What Would a Lady Do?

1. Pong

As a child, I was once seized by a sudden desire for a sewing machine. My mother had taken me to a Viennese shop full of used toys and told to me pick something for my birthday. My eyes wandered over many objects on the shelves that existed only as single specimen, as if in a museum or a showroom. When I spotted the little sewing machine, I knew it was what I wanted. The salesman brought down the off-white object with its bright-red Singer logo and placed it on the counter in front of us. I could feel its weight from afar. This was, in fact, no mere toy; one could really sew with it. And it was priced accordingly.

My mother, amused by my wish but appalled by the price, asked the salesman: “Isn’t a sewing machine more for girls?” He agreed, adding that the same could be said for cooking, but the truly great chefs, or fashion designers, were all men. Surprised, my mother agreed, but wasn’t going to give in so easily. While she tried to steer me toward a much cheaper, jet-black rectangular box for playing the video game Pong, my longing for the original object of my desire only grew.

After all, I knew such machines from home and remembered how proud my mother had been of her first Singer. I was often asked to help thread the needle when it became more difficult for her in the evenings, which I always did gladly and with great seriousness because I almost always succeeded on the first try. During this delicate maneuver, the lower flap of the sewing machine was opened to reach the second thread attached there around a small bobbin. That gave us a glimpse into the machine’s interior, dense with fascinating mechanics. Finally, she would always clamp in a piece of fabric and turn the heavy wheel of the sewing machine to check that everything worked. That was my favorite moment. I would lean in to watch intently as the needle slowly and silently pierced the fabric from above, catching the second thread below before gliding upward again. I was never allowed near the needle when it moved at lightning speed.

Ted Dabney (left) in 1972 with a Pong arcade cabinet and fellow Atari employees Nolan Bushnell, Fred Marincic and Allan Alcorn. License: Fair Use.

What exactly would I have sewn with my own little machine? I didn’t know, nor did it matter. What captivated me was the shrill hammering sound and the calm, controlled motion that pressed the fabric under the needle, guiding it along at just the right pace while the needle raced up and down. But I never got the Singer in the end. Perhaps it would have revealed itself to be a costly childish whim that I would never touch again after taking it home from the shop. At least that was what happened with Pong, the substitute.

2. What Would a Lady Do?

The most vilified figure of masculinity in the twenty-first-century Western imaginary is most certainly the Afghan man. While he is associated with military bravery, archaic sociality, and problematic religiosity, the political, historical, and ethnicized dimensions of these imaginaries are routinely rendered invisible. Elements of hypervisibility and hyperinvisibility are mutually constitutive in ideologically lubricating the killing machine of the longest war in US history. And since that so ingloriously ended war, this formation has become a favored means of weaponizing gendered resentment across many countries.

Incidentally, oriental Afghans and occidental women have something in common. Many Afghans, in fact, have no last names in the modern sense. Only those who require modern identification documents (for travel, for example, or the purchase of land) must state or choose a surname. In a sense, this makes Afghans the counterparts of women in the West who carry either their father’s or their husband’s name, or, in recent decades, a combination of both. These supposedly woman-hating men thus share a fundamental namelessness with the seemingly most emancipated of women. More than just a historical contingency, this namelessness marks the existence of a secondary order and could be a starting point for asking how such a constellation of power is arranged.

Attan is a Pashtun dance widely practiced in Afghanistan, often collectively performed at weddings and other celebrations. The Attan fosters morale in battle and resistance. Today the dance is practiced by different ethnic groups and genders across Afghanistan and appears in multiple regional styles, some of which place particular emphasis on long hair.

But how can a person oriented toward emancipation invoke critiques of masculinity while belonging to a group universally cast as the most extreme patriarchal offender? A thought by the exile Theodor W. Adorno remains indispensable: “The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”1 Here, stupidity does not signify the absence of thought, but a mode of thinking marked by violence, a kind of scar, a hardened surface within the intelligible. In view of the ideological mobilization of gender to justify military violence, self-stultification can serve as an escape from drowning in anger and grief. It might seem so much more reassuring to chain one’s sense of self to a polarized constellation of perspectives that fail to transcend the false antagonisms and horrors of the present. As Adorno writes: “The violence that expelled me thereby denied me full knowledge of it.”2

Today it is almost impossible to maintain solidarity with contexts and realities diametrically opposed to the reigning powers without feeling a reflex to defend what has been unjustly criticized and brutally attacked. 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?

3. Jamal-Be-There

Today, masculinity appears to many as a kind of fundamental flaw. What is deemed acceptable about it in the practice of everyday life tends to be whatever has not yet come under scrutiny by queer or feminist perspectives, whether activist or academic. Legitimate masculinity thus seems to consist in a residue or remainder that has not yet been attended to. In light of such critical scrutiny, it can sometimes seem as though masculinity itself means internalizing personality traits and modes of comportment perceived as feminine, as if the better masculinity is the more feminine. There is, in principle, nothing to object to in that. Anyone willing to confront the centuries-old traditions of modernity and millennia-old forms of domination, one hopes, will also confront their genital and historically affective orders.

But what kind of political temporality are we entering when we explore these perspectives today? Contrary to the assumptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a substantial transformation of the social order will presumably take not decades, but centuries. Until then, the task at hand may indeed be to prevent the worst (ecocide, the degradation of human and animal life, nuclear annihilation) and to prepare for something better. And of course there remains the present. Supposedly the only life we have cannot simply consist in waiting for the day after the revolution. But then what are revolutionaries to do in nonrevolutionary times?

Between the small happiness of one’s own private life and the great happiness of social revolution, a space opens that belongs wholly to neither. Nor can it be reduced to a direct line between both. For some, this very line offers a lesson in orientation. Becoming a parent, for example, can profoundly transform one’s own masculinity. Anyone who takes this constellation seriously, in all its depths, cannot but become, in their own way, a “trans man.” Here, the question of role models arises in a distinctly concrete, everyday sense. While feminist history abounds with female icons, their equivalents on the male side are almost entirely missing, a lack that becomes particularly tangible when one becomes a father oneself. 

Whatever one writes or thinks, one ultimately lives under constant, minute observation, sometimes only becoming aware of one’s gender performances in their most subtle forms when one’s child begins to imitate them, perhaps not very successfully at first, but all the more delightfully when reality stages its own satire. A father oriented toward emancipation would then find himself compelled to perform as the kind of anti-masculinist role model one would have wished to take cues from oneself.

Adorno’s sentence about the “almost insoluble task” appears, tellingly, in a section entitled “Hans-Guck-in-die-Luft” (Johnny Head-in-Air), a kind of anti-idealist cautionary tale about the misfortunes that befall a boy who gazes not at the ground before him but up at the sky. The most essential prerequisite for a parent would probably be a simple “Jamal-Be-There”: be materially present in the full sense. This does not necessarily mean throwing oneself into the reformist pedagogical mills of improving the world through improved children, those remnants of the great aspirations that survived their own shipwreck. But being part of the desired future already here and now seems almost beyond question. A certain failure is built into the tactics that respond to the problem of being without role models; the post-heroism of humanity’s grand politics seems to echo in the small politics of home.

Beyond the scope of parenting, progressive circles ascribe a special significance to language. During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, activists in Germany and Austria increasingly addressed people who did not immediately appear “natively” German or Austrian with the US Anglicisms “POC” or “BIPOC”—terms that relate to very specific US conditions, difficulties, and developments. The often-naive adoption of such imported conceptual apparatuses reveals a disturbing misrecognition of the concrete contexts and realities of those suddenly being addressed. The proliferation of such categories and identities cannot be separated from global US hegemony in matters of academic scholarship, mediated popular culture, and military annihilation.

I prefer the preceding uncertainty and discomfort in how to correctly address the other. This search on shaky ground seems infinitely more rewarding than the false certainty of doing and saying the right thing. Consistency is commendable, but rigidity is death. Instead, decisions can be made and experiments undertaken out of an everyday pragmatics and a sense of world citizenship. One need not remain alone in this: masculinity, as we know, does not belong to men alone, and progressive masculinity is by no means a privilege of the West.