I had a similar reaction to the first post as those people who wrote to you, so I appreciate this more nuanced follow up. As for the masculinity prophets and such, they're charlatans, but they're also interesting in that they've identified a real problem, which speaks to their appeal. I find that they mostly attract curious people who feel that something is wrong, or missing, but who lack any historical understanding of themselves or the world. This is really a fault of education and a result of the fact that you can go through university without learning anything besides marketable skills or whatever. When Peterson or whoever expresses some idea, it's the first time these people are hearing of it, and they think he's a genius instead of a peddler of watered down pop psychology.
The best depiction of masculinity I've read is, in general, Knausgaard's "My Struggle," but specifically, one scene where his wife gets locked in a bathroom at a party, he tries to muscle the door open but can't, and then a big, strong guy breaks the door down instead. Knausgaard spends the rest of the party sulking and feeling immense shame that he couldn't help his wife, all while knowing rationally that this is absurd and that no one actually cares. To me, this is the tension: we know masculinity is ridiculous, but we still feel a deep desire to meet its demands and a sense of failure when we don't.
Have you read the New Yorker interview with Samuel R. Delany? I mention this not because it adds anything pertinent to the discussion of gender, though it might contribute something in a sidelong fashion - but because he begins his day with an evocation of Spinoza. It thrilled me.
I loved your previous Substack on this subject and I loved this one, too. My only issue here is with the fact that you plan on writing fewer entries on here? :( That I don’t like one bit!
Precisely. That's why it called the comment section and not the debate section. I've actually read a few of your articles, have liked them and generally agreed with you. It was meant as a mildly amusing (if one is generous) friendly ribbing. Nothing more or less.
I wonder whether it is possible to imagine what a mechanism for 'not preserving gender [at the social level]' would look like. I wonder if people who intuitively disagree with the idea of abolishing masculinity do so primarily because they can imagine no such mechanism, and feel that arguing in favour of it implies, off-stage left, some version of this mechanism which they find painful to imagine, or simply unreal. The level of mechanism here so seems utterly opaque (not in the essay, but in reality) that any attempt to locate and pull the level could just as well have the opposite effect (re-grounding masculinity). And if that is true, is there any point in knowing that we should aspire to get rid of gender? Maybe this is a desperately non-philosophical approach, but if gender is uniquely conceived as belonging to society, rather than to individuals, the question of mechanism is primary.
yeah, i think that's right, but i think there are two different questions and both are worth asking. the first is: abstracting away from how feasible it is to abolish gender, is gender good? i think this is worth asking even if the abolition of gender proves impossible because the answer can serve as what philosophers would call a "regulative ideal," a perhaps impossible point to aspire to, but at least a guiding star. the second is: what would abolishing gender actually look like? i think your point speaks to this latter question, and to the difficulty of imagining a world without gender. i suppose i don't find a gender-less world so hard to imagine because i feel i have little glimpses of it all the time, whenever i interact with people whom i've convinced to see me just as a person, and whom i see that way in turn. so: basically whenever i interact with my husband, or with my friends. but i will save more concrete picture-painting for an essay i will someday soon-ish have time to write, i hope!
psyched to read the next essay whether it exists or not! my only comeback is that, if it's the case that the people close to you are the ones who don't see you for your gender, perhaps gender is simply a function of distance, and to eliminate it you would have to eliminate distance, and distance is constitutive of society. so if you eliminate gender without eliminating distance, you would just end up with something else, which might be worse. and I guess something can only be truly 'bad' if its non-existence would be preferable... je ne sais pas, I guess I'm arguing for universal apathy so I must be wrong. it was a nice read, thank you!
Isn't a lot of this suffering about social and economic structures and institutions? These things change bottom up. It's concerning to me too but I think just the culture and culture wars cannot change it. (The 'solutions' are inhumane and alarming and bad for men as much as women but also just a political ploy to stir shit up, not even 'solutions.') If no working person can afford to rent an apartment, we cannot change the culture that existed in totally different economic conditions.
Men weren't HAPPY before anyway. All the comedians would joke about their misery and New Yorker cartoons with the guy at the bar 'my wife doesn't understand me.' Working men had it bad in capitalism in the good old days and they have it bad now. The 'men are suffering' seems like an ideological ploy to find someone to blame while rich people pick their pockets.
I think that’s certainly right! I think there are probably multiple sources of suffering, one of which is social expectation, but you’re surely right that material conditions are also a big one (and one that more male models won’t fix).
You can't meet social expectations designed for one era when the resources you needed to meet them and the economic possibilities that formed them are different in your era. We probably can find historical evidence of men struggling to meet some (probably somewhat different) ideal of masculinity at junctures of economic upheaval.
(Another problem is that male dominionists etc. cherry pick evidence and lie about facts and history to create the nostalgia they rely on to complain.Another is a lot of these guys are racist but like to use data that includes Black men to prove their point, so THEY are in favor of the suppression of men. Also they create a narrative that is disabling to men, which certainly doesn't help men. In my opinion, the right wingers created this problem by destroying working and middle class power and now are pointing fingers at feminism to conceal their role.)
Is this the Substack equivalent of subtweeting? Analytical philosphy and literary criticism? Damn lol. Which accounts did you find overly 'sentimental' and 'romantic'? I got your email, but I'm not going to waste my time responding to your bold and flippant claim to have totally, probably, already read anything I might suggest and thought it was total bullshit...deciding in the end to rely heavily on some fly-by-night neoliberal think-tank intellectual who only other journalists take seriously. Incidentally, I think that anyone who uses those terms in a derisory or pejorative sense should perhaps re-think their (self) description as a 'literary critic. The issue at hand is as equally affective and aesthetic as it is ideologcal. If you don't agree, I'm actually very curious about what you actually 'love' in Mishima - a man for whom the aesthetic was paramount, and for whom all drives were essentially death drives. However, I think its less about your not taking men's 'suffering' seriously and more that your half-hearted critique - like much else in mainstream cultural criticism - is a barely concealed narcisstic projection that attempts to unversalise what is quite clearly a very narrow and subjective experience. I think the most pertinent question is why do you, a Harvard educated analytical (i.e Professional) philosopher and unsentimenal literary critic writing for The Washington post still feel that your potential is so constrained by masculinity? And why do you feel that the very notion of masculinity is irredeemable and worthy only of effacement or abolishment?
if you have arguments to make, or recommendations to offer, then make and offer them! don't just engage in meta discussion of your psychoanalytic diagnosis of me because i'm an ~elite~ or whatever
no, several people wrote to me to express that they thought i wasn't taking male suffering seriously. there's no sub-tweet here, there's a tweet. to the extent that i find your responses annoying, i've said that to you and would and will again: i don't know if i've read what you'd recommend, which is why i am asking what it is. maybe i've never heard of it and it will totally change my mind. by the same token, i think it's presumptuous of you to assume i haven't, and that the only possible reason i could believe the things i do is if i haven't read mishima or evola or whatever.
I had a similar reaction to the first post as those people who wrote to you, so I appreciate this more nuanced follow up. As for the masculinity prophets and such, they're charlatans, but they're also interesting in that they've identified a real problem, which speaks to their appeal. I find that they mostly attract curious people who feel that something is wrong, or missing, but who lack any historical understanding of themselves or the world. This is really a fault of education and a result of the fact that you can go through university without learning anything besides marketable skills or whatever. When Peterson or whoever expresses some idea, it's the first time these people are hearing of it, and they think he's a genius instead of a peddler of watered down pop psychology.
The best depiction of masculinity I've read is, in general, Knausgaard's "My Struggle," but specifically, one scene where his wife gets locked in a bathroom at a party, he tries to muscle the door open but can't, and then a big, strong guy breaks the door down instead. Knausgaard spends the rest of the party sulking and feeling immense shame that he couldn't help his wife, all while knowing rationally that this is absurd and that no one actually cares. To me, this is the tension: we know masculinity is ridiculous, but we still feel a deep desire to meet its demands and a sense of failure when we don't.
if you haven't read this amazing essay by my friend phil on masculinity, i think it really speaks to this knausgaard point: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/identitieswhat-are-they-good-for/articles/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-man
Have you read the New Yorker interview with Samuel R. Delany? I mention this not because it adds anything pertinent to the discussion of gender, though it might contribute something in a sidelong fashion - but because he begins his day with an evocation of Spinoza. It thrilled me.
yes, i loved the profile! delany seems like the coolest, weirdest person
I loved your previous Substack on this subject and I loved this one, too. My only issue here is with the fact that you plan on writing fewer entries on here? :( That I don’t like one bit!
Who is Reeves? Pardon my ignorance.
You do appear sometimes a bit the female Henry Higgins, the motto being "why can't a man be more like a woman." You should write a song...
that's a really solid argument
Precisely. That's why it called the comment section and not the debate section. I've actually read a few of your articles, have liked them and generally agreed with you. It was meant as a mildly amusing (if one is generous) friendly ribbing. Nothing more or less.
Sorry, the internet makes everyone churlish and uncharitable, including me!
NP. Keep writing.
I wonder whether it is possible to imagine what a mechanism for 'not preserving gender [at the social level]' would look like. I wonder if people who intuitively disagree with the idea of abolishing masculinity do so primarily because they can imagine no such mechanism, and feel that arguing in favour of it implies, off-stage left, some version of this mechanism which they find painful to imagine, or simply unreal. The level of mechanism here so seems utterly opaque (not in the essay, but in reality) that any attempt to locate and pull the level could just as well have the opposite effect (re-grounding masculinity). And if that is true, is there any point in knowing that we should aspire to get rid of gender? Maybe this is a desperately non-philosophical approach, but if gender is uniquely conceived as belonging to society, rather than to individuals, the question of mechanism is primary.
yeah, i think that's right, but i think there are two different questions and both are worth asking. the first is: abstracting away from how feasible it is to abolish gender, is gender good? i think this is worth asking even if the abolition of gender proves impossible because the answer can serve as what philosophers would call a "regulative ideal," a perhaps impossible point to aspire to, but at least a guiding star. the second is: what would abolishing gender actually look like? i think your point speaks to this latter question, and to the difficulty of imagining a world without gender. i suppose i don't find a gender-less world so hard to imagine because i feel i have little glimpses of it all the time, whenever i interact with people whom i've convinced to see me just as a person, and whom i see that way in turn. so: basically whenever i interact with my husband, or with my friends. but i will save more concrete picture-painting for an essay i will someday soon-ish have time to write, i hope!
psyched to read the next essay whether it exists or not! my only comeback is that, if it's the case that the people close to you are the ones who don't see you for your gender, perhaps gender is simply a function of distance, and to eliminate it you would have to eliminate distance, and distance is constitutive of society. so if you eliminate gender without eliminating distance, you would just end up with something else, which might be worse. and I guess something can only be truly 'bad' if its non-existence would be preferable... je ne sais pas, I guess I'm arguing for universal apathy so I must be wrong. it was a nice read, thank you!
Isn't a lot of this suffering about social and economic structures and institutions? These things change bottom up. It's concerning to me too but I think just the culture and culture wars cannot change it. (The 'solutions' are inhumane and alarming and bad for men as much as women but also just a political ploy to stir shit up, not even 'solutions.') If no working person can afford to rent an apartment, we cannot change the culture that existed in totally different economic conditions.
Men weren't HAPPY before anyway. All the comedians would joke about their misery and New Yorker cartoons with the guy at the bar 'my wife doesn't understand me.' Working men had it bad in capitalism in the good old days and they have it bad now. The 'men are suffering' seems like an ideological ploy to find someone to blame while rich people pick their pockets.
I think that’s certainly right! I think there are probably multiple sources of suffering, one of which is social expectation, but you’re surely right that material conditions are also a big one (and one that more male models won’t fix).
You can't meet social expectations designed for one era when the resources you needed to meet them and the economic possibilities that formed them are different in your era. We probably can find historical evidence of men struggling to meet some (probably somewhat different) ideal of masculinity at junctures of economic upheaval.
(Another problem is that male dominionists etc. cherry pick evidence and lie about facts and history to create the nostalgia they rely on to complain.Another is a lot of these guys are racist but like to use data that includes Black men to prove their point, so THEY are in favor of the suppression of men. Also they create a narrative that is disabling to men, which certainly doesn't help men. In my opinion, the right wingers created this problem by destroying working and middle class power and now are pointing fingers at feminism to conceal their role.)
Strongly agree with all of this!!
sibthis is real work to us
Is this the Substack equivalent of subtweeting? Analytical philosphy and literary criticism? Damn lol. Which accounts did you find overly 'sentimental' and 'romantic'? I got your email, but I'm not going to waste my time responding to your bold and flippant claim to have totally, probably, already read anything I might suggest and thought it was total bullshit...deciding in the end to rely heavily on some fly-by-night neoliberal think-tank intellectual who only other journalists take seriously. Incidentally, I think that anyone who uses those terms in a derisory or pejorative sense should perhaps re-think their (self) description as a 'literary critic. The issue at hand is as equally affective and aesthetic as it is ideologcal. If you don't agree, I'm actually very curious about what you actually 'love' in Mishima - a man for whom the aesthetic was paramount, and for whom all drives were essentially death drives. However, I think its less about your not taking men's 'suffering' seriously and more that your half-hearted critique - like much else in mainstream cultural criticism - is a barely concealed narcisstic projection that attempts to unversalise what is quite clearly a very narrow and subjective experience. I think the most pertinent question is why do you, a Harvard educated analytical (i.e Professional) philosopher and unsentimenal literary critic writing for The Washington post still feel that your potential is so constrained by masculinity? And why do you feel that the very notion of masculinity is irredeemable and worthy only of effacement or abolishment?
if you have arguments to make, or recommendations to offer, then make and offer them! don't just engage in meta discussion of your psychoanalytic diagnosis of me because i'm an ~elite~ or whatever
The argument is in there. As are a couple of questions...but I suspect I know the answers already. And I don't think you're an elite or whatever.
no, several people wrote to me to express that they thought i wasn't taking male suffering seriously. there's no sub-tweet here, there's a tweet. to the extent that i find your responses annoying, i've said that to you and would and will again: i don't know if i've read what you'd recommend, which is why i am asking what it is. maybe i've never heard of it and it will totally change my mind. by the same token, i think it's presumptuous of you to assume i haven't, and that the only possible reason i could believe the things i do is if i haven't read mishima or evola or whatever.