The Poisoned Promise of a “Reforged Masculinity”
The right wing has made much of masculinity, prompting some to argue that the left must offer its own competing conception of what it means to be a man. But even the most progressive masculinity cannot escape its role in the overall system of patriarchy.
Decadent young woman, Ramon Casas (1899)
Mara Luise Guenzel (she/her) is a freelance writer, usually covering gender, culture, and media. She is a member of the CWI and active in the German branch SOL. Her previous work got published in the newspaper “Junge Welt.” in the feminist magazine “Wir Frauen” and the literature journal “kritisch-lesen.de.”
Have you heard? Masculinity is in crisis—again. Every couple of months there is a new think piece published, usually citing the gendered gap in college enrollment, high rates of suicide among men, and the shrinking size of male social circles or reported male loneliness. Sometimes, even the later-on-average age of first sexual encounter is also invoked to support the argument that young men are getting more and more miserable. E. Day, in his recent essay The Left Must Reforge Masculinity, continues this trend. In it, Day argues that the left needs to reforge and “evolve” masculinity.
Day draws on this data to make the correct claim that masculinity is in a moment of crisis. As a result, the left should, in his opinion, build a masculinity that is based on “sincerity, kindness, self-improvement/self-worth, chivalry, community [and] righteous justice.” To ground his claim, Day accurately describes the changing base upon which the superstructure of gender is built: the entry of middle-class white women into the workforce following the declining rate of capital coupled with a coalition of radical and socialist feminists fighting for economic independence. This, combined with sinking buying power, has eroded the traditional concept of the breadwinner and left men adrift. He states correctly that current-day men inherited “male supremacy with hardly any supremacy to stand on.”
Yet, Day argues that this giant with feet of clay is to be reformed instead of dismantled. He believes that masculinity can be “reforged”: remade along positive lines. But, even if we successfully reform masculinity, we cannot get rid of its reactionary elements that directly enable the current antifeminist moment.
Kings without an empire
The “male supremacy” Day diagnoses is not based on an individual, direct reign of men over women. Rather, it is a system of division within capitalism structured along the lines of gender. This gender gets projected onto a body, following the perception of secondary sex markers. Its primary function within capitalism is to enforce the division of reproductive labor and the division of the working class. In other words, male supremacy is itself a feature of capitalism necessary for its reproduction. By paying women less, or not at all, they become economically dependent on men. The ‘man of the family’ gets to be governor over the small enclave constituted by his family unit, pretending to be a king to soothe himself for the fact that he is being exploited by the actual powerful people in the world, the capitalist class.
In return for this exploitation, he receives the “wages of masculinity”: psychological comfort and social support simply for being a man. He gets to have the sexuality of a woman at his disposal in return for her survival, since she has nowhere else to turn once married off. After the development of economic independence, however, this situation has largely changed. Women were able to get jobs and so deny this reign, deny sex without (or with, at least, decreased) fear of facing assault or rape, became able to flee abusive husbands, became able to live in homosexual relationships. It was simple: with increasing economic independence, women also gained increasing freedom. Free to choose who to love, who to marry, when to marry, and whether to marry at all, or to live alone or with someone else.
This increasing economic independence for women meant, as Day correctly describes, an inverse loss of the role of men in the dialectic of the sexes. What was left was the untethered force men used when women denied them reign over their sexuality and lives. At the same time, capitalism entered its death struggle. With a declining rate of profit, the crisis cycle of capitalism became shorter and shorter. Within the last 20 years, the Imperial Core was shaken by the burst of the dot-com-bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, the Euro-crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic fallout after the Invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and whatever the hell is happening right now. With a barely existing socialist or even a worker’s movement offering solutions to the crisis, the far-right has gained more and more support within the Imperial Core, offering something beyond the “Onwards” of the other capitalist parties.
The far right has used the moment of economic crisis to appeal to a base of young men, disillusioned by the outlook of a life in perpetual capitalist crisis and increased loneliness. The solution the far-right offered them was to become “men again,” while furthering their own interest in serving as parties for their allied capital factions in their goal of a continued neoliberal dismantling of what is left of the welfare state. They told young men that feminists had destroyed masculinity, made them beta-males, invaded the last spaces that remained for them (e.g. gaming, nerd culture), and they used this to introduce young men to racist and antisemitic narratives like the Great Replacement, using the grievances of a perceived loss in social status, and an assumed inherited right as men now denied, to further their goal of a far-right “metapolitic” to build up a mass base. They told them that romantic relations used to be a given, falsely equating marriage with romantic relationship, leaving out all the dirty stuff of economic dependencies, compulsive marriages, and so on, painting a rose-tinted, nostalgic image of a brighter past where the sexes lived peacefully and happily in white-picket-fenced homes. Supported by large billionaire funds, the far-right project quickly gained momentum, exploding in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. After Trump failed to get re-elected the first time, the right-wing spaces for men evolved and became the Manosphere. They continued stoking this gendered polarization, utilizing the crises of capitalism in the 2020s, festering in the underbelly of the internet until it entered mainstream in the last couple of years.
When these political projects entered power, they quickly tried to reinstate the kingdom of the nuclear family. Abortion bans in Poland and Hungary; the one-two punch of the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade and red states adopting “trigger laws” banning abortion; the ban of queer literature in schools in Florida 2022 and in Hungary, as well as the denial of Gender-Self-Identification laws and the looming threat of denial of access to gender-affirming healthcare. While a proper analysis of the reasons for this happening is necessary, it is safe to say that Day is correct in his acknowledgment that the right has very successfully gained the support of young men by catering to their economic struggle and grievances–by offering those kings without an empire an opportunity to become tyrants.
The unbearable normalness of masculinity
The masculinity to which the right-wing is attaching itself is a masculinity that is defined by an outside Other. This “Other” is the woman or immigrant coming to a place where they don’t belong. This Other is a critical component in the construction of masculinity, as sociologist Reawyn Connell argues in her 1995 landmark study “Masculinities” (p. 68). Connell argues that masculinity always exists in distinction from something, usually women, but also men of other races and classes (p. 75). She goes on to state that there is not a masculinity, but rather something she calls the “hegemonic masculinity,” a masculinity that “occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relation” (p. 76), configured as the “current accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy.” She follows Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in her definition of hegemony, in which hegemony “refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life.” (p. 77). Masculinity, for her, is not an identity, but a position within social relations, a political structure, which gets assigned to an individual based on an interplay of perceived sex characteristics and cultural practices.
For Connell, hegemonic masculinity is not always the most powerful person available within the social structure; it is an ever-shifting set of values and norms that offers to mend the contradiction within the dialectic of the sexes, created by the uneven distribution of property and social power within the sexist society. Hegemonic masculinity is also different for different groups. For some, the gentle masculinity of, for example, Barack Obama is aspirational, while others strive to emulate the blunt macho-types like Andrew Tate, and still others have left for the realm of fiction and subordinate themselves under the imagined figure of the high school football captain or the figure of the “Chad,” the archetype key to the worldview of the participants in Incel forums. They all hold different options for the future of the patriarchy, differing in many aspects but one: the system itself is not to blame nor to be dismantled.
This hegemonic masculinity is constituted by suppressing other, non-hegemonic masculinities, like Black or gay masculinities, and, this is key, women of any subset. One might imagine masculinity as a pyramid, with the hegemonic masculine men on top, below them the non-hegemonic men, othered and subordinated, and, below them, women. This position of hegemony is always under threat of dethronement by other concepts of masculinity; the bearers are threatened by the bearers of other masculinities currently subordinated within the set of gender relations currently dominant.
Many of the male readers might think now, “Well, I am none of these figures; I am actually quite normal, a regular guy.” And this is probably true. As Connell states, the number of men actually meeting the normative standards of hegemonic masculinity is quite small. And yet, she argues, most men (whether they label themselves that way or not), even those who don’t fit the narrow standards of hegemonic masculinity, gain from this hegemony, benefiting from something Connell calls the “patriarchal dividend” (p. 79). Even masculinities that are not actively subordinating women, even those men who are good boyfriends, who “love their [girlfriends] and mothers, are never violent towards women, do their accustomed share of the housework” (p.80), “normal guys,” so to say, benefit from a system that is built on the subordination of women. This is not an active process. Men are not automatically living better lives, like many far-right online commentators who were trying to strawman the position of feminists in the late 2010s argued–they are merely spared a worse life, the life of a woman.
The unending horrors we see online–a growing manosphere, influencers proclaiming “Your body, my choice,” and the young men cheering them on–are what Veronika Kracher called in her book Incels the “escalation of the status quo.” In Germany, a 2022 study found that approximately a third of the participants showed a conclusive sexist and antifeminist worldview that saw men and women as fundamentally different (p. 253). Misogyny and men’s entitlement towards women are widespread, a common phenomenon almost any woman can attest to. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 81% of women reported sexual violence in their lifetime in the US, 20% of the women in the US experienced an attempted or a completed rape. 30% of these women were between the ages of 11 and 17. Half of the women who reported rape reported that their perpetrator was an intimate partner, while 41% reported it was a close acquaintance. The CDC reports that 90% of child sexual abuses are committed “by someone known and trusted by the child or child's family members,” with 20% of girls experiencing CSA in their lifetime. It also reported that of the 3.28% of men who experienced rape in their lifetime, an overwhelming 87% of perpetrators were other men. These are not fringe types; many of these people are normal men. These numbers quantify the framework laid out by Connell. This violence, either direct and physical or symbolic, is a means to enforce the hierarchies masculinity is built upon. It’s the force that keeps the system in place where hegemony fails. It is not an outlier; it is normal, no matter how unbearable it is. And the reason the Manosphere is seeping into the mainstream is because it solves for many men the ever-increasing crises encroaching into their lives, with the ever-worsening job market, the affordability crisis,and the loneliness epidemic, by telling them the solution is to become “a man” again. It disguises the proper solution by gendering it, selling the far-right as a solution to the increasing crisis of legitimacy–all accelerated by women becoming more and more financially independent and fighting for legal rights.
A poisoned promise
Masculinity, a system built upon the subordination of women, has no progressive option but to die. Maybe it ought not to be brutally murdered but to wither away, hopefully within our lifetime. Any attempt to reform it, like Day proposes, enters an uneven battlefield, where the odds are stacked in favor of the purpose of the system: to subordinate women in order to extract their reproductive labor.
At best, it will propose a new masculinity and build on the certainly positive values Day proposes in his article. But what will come from this? What is the ultimate goal? In giving masculinity a new form, we might give masculinity a new set of clothes it can dress itself in, but we cannot change its core. It might be important to learn from the New Left: While women have always been part of the socialist movement, the women’s question stayed a side note. While prominent socialists of the First International like Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, and Alexandra Kollontai participated in the debate, it never became a core of the socialist struggle. This changed with the advent of the “Second Wave” of feminists beginning in the 1960s, where women began to take more space everywhere but also in the socialist cells in the capitalist bloc. This forced men to interrogate their own complicity in the system their female comrades were trying to fight against. They proposed new types of masculinities: soft, feminist, “A new man.” This promise was sadly not fulfilled. While men might proclaim to be feminists in their meetings, at home they still reproduced the same oppression they criticized. This struggle manifested in two key examples: in one of the German women's movement’s most prominent novels, “Häutungen” by Verena Stefan (published in 1975 in German and in 1978 under the title “Sheddings” in the US), as well as “Der Tod des Märchenprinzen,” which was published in 1980 in Germany but never translated into English.
In Stephan’s “Sheddings”, she writes an autobiographical account of how she dates within the leftist milieu of 1970s Berlin. She is disappointed over and over again by various types of men and masculinities within it, each of which always ends up gravitating around the desires of men. She ultimately finds love and companionship in a lesbian relationship. For the protagonist, what is key is the reciprocated attention her female lover gives her, something not present in her heterosexual relationships. The book ends with the protagonist living alone, away from her leftist social circles, driven out by the sexism and self-absorbed personalities of the men in her life.
Similar things happen to the protagonist of the “Märchenprinz”. This book, set in 1980s Hamburg, tells the story of a woman falling in love with a man from the environmental movement, an important part of the left in 1980s Germany. He proposes himself, just like the central boyfriend in “Häutungen”, as a soft man, something both protagonists desperately desire. But, just like in “Häutungen”, the boyfriend does not commit. He plays fast and loose, communicates badly, cheats on her; in short, he is a bad boyfriend. Our protagonist, just like in “Häutungen,” withdraws from her leftist social circles into a self-chosen isolation as a result of these experiences.
Both books tell the story of men/masculinities who are “new”: soft masculinities, certainly thinking of themselves as aspiring towards similar ideals Day proposes. But they also, maybe more importantly, tell the story of the subordination of women: the role of masculinity, even in its “softest” versions, driving them out of their relationships, and, more importantly, out of their and our movements. This is the worst case. Alienating women will weaken our position and our organizations, which should be our immediate priority. The proposal of a new masculinity gives both men and women a poisoned promise: you can have your cake and eat it too. But you cannot have a positive relation towards a category that is in structure based on the subordination of an Other, while also fighting against this subordination. The promise of a reformed masculinity is that everything stays the way it is—it just gets a new coat of paint: you can keep the old ways, while just being a bit more gentle about it.
Deserters of the war on women
However, we should not be dismissive of the desire for a new path for men. Their struggles are certainly evident, and, as Day correctly states, we as socialists building a new future must have an answer for them. But what is it we need to offer the men struggling within our society if we don’t just want to offer the same old? The problems men face in our society, of an uncertain economic future, unfulfilled lives, and increasing loneliness, are either directly rooted in the economy or downstream of it. They cannot be solved by a similar re-gendering as the far-right proposes.
Communists need to offer a rigorous analysis of the issues of our times. We need a program that goes beyond the mere reforms of social democracy but which does not just gesture towards an abolition of capitalism vaguely. A good program describes the way we can take power, and shows the working men a way out of their misery while inspiring them to fight with us, united as a class. This is the only means to bring men out of their myopia and misogyny as well as being a genuinely sustainable solution to the issues men face.
Regarding gender, there is one further path hidden between the lines of the writings of Connell. Because masculinity is a "pyramid"—it depends on the constant struggle for a subordinate masculinity to rise to the top and captures all men with the passive benefit of the "patriarchal dividend" – the only way to dismantle it is through defection. In this time of the multi-crisis, the far-right has turned the Cold War on women into a hot one. It is winning recruits among the hopeless young men who want to secure their place in a hierarchy that ultimately will eat them alive. The path forward is the path of defectors of the war itself and the saboteurs of the war effort, those who will actively aid the subjugated and build a counter-movement. This will be, at this point, a small minority of men. As allies, they can build a new tomorrow.We as a Left need to offer a safe haven for those who intend to desert, who want a more equal world, and who want not just to cling to the identities of yesterday but to build those of tomorrow. By betraying masculinity, refusing to embrace differentiation from the Other, and becoming equals, they will cease to be men, as we understand them. They will become something much more important.
They will become comrades.
