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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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?