Post #2175106

So trudging through Ivan Jablonka's History of Masculinity, some thoughts. First off, the alleged history of masculinity has very little mention of men or masculinity. Which, OK so playing the game of excluding men from their narrative like women are, yada yada. Problem is, I was already familiar with most of his material. What I was after was more insight into the mostly male crap heads who cause most of the problems in the world and Jablonka didn't really deliver. We are given a received frame through which we are told to view the world. While it is true that the frame is biased towards the male gender and masculinity, patriarchy is a consequence of the frame, not the frame itself. To understand the essence of the frame, it is necessary to look at the rubes following the cults of MAGA and Boris Johnson, mostly but not exclusively men who have invested their entire self-actualization in the service of what they see as a cause greater than themselves. And so, they praise men who are so obviously frauds as their personal messiah. The first frame we are given is a hierarchy and we are told that our objective must be to climb to its apex. After a while this simplistic frame is replaced with a new one which admits that the hierarchy we are born into is in competition with other hierarchies: nation, religion, culture. And it is our duty to ensure that our hierarchy wins against its competitors. And as George Orwell explains in 1984, this struggle between hierarchies is in fact a sham, a deliberate fiction maintained for the sole purpose of maintaining the hierarchy. And so in 1989 as the Brelin wall was starting to crumble, Margaret Thatcher was dispatched by Bush the elder to tell Gorbachev to ignore protests on behalf of the protestors, he should crush dissent with an iron fist. It is that betrayal, a betrayal which I knew about long before it was revealed by the Gorbachev archives, which has informed my politics and led to my work on the Web. The real goal of the Web was to give people direct access to information without the frame inserted by the press, the academy, the church. Once we can find a place outside the frame, we can see how the system works. Men like Boris Johnson found people who could further his career with the promise that if they helped him climb the greasy pole, he would pull them up as well once he got to the top. And so social media is filled with angry old men shouting loudly that Trump is the messiah, that only a fool, an idiot, a communist would oppose him. Angry old men franticly demanding that the hierarchy be preserved so that they can take their rightful place within it. Yesterday, J.D. Vance gave an angry speech about the 'fact' that a dozen eggs now cost $4 under Vice-President Harris while in a supermarket standing in front of signs selling a dozen eggs for $2. It isn't an accident that Vance is the very best the patriarchy could find to defend it, Vance and Trump represent a type of masculinity most men now reject because just like Trump's tax cuts only benefited the 0.1%, the 'benefits' of the patriarchy are distinctly skewed as well. I don't see the image of strength and power Vance and Trump want to project. I see two frightened little men who are desperate to gain position and power but have absolutely no idea how to use either. Patriarchy provides an alternative frame through which we can understand the power dynamics that drive authoritarian bigots like Trump and Putin, but it is a flawed frame because it reduces all relations to gender and is counterproductive in that it encourages men to imagine they have a stake in maintaining it. Some on the far left employ a similarly flawed frame of colonialism which holds the US, NATO and the democratic nations generally as being responsible for all the misery in the world and that therefore Putin's aggression against Ukraine is legitimate. If we instead look at history as the result of the actions of individuals rather than states, we can see that every country has a war party and that the invasion of Iraq was the result of neo-colonialists who had the ear of George W. Bush and that we have to look at individual circumstances to decide what causes to support and not the frame we are given and told we must not question. And the last is the really important part because if we blindly follow those in authority without question, we are going to end up following incompetent clowns like Boris Johnson and incompetent rapist clowns like Trump.