when there are a sizeable base of people fully buy into the idea that any attack on their own right to have everything they want is a violent attack upon their own person. And when each man can count their entire family, and prosperity of their entire family into that same self-serving dominion, that is when you have the zealous foot soldiers that will condition themselves to see everyone else as an enemy out to destroy their very sense of identity.

Family values in the hands of patriarchal misogynist are identity politics. They are used to create a sense of self, with specific, coded radicalized and gendered ideologies that justify violence and dehumanization of anyone that isn’t willing to step in line and give themselves, their bodies and their labor, to the cause of supporting the next biggest patriarch up the chain.  

In Post 23 of 100, I talked about the pain of sitting through a Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) video to make sure I was responding directly to his criticisms of the TV show Adolescence, and not my own imaginings of his argument, or how he might have been represented by someone else.  One idea that he mentioned that I have been wrestling with since watching that video is trying to answer the question that titles this post. How can anyone, especially a grown man living in Suburban England, really believe that there is some kind of matriarchal authority that is currently controlling western society/culture?

After only a small amount of internet research, I realized that this question is at the heart of the entire Manosphere/Men’s Rights Movement (MRM)/Incel identity and is going to take some time to research and write about, over the course of several posts, so I will step back from trying to look at that question in its entirety for this post, and instead look at the one thing Carl Benjamin said in that video that has some truth behind it…but only really one small aspect of it.

The vast majority of school teachers in the US and in the UK are women. Benjamin is UK-based and looking at those figures, but I am in the US, so I will point to this Pew Research Center report, and acknowledge that 77% of K-12 public school teachers in the US are women, and that the ratio of women to men in the profession skews even more heavily the younger the student grade level. Carl Benjamin uses this statistical reality to make the claim that this is the root of young boys growing resentful of the authority of women, because they are having their social behaviors monitored and evaluated by feminized standards that don’t understand what it means to be a boy. 

I think there are a lot of people who probably find this argument to be moderately compelling when based on this evidence. I know for me, as college professor and as a male outreach facilitator for a domestic and sexual violence shelter, I absolutely have had an easier time getting male students to listen to me and respect my ideas than many of my colleagues who are women. Male teachers who were adequately trained to address misogynistic violence (like what happens in the show Adolescence, at the extreme end) and the rhetoric that leads to it probably would have an easier time engaging with the boys and young men most likely to need guidance away from misogynistic ideas and behaviors. There is violence prevention research that backs up the claim that young men, especially young men already headed down the road of embracing misogynistic and abusive ideas about gender relationships, will be more likely to listen to men than women. Troubled boys will tend to listen to and respect the opinions of male authority figures over women. However, as Carl Benjamin makes clear in almost all the rest of his video, if young men struggling with patriarchal, misogynistic ideology are turned over to the kinds of men he advocates should be disciplining these boys, then their misogynistic and patriarchal ideas are not only going to be reinforced, they are going to become almost unshakable, especially in an environment like a public school, where most of the student’s future teachers are going to be women that the boy has been doubly socialized to disrespect as an authority figure. Patriarchal and misogynistic male teachers are capable of having a massively oversized reach and effect on the boys and future young men they are teaching, making the “just get more men into teaching/mentoring roles and positions of authority to be a potentially dangerous approach to reducing gender-based/misogynistic violence. For example, just imagine putting Carl Benjamin into a high school classroom…and then stop imagining that right away, because you don’t deserve to have that occupy space in your brain.

But all of that is getting a little off topic to this post. I think one place where the manosphere has been successful in recruiting young men into patriarchal misogynistic (PM) movements has been in framing educational institutions as centers of feminist/matriarchal dominance, and then attributing any fault in a student’s educational experience as being a product of that matriarchal authority. The school is underfunded and lacks resources that would benefit the student or engage with their interests or learning styles…blame female leadership. The school is beholden to meeting specific state/federal standards that require teachers teach specific and required material in such a breakneck pace that nuance and context are impossible, so overgeneralized, “correct” answers to the tests become all teachers can afford to teach…blame female leadership. The school’s physical infrastructure, built decades ago and underfunded at every opportunity, feel structured like a prison, sniffle creative thinking, and limit especially physical forms of emotional expression…blame female leadership.

Another aspect of this situation that patriarchal misogynists manage to avoid addressing when they talk about how terrible it is for boys and young men to be surrounded by female teachers is why this unbalanced ratio became normalized in the first place. While there are many factors that have played a role in women becoming an oversized sample in the field of education, it has never been the case that more women were encouraged into the field of education after that field has experienced increased growth or economic support by society. Women generally are paid less than men in every field, and this remains true for teachers. Hiring women as teachers has been an intentional strategy in past decades for bringing down the cost of schools and reduced educational budgets tend to push men out of jobs faster than women when they see a limit to future pay increases or professional growth. Society devalues education, and, surprise surprise, the field of education becomes more and more feminized. This makes it even easier for PM advocates to point at schools as locations failing to meet the needs of boys and young men for either educational or emotional development. 

I think I will need to write a future blog post about more personal experience I have had with women gaining access to positions of authority within organizations and institutions, and how frequently that leads to immediate and harsh critiques of these places as “no longer supporting the value and potential they once had,” as I have seen that in political movements, worksites, and school clubs and organizations many times. Men, even politically conscious ones,  grow uncomfortable lending their political, social and economic power to places where they feel limited or controlled in what they can say or how they act. 

My last thought that I want to tag onto this blog post, about why some boys and young men see school as a place dominated by matriarchal authority, and limited by that authority from developing into the people they want to be, is that they are not just navigating this space on their own, they are being influenced by familial and social role models in their lives. Fathers/uncles/gaurdians who struggle to listen to, respect or value the work of women in their lives are going to act just like Carl Benjamin when they see their male children learning to listen to, respect and value the work of their female teachers, and every teacher knows that the energy parents and guardians put into their children’s development is going to be massively more persuasive than that put forth by the teachers. For patriarchal and misogynistic parents and guardians, a “feminized” educational system becomes an exceptionally easy breeding ground for instilling hatred for women in positions of authority, especially when schools and adolescence are already naturally going to be sites of rebellion and a growth of independence.    

So, no, I don’t think it is really fair to even pretend like having more women teachers than male ones means that schools are sites of matriarchal or feminist authority. But I think it is very easy to feel that way if you are man with a predisposition to misogynistic thinking and are in a location where misogynistic thinking might actually be called out as such instead of laughed off or implicitly agreed with. There are already ample studies that indicate than men tend to think women speak more often then they actually do, it really isn’t all that surprising that many men seem to react the exact same way to seeing a women exert any authority at all in a setting that the man does not expect them to.  

In the second episode of Adolescence, a kind of tricky thing happens that is really easy to miss. The episode is about the police coming to the school attended by both the perpetrator and victim of the stabbing to ask questions of some of the students and try to gather information about building a case against the boy, Jamie. The police are looking for the murder weapon, and think it might have been passed on to a friend. The episode is mostly about the perspective of the officers and the difficulty of getting kids to talk to them at all about what happened or why, even though all of the kids already seem to know more than the police officers do, largely because they have been communicating about it in emoji code on social media. Eventually the male detective’’s son, who is also a student at the school, gets a private moment to let his father in on the code, mostly because the son is getting embarrassed by how incompetent his father is looking in front of the whole school. I might do a later post about the necessity of having coded “kids only” language/means of communicating and how I think adults today might be blowing that aspect of social media out of perspective, but I think the more interesting thing to talk about in that episode, is the clear collusion that occurred and continues to occur with Jamie’s friends. 

Because the show never does any voice over narration, and everything is presented from the perspective of the characters in front of the camera at that moment, there is a lot that goes unsaid in the show, or only gets hinted at or briefly mentioned. One of these is understanding the extent to which Jamie planned to murder this girl and that he did not do it alone. To make sure I am not making assumptions about things that other people don’t see, I will lay out, chronologically, what I saw presented as what happened leading to Jamie murdering his classmate Katie.

– Katie shares revealing pictures of herself and a friend with a boy in her school.

– The boy shares these pictures with enough other people that they go viral within the class.

– Jamie either becomes interested in Katie as a result of seeing the pictures, or already was interested in her, and decides to try to win her over romantically by appearing to be sympathetic and understanding of how unfair it is that the pictures were publicly shared. 

– Katie sees through this trick and identifies Jamie as a creep, leading her to mock him, by calling him an incel.

– Jamie is very hurt by this, talks to his friends, and plots some kind of revenge. Some aspects of both Katie’s rejection and Jamie’s reaction is posted on social media and observed by most of their classmates.

– Exactly how much his friends know at this point is not really revealed, except that one of his friends, the one Jamie identifies as stupid, gives him a knife to use for his revenge plot. Maybe the friend thought he was just going to scare the girl, maybe he knew more, it is left very vague in the show.

– Jamie stalks the girl down and murders her very quickly, with almost no conversation before hand, as shown in the CCTV recording in the first episode. He stabs her multiple times and then flees, clearly not realizing that the parking lot had a camera on it. 

– Some how Jamie gets home, in new clothes that are not covered in blood and without the murder weapon. The audience is not told how this happens although the police suspect that he went to a friend’s house and received help getting rid of evidence. 

– The next morning Jamie is arrested.

I think one of the reasons why Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has expressed interest in this show being watched in schools and discussed by youth and educators is because there are many points where other people could have intervened to stop this fictional murder from happening, and this kind of proactive thinking is at the heart of well-researched violence prevention programs. Like getting people to talk about the crime itself and the emotions around it is one important part of helping people be prepared not to participate in such actions, but talking about the situation from a broader social perspective also helps people see that this kind of violence isn’t just about the emotional state of the perpetrator, or showing young women what to look out for or how to protect themselves, but that an entire community enabled this violence to happen and could have done a lot more to prevent it.

This is why I think the second episode is about much more than just the police trying to find more evidence to convict Jaime of the crime, even though, from their perspective (which is the one the camera stays on for most of the episode), that is what their trip to the school is about. 

Interestingly, and probably true in most real incidents of gender/sex-based violence amongst youth, the adults in this story were all pretty clueless and not in much of a position to identify the risk factors before it happened. Not the parents of either child (we think, we never see Katie or Katie’s parents to know how much of the situation she was bringing home) nor the teachers were going to be aware enough to figure this out. Even if Jaime’s parents had been more observant of Jamie’s social media presence, he was communicating in code that would have completely stumped them if they had seen the posts. Obviously they feel incredibly guilty when they realize that their boy had been the one to do it, and many of the other adults in the community around them are probably placing blame on them, because parents are supposed to be accountable for the actions of their children and take responsibility for teaching them not to be terrible people in the first place, but that kind of rhetoric is almost always just applied after something terrible has happened as a way to find someone to blame. Occasionally there are very specific, tale-tell signs that grown ups should be educating themselves to look out for and be prepared to get involved when we see them, but, I feel, an uncomfortable truth for many adults in the room is that part of raising kids, or being a part of their education and growth is preparing them to be active members of the various communities to which they will one day belong.

***when I say gender/sex-based violence, I am talking about sexual violence, domestic violence, and all violence that originates from one person feeling like another person has an obligation to treat them a specific way because of their genders, sexes, or sexualities. So it also includes misogynistic violence, homophobia, and violence against transpeople. It is maybe a little awkward of a thing to write out/say, but it is more specific than just saying violence as a whole.*** 

Definitely in the case presented on the show adolescence, it is the youth community around Jamie and Katie that were most powerfully situated to do something to change the outcome, but also were clearly not being prepared by their families or the social institutions around them to do so. Jamie’s friends were active participants in enabling the violence that occurred, and clearly knew it afterwards, as they react by pulling a fire alarm when the police do arrive at the school to learn more, and don’t provide any useful information until cornered and essentially tortured to reveal it (there is no Television better than the righteous police office crossing the boundaries of legality to get information that might not even be necessary for their case, but that we know the interrogated person has). The rest of the school was overly comfortable sitting in the “innocent bystander” role, eating their pop corn and gossip about the entire situation as it unfolded, through Katie’s murder. 

Bystander intervention training was pretty much my area of focus in violence prevention work, and is still the direct action and preparation for action that I think can have the most positive effect on ending and minimizing the threat of gender/sex-based violence. There are a lot of reasons why kids don’t feel comfortable stepping into an active bystander role, and why a lot of adults feel uncomfortable letting them, but I think that is a deep enough topic for its own future post. So all I will say is that a more active bystander intervention model could have had the potential to empower one or more of the youth witnessing this situation into taking positive action that could have stopped it from escalating. I will also go over personal experiences with that kind of thing from my youth in a future post as well. I will say that I agree with Starmer that the show Adolescence could be used as a conversation starter that could lead youth to the development of bystander intervention strategies as well as a stronger understanding of what kinds of behaviors can escalate to unthinkable violence when no one does anything to stop it. Maybe in England, there is a better institutional structure to facilitate that happening, but it feels like in the US, any attempt to get that conversation started at institutional levels is going to be met with extreme patriarchal, misogynistic responses masquerading as protectionism for children. “How DARE you think MY CHILD needs to be exposed to such horrific ideas, or be prepared to respond to them! If anyone is going to teach my kids about sexual and domestic violence (or even worse, gender-violence)! If they are going to learn about it, it is going to be from sneaking off to consume media behind my back, or worse, experience it first hand and have no idea how to talk about it or to whom!”

As I mentioned in my post 21 of 100, I had many reasons for knowing that I wanted to watch the show Adolescence, but one of them is that I have been seeing “hot takes” pop up about how the show is garbage because the inciting incident for the show involved a black boy murdering a girl over a stuffed animal (absolutely untrue that the show was written in response to this incident), and by doing so, the real purpose of this show, and the support that has been shown to it by the British liberal/labor establishment, is to demonize white masculinity and scapegoat white boys for the rise in “what is being”so-called” misogynist violence. In responding to one of these “hot takes” written by my old ex-professor (the one I wrote about in  post 18 of 100), pointing out the factual inaccuracy of claiming that the show’s creators intentionally race swapped the murderer in their story, I was pointed to a Sargon of Akkad video  (Sargon Akkad is Carl Benjamin’s Youtube persona) , titled “The Perpetual Inmates of a Social Prison” as why it doesn’t actually matter what the show creators thought they were doing. Their real purpose (and why the show has been so promoted), whether they know it or not, is reinforcing this pervasive narrative that white men are the root of all evil, perpetuated by a feminism that is currently dominating the current world order. These guys really and fully do believe that women hold all the social and institutional power in society and I am going to write a lot more about that in the future, but for this post I want to talk about how badly Carl Benjamin misses the boat when analyzing episode three of Adolescence.

***I am sorely tempted to mock Carl Benjamin by calling him his YouTube name, Sargon of Akkad, just to avoid having to keep using my own name over and over again when talking about a guy who was one of the central instigators of the Gamergate harassment campaign, but I will avoid that temptation because it is a good exercise in humility to not take pride in my own name.***     

I really cannot negatively review this video badly enough, nor discourage you from watching it unless you are a glutton for idiotic, misplaced, misogynistic anger, but as an academic, I don’t like writing about people’s perspectives without having taken the time to read/listen to those perspectives myself. I have read Mein Kampf, I have read The Protocols of Zion. I try to understand bad ideas at their sources, not how they are portrayed to me. So I decided to watch this 2 hour monstrosity of video in its full (even though you can get everything you need out of it to understand where Benjamin goes so wrong in the first 20 minutes) just to make sure I didn’t miss any hidden gems that would really help me understand why all my ideas about misogyny are wrong, social-programing instilled by the secret feminist order that is out to feminize all boys and men to ensure that we can never take back the political power that us white men have somehow, supposedly, lost. The kicker for me about this video, is that from within the first 5 minutes of watching it, that it is abundantly clear that the reason why the manosphere and the right are so mad that the show cast a white boy to play the role of the murderer, is because they cannot help but immediately empathize with, and see themselves in the role of this character. For Carl Benjamin, certainly, and probably many more men with patriarchal misogynistic beliefs, the character of Jamie, the boy murderer, represents white masculinity, and every time he is being interrogated or evaluated by official representatives of the state, they are experiencing (or they would probably claim re-experiencing) all of the trauma of having become heavily repressed/oppressed second-class citizens in a civilization that was founded  to empower and protect them. 

Seriously, in his video, Carl Benjamin, flies off into a rage, cussing, his face flush, because, in his mind, every white boy in England knows exactly what it feels like to be sat down in a chair and interrogated for hours by a “menopausal, HR Harridan” ( Benjamin’s words, even though none of the women in the show that ever interact with the Jamie character in this way are of Menopausal age) that is trying to tell “us” (the white boys) that our naturally spirited, “boys will be boys” behavior is mortally evil and the cause of all of societies problems. Remember, that this scene is actually of a court appointed psychologist trying to determine whether Jamie is of mature and sound enough mind to realize that what he did was murder someone. Anytime Carl Benjamin does remember to talk about how Jamie might be different than a typical white boy, he does the same kind of mitigating, apologist behavior that you see in a conspiratorial misogynistic character in the fourth episode of the show that tries to convince Jamie’s father to call the arrest of his son a government plot to oppress the white man…even down to referring to Jamie as an “alleged murderer,” as if he was an actual person in a real trial case, and not a fictional character in a TV show that really makes no effort at disguising his guilt.  

While I think it speaks highly of the shows ability to humanize Jamie as a character, it is also just jarring and wild to me to see a guy who has absolutely no sympathy or empathy for the real life Hassan Sentamu, basically just immediately see himself in the shoes of Jamie, and repeated talk about how boys like Jamie are just “boys being boys” who need real men in their lives to help steer them…as if murdering a girl who might have been a bit of an internet bully falls into this “spirited boy behavior.” Doubly jarring and wild to me is that Carl Benjamin’s big argument about why the matriarchal power structure he believes currently controls England is so bad, is because it shows no grace or mercy for this kind of “spirited boy behavior”…again remembering that in this fictional case, the behavior is blatant misogynist murder, who then attempts to cast the “you can’t actually believe I would actually do something like this” charm offensive to hide his guilt. Carl Benjamin insists that this experience, of being the white boy oppressed by a system that views whiteness and masculinity as markers of social evil, is so well represented by the way this psychologist woman “interrogates” Jamie, by calling into question everything about himself that he identifies as himself, that it captures everything wrong with contemporary British society. Again, never actually recognizing that what the Jamie character really did was conspire with others to acquire a knife, stalk, and then murder someone for rejecting his attempt to manipulate her into liking him by being nice to her when he sensed she might be weak. The psychologist in the scene’s goal is not to make Jamie feel bad for being a boy attracted to a girl who rejected him, her goal is to get him talking about what happened enough to figure out whether he was aware enough of his actions and their consequences to face trial for them. 

Carl Benjamin is unquestionably one pillar of manosphere rhetoric and thought. He presents himself as different from a character like Andrew Tate, even though he talks about Tate a lot in this video, because he is civilized, married, a father, (who also, you know, generates lies and misinformation to get others to harass and dox women), but he makes it very clear that he believes that women’s jobs are to be merciful and kind to men, even ones who are violent misogynists, and that women who refuse to take that path and dare to think themselves capable of talking to boys or men about why their violent behaviors are unacceptable are “HR Harridans” who should just ceed all of that power over to a man who will just know how to handle this kind of behavior on account of being a man and having gone through adolescence as a boy. Never mind that that experience of going through adolescence as a boy has likely been full of traumatic violence and abuse (something that Benjamin himself points out without realizing he is doing so, repeatedly in the video),  or that many of the men in the show itself that try to act in that role for Jamie, end up creating trauma for him by infantilizing him or failing to process their own trauma without projecting it on to him (something you learn about especially with the father in the fourth episode, but also in the first two episodes with the arresting police officer). 

In my mind, that call for “get the professionally trained women out of the room and just let these incompetent men handle the emotional growth of boys into men” is a pretty compelling metaphor for what the manosphere is setting out to do, and why I think men who realize that it is crap need to step up and risk having a bunch of misogynistic hate mongers call us names like “gelded beta cucks,” in public without crumpling behind the traumas that these kind of guys have been using against us since we were children to convince us that it is wrong to see women as human beings worth of friendship and respect, even if they are not fucking us or acting as our mothers. They are all-to-happy to debate and harass women who will call out the idiocy of blaming all the political and social issues of our day on the feminization of men, because they fundamentally don’t believe that any real men will actually listen to or respect women, and so they see themselves as having already won any debate against such women before it has began.  You can really see this playing out in the way that they talk about the show Adolescence,  and the way they look at female authority figures in the show as standing in for their imagined “matriarchal, anti-white, misandry” power structure that is preventing the white man from enjoying the spoils of western civilization by having empathy for the conquered, colonized, and exploited. While I think there might be some merit to a critique of the authoritarian structure of schools, criminal justice systems, and family structures, the patriarchal misogynists are only interested in critiquing the people at the top of those hierarchies if they are feminists, and think the solution is to just put more white men back into those positions of authority, especially white men who understand and are sympathetic to “boys being boys” and, you know, murdering girls who don’t show them the mercy and compassion that white men deserve.  

Note: This is a post about a show about a boy who pretty brutally murdered a girl and the investigation and fall out from the murder. The show is not graphic in its depiction of violence (the inciting incident is only shown very briefly, as the characters watch a small lap top that captured the crime on a CCTV recording, and it is grainy and not even the focus of the scene), but the show is all about that violence and how various people react to it. It is not really a show that I think needs any kind of spoiler tags because it is not a mystery and probably something to be fairly informed about before deciding to watch it. I am not going to try to censor myself when talking about it, so reading this may spoil some narrative elements if that kind of thing is important to you.  

I can already tell that I am going to be writing a lot about this show, and breaking down specific elements it brings up for me, and in regards to patriarchal misogyny in much greater detail, but I figured I would start with one “my reaction post” about it first, and then see where that goes.

Firstly, I knew I was going to have to watch this show and talk about it in these blogs as soon as I heard about it, because it seems so invested in this conversation, especially about not figuring out how to talk to young men about patriarchal misogyny. Secondly, I have been seeing some other folks “hot takes” about the show, generated without watching it, and I knew I wasn’t going to be that guy who talked about what I think the show was saying or why it made the choices it did without actually seeing it form myself. I have some craft and form reactions to it that I will probably touch on in this post, and then a whole lot of content reactions that I may bring up, but will probably deep dive into in future posts. I think the show is an important enough conversation starter about these topics that I will probably watch some of the episodes multiple times to try to give more detailed analysis. But for now first reactions:

I was told to be prepared for the show to be intense. I may have over-prepared myself, and perhaps been a little more prepared than most to take in this kind of media to begin with, but it didn’t really hit me hard until the 4th episode. There are topics and portrayals of those topics that are intense in each episode and if I had still processing traumatic experience with things like: being arrested for a really serious crime that I had definitely committed, having a classmate or close friend violently murdered by someone I knew, or working closely as a psychologist with someone I knew to be an unrepentant murderer, the first  3 episodes might have been a lot more intense for me. Instead, the only episode that really hit me hard emotionally was the 4th episode, which is set about a year after the incident and focuses on the parents of the murderer processing what happened. I have daddy issues that I will probably have to talk about in a future blog at some point, but know that movies/shows that intensely deal with parents, especially fathers, either failing their children, or making choices that hurt themselves to protect their child just absolutely destroy me, and make me ugly cry. I may have never rage-cried as hard at anything in my life as watching Billy Elliot’s father break a picket line to pay for his son’s dance lessons. 

One of the reasons why I think people are having intense emotional reactions to the show though is because it is filmed in these long, long, long single take shots with a camera that will pan around the characters and move through the set in what must have been absolutely grueling scenes to direct, film and act through. There is almost no outside narration in the show, but the camera does a good job of giving you a view inside as many as 3 or 4 different characters’ heads at a time by being focused on their faces as they are reacting to the immediate story beat. At times I found the cinematic approach exhausting to watch, and I don’t think I would generally say I think filming that way is a good idea, but I think it did work for this show, and for this topic. Although, I did sometimes find myself focusing on that camera work instead of the plot  because it is impossible to film that way and not have some scenes play out much longer than needed because you have to follow characters walking down flights of stairs and through halls for much longer than you are used to seeing as an audience member. Relatedly, and to help pass some of the time in those scrolling shots, the ambient sounds and noises, on top of the thematic music that would be playing definitely toys with your emotions as well and probably compounds some viewers’ anxieties and emotional reactions to the show. 

One “hot take” that I see coming out of rightwing reactions to the show is anger that the show is trying to demonize an angry, hurt white boy as some kind of zealot in the army of men’s right groups, incels and patriarchal misogynists, and that the show’s purpose is to make white straight men out to be “the enemy.” Now most of the people repeating this take are going to dismiss everything I have to say, because I am openly talking about resisting and challenging patriarchal misogyny in this blog, but I think if they actually watched the show, they would probably realize that the show is really tame on the theme of large scale social or political theories driving this kind of violence. I don’t think any character in the show even uses the word misogyny to talk about the crime that has been committed, even though it is a crime driven by a young male character’s anger at women. Almost every character in the show is incredibly sympathetic to the murder, even the arresting cops, and if the character was not a sweet and innocent looking white boy, I don’t think audiences would have found any of that sympathy believable. I think what these very flimsy and shallow analyses miss the most is that the show itself is very much less about the boy or the social factors that might have influenced him, than it is about being parents/adults and trying to understand how things like this happen and maybe be more proactive identifying signs that lead up to it. Honestly, some of the trolling takes I have seen about the show almost just seem mad that there is a default assumption by all the adult characters in the show (and most of the kids) that a boy murdering a girl (who might have been bullying the boy by calling him an incel) is morally bad. Otherwise, the show is far more politically neutral and sympathetic towards the character who commits the murder than many people who have experience with this kind of violence happening in their lives might be comfortable watching. The girl and her family’s grief and pain is never even shown on screen. One of her friends gets a brief amount of time in front of the camera, struggling to process her pain and sense of loss, but that is really it. This show is about the boy, his family, and helping the audience see all of them as real, complex people, perhaps to the show’s detriment.    

In future posts about this show, I want to talk about: episode 3 where the boy/murderer converses with the psychologist, who maybe the first person to get him to start processing what he had done, even while exposing herself to what can only be called abuse from someone who is still trying to convince himself and the world that he did nothing wrong…specifically because what he did was not really wrong; episode 2 and whether social media really is something entirely new in how it enables kids to create unsupervised social worlds for themselves; Episode 1, and how handling violence like this through the criminal justice system is so problematic as far as really understanding what is going on or figuring out how to change it; and then, of course, I think I have to talk about being a parent of a child that will have to deal with being socially identified as a boy (unless/until she/they doesn’t/don’t identify as a boy and then we, the parents will do everything we can to support her/them be correctly socially identified) and how that relates to my own experiences and fears around growing a boy surrounded by the violence of enforced masculinity and patriarchal misogyny. In other words, I will be coming back to this show, but future posts will not only focus more specifically on particular topics, they will also fold in a lot more personal experience around those topics and issues. 

Until next time, be kind when you can, to yourself, and all those who will use your kindness to build a better world for us all…including you. 

Benjamin C. Roy Corry Garrett

In post 18 of 100, I talked about why I think loyalty, as a value, is a misplaced effort to create security in a relationship, because it is something that can only be shown to someone who is in a position of authority over another person: to test or expect loyalty from another person is to exert some amount of power over another person (This is what I talk about in that post and why I don’t think it is bad for people to value loyalty, but that in a society where people have different levels of power over each other, loyalty is not a value that can be fairly expected of all people equally). 

Advocates of patriarchal misogyny want loyalty from followers/subjects/subordinates, because truly loyal subjects require nothing in exchange for their faith and dedication to the cause. As long as they feel like they are trying to prove their loyalty to their patriarch, there is almost no act of fealty that they will not do. Eventually, with no return on the investment their loyalty has cost them, some followers will grow bitter and jaded, but to the rest, that will just be read as a sign of disloyalty. This is a very old pattern that infuses hierarchies much older than patriarchal misogyny. 

One of the strangest things about the kind of patriarchal misogynistic value system we have seen established under Trumpism, at least to my eyes, is that Loyalty is incredibly heavily sought after and tested, but from the top to the bottom, it doesn’t seem like accountability is valued at all. In many hierarchal social structures, it is very common to teach that anyone with authority over other people has certain obligations to those people that they are expected to carry out and that leaders are expected to be accountable not just for their own mistakes, but the mistakes of their subordinates. Now I am not saying that this valuing of accountability was always put into practice by other hierarchal systems, but it was often preached and reinforced with storytelling and myth-making within that system. This is just 100%, transparently not the case with Trumpism. From the top down, it is very clear that the patriarchal misogynistic hierarchy being established places no value what-so-ever on leaders taking accountability for their own actions or the actions of those beneath them. It is a system firmly rooted in pointing the finger at anyone else when something goes wrong and refusing to ever admit any wrong doing, under any circumstances. You see this kind of thing in the flimsy fascist caricatures of empire presented in media, such as with the Empire in Starwars, or many of the different portrayals of Prince John from the Robinhood myth, but it doesn’t seem like you see it for very long in real world hierarchal regimes…except maybe I am wrong about that. The thing about both of the two fictional examples that leapt to my mind, is that these were relatively short lived examples of empire. Like the starwars empire might feel long, lasting at 24 years, but the Republic it replaced lasted thousands of years before it, and Prince John’s rule barely ever gets off the ground in the Robinhood myth, even if it seems like he later returns to power, uncontested, after King Richard’s death, but that is rarely a well-told part of the myth.

So maybe we do tend to see authoritarian systems abandon the longer-term value of accountability on behalf of their leaders, but most frequently towards a paranoid collapse of those systems? Maybe this is something that can give us a little bit of hope as we see no leaders within Trumpism demonstrate leadership traits that inspire the kind of loyalty that is necessary to keep extremely authoritarian systems  running for more than a brief period, often punctuated by violent unrest? It seems like it will be incredibly ineffective to try to build a lasting patriarchal system of power on a model of masculinity that completely refuses to take accountability for anything.  I guess I did nothing to answer the question I pose in this blog post’s title, but it does seem like the consequences of it are already starting to undermine the authority of Trumpism.