Permanent Victims
by Stuart Walton
Ivan Jablonka, trans. Nathan Bracher, A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice, Allen Lane, 354pp, ISBN 9780241458792, £25.00
The crisis of masculinity is the special preserve of those who consider themselves sufficiently masculine. Its crisis arises in the gap between its status as a biological attribute and its affectation as a cultural style. Its cognate quality, a manliness that might denote maturity, has given way to a performative version of male ontology measured in bench-presses and a readiness to get stroppy when literally nobody is interested. Conceived in antagonistic opposition to the feminine, against which it must arm itself as against the encroachments of a global virus, it has found itself having to defend, or at least explain, a whole range of aggravating social behaviours — manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting, a mode of demonstratively splashy swimming that somebody will soon call 'he-style'. The crisis within masculinity has thereby become a diversionary tactic from the crisis caused by it, which we otherwise know as human history.
In the face of feminist critique, and the acerbic scorn of cultural critics of every stamp on social networks, in the mass media, even in the canons of advertising, where an army of asinine males awaits enlightenment by the astuteness of women, masculinity has found itself forgetting the forbearance in which it was schooled through puberty, and turning petulant. Disaffected young men of the Westworld have begun to believe that everything is loaded against them. Their self-respect has been stolen from them, they believe, by women who won't look twice at them. Their innate physical strength and their yearning to take on leadership roles are redundant attributes, while the breakdown of all their relationships is invariably blamed on them. They have willingly become what they never imagined being — permanent victims. At the time of writing, 'masculinity' is the third suggestion that Google offers as a substantive for the qualifier 'toxic', after the presumably more urgent 'toxic shock' and, in second place, 'toxic relationships', and we all know whose fault they are.
There is nothing to be gained in trying to frame the debate about men in terms of gender essentialism. Masculinity does not consist in attributes and aptitudes that men don't share with women, not least since there are now so few of those anyway, but in the specifically male versions of each attribute, which are cultural and psychological properties. Nina Power tries, nevertheless, to confront the objection to essentialism head-on in the early stages of What Do Men Want?: 'Our culture often flinches from the idea that “men” and “women” can be defined, and that we can draw any conclusions about who we are from our biology . . . Sexual difference is real,' she insists. So it is, but what is less real is the attempt to download everything peculiar to each gender's experience and behaviour to the fact of gender itself, as distinct from the codifications to which each of the genders is subject, even to the extent of functional incongruity. On one unquestioned assumption, men are hopeless at going to the doctor, because a diagnosis feels like a judicial sentence. Equally unshakable, however, is the belief that men love being ill, because they like being looked after, in the play-acting pursuit of which they are as shameless as golden retrievers, and haven't the faintest idea what real suffering is because they have never given birth.
A boy's socialisation is aimed at the development of an impermeability that he can wear like chainmail. Among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea, boys spend their adolescence in an enclosure known ominously as the House of Men, in which each endures several years of beatings, insults and humiliation, until every last trace of his mother's influence has been driven from him, and he emerges a man. Much the same regime was followed at the boys' grammar school I attended in the 1970s. In this procedure, the acquisition of manhood is explicitly a process of subtraction, of removing the sensitivity and reflectiveness, not to mention the sense of justice, from a boy until he internalises his own damage, and his own turn comes to deal out the same treatment to the next generation. These practices were deemed necessary by the Victorian British public school, if its end-products were to be men with enough steely impregnability to administrate the Empire. Military academies of the post-colonial era assumed the same role. If cadets were not broken down first through physical and psychological torture — a process rendered with horrible clarity, and not a little sentimental ambivalence, by the American novelist Pat Conroy in The Lords of Discipline (1980) — they would hardly last five minutes in one of the criminal quagmires known as war-zones.
Toughness, or the striving for it, is now seen as the one of the components of toxic masculinity, and yet a conflicted world cannot dispense with people, who assuredly don't need to be men, sufficiently armoured against conflict. Only so will they defeat repression, engage in frontline fighting, defend the weaker. What turned male toughness disastrous was its equation with coldness, which provided repressive systems with their staff in the first place, poisoned love relationships with emotional frigidity, and, at rock bottom, prompted willing participation in the various fascisms. If toughness, tested to the inhuman destruction of the individual, is what has generated the late increase in male suicide, the very methods by which young men kill themselves display the marks of a bravery they feel they need to perform, even at the bitter end, a point emphasised by Ivan Jablonka's History of Masculinity. For too many of these men, the subjective assumption of failure is their last rebuke to a world that has failed them. The love they have not managed to access is often expressed in the psychic relief of intoxicants, which pass over into toxicity themselves when they are asked to function as antidote rather than supplement.
A significant, hardly unexpected aspect of the raft of recent literature on masculinity is the refraction of the issue through the history and practice of feminism. The painfully slow advancement of women's rights in Western history, let alone in those parts of the world where it has barely even begun, has only proceeded through articulation of the many ways in which the presumption of male pre-eminence has denied women their full humanity. Men need, as much as ever, to learn from women what the age-old male exemption from self-awareness has done to themselves as well as women. In this respect, feminism, like all liberation struggles, is embroiled in the duty of addressing the very people from whom it most wants to dissociate itself, relying on persuading a significant minority of the privileged to convince their peers in turn that everything is wrong. The more justified the condemnation, the less productive it is of progress, while men who suggest that other men might need to rethink their sexual attitudes are derided as 'cockblockers'. One of Power's respondents, in attempting to answer her title question for her, says that he wants only to be 'a good man', where 'good' is more a matter of the virtue that shares a linguistic root with virility than it is about proficiency. The man who wants 'a woman who will let me be myself', by contrast, could be reducing an ethical universal to a case for the small claims court.
The counter-attack against feminism in recent years is the tactic of perceived victimhood, a response only likely to generate further contempt in an endless loop. MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) and other such phenomena of the contemporary men's movement imitate the militant separatism of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, the belief that the marginalised would be better off living entirely apart from their oppressors. They have doubtless all got very good at doing their own washing. Its principal problem arises with the cyclical surfacing of the sexual instinct. Sex between men hardly ever seems an option, and a lifetime of self-gratification is only fulfilling when willingly chosen, rather than glumly incurred through gender apartheid.
The NoFap movement's answer to the etiolated sexuality of men is to do away with sexual release for concentrated periods through the ferocious discipline of sperm retention. Fapping — what the British know as wanking — is where men are going wrong. The more you fap out your essential life-force while gawping at porn, the less masculine energy you possess. Founded on a forceful critique of online pornography, the movement also advises against masturbation without visual aids. The result, as Power summarises it, is 'a renewed appreciation of the small things in life . . . increased energy and mental clarity'. Somehow, we have found our way back to the virtuous aims of the Victorian cereal-manufacturer, plotting a route to pure thoughts through puffed corn. This is at least less hysterical than seeing self-pleasuring as the degrading alternative to proper sex, a delusion that prompted Norman Mailer to the criminal malice of telling an interviewer in 1963, 'It's better to commit rape than masturbate.’
It is the brute prodigality of the healthy male sexual constitution that counts in the politics of pleasure. When he has barely started on his puberty, a boy has already lost count of his orgasms. When he has to step up to the challenge of conception, a mile is as good as a miss. If the last half-billion sperm didn't take, there will be another few hundred million along in half-an-hour, ten minutes in a pinch. All attempts to spiritualise these physical responses beyond the hormonal faculty of pure enjoyment, result in the excruciating afflatus of a DH Lawrence. In a work of masculine existentialism, The Meaning of Being A Man (2020), Ole Bjerg tries out a balancing-act between Lawrentian transcendence and cheery bluntness: 'Of all the things that men can do, the production of sperm must be in the top five of the most amazing ones. It is one of the two sources of life. And yet we think nothing of it. We regularly squirt it into the lavatory when we masturbate.' Speak for yourself, bro.
The biological structure of male desire, a series of relentlessly linear rises and falls, has led many men to conceptualise sexuality as an urgent imperative, the requirement for which is scarcely less pressing than the need for water. A culturally sanctioned role as pursuer or, worse, predator, has generated both the tradition of seduction, which aims to inaugurate desire through persistent cajolery, and the present-day phenomenon of incels. The involuntary celibate might have thought he was defiantly appropriating a subaltern status, in the manner of a gangsta rap group calling itself NWA, or the application of the intellectual abruption 'queer' to everybody who is other than canonically heterosexual, but has instead worn the label like a permanent taunt to himself, his inflamed, possibly murderous, rage the index of his feeling of entitlement to affection. The problem, as he insists on learning the hard way, is that furious entitlement is one of the least seductive of male attributes. Others feel you can never have too much testosterone, but stimulating the body's natural production of it, or augmenting it with supplements, are likely to promote qualities that are not in short supply — aggressivity, competitiveness, peremptory self-assertion. The grand prize might rather be a version of masculinity that could just be slipped into if it would genuinely excite the other, making a man all the more appealing even when it didn't quite fit.
The search for solutions to masculinity's crisis has become a publishing sector in itself. Jablonka's book is a lengthy rehearsal of feminist history and the problems provoked by gender disparity in the present world, very little of which prompts any objection. He rightly points out that masculinity has always generated its own internal crises, long before it has begun to worry about its relations with the feminine. The attributes of his notional, suavely reconstituted male have such a 1950s air that it is hard not to feel that role models have gained nothing since Cary Grant got too wrinkly for a topless shower scene in Charade. The new man might be seen 'wearing a cashmere sweater, furnishing [his] penthouse, enjoying jazz, being a connoisseur of whisky and making love with flair'. At the close, Jablonka ventures the cool comfort that '[s]ince men can't be thrown in the bin, it is better to make do with them'. As a rallying call we can all get behind, this could stand a little more hothousing.
Nina Power offers a more humanist prescription based on mutual tolerance and understanding, women's for men as much as the reverse. Too many of her sentiments, in searching for the resonant chord, produce only the flat twang: 'But there is so much to live for: life is very surprising. It is worth sticking around just to see what might happen, if nothing else. And you never know who can help you when you're down: that too is sometimes amazing'. She at least has pertinent observations to make on the inevitability of power imbalances within relationships, and her stricture that the reform of men's behaviour has to be inspired by other men. Meanwhile, she advises us all to construct our relationships as though there were no certainty that you would see the other person again the next day, which in one sense is exactly how men want it.
Bjerg's book starts from the promising premise of looking at masculinity as one of the variable potentialities of the male, the cultural performance of his fundamental essence as a man. Disastrously, though, he has an intellectual crush on Heidegger ('my favourite') so sizeable that the Freiburg ontologist's desiccated thought-forms dominate nearly the whole book. Perhaps one of the most shaming characteristics of the academic male is an aptitude for retailing a philosophy that issued from an unrepentant proponent of the Nazi state, without once mentioning the fact. Thames and Hudson's Big Idea volume, Is Masculinity Toxic? (2019) by Andrew Smiler, suggests cuddling parties as a way of breaking down the barriers. The accompanying illustration, resembling a still from a Troye Sivan video, looks like an open invitation to paresthesia. Who would want to be the first to say they had had enough? For the psychoanalytical Antony Easthope, writing on The Masculine Myth in 1990, the problem lay with men's incomplete sublimation of homoerotic desire into the bonds of social obligation, fraternal duty, and the disavowal of the feminine, internally and externally. The VICE journalist Jack Urwin's Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity (2016) appeals to men, via much effing and jeffing, to prove they can do anything women can do, including showing a bit of fucking sensitivity, but also has enough subtlety to suggest that masculinity is best not conceived as diametrically opposed to femininity.
Men, whatever their orientation, need to be more interested in being what women want them to be, which will include empathy and compassion for feminine travails, not adding to them through male indifference or hostility. And they probably need to stop configuring their sexual responses in the mode of jacking off to internet porn. Two months on experimental testosterone may be interesting for the mildly amphetamine-like internal quiver each day's dose produces, but when it comes to prompting the sexual instinct, it isn't even close to receiving a romantic message from my favourite.