Brutality is Not Masculinity
It's cowardice
“The Cave of Cowardice” where ‘timid travelers’ pay tolls to a demon.
The billionaire co-founder of software company Palantir has called for the return of public hangings in order to demonstrate “masculine leadership.”
That is the kind of masculinity you get when men prance around on stages waving chainsaws, making assertions about war or giving interviews in comfy chairs while doing nothing that is actually brave.
An enduring meme in our culture is that peace-making is feminine. It is “soft.” War-making is “hard” and masculine.
When I first arrived at the Center for American Progress to be a Senior Fellow, I came to a hallway where there was a sign and arrows. One sign said “Soft Power” and an arrow pointed left. The other sign said “Hard Power” and pointed right.
I said to the person giving me the tour, “Has the entire women’s movement gotten past you people?” He just looked at me, puzzled.
Despite more than a century of feminist philosophy showing such dualisms are patriarchal bunk, they continue.
The feminist critique of dualism emphasizes its gendered dimensions and argues that it is one of the pillars of misogyny. It is a main root of male domination. Simone de Beauvoir says of this rootedness: ‘To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.”
Joseph Nye, Jr., a Harvard political scientist, coined the term “soft power“ in the late 1980s, defining it as influence through attraction (culture, values, policies) rather than coercion, while the concept of “hard power“ (military/economic force) existed to coerce.
Such dualism of “soft” and “hard” is a patriarchal body metaphor, of course. It follows from this that women are deemed “soft” and thus weak, and men are deemed “hard” and thus capable of being strong and violent.
Men’s supposed capacity for violence is emphasized in order to demonstrate they are brave and capable of “leadership”.
Being violent is not being brave.
The bravest man I ever met was President Jimmy Carter. Graduate of the Naval Academy, Carter, as a U.S. Navy lieutenant and nuclear engineer, led a team into a partially melted-down nuclear reactor at Canada’s Chalk River Labs in 1952, performing dangerous, short shifts to dismantle the core, risking his life and experiencing radioactivity in his urine, long before his presidency.
President Carter was a life-long peacemaker ultimately winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Get that, Trump? President Carter received an actual Nobel Peace Prize (as did President Obama) not the one pulled out of a Cracker Jack box or wherever FIFA got it to hang on your neck.
Trump, you may recall, dodged the draft making up a fake injury to avoid military service, because “I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”
He mocked Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, for being regarded as a military hero. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said during a July 2015 interview.
Still, Trump is a coward of no common order. Among Trumpians, talking tough seems to be enough.
The dualism of male as proactively violent and female as receptively passive has been around for millennia.
That dualism has been substantially challenged by people of different races, sexualities, and national origins not only saying “I am also human,” but making their way in this American culture.
And patriarchy is in shock, reacting as it always does with threats of violence.
This whole spasm of threats, cruelty and deliberate stupidity we have today is the thrashing around of a wounded patriarchy too cowardly to be fully human.
It is incredibly dangerous.
But I believe it is also dying.
I think of us as hospice workers and midwifes of the dying of patriarchy. An honorable profession. Thanks for this good analysis.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. Hegseth is off the charts...