Lovely MRA agitprop from Return of Kings.
Considered "a leader in the emerging field of masculinity studies", sociologist Michael Kimmel examines the relationship between masculinity and political extremism. On the controversial thesis that returning vets are susceptible to political extremism (a correlation borne out in the Middle East, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia), Kimmel says:
What we do know to be true is that our military exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan have left veterans coming home with serious PTSD. I mean, think of the types of terror that they’ve lived with – that any time you get into a car could be your last time on earth. That can’t help but shake you up. Couple that with racism towards your enemy – one of the ways you convince yourself to kill an enemy is to hate them; think about what we used to say about the Vietnamese, or what my father’s generation used to say about the Japanese. I think that is an equation that might make some people susceptible to far-right ideology.
Kimmel references James Gilligan's assumption that shame and humiliation underlie basically all violence: “Because I feel small, I will make you feel smaller.” Interviews with extremists confirm these groups are often bound by a shared sense of "humiliation and shame":
He calls this “aggrieved entitlement”: "If you feel entitled and you have not gotten what you expected, that is a recipe for humiliation."
The false nature vs. nurture dichotomy does little to elucidate rigid and/or persistent masculinities. I wish my ev-psychy friends would stop trying to build a scientific case for evangelical pop psychology. As Kimmel notes, nature and nurture are "intimately linked":
What we know is that testosterone as a hormone both drives aggression and responds to aggression. It is a really malleable hormone. And I think that you can’t understand the natural biological conditions of violence without understanding the social conditions, and I think you can’t understand the social conditions without understanding the biological conditions.
Let me give you two examples. The first: how come men use a biological argument when they are angry and they beat up someone smaller or older than they are or they beat their wives – yet they don’t beat their bosses? I mean, my boss would likely piss me off more than my wife would, right? Why don’t I beat him up? Because you have to feel like you have permission. You have to believe that the target of your violence is “legitimate”.
There is a famous experiment by a primatologist at Stanford. He takes five monkeys and measures their testosterone. Then he puts the five monkeys in a cage. The monkeys immediately establish a hierarchy of violence – number one beats number two, number two beats number three, number three beats number four, number four beats number five. Of course, number one has the highest testosterone, and so on.
So the experiment is: he takes monkey three out of the cage and he shoots him up with testosterone, off the scale, and puts him back in. What do you think happens? When I tell this story my students always guess that he immediately becomes number-one monkey. But that’s not true. What happens is that when he goes back in the cage he still avoids monkeys number one and two – but he beats the shit out of numbers four and five.
So what any reasonable biological researcher would conclude is that testosterone does not cause aggression, it enables it. The target of the violence must already be seen as legitimate. You have a biological argument and a sociological argument. So the answer to your question is that it is never either/or. It is always both. Always.
More on fragile masculinity happening now at a gas station or Senate chamber near you:
Republicans attack University of Wisconsin-Madison's The Men's Project, a program intended to help males see outside the box of their socialized masculinity and into a world inhabited by fellow human beings.
James Gilligan celebrates the 2011 USC decision in Brown v. Plata ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000. But what Gilligan celebrated in 2011 is under attack by Sessions' Justice Department.
Crown Equipment CEO James Dicke II expresses his enthusiasm for Trump's cabinet picks while complaining about how regulations stymie "the cost of production". What he fails to mention is how the US health system could absorb the costs of China's unregulated, toxic workplace environment.
Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill gets huffy about what fascism is-- and isn't. Alas, he overlooks the extent to which the aggrieved "workers groups" were actually subsumed under the former blue-collar worker badge in this election. Perhaps Brendan ought to watch a few stadium videos for insight into how militarization of angry aggrieved workers takes place in the internet age. Trump isn't arming militaries-- he's arming and supporting a growth in militias. If you imagine a happy ending to this story, you should stop watching porn. There is no happy ending to the militarization of stupidity.
