Hot Masculine Summer

Maybe it’s the climate change, maybe it’s all the hot air surrounding our latest “crisis of masculinity” right now — the Times, the Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist, Politico, all have various lengthy discussions of it, and have been doing it for most of this decade so far. As much ink as they’ve wasted on it, it seems to be ramping up even more now. Men are falling behind, or at least, not doing as well as they used to, and right-wing grifters like alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate and alleged intellectual powerhouse Jordan Peterson are popping up everywhere to show men back to the glory days of strength and vigor and power.

One of the hottest of these macho scam artists right now is actually someone I met at a party maybe 20 years ago. He was fond of drunkenly challenging people to play chess without a board, something he claimed he could do because he was smart enough to remember where all the pieces were without seeing them, without the pieces even existing. Today he’s a neo-fascist philosopher with a PhD who goes by the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert.” He still thinks playing chess is a great test of intellect but now there’s a whole homoerotic BDSM fitness thing to go with it, real Hugo Boss for the SS vibes. It’s cheap and tacky but apparently young men just eat that shit up.

Meanwhile, other right-wing grifters are melting down over the popularity of the Barbie movie. Some of this is just an attempt to garner more hate-clicks as the Twitter ecosystem dies out.

But some of it does appear to be a genuine obsession with performing masculinity in exactly the right way. They don’t appreciate the irony of their performance being, basically, drag. They think it’s innate. Tell a dude in a lifted pickup that his $75,000 expression of masculinity isn’t all that different from a pair of high heels, and he very well might get so angry he tries to crush you with it.

None of it seems new to me, though. I mean, men have been worrying whether other men are pussies for longer than I can remember. Teddy Roosevelt’s football reforms, for example, were driven by a concern that young men needed to play violent sports to be truly manly. It probably goes back at least as far as Socrates being executed for corrupting the youth of Athens, if not further.

I sometimes recall the way my peers taught me about what it means to be a man one summer. You see, as a child, I loved bright colors. When middle school hit and it was time to go to sleepaway summer camp, I picked out a bright purple sleeping bag. I packed my favorite neon pink shirt, because neon was rad in the late 80s and early 90s. I also had a very close friend who stayed at that camp for half the time I did, and I hugged him goodbye when he left.

I got called a faggot for it, of course, for that and for everything else about the way I was — I cried at sad movies; my taekwondo lessons had never actually taught me how to fight; I talked about things I’d learned from books; I brought sci-fi novels on hikes. I don’t remember who said what exactly, but I remember it culminated in a shoving match on a narrow trail several days into a camping trip.  We’d been rock-climbing. There was a cliff.

I don’t think I even told the counselors. Tattling only made it worse, and besides, it was normal. Just typical teen boys bickering, the typical way young men learn not to be pretty or thoughtful or affectionate.

This might be a broad generalization, but it seems to me that anyone who worries about the definition or nature or behavior of masculinity, or doing it correctly, is a colossal piece of shit willing to destroy other people rather than face his own insecurity. I don’t care if you’re a sincere seeker, a pseudo-intellectual, or an edgelord fascist: once you start trying to argue about whether this kind of joyful, fluid, self-expression “counts” as “manly” you’re taking a step down the path that leads to O’Shae Sibley getting stabbed to death in a parking lot for the way he dances.

Further Reading

Joy

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