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January 9, 2005
Masculinity crisis. What is it?
There has to be one, judging by the spam about viagra as the new technology (magic erection pill) that will repair shattered masculine subjects who so desire technologically enhanced bodies. The body machine has broken down.
Is it a paralysis when it comes to addressing emotions and expressing feelings?
Has it got to do with men's estranged relationships with their mother as psychoanlysis implies? Or as lack leading to excess. Or father/son relationships?
Probably all of the above.
Can the masculinity crisis be linked back to the surrealists? To Bataille? I reckon we can as the masculinity crisis involves transgressive male violence (including doemstic violence) and death (male suicide and killing raped women). Bataille is probably more useful than the moral panic that overwhelms us on the American crime and punishment shows circulating throughout free-to-air television.
Bataille writes in the diary section of On Nietzsche:
"In carnal love we ought to love excesses of suffering.Without them no risk would exist....Right away, the beloved gets strangely confused with me. Moreover--once seen the beloved becomes incomprehensible. All the pursuing, finding, and embracing of the person with whom I'm in love,what good does any of it do? I suspected all along...But without first drowning my anguish in sensuality, how could I have endured these torments of desire?" (p.71 & 72)
Today the masculinity crisis is generally seen as a negative reactive response to feminism, to the growing independence of women, and to the blending of gender roles. It is seen in terms of an anxiety about the "effeminisation" of males and gayness a fear of a disturbing or disturbed femininity and the need for a recuperative space to reaffirm male masculinity along conventional 19th century lines of 'female difference/male dominance'.
This account is partly right, I suspect. Some men certainly do want to retain control over women and they are more than willing to pay for being men.
Maybe the masculinity crisis is something deeper? Something that we can link back to Bataille's split subjectivity, pornography and tormented desire?
This is one account. It asks:
"How do men win their masculinities now? Therein lies the true crisis: the measure of a man has changed, leaving many young men without a roadmap to establishing their identities and without clear-cut ways to validate their masculinity."
It suggests that women's liberation is not the cause of this crisis, even though women are often its scapegoats. What we have is the transgressive turn to violence, a growing class of 'lawless, sometimes violent young men, and more and more big bad boys who bite social workers.
If it is about masculinity, then it is about sexuality, bodies, desire and the recognition of our object of desire as another subject. As Bataille says:
"Pain flows from the beloved's obstruction of that love. The beloved turns aside---is different from me. But without this difference---my recognition of this beloved would have been in vain. Identity still remains in effect. Only when our response to desire remains incomprehensible is that response true. A response that is understood destroys desire."
This suggests that there is more going on than angry, violent, sexually dysfunctional men reacting to their lose of power by desparately clinging to the past, as pathological traditionalists, recidivists and losers.
It suggests that we look at the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. With Bataille the focus is on the lived experience of sexual desire and the practices that shape that desire which are an aspect of the gender order.
What is pushed into the background is the power relations involving the subordination of women and the domination of men and the gender division of labor whereby men gain from unequal shares of the product.
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