I’m back to writing in English, and oy vey, whenever I think on the direction of something un-PC, I get terribly blocked. I’ve been struggling with a 200-word excerpt on neoliberal masculinity since morning because what I want to say (and what the textual evidence shows) is wrongthink.
So I’ll try to think it through here to see if it helps.
OK, so how do we describe positive masculinity normally? What words do we use? We say, he’s strong, dependable, reliable, solid, he’s a rock.
Nobody ever described the masculine ideal as changeable and malleable, right?
And what is solid? It’s the opposite of fluid. The fluid changeability of neoliberalism is the opposite of masculinity.
At the same time, neoliberalism expects ultra-productivity and competitiveness, which are traditional masculine traits.
So there’s an unresolvable conflict in that you have to dissolve yourself in feminine traits while enhancing the very masculine ones.
And it works exactly the same for women but in the opposite direction.
That’s why the neoliberal ideal is both “gender-fluid” and asexual. It’s something that’s always in-between, engrossed in refashioning a barren self. It is always in the process of becoming and never actually becomes.
Does it make sense so far?
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OT: In the Polish parliament, Grzegorz Braun, supposed monarchist, real russophile and virulent anti-semite took a fire extinguisher to a menorah lit in the hall also managing to spray a woman standing by it in the face.
He’s been expelled from the building and could be (hopefully) facing charges….
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God, what a douche.
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“what a douche”
Douche doesn’t begin to cover it and I suspect it was planned by PiS (former ruling party) to delay parliamentary procedings so that Tusk won’t go to Brussels tomorrow as Prime Minister…
I also suspect his whole branch is financed by russia, but….
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“Does it make sense so far?”
Yes. Of course charisma almost always involved some degree of androgyny. Steve Sailer has written about how even dictators (‘big men’) have to develop keen intuitions about people’s emotional states and be able to engage with them on an emotional level in a way usually reserved for women (for evil ends but that’s not the point).
And of course a feminine woman who can, when she wants, get down to business or political negotiations like one of the boys is always intriguing. I remember the experiment with a woman talking like Trump in the 2016 debates vs a man talking like Clinton and people totally supported the womaen (the experiment was then forgotten because that’s not what it was supposed to show).
A few minutes I was totally blanking on the word ‘androgyny’ which seems to have disappeared from public discourse and I think that’s maybe a clue….
Androgyny is about a person knowingly or not adopting features of the other sex and comes from a place of self-knowledge, which is one reason it almost always works.
“Non-binary” is an amorphous mess that comes from a place of anxiety, who wants to be a nervous wreck sobbing about pronouns?
Also, neoliberalism fetishes (for lack of a better word) the worst sort of burlesque of traditional masculinity (Tate) or femininity (Only Fans ‘models’). Though both are financial swindles…. and both seem (to me) to be more than a little… repulsive….
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This makes sense. The push in the white collar professional sphere to adopt traditionally feminine traits combined with the fact that precarity requires everyone to be more cutthroat competitive than ever explains a lot about the peculiar ugliness of current culture. I don’t know that the more masculine culture of, say, Wall Street in the 80s was less ugly, but it was different.
“Also, neoliberalism fetishes (for lack of a better word) the worst sort of burlesque of traditional masculinity (Tate) or femininity (Only Fans ‘models’). Though both are financial swindles…. and both seem (to me) to be more than a little… repulsive….”
This reminds me. I don’t use tiktok (or other social media for that matter), but in news stories I often see pictures of “influencers”. They are all young women and they all have this uncanny valley thing going, where they look half way between a doll and a person. I don’t know if they are achieving this effect with make up or using some app to alter their screen image. Either way, I find it super creepy.
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““influencers”. They are all young women and they all have this uncanny valley thing going”
Totally, I have the idea they’re trying to look like sex dolls because… that’s what a lot of their customers are used to or can relate too… and things get even more disturbing but I need to let that idea settle in before saying more….
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I think what they’re really trying to look like is anime, which is more relatable for their customers (sex dolls are actually quite expensive.) A lot of them also seem to be trying to look like children but we’ll try not to think about that.
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I used to laugh with everybody else about the old superstition that having your picture taken steals part of your soul.
The rise of “social media influencer” as a profession… that superstition explains everything.
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I’ll give it a go despite hating this idea …
I’m inclined to consider Samir Amin’s “obsolescent capitalism” and some of Fredric Jameson’s “late capitalism” as background to the concept, which puts this into a two decade plus old philosophical framework.
And so: neoliberal masculinity replaces real virility with a virtual or simulated virility based on the extension of (late) capitalist forces projecting power.
The archetype imagined is not Arnold Schwarzenegger the body builder and actor, but instead Arnold Schwarzenegger the politician and businessman.
Neoliberal masculinity makes both the wielder and those it’s wielded against suffer, not as a weakness, but instead as a core trait.
You have to like masochistic fetishism in order to want it.
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