Making masculinity tremble
(Die deutsche Version erschien am 25. April 2021 im sai Magazin. Männlichkeit zum Zittern bringen.)
Shaking, whirring, pounding, groaning. I walk past a construction site. Scratching, bending, breaking, trembling. A man is standing next to a container. He is shivering. I look into his eyes. The air between us is trembling, moving towards me. Then he puts down the jackhammer. His body stops shaking. But inside he continues to tremble. How do I know this? Certainly not because of my experience on a construction site. Rather because of my experience as a cis man. Because I tremble too. It is a shiver that accompanies every cis-male life, inculding my own.
© Julie Matthées
Men don't shiver because they are too cold!
It is not the cis-man per se who is shivering, but his masculine identity - that is, the image he has of himself and society has of him: The man as an independent, strong and autonomous lone fighter.
But how can a man become autonomous? The researcher Klaus Theweleit examined images of men under fascism and came to the conclusion that male autonomy was produced by drawing a rigid line between masculinity and femininity. The binary gender system was used to produce soldierly men: Femininity was associated with the enemy, whereas masculinity was associated with one's own country - the fatherland. As a result, femininity always had a threatening effect on the soldierly man, who therefore had to dispel everything feminine within himself. Among other things, he had to toughen himself physically and discipline himself mentally. Theweleit coined the image of the male body armour, which destroys everything that is considered weak because it would destroy him himself.
And this still holds today: being weak is associated with being "female"; only a few years ago I banned the term "pussy" from my vocabulary.
The hierarchy between men and women*, but also between men themselves, which is perpetually reproduced, establishes a supposed independence through superiority. Even if self-proclaimed alpha males are becoming a rare phenomenon, the logic is still the same: whoever knows the most, can do the most and is generally at the top of the food chain, is independent. Goodbye weakness!
And this is where the trembling begins. Cis-masculinity apparently needs femininity in order to dominate and exclude it. "The man must be strong" can also be read as "The man must not be feminine". This leads to a paradox: cis-male identity claims to be autonomous but needs femininity for the feeling of autonomy at the beginning. Femininity thus constantly challenges cis-masculinity. The psychoanalytic researcher Rolf Pohl calls this paradox the "masculinity dilemma": cis-male identity is always shaking and shifting back and forth between the imperative to be independent and the awareness of being dependent on femininity.
Trembling between bed-hopping and rape culture
If the cis man needs femininity in order to exclude it, this means that femininity is logically always present in any cis man. But it also means that she must always be excluded. One of the ways this happens is through heterosex. Because if we leave behind the idea of a biological man, we also have to say goodbye to the idea that people who seem to idenitify as men always want sex. The fact that they want sex is nothing natural, but simply gives the cis-male identity possibilities for action to overcome its dependence on women: literally through their "conquest" - that is, in most cases, through heterosex. Heterosexual desire can thus be understood as the transformation of the "masculinity dilemma" into sexual desire. And no longer as: "The man just can't help himself". This realisation, however, does not change the effect of the men-want-sex myth. Because sexual desire relates to the cis man's idea of autonomy. As a result, the patriarchal man really can't help but want sex all the time - because it is fundamental to maintaining his own "autonomous" identity.
Sex and sexualisation are thus only valves for the inner tension of the cis-male identity - for its trembling. But it can also happen that the tension is relieved in more extreme ways: In rape or feminicide. Rolf Pohl sums it up like this: "In all forms of sexual violence, the woman is punished for the desire she triggers in the man". Patriarchal society, however, continues to explain violent behaviour with the myth of the male sex drive. And thus provides the basis for the daily perpetuation of rape culture.
© Julie Matthées
© Julie Matthées
Trembling anti-feminists...
An extreme example of sexual violence is Incels, an anti-feminist internet movement that provides the ideology for attacks on women* worldwide. Their misogyny stems from the view that men have a natural right to sex, but women refuse to give it to them. Translated into reality, this means: Incels see themselves as autonomous men - that is, subjects - who assume they can do whatever they want with women. Women are objects for them. Within this logic, any form of feminism is understood as an attack on men's autonomy: Something is supposedly being taken away from men. However, through the transformation of women from object to subject - through feminism - these cis-men are only confronted with their inner dependency. This was not visible before because gender power relations were considered "natural", i.e. the man was seen as subject and the woman as object. Anti-feminism therefore always expresses itself violently. It has to push women back into the role of objects that can be dominated. This can be seen in the case of incels, for example, in the evaluation of women's attractiveness through scales or by referring to women with the pronoun "it". From this point of view, women are supposed to take back their wole as a stable lifebelt for trembling cis-men to hold on to.
... tussel masculinely.
Incels are just one extreme manifestation of patriarchy. Weaker mechanisms of the same sort can also be observed in other movements - such as the mythopoetic men's movement: Emerging in the 1980s as a counter-movement to the second wave of feminism, these men wanted to alleviate their shiver by recalling an originally free male identity - a male archetype. And this is nothing less than a Stone Age man. The idea is that the original masculine energy has been buried by the women's movement. The task is to dig it up again. Recipe for this: get together with other men, do things like wrestling, hunting or campfire sit-ins and connect with your original masculinity through body-intensive work. It's not uncommon for this to include an evening cuddle session, where Stone Age men can also show their masculine tender side. Sounds harmless, actually.
Like the incels, however, these cis-men react to emancipatory developments by retreating into homogeneous groups of so-called male alliances. There, they can finally feel male autonomy again. When the male identity is allowed to fully unfold in its contradictions, the trembling finally stops. In the end, however, energy and motivation are only gathered to once again subjugate women* or other marginalised masculinities. Because once they leave the men's group again, cis men start trembling again - both inner and social pressure to have heterosex and to be the dominant person challanges the idea of autonomy. This must therefore be proven again and again to oneself, to other men and to women*.
© Julie Matthées
Is it just an extreme shiver?
Cis-masculinity does not exist naturally. It has to establish itself again and again through dominance. This applies to the cis man who repeatedly interrupts women, as well as the cis man who stalks women at night or even pulls out a knife. Femicides are of course extreme examples of what masculinities can produce. Nevertheless, they are only an extreme expression of a scale of masculinity that can also be shown in a less extreme way, for example through mansplaining.
Mansplaining, rape culture and femicide are, to varying degrees, expressions of the same thing: the reproduction and safeguarding of cis-male identity. For in order to be autonomous, dependency and vulnerability must be negated - the trembling shift between the poles of autonomous versus dependent must be brought to a standstill. The core of cis-male identity is therefore violence. And it can only be stabilised with more violence. Those who try to save cis-masculinity have not yet understood this and risk making themselves guilty as well.
Bibliography
1| I explicitly refer to a binary gender system here because this text explores the production of cis-maile identity within patriarchy. Nevertheless, I try to mark the reference to binarity by writing “cis man”.
2| https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/klaus-theweleit-ueber-maennerphantasien-die-angst-vor-der.1008.de.html?dram:article_id=462394 & https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2006/4650
3| https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/metoo-interview-1.3801247
4| V. Kracher (2020). Incels: Geschichte, Sprache und Ideologie eines Online-Kults. Ventil Verlag
5| https://jungle.world/artikel/2019/01/gekraenkte-maennlichkeithttps://jungle.world/artikel/2019/01/gekraenkte-maennlichkeit
6| https://www.bpb.de/apuz/25500/geschlechterdemokratie-als-maennlichkeitskritik?p=all#footnodeid55-55
7| https://christophmay.eu/wer-schweigt-stimmt-zu-rant-gegen-maennliche-abwehr-christoph-may/
8| By the way, this current was portrayed in a thoroughly positive way in the Y collective documentary "Masculinity under proof: Men on the way to themselves" and has been given a huge platform in this very popular medium. For a more detailed critique, see here.
For further reading on critical masculinity
Blog by Janosch, good for an introduction to the topic of critical masculinity.
Blog by Kim Posster, critiquing masculinity from a Marxist lens.
Journal "Men and Gender" free to download. GER.
Bell hooks "The will to change" - good book to introduce the topic of masculinities and how masculinity can become human.
