Power = fucking and fighting, pretty much no matter what
Published by punkass marc June 3rd, 2008 in Lick My Jackboots of Love, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged, for realsJessica linked an article from Robert Jensen about masculinity. The jist: in mixed company, people of both genders describe what it means to be a man with words like “strong, responsible, and loving.” When it’s just the boys, though, the definition of masculinity changes:
To be a man is to be a player, a guy who can attract women and get sex; someone who doesn’t take shit from people, who can stand down another guy if challenged, who doesn’t let anyone else get in his face. Some of the men say they have other ideas about masculinity but acknowledge that in most all-male spaces it’s difficult to discuss them.
So in male-only (or male-dominated) circumstances, the concept of masculinity takes on an ugly face that even guys who participate in it don’t always enjoy. He also points out (correctly!) that the positive ideas of men-dom offered in mixed company actually apply to *people* and not just men. Then Jensen asks:
If the positive definitions of masculinity are not really about being a man but simply about being a person, and if the definitions of masculinity within which men routinely operate are negative, why are we holding onto the concept so tightly?
Uh, because sometimes it feels good to be bad.
There’s a reason these movies make so much money, people.
Look, the negative qualities of masculinity are truly awful, but they’re also seductive — lots of guys want to be able to fuck whomever whenever and possess the willpower to walk away. Lots of guys want to be able to kick the crap out of womever whenever, whether they’re potential threats for their similarities or their differences. Is this really so confusing?
The ugly truth about guys is that nearly every one of us has — at some point or another — enthusiastically bought into one, some, or all of these negative definitions. Even if it’s just for a moment, what man hasn’t had a thought about sexual or physical domination of another person? Jensen seems to think that the only peer pressure being exerted is the pressure of the all-hetero-guys circle, but I can guarantee you that plenty of guys in his classes are being just as disingenuous about not enjoying the qualities of a bad boy. Sure, even the most ardent misogynist homophobe macho asshole probably gets tired of the bullshit now and again, but even the most thoughtful and enlightened fellow’s wanted the power to dominate others at some point.
In fact, I’ll go one further — what *person* hasn’t had a fantasy of power or domination, even if it’s fleeting? Aren’t the ideas of successfully fucking or fighting anyone just as gender neutral as positive qualities like loving/caring? They *seem* to be masculine+hetero because straight guys sit atop the pyramid of power (especially if they’re rich and white!). We’re given license to acknowledge them, express them, and act on them much more freely, but they’ll show up at the top of any society founded on hierarchies.
What Jensen’s actually arguing is that power structures like the patriarchy suck. I’m just not sure he realizes it. Culturally, humans will probably always have to resist the urge to grab for power, to take what we want from others physically or sexually. Even if we were ever to *truly* equalize everything on the gender front, won’t rich people and/or white people still rape and kill and enjoy it?
Obviously, the Patriarchy won’t be abdicating the throne anytime soon, and thus hetero men in like company will nearly always be the ones fitting the negative definitions offered by Jensen and his students. But we should always remember that:
1) These bad qualities are derived from power, not gender.
2) Empirically, people seem to enjoy expressing power (or fantasizing about it), even if they feel guilty about it later.
To get rid of these qualities, we won’t just have to dump the Patriarchy, we’ll have to dump every Archy.
Go team!
Yeah, I’m extremely familiar with that dynamic. It ends up trapping you inside it no matter how sincerely you feel it’s hateful, because when you live in an -archy, you are not given the choice really between either choosing to play into the power structure or being left alone. You’re given the choices of either playing into the power structure or being played by it. Which forces even those who want nothing more to change the system, to become part of the system in order to change it. The fundamental problem there’s pretty obvious, huh.
The interplay between masculinity and the patriarchy goes back and forth. To be a member of the power class of the patriarchy, you must show that you are worthy by being an asshole. Even guys who don’t really want to be assholes will go along if it’s been made clear to them that they either act the part or get the boot. Take the psychology of the gang rape. Criminologists will say that a lot of gang rapists would never rape in other circumstances, but are basically told by their male friends that they join the rape or they aren’t real men (i.e. eligible for the benefits of being men in the patriarchy). Often after a gang rape, there’ll be like one guy or two who did the raping for minimal amount of time to get past his friends and will take the victim home or even help with medical treatment. I’m serious. On its surface, it makes no sense, but in light of these dynamics, it does.
I agree with you, Marc, and I think that it’s because power and sexual success are such great forces that women are told to not want them. Most women would find benefit in their lives if they could become more aggressive and assertive about their goals and wants. This is why we’re told not to.
(My own last blog post was mostly about this sort of ideal: idealising violent power and sexual success, but mysteriously insisting it is always packaged with whiteness, maleness, straightness and wealth. Why, why, why? Don’t ALL sorts of people lust after those things [if only as an imaginary want that you'd never take up IRL]?)
I also love Jensen’s assumption that all guys are hetero and that you can find out everything you need to know about all guys ever by only asking the heteros. Clearly gay men have nothing to add to the story of masculinity, because they’re not really masculine or something? Wtf is he smoking?
To get rid of these qualities, we won’t just have to dump the Patriarchy, we’ll have to dump every Archy.
Cool. You’ve become an Anarchist.
I can dig it. I’ve been thinking about it, too. Really, the biggest thing wrong with being an anarchist, as far as I can tell, is the same thing wrong with being a socialist, or an animal rights activist: namely, that due to decades of bad press from the powers-that-be, most people will dismiss you out of hand without listening to you due to your label.
I am much more of a socialist than I am an anarchist. And really, anarchy is all about the expression of personal power — certainly it’s tough to assume that we won’t have more raping and killing in an anarchy, yeah?
Read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.
Is LeGuin pro-anarchy?
I don’t think I could do justice to the awesomeness of the book so I’m going to pass you on forward:
From Wikipedia:
“The story is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti. Urras is presented as having much in common with cold-war era Earth. It is divided into several states which are dominated by the two largest ones, which are rivals. In a clear allusion to the United States and the Soviet Union, one has a capitalist economy and patriarchal system and the other is an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat. The story takes place on the fictional planet Urras and its moon Anarres (since Anarres is massive enough to hold an atmosphere, this is often described as a double planet system). In order to forestall an anarcho-syndical workers’ rebellion, the major Urrasti states gave the revolutionaries the right to live on Anarres, along with a guarantee of non-interference, approximately two hundred years before the events of The Dispossessed. Before this, Anarres had had no permanent settlements apart from some mining.
The protagonist Shevek is a physicist attempting to develop a General Temporal Theory. Anarres is in theory a society without government or coercive authoritarian institutions. Yet in pursuing research that deviates from his society’s current consensus understanding, Shevek begins to come up against very real obstacles. Shevek gradually develops an understanding that the revolution which brought his world into being is stagnating, and power structures are beginning to exist where there were none before. He therefore embarks on the risky journey to the original planet, Urras, seeking to open dialog between the worlds and to spread his theories freely outside of Anarres. The novel details his struggles on both Urras and his homeworld of Anarres.”
Also:
http://www.amazon.com/Dispossessed-Novel-Perennial-Classics/dp/006051275X/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212597436&sr=1-22
And really, anarchy is all about the expression of personal power — certainly it’s tough to assume that we won’t have more raping and killing in an anarchy, yeah?
Well, it depends how you look at it. If you accept the argument that large scale warfare (with its attendant large scale raping and killing) is only possible when done by large scale states, then I think you’ve got a decent argument for anarchism. Not anarCHY, but anarCHISM– seeking to weaken large centralized power structures wherever you find them.
The raping and killing which smaller scale power structures can accomplish (say, the mafia wars of Prohibition era Chicago) will always be outstripped by whole orders of magnitude by the raping and killing which large scale power structures can accomplish (say, just about any officially declared war between nations in the twentieth century).
I want to be able to fuck, a lot. Be that just by myself. I don’t see this as any sort of aggression though. I see it as sipping really good ice tea, on a beach.
Thene,
What indeed baffles me about Jensen is that he spends a lot of time talking about straight men, and getting credited for being a rare man who “gets it”, yet he is actually gay. He talks about men fucking women, but he has no such natural urge in himself. I don’t see his social critique in sex in the society so much different from that of women themselves. He might be a great sociologist, but I don’t see why I should view him differently from other female sociologists. And I personally find his connection of physical sexual pleasure to violence of sorts, quite disappointing.