I’m not surprised by the upsurge of enthusiasm for the so-called Masculinist Movement. What’s new? The whole of human history has been one long masculinist movement with armies of men fighting to the death to demonstrate who was the toughest, bravest, and the most easily led. Women, with their superior intelligence, have, with rare exceptions, been content to leave this brutal sport to men.
The current version of the Masculinist movement seems to be inspired by the fake tough guys in the white House, who perform on camera a crude kind of MAGA masculinity, although they are all just desk workers in fact. The underlying fantasy of Masculinism is nostalgic, harking back to the golden age of mindless violence when real men carved out their destiny with their fists. Many of us thought that age was over. Forty years ago, my colleague John Gagnon wrote an influential article called “Physical Strength, Once of Significance” in which he argued that we had become a nation of desk workers. We sit and sit, like the Gumbie Cat in T.S.Eliot’s poem. Physical strength is no longer essential, unless your hobby is starting fights in bars.
Professor Gagnon was exaggerating, but he had a point. In this century, the vast majority of men work in white-collar jobs where the biggest physical challenge of the day is switching on the computer. Fewer and fewer of us are active in sports, as distinct from watching sports on television. In other words, the modern male, and I’m one of them, is a flabby creature, not worth betting on in a cage fight.
Of course, physical strength is still needed for many essential jobs. We would be lost without builders, landscapers, tree workers, furniture removers, and all the others who handle the hard physical labor that we can’t or don’t want to do ourselves.
But the masculinist movement seems to have goals way beyond the desire to make men fit to do little jobs around the house. It seems to embrace a whole rather dark ideology built around physical strength and violence. Pictures show male bodies are so inflated with muscle they look like those toys we used to make by twisting balloons together. Testosterone is the drug of choice, and testosterone tests are soon to be imposed on the military. Gyms are popping up everywhere. The focus of the movement seems to be entirely on the idea of building physical strength rather than character or intelligence. But character and intelligence are not essential if you can beat your opponent to a pulp. You might as well call it the “musculinist: movement, and indeed these sculpted bodies have become an art form in themselves.
Dare I ask, what are they afraid of? Do they anticipate hand-to-hand fighting with some invading foreign army, or indeed with a rival political party? Is their domestic life so challenging that extreme violence is required at home? Are the streets so very dangerous? Is every human encounter an excuse for a fight?
It seems that some men feel challenged, not only by capable women but by robotic machines that can think, perform heavy physical tasks, and even fight. They see their historic power and dominance based on brute physical strength slipping away, and they are right. Good. Excellent. The Stone Age is three million years in the past. It is possible to carry nostalgia too far.
