The Nature of Masculinity

~ Clarissa

The story of Lance Twiggs is very interesting in what it tells us about the nature of masculinity. His lifestyle – the mold experiments, the gadgets, the collectible cards, the trinkets, the mess in the living room, the financial dependence – are those of a young, badly parented boy. He never became an adult man in anything other than his biological age and physical development. His forays into transgenderism and furrying are a clear sign that he knew he wasn’t managing to become a man.

“If I’m not a man, I must be a woman or am animal” was his logic, and it does make sense in a really warped way. He clearly perceived a mismatch between the form and the content of his self and tried to plaster the rift with adopting other identities and self-medicating with drugs.

We can pretend all we want that reality is infinitely malleable but it’s not. We have shied away from talking about the importance of male rites of passage, normal stages of masculinity, male communities and networks of support, and the result is a large number of young men who have no idea how to bring their minds into alignment with their bodies of grown men.

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Published by Clarissa

25 thoughts on “The Nature of Masculinity”

  1. After reading all the stuff in that link…

    This isn’t a masculinity crisis. The kid is possessed. Modernity doesn’t have any way to address that.

    -ethyl

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    2. Your interpretation is supported by the fact that Lance got somebody else to engage in a violent act and easily evaded responsibility. It’s typical trickster behavior.

      One explanation that clearly doesn’t work is “mental illness.” The moment the authorities showed up on his doorstep, Lance became extremely compliant, helpful and bamboozled the law enforcement into letting him go. Crazy he is not. Possessed by timeless evil? Very likely.

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      2. ‘ One explanation that clearly doesn’t work is “mental illness.” ‘

        I don’t quite know what you think about psychiatric concepts, but Lance was living exactly in a way that often ends up with a trip to the psych ward and a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

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        1. When the FBI showed up, he managed to give evidence against his boyfriend and convince them of his own complete innocence. This shows a great presence of mind and excellent self-control. A genuine illness is not something you can turn on and off whenever it’s convenient.

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        2. ^^ What Clarissa said.

          Grew up with a close family friend who was legit schizo. Parents would have to go help her sort out her prescriptions and ferry to doctors appointments now and then. Would leave alarming messages on our answering machine about… all sorts of things. Lasers. Satellites. How these things were involved in her interpersonal problems with people at church. All mixed in with blizzards of almost-cogent verbiage, tangents so thick they could be fur. If you didn’t listen too carefully, you could sort of tease out the theme of whatever crisis she was experiencing. Whatever she meandered back to more than twice, that was probably it.

          She was astonishingly good at getting what she needed out of doctors and bureaucrats, the staff at the welfare and medicaid offices, the social security admin. Not because she was coherent or logical, but because once she got to talking, whoever was dealing with her rapidly progressed from puzzled/annoyed/bored to *completely desperate* to get her out of the office by any means possible. They would do anything– call her relatives, talk to her social worker, whatever, and they would do it *right now* instead of on their usual leisurely schedule.

          I’ve often wondered if that was a learn-able skill 😉

          She was part of a large and extremely dysfunctional family. One of the brothers was also some type of… probably would have been dxed schizo if they could ever have got the extra fellow to show up in a doctor’s office. Whatever was going on with that dude, it was a whole other flavor. And frankly, we all think it was possession.

          The sister was confused, incoherent, had weird delusions, was tenacious if not terribly bright, and fairly harmless.

          The brother: paranoid, sneaky, secretly destructive, used to finish a project (was talented– if you ever wanted a beautiful tacky airbrushed mural of stampeding mustangs on your RV, he was the guy), close up the garage, and then later the other, muttering version of him would sneak back in and destroy his work. The big difference, IMO, was the drugs. She didn’t do drugs. He did. Something about adding drugs to that mix blows off all the locks, and then you get squatters in your soul. And the thing is, those squatters are conscious, have some kind of intelligence, are 100% malign, and capable of subterfuge. The dude would periodically get arrested for drugs, or assault, or vandalism. The family tried hard to get the prison to just *keep* him because in prison they could keep him off the drugs, and he improved. They’d all dutifully go visit him there. But he was always found incompetent to stand trial, and then because he was off drugs in prison, they’d also decide he wasn’t crazy enough to go to the psych hospital, so then as soon as he was out, back to the drugs and destruction, weird voices coming from his room, threatening the family members who looked after him. They were all scared of him.

          So: mental illness. We call both of these things schizophrenia. But there’s still a huge difference between just-schizoprhenic-mentally-ill, and bodiless evil taking up residence, which seemed to grant the guy the ability to “act normal” for long enough to snooker judges, doctors, prison guards, and social workers. The lady in question had no such ability. She was clearly, obviously crazy to anybody who interacted with her, consistently and all the time. She could keep up with day to day predictable stuff, like paying the electric bill and keeping track of appointments, just barely, but did need some assistance with the bigger stuff, like if medicare changed her doctor or a relative died. And: she could be helped.

          Whatever was going on with him, it was not something that our current, modern paradigm of “mental illness” or even “schizophrenia” is equipped to deal with. We don’t have a good way to talk about this, and we end up talking past each other, at least partly because it makes rationalist scientific types uncomfortable.

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          1. Somebody who gets others into terrible trouble but somehow magically avoids suffering any consequences is not crazy. Illness hurts the sufferer. But this guy seems protected. It’s dark protection, for sure, but it’s there for as long as he keeps doing the bidding of the dark presence inside him. Drugs absolutely open up a portal into something really nasty, especially in weird combinations.

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  2. the result is a large number of young men who have no idea how to bring their minds into alignment with their bodies of grown men.

    The Post-modernist war on reality has a lot to account for, but the growing feminization of society, of public as well as private spaces, the professions in particular, has to take the blame for what is essentially an all-out war on (White) men and the very concept of masculinity.

    Meanwhile in Europe, polygyny is soon going to be recognised as a human right: https://eclj.org/family/echr/la-polygamie-est-elle-un-droit-de-lhomme-?lng=en

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    2. Avi

      …”feminization of society, of public as well as private spaces, the professions in particular, has to take the blame for what is essentially an all-out war on (White) men and the very concept of masculinity.”

      Surely you jest, guys will admit when they step on their dicks because everybody expects that. But so very, very few women ever seem to accept much responsibility for their behavior that it must be innate, as in genetically determined. Outliers, virtuous women, are indeed “more valuable than rubies”.

      After Clarissa’s comments about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, I listened to it. Frankly, Fuentes is clearly a disturbed incel with definite fascist inclinations. But when they were discussing young male problems, Tucker actually referred to decades of behavior he correctly termed as hate. But then went on and on about how while women are harsh to each other, women are kind and gentle to men. Okay then Tucker, exactly who the hell was doing all these decades of hating ;-D

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        2. Sadly, the gormless have somehow increased; no doubt involving an unnatural act, and indubitably creating yet another rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem ;-D

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  3. “never became an adult man in anything other than his biological age and physical development”

    (gonna flog a dead horse now…) the perfect neoliberal consumer is a teenager since they have the requisite mercurially changing nature to latch onto whatever the big product roll out is this week.

    He can’t become a man unless he also becomes an adult (which means more stable bearings and resistance to being whipped around by marketing) and pretty much _everything_ in the culture is about preventing that (same goes for women though the results are a bit different).

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    1. This self-infantilization looks ugly in a 28-year-old but in people in their fifties it looks much much worse. I have a colleague who scraped her knee and then kept visiting my office to give me updates on her scraped knee and show me the scratch.

      When my kid scrapes her knee, I swear it’s a lot less of a production than this middle-aged colleague staged. I also have a 30yo GA who thinks it’s appropriate to share with me the endless details of an ongoing squabble with a roommate over – and I kid you not – where to place the washed forks in the shared kitchen.

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      1. ” give me updates on her scraped knee and show me the scratch”

        Quick way to stop that: Next time she does it, look at it a few seconds then ask in a deadpan voice “So…. when’s the amputation?”

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        1. This is almost exactly what we did with our kids. Occasionally went so far as to fetch a sharp implement and offer to do it right now, save a trip to the hospital. Only needed a couple of repetitions before they caught on 😉

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        1. This kind of literary analysis is exactly what I do in my research and I love, love, love it! Everybody, please read, it’s very good.

          It also explains perfectly the difficulties I have ran into in my communication with the people of this generation. Great people, love them, but I don’t know how many times I had to bite down the words “this is not about you” in talking to them.

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        2. ethyl

          Kid, do you think that I am bullshitting you when I say that the leaders of the 60’s revolution were not boomers; but rather were earlier generations, many born and raised when the best men were overseas, or even older. Just check their ages, even Mitchell. And hell, Friedan was an old bloody communist. As was Jane Fonda’s dad, and no, she sure as hell was not a boomer either. The take over of academia began before WW2. The sparks in the 60’s were created by the shocking massive biological change brought by the Pill augmented by the collapsing of social institutions wreaked by No-fault — and we haven’t yet figured our way out ;-D

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          1. I am aware of it. My parents were hippies, deep into that scene. They didn’t make it to Woodstock, but they had friends who did. Through an act of brutal divine mercy, we were spared growing up as yuppie suburban kids. But we still knew all their hippie friends, and I’ve compared these people’s ages… the leaders of that movement were all older. I don’t think they believed their own bullshit, but my parents’ cohort certainly did: and they were the ones who grew up to be boomers. They ate it up.

            Always plenty of blame to spread around eh?

            I do think it’s illuminating to get at their sort of core myth, to understand the things they did after.

            -ethyl

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