Issue 159: “Masculinities”

The “manosphere” is once again having a moment. Since the term appeared sometime during the 2008 financial crisis, its breadth and influence have only grown. Like other ideological vortexes that prey on alienated subjects, its appeal comes from its ability to make conformity and bootlicking look like provocation. The internet has made its tendrils hyperefficient, but the crisis isn’t new. Masculinity has always functioned as a synonym for power itself, for patriarchy, for an ancien régime of established authority that never fully recedes. The question isn’t whether there is a crisis of masculinity, but whether analyses of it—from the left or the right—can escape the twin traps of fascist reaction and utopian fantasy.

Maxi Wallenhorst examines how contemporary far-right figures (podcasters and political commentators) create a “crisis of masculinity” not as a coherent ideology but as a “moodboard of entrepreneurial belonging.” Reading this panic of sexual politics alongside Klaus Theweleit’s canonical Males Fantasies (1977), Wallenhorst considers whether analyses of masculinity are still reacting to a reductively utopian sexual optimism. Theweleit also appears in this issue in conversation with curator Marius Babias and artist and filmmaker Clemens von Wedemeyer. Focusing on amateur films shot by the Nazi officer Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch during his Wehrmacht service, the three discuss the private and intimate moments that adorn military expansion and total war.

This issue also features an excerpt from Tareq Baconi’s beautiful queer memoir Fire in Every Direction. Baconi describes hearing his father recount his mother’s participation in Palestinian solidarity movements in Beirut before the Lebanese Civil War. Through the retelling, Baconi sketches how notions of what it means to “be a man” are always in conflict with revolutionary courage, but also how patronizing elements of masculinity can appear even in expressions of profound care and love. McKenzie Wark expounds on the concept of “femmunism” by taking us to a rave where straight culture and queer culture clash. Drawing on her experience “as a transsexual woman who came out late,” Wark uses the dance floor to imagine a society where it isn’t gender as such that gets abolished, but “compulsory genders and their hierarchy.” 

What do men and pets have in common? Humanity’s evolution has always been a process of self-domestication, writes Ingo Niermann. This is the point missed by the manosphere’s panic about declining masculinity: humans have been getting “softer” for thousands of years. Jasmine Amussen explores her lifelong attraction to a certain type of white male—armed, angry, and politically incoherent—and the American manifestations of this archetype, from Timothy McVeigh to Luigi Mangione. 

Mary Walling Blackburn shreds masculine territorial control by playfully re-rendering it as machinic sound art jamming over landscapes, into and out of bodies, and across class divides. Reflecting on his memories of masculinity as an Afghan youth, Fahim Amir asks how the weaponization of patriarchal masculinity conceals a broad range of gender dynamics that swirl across polar orders and cultural regimes. Beginning with her own reflections on an upbringing in Mexico, Julieta Aranda looks at masculinity across Latin America as caught in its own cycle of perpetuating violence and destruction—the only way it can (poorly) express freedom and possibility. What would it mean for men to be capable of birthing worlds, asks Aranda, rather than only defending and controlling them?

—Editors

Tareq Baconi—Fire in Every Direction
On the far end of the corridor, Baba looked over the heads of his fellow students, searching for her as the troops circled them. He shoved his way through; some students were standing listlessly, others had their fists in the air, shouting. There was so much noise that he could not make out what was being said on the loudspeakers. But when he got close enough, he saw her standing on a podium, in the middle of the corridor, shouting through a megaphone. Of course, he thought to himself. Of course she’s the one with the megaphone. The soldiers moved in.

Jasmine Amussen—Bombers Row
As time passed and I saw the world, it seemed that the special factors of my girlhood (impoverished, rural, heartland, shifting racial identity) had tuned me to the frequency of a specific kind of American male. It was my own United States of Timothy McVeighs—a man who wasn’t familiar to me growing up, even though I was only a few hours’ drive away from the Oklahoma City bombing when it happened. My radical interracial parents didn’t raise their girls with television, and news moves slower the closer you are to the earth.

Maxi Wallenhorst—The “Crisis of Masculinity” Crisis
As with so much of fascist politics, the internal contradictions are part of the sex appeal. As they rally the consumers they fashion as troops around birth rates, testosterone levels, and rape fantasies, Carlson and Fuentes’s exchange makes clear that late-fascist sexual politics do not directly translate into any personal requirements for men, but rather into a moodboard of entrepreneurial belonging.

Klaus Theweleit, Marius Babias, and Clemens von Wedemeyer in conversation—What You Don’t See: On the Private Films of a Wehrmacht Officer
There’s plenty of footage showing men going for a swim, sometimes stark naked. That seems to have been one of their main entertainments—when they weren’t busy killing, murdering, prevailing by force of arms, and destroying cities and towns. The moment there’s a body of water they take off their clothes and jump in. And then they frolic like a gang of boys, regardless of the fact that they’re all officers. They undress, and when they’re among themselves they can show themselves naked, in lieu of the sex they’re not having. Cases of rape or relationships with local women never appear in the film.

McKenzie Wark—Femmunist Intimations
A situation without hegemonic masculinity can still include men, of course. Without hegemonic masculinity, the other kinds rearrange themselves in its absence. There’s reversal: masculinity becomes the second sex, the supplement. That whose existence makes the language of femininity sing. The best kind of masculine object for this purpose is “trade.” A nuanced word in queer language, but “supplement” wouldn’t be a bad translation.

Ingo Niermann—Pets Going Their Own Way
The manosphere’s various concerns about threats to masculinity all come down to domestication. The foundational story of the manosphere goes something like this: Once humans settled down and tamed animals, they also tamed themselves. Women, physically inferior, were thus tamed already, or at least pretended to be tamed (like cats), in order to awaken men’s protective instincts for them and their offspring. But now men likewise overcame their hunter instincts, allowing themselves to be trapped in boring daily routines and weakened by a high-carb diet. Millenia later, this has resulted in testosterone deficiency, monogamy, women’s liberation, equal rights, and a general coddling.

Fahim Amir—What Would a Lady Do?
Yet this position is by no means singular, and joins countless other seemingly “impossible” constellations within which many find themselves. As an Afghan man who finds himself in impossible situations when the narrow-mindedness and complacent aggression of the other consciously or unconsciously discharges itself, I ask myself a simple question to avoid cultivating a demeanor that would bind me to myself: What would a lady do?

Julieta Aranda—From the Ruins of Utopia
War becomes the black mirror of reproduction that administers the destruction of worlds. War serves as the masculine womb, the masculine spectacle of origin. Through war, men become “creators” by destroying: borders, bodies, futures. In the logic of patriarchy, death becomes a masculine form of world-making. The fantasy of war is not an accident. It is a compensation mechanism. War becomes a womb that births death. A brutal response to the fear that creation is not masculine. It is the only place where masculinity can pretend to “create” something original: borders, ruins, ecological collapse, bodies liquidated for glory.

Mary Walling Blackburn—American Shivaree: A Class Warfare Torch Song
Some want to consume or replicate the do-good, but some of us still desire to consume the do-bad. My own desire to ingest or embody masculinity unpredictably strobes. Sometimes I have craved its noisy bravado and in other moments mimicked its emotional economy. I have wanted to skin it and wear it like an animal’s hide. Had such a hide been available, would I have slid on this sheath and pillaged an image, a person, a people, a desert lake, a swamped planet?