21 August 2023. Masculinity | Politics
21 August 2023. Masculinity | Politics
The problem with men // The problem with elites. [#489]
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish three days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. A reminder that if you don’t see Just Two Things in your inbox, it might have been routed to your spam filter. Comments are open.
1: The problem with men
There’s a long article about masculinity in the Washington Post by Christine Emba, which is a subject I haven’t written much about here recently. It’s hard to find pieces that take the discussion forward.
The usual way this gets phrased is that we have a current “crisis of masculinity”, and Emba uses some of this language here as well. She starts with some notes about some of the men in her broader social circle:
They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the “manosphere.”
And she frames her question around an anecdote from a doctoral student at an American Ivy League university:
“I had this kid show up — well, I say ‘kid,’ but he’s an undergraduate here. I mentor them sometimes. He came over to my house and asked me if we could speak privately.”... “And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”...“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”
Emba acknowledges that this is maybe not a new concern. In 1835, Washington Irving complained about the lack of “manliness” on young American men. In 1958, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”
(Christopher Dombres, ‘The myth of self-reliance’. 2018, public domain. After the Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein (1963), a copy of Run for Love (from Secret Love) by Tony Abruzzo, DC Comics (1962).)
All the same, there’s some well-trodden socio-economic ground as to why men might be struggling with masculinity right now, mostly to do with the decline of manufacturing, the rise of ‘soft’ skills in the the workplace, and the educational performance of women relative to men in schools and universities.
This has consequences for relationships as well:
Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men.
Of course, look around you, and men still seem to be doing pretty well. The number of women CEOs, for example, is still small. But Emba is more interested in the men who don’t have access to money and influence:
(M)illions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood.
It’s a long article, and she lays this ground carefully enough, but for reasons of space here you’ll have to take it more or less on trust. As she says, old models are unreachable or not socially acceptable. New ones are still emerging.
And some of the models that are emerging are problematic, associated with a regressive gender politics championed by people such as Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. She’s not a fan of Peterson, but she acknowledges that he fills a gap:
The rules aren’t particularly unique: Get fit, pick up a skill, talk to women instead of watching porn all day. But if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation.
And she also notes that
the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational.
There’s quite a lot more of this in the right-wing political space. She name checks a video by the former Fox TV host Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley’s recent book Manhood. These versions of masculinity tip quite quickly into misogyny, and then into the wilder conspiracy theories of the New World Order. It is a masculinity
defined solely in opposition to women — or to the gains of feminism, more specifically.
And, as the American Psychological Association said in 2018, in its “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” this form of traditional masculinity is not good for physical or mental health:
“traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.” The guidelines suggest that “there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.”
One of the issues here is that progressive politics has focussed—not wrongly—on dealing with gender disadvantage. This may have had unintended consequences:
What ends up happening is that, if women are still seen as needing tools to overcome disadvantage, men are often expected to just shape up by themselves... it’s surprisingly acceptable for those on the left to victim-blame men who are struggling themselves.
And this might also explain why quite a lot of the writing on this question ends at the diagnosis stage. It’s politically difficult to do more. Richard Reeves, whose book Of Boys and Men is quite a significant contribution to this landscape, acknowledges as much in an interview with Emba. As he also tells her:
“As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”
Some notes on what those virtues might be pop up in fragments in her interviews. Scott Galloway suggests that “Real men protect other people.” Reeves’ recipe is similar: “proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.”
Some of the young men she spoke to could also describe characteristics they admired, but thought would be mis-represented:
Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.
These characteristics are shaped by biology, to some extent, or specifically by testosterone. Biology isn’t destiny, of course, but she suggests that a new model of masculinity will need to incorporate some of the distinctive characteristics of men.
In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character , not just biology. And it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.
Trying to undermine patriarchy has left a gap that needs to be filled in a way that doesn’t try to re-instal patriarchal values. But it is going to be a slow process. Changes is social values take decades.
Hat tip to the Dense Discovery newsletter for pointing me to the Christine Emba article.
2: The problem with elites
The radical American magazine Counterpunch has shared a letter from the Russian political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky, currently in jail awaiting trial under the Russain state’s sweeping laws about “justifying terrorism”. It’s his fourth time in jail (once under Brezhnev, once under Yeltsin, twice under Putin), and I’ll come back to the letter later on.
(Boris Kagarlitsky. Photo: Alexander Demyanchuk / TASS.)
Because Counterpunch also pointed to an article elsewhere by the activist and scholar Jeremy Brecher about Kagarlitsky’s political thinking:
While Kagarlitsky is best known today for his outspoken opposition to the Russian war on Ukraine, for decades he has been an outspoken critic of every Russian regime; an interpreter of the developing crisis of global capitalism; and an advocate of the old-fashioned – but perhaps also futuristic – idea that working people can and must join worldwide to stop the devastation wreaked by rival elites.
In particular, Brecher spends time on Kagarlitsky’s proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war, and also his thoughts on climate change.
On the war, Kagarlitsky writes that “the people are tired of war”; and that what is needed is a plan that will “stop the bloodshed and create conditions for the mutual laying down of arms, without fear of monstrous consequences for Ukrainians and Russians.”
Here’s his four-point peace plan:
Stop fighting on both sides;
Cessation of any supply of foreign weapons and ammunition to both Ukraine and Russia;
Abandonment by the Russian Armed Forces of the territory of Ukraine as of February 1, 2014 (“zero option”);
The UN and its peacekeeping forces are temporarily introduced to the territories left by the Russian Federation Armed Forces.
He acknowledges that this is extremely unlikely to happen. But it is in part a political device because he’s interested in the reactions to the plan. This
will allow us to find out “what is actually more important to the elites and governments – is it land and territory, saving face (in fact, saving power and capital), or is it people’s lives?”
Inevitably he has been attacked both by his own government and by those on the left in the West who accuse him of supporting Western hegemony. But Kagarlitsky is clearly not a shill for the West. When he was invited in 1998 to speak to Congress about the impact of the post-Soviet Russian economic programme, he told it:
"The one thing we need from the west now is to leave us in peace... We need it to stop imposing economic policies that are ruinous for us, while using the pretext of giving us aid."
Kagarlitsy sees the Russia-Ukraine War as a symptom of the wider crisis of climate change. He calls out the fact that elites, in Russia and the West, talk about climate change, but not to the point where they actually do anything meaningful about it.
In Russia:
“No one in Russia publicly denies that there is a problem.” At the same time, “no one among top Russian politicians ever considers that to be anything serious.” The Russian elite believes “As long as we can continue to sell oil, the rest doesn’t matter.”
The position is slightly different in the West.
Western elites do understand that certain changes are necessary to address climate change. But the problem is “who is going to pay the bills” for the process of transition? Elites in the West do not want to pay. “They’re going to make someone else pay for the transition.”
This, he argues, is reflected in the language around climate transition, which is around technology and science rather than social change. From the perspective of the elites, he says:
the growth of the economy should not lead to a sharp increase in wages, a strengthening of trade unions, and that government regulation and stimulation of the economy not be accompanied by a system of public control over the decisions made.
To the extent that this programme might work, it represents more of the same thing: the long process of exporting the problems of capitalism from the core to the periphery, both globally and within countries:
Thus, it is the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the world population who not only become victims of structural reconstruction , but also appear “guilty” of environmentally irresponsible behavior, while their resistance is seen as immoral... But it is clear that in reality the environmental agenda is not a response to the crisis of capitalism, but merely a pretext for unleashing a new and violent advancement of the system in which all of its contradictions will be revealed in full scale.
Kagarlitsky believes there is a solution to this, but it lives in the realm of activism not technology and economics. The politics of the core and the periphery need to be re-connected. That means that what he described as “social” movements working on climate change in the global North need to make contact with labour movements in the global North and South, working internationally. As he says:
Environmental reform in the interests of the majority of humanity, as long as the capitalist order remains as it is, is impossible in principle.
As for conditions in the Russian jail, they’re apparently not too bad. He is allowed to receive letters and to reply to them. He is hopeful that he’ll get to read the books he brought with him, once they have been checked for extremism. The food is not too bad. And although I think this is probably Russian humour, being in prison is also a form of recognition:
I think that the current arrest can be considered a recognition of the political significance of my statements. Of course, I would have preferred to be recognized in a somewhat different form, but all in good time. In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is.
There’s also a petition asking for Kagarlitsky’s release.
Readers’ notes: Marriage
My former colleague J Walker Smith, who is something of an expert on social trends, suggested that I was thinking of marriage in an unhelpful way in my piece on Friday, when I quoted a Twitter thread by the British journalist Lewis Goodall. Walker shared a chart published in 2015 by The Futures Company, our former stamping ground. This is global data that shows the percentage of women in “marriage or a union”, plotted cumulatively. The 1970 line and the 2010 line are actuals. The 2030 line is a projection.
Some of Walker’s commentary on this:
If you look at data in the table data below the lines, the takeaway is a little clearer. In 1970, 80% of women were married by age 25. In 2010, though, it wasn't until age 30. And the projection (back in 2015) was that in 2030 it would be age 35. Note that 80%+ of women still get married (there's no dearth of marriage), but it just takes longer to get there, by age (hence, the increase in the age range before 80% is hit). This is where I think the twitter thread is wrong. Marriage is not disappearing.
In summary: Women are getting married, but later. As to why they are getting married later: we can speculate, but in many countries they are more likely to be in higher education than they were in 1970; they are more likely to go into work (and therefore more likely to delay marriage); and medical advances mean that it is possible to delay having children, which is often associated with marriage for legal reasons and still, in many countries, social norms.
And looking specifically at Lewis Goodall’s observation that:
In 1972 there were 84 marriages per 1000 unmarried men and 63.5 for women. In 2019 it was 18.6 marriages per 1000 unmarried men and 17.2 for women,
this does seem like a big drop. But it’s actually a statistical effect of people getting married for the first time over a much wider age range.
j2t#489
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.