“To read through the contemporary deluge of books and essays on the plight of men, manhood, manliness, and masculinity—summarized in the notion that we’ve neared the end of each—or to return to the precedent of our forbears by listening to podcasts, the new acoustic genre of edifying instruction, is to relive the ancient experience of illiteracy, when knowledge was stored and conveyed by word of mouth arranged in rhythmic patterns that could be memorized and recited. For the authors of these ‘texts,’ whether of the books or the transcripts or the reviews, seem determined to say the same thing over and over, as if the mere repetition of the tried and true is a convincing rhetorical strategy. And as if the novel fact of approaching equity between males and females is a sign of deviation, devolution, and decay—something to be feared.”
That’s almost the lede of my latest at Project Syndicate, which is kind of a review of Josh Hawley’s new book, Manhood, another pathetic installment in the “conservative” revolt against equality between males and females, or black folk and white. In concluding, I note the resemblance between the articulation of the fascist personality in the Germany of the 1920s—what Klaus Theweleit studied with such care in Male Fantasies (trans. 1988-89)—and the mourning for the masculine virtues which saturates contemporary commentary. The authors in both moments conjure a laughable and yet frightening world that no longer seems elsewhere, a world in which upright men arm themselves against their emasculating enemies, who are invariably coded as feminine, fluid, formless, and watery, a force from the left, of course, that will destroy the bodily integrity and intellectual resolve—the fortitude and the ferocity—that masculinity requires.
Here’s the pass-through link to the piece, again courtesy of Jonathan Stein at PS:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/conservatives-fixation-on-defending-patriarchy-by-james-livingston-2023-08?h=9IeOuKgbUPur425XnSxdAJq78L%2bMD3pQqnZVQLoAaI4%3d
In late 19th Century England these same fears of the erosion of masculinity were much discussed, blame being given even to novels like George Eliot’s where few manly men were to be discovered on the home front. Domesticity had undermined the formation of masculine culture. And yes, misadventures in imperialist wars were thus being harmed. I’ll read your article ...