On Masculinity, Volume 2
My neck hurts, but at least it isn’t green.
Two pounds of polished stainless steel. That was the weight. The package dipped when I pulled it out of the mailbox. A rare occurrence even for someone that gets funky shit in the mail like me. It was in a silk bag and shrink wrapped. Fifty american dollars was the price I paid, though similar pieces sold for less. Call it the outcome of a joke. Tell me I’m too stupid for my own good. Both are true.
But I had to know. Especially after reading reviews that swore up and down it was a “highly masculine” piece. With titles like “mack on the attack” and users hyping it as the next viagra, curiosity won in the mind of this cat. I checked my account, and hit order. It arrived just as fast as the reviews had said. I pulled it out, and fiddled with the glasp for a moment. Seconds later, it was upon me. I couldn’t help but laugh at how I looked. God, who wears this shit?
Thousands. Thousands of men every single day order 21mm wide stainless steel necklaces in order to appear more masculine. Some order even two. With a migraine creeping up the back of my skull I’ve zero idea how that was possible. Maybe they toss in a bottle of tylenol if you buy two, I don’t know. But yet the customer demand persists even when common sense fails. When your identity feels under attack, even a fancy gardening chain looks like an out.
Identity-especially gender identity-tends to be the thing we hold most sacred. We have to live with ourselves the rest of our lives. We’re there through every triumph and failure, every moment of strength and weakness. Only we truly know the quality of our character, the secrets unsaid and the deeds that take root in our hearts. Rare arises the occasion to open that to the world. Were we to do that, the cerberus of fear, self loathing and doubt keeps watch steadfast.
So.
We fall for marketing schemes. We seek obtuse methods, even when facts refute them. We grab hold fast to mysticism and fiction in an effort to elevate ourselves to those same heights. With regards to masculinity, the climb is rarely about self enrichment. It’s about money and displays of assumed status. It’s having control in a society whose machinations root into us the moment we exit the womb.
It’s to grasp for the mask and script rather than introspection. To give into the latter, we worry, would be our undoing. Little has changed with this song and dance in hundreds of years. It’s always the same routine, but we trot it out tiredly still.
But what if we didn’t have to?
Today, I am proud to present a sequel to one of my favorite things I have ever written. Whereas our first entry was a critical look at the emotional fragility of masculinity, today we’re going to discuss how society perpetuates the suffering of masculine identifying people.
Let us begin.
The Clash (Or Rather, The Lack Of)
When I look back over the “masculine influences” in my life, I can’t help but laugh.
It was all the usual highlights. Superheroes and wrestlers. Video game characters like Kratos and Solid Snake. When I was a boy, these were practically shoved into my fingers the second I could grip things. My parents-bless them both-thought it was the right thing. Boys like cars and beating up bad guys and explosions. I didn’t question it-why would I? If it came from my folks, it had to be “right”.
That’s the thing about growing up. It turns your parents from gods or tyrants into these silly, wrinkled little elves. I’ve often felt childhood ends not with finding the truth about santa, but that moment you realize your parents are just people. They fuck up, they assume, they just nod their head and do the best they can sometimes. Breaking away from the media my parents selected and hand picked was an early thrill. One that cracked my head open via a dial up modem.
One of my earliest memories of “weird” media is actually seeing Throbbing Gristle performing live. Throbbing Gristle, for those that have never heard of them, was a british alt band that featured “fuckery” at the forefront of all they did. Their music often had no real melody. Live performances were a cacophony of noise that erupted from the stage as Genesis P. Orridge screamed the vocals. In some clips you can see people shooting up or popping pills. It was such a jarring break from all the media I’d consumed up to that point-I had to have more.
Some snuck their dad’s liquer and porno mags. I chose rock bands nobody my age had heard of. We’ve all our means to get high.
It wasn’t Gristle’s sound that caught me, though. Even still, I can bop my head to just about anything. Rather, it was the lead singer. Genesis themself. Their appearance depending on the era ranged from lithe and male leaning to quite femme. Later in life they transformed into a beautiful amalgam of grandma and shaman. I’d sit there, watching the band perform and constantly ask myself what they were. Woman? Man? I didn’t know. I’d not realize the answer until much later, but the thought lingered with me well past those initial viewings. Before words like “trans” and “egg” and “non-binary” were in my regular vernacular, “What” was.
That word led me to Prince, who to this day I still consider one of the most beautiful men in the world. I had heard him for years, but seeing him had such a radical effect on me. Men could look like that? Holy shit.The word grew to a question that grew gradually impossible to ignore. If men could be like that, why couldn’t I do anything I wanted?
So I learned to sew. I learned to garden. I learned to cook. All things that inherently weren’t gendered, but I was fearful of being “too girly”. So I learned to hunt, trap, shoot and skin as well. I told myself if I balanced things out, I’d reach an equilibrium of “manliness”. Or, that the shooting and game hunting was “so manly” that the other stuff was immaterial. Yes. This was a real thing I believed.
I mention all of this not for nostalgia’s sake, but because the media sphere isn’t like that anymore. We’re no longer “stumbling across” things in our youth due to algorithms and math. Servers all over the world have been purpose built just to guess what you’re going to click next on Youtube. Youtube itself has morphed from supporting creative freedom to encouraging clicks to feed those very servers. Unless you sign into a different account, that pattern of behavior follows you elsewhere.
Thus, the media you consume effectively shapes your worldview. Especially in the COVID era, where we’re watching and clicking more than ever before. It’s incredibly easy to create an echo-chamber around yourself in isolation. Just look at your feeds over the last four years.
I was fortunate. Prince and Genesis were the most outlandish things I found. These challenges to what I considered “normal” and to my personal identity were a net positive. Because I was alone, largely isolated and easily influenced. Literally anything could have altered my view of the world then. My history isn’t unique. Rather, it’s the norm for almost everyone.
When media is being specifically farmed based on a single click, it isn’t “curation”. It’s propaganda. It’s being spoon fed into troughs, without stop or outer dialogue to challenge it. There’s no “clash” so much as a slide into total agreement. It’s the dangers of television those wizened elves that raised you spoke so self-assuredly of.
Hence the creation of things like “the manosphere”.
Just Like Charles Atlas
“Listen here-I’d smash your face, were you not so skinny you’d just blow away!”
Reading that line and the rest of the ad composing “The Insult That Made a Man Out Of Mac”? It’s damn near impossible not to laugh. Especially given the context of modern viewership. The comic (all Charles Atlas comics actually) have been endlessly parodied. The ad is so incredibly blatant and kitschy in it’s targeting that it practically slaps the viewer in the face. “You’re weak,” it screams, “Weak. But you don’t have to be if you buy our product”.
All things considered, I applaud the ad. It had absolutely no idea what it would unleash on the world-but at least it didn’t bullshit you. It was marketing at the most base level to a highly impressionable audience-boys and male teens too young to get drafted in the war. Always in the back pages of Captain America smacking the shit out of someone. With respect to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee-comics were at the inception of what we refer to now as the “manosphere” simply by featuring Charles Atlas pitching basic fitness.
The “manosphere” has evolved from print media and ads to an entire identity. You encounter it literally every day. Axe body spray ads featuring buff men bedding hundreds of women. Films featuring gruff, no-nonsense action stars that shoot first. Entire subscription services that send a box of “manly” products right to your door. Stainless steel chains. All of this to push a non-physical ideal in a highly predatorial fashion. You are not enough, but you can be. It’s consumerism that specifically targets your subconscious mind, so toxic it could be the elephants foot.It’s self perpetuating and it makes billions of dollars for corporations every single year.
Profiting on the backs of self doubt, loathing and fear. That’s what the manosphere is, in essence. It won’t appear that way, as it’s constantly shifting to find the weaknesses of every “type” of man. It’s modern iteration-that of the much lauded “sigma/alpha/beta male” ladder-is yet another way of commoditizing and pushing product.
When I first heard about “sigma” male types, I outright rejected it. Six years of graduate studies on communication theory made me laugh as many of you did. I cracked my jokes about being a “ligma/sugma” male and went about my day. But the term wouldn’t leave my brain. It festered in the back of my head and did precisely what it was designed to do. We’re not immune to propaganda or clever marketing, and Sigma male discussion was both. So, I went looking. I fired up youtube. I watched videos that had been endlessly lambasted for their thumbnails on twitter.
I was actually disappointed with what I found. Not because it was so overt, but rather how incredibly boring and pedestrian the entire approach was. Video after video from faceless nobodies, repeating the same terminology almost identically as it cut vague insults at the viewer. You’re not a sigma male, said one, unless you buy our multi-class no-fap sigma male course. Another referenced the hetro-normative values of the Spartans, who openly engaged in pederasty.
It’s the willful misrepresentation and misinterpretation of history and facts in order to keep patreons, merch stores and ad revenue going. It’s the modern Charles Atlas, with a shoe-string budget, stock photos and effects ripped from freesound. The only thing missing is Captain America asking us to buy war bonds to fight the Nazis.
The entire “manosphere” method of marketing functions on the same axioms. So what gives? Why does this crap keep existing when anyone with a brain would laugh at it? It’s actually incredibly simple.
Charles Atlas ads worked on the basis of targeting vulnerable, young and information-anemic readers. The modern manosphere not only uses this, but also the non-stop barrage of marketing platforms to hammer in a message until you listen. It doesn’t matter if you individually, as an adult capable of reasoned judgement, laugh. There’s an army of teenage boys and younger men who have built echo chambers that keep clicking. There’s an entire battalion of boomers who just spent four years believing every conspiracy theory on Youtube. We’ve surpassed the wettest dreams any marketing agent could have for “target demographic”. There’s a hoard of customers. They’re always clicking and always buying, be their purchases information or goods.
Tackling this takes more than muscle, sly cutting words or quips.
It’s going to take fundamentally changing how we acknowledge manhood and masculinity.
The Tin Man
He pounds his head against the wall until the bricks shatter. Then, in full view of his doctor, he slumps to the ground. He’d sob if he could. Cliff Steele-also known as Robotman, leader of the Doom Patrol-stares at the wall and says “Why can’t I feel anything?”.
Cliff lacked nerve endings or genitals. In time, he’d come to lose his last human organ (his brain) as well. Yet despite this, during Grant Morrison’s run Cliff becomes the bravest man in DC. Even as he’s torn apart, reduced and rebuilt countless times. He openly admits he’s afraid, talks about his mental trauma and how often his failures haunt him. During a run-in with the Candlemaker (who can kill with a touch), Cliff is dragged into a literal nightmare. In it, he survived the crash that made him Robotman.
He lives alone in an apartment with nothing but booze and his television. He’s a man by all accounts, sure. But having flesh, his genitals again? It’s a curse. Having his manhood by measure of popular definition and perception is damnation.
I think about Cliff often these days. Not just because Morrison’s run on the comic is fantastic, but because I empathize with Cliff’s journey quite a bit. Like he, I’ve been broken and shredded. I’ve wept openly and pondered if I’d ever be made whole again. I’ve come to question my identity and very existence as a man. These questions don’t take extraordinary circumstances though. They also don’t turn you into a hero, nor a villain.
The venn diagram of inner dialogues that lead me to becoming non-binary and those seeking to become “sigma males” is a circle. The circumstances to our answers aren’t. The divide happened over degrees of two things.
Empathy and love.
I stated earlier I was fortunate in my stumbling. That was only half the story. I was also fortunate to be blessed by having masculine role models who were there for me when I was crying. I was fortunate to have men in my life who were loud and passionate with their love and understanding. Men who, despite what a wagon wheel of propaganda rolled over them, would hold my hand as they told me I was stronger than any one breaking point. That, at least to them, I was a king.
If I had lacked these elements, I would have been left to the cesspool of marketing that ate the brains of the youth. I would be clicking, and clicking, fervent in my denial that I was a “beta cuck” as I sat alone in a room. Sipping booze. Watching screens flicker.
Towards the end of Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol, there’s an insistence that “there’s a better world” beyond the horrors Cliff has witnessed. That, regardless of how broken a man he is, even he is not so far gone as to be denied his humanity. Cliff finds that very thing as he holds the hand of Kay Challis (“Crazy Jane”), and they walk together out of the rain. She loves him not for being a man-but being himself.
That, at the end of the day, is the root answer to tackling masculinity. Not in the products and advertisements that poison us. Rather, it’s in the love we find. The quiet moments of introspection, and the people that look beyond the physical, waking existence of our personage to love us regardless. Being a man comes not from outside but the furnace that burns within us, driving the perpetual motion of our souls. Manhood and masculinity aren’t a single instance, youtuber, concept or thing.
It’s so much more.
There’s a better world.
There’s a better way.
I want to end this by saying the following to any and all of my masculine brothers (for I consider you nothing less) reading this: You have always been a good man. You have always been a strong man. You are loved. You started life beautiful and mighty. You face every day with all the strength and power you’ve sought beating right within your chest. You don’t need a faceless corporation to tell you that. Nor a course, nor some bloke with a stick up his ass and a camera.
You’ve had it the whole time.
-j