Masculinity and the Ruling of the World

Denise Thompson

• Publisher: Denise Thompson
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648803614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Masculinity and the Ruling of the World argues that there is a world-wide culture of masculinity that breeds arrogant dissociated men who are the prime culprits in the depredations that have brought humanity to its present grievous condition. The argument is that male domination not only oppresses women, it distorts the whole of the social world. At the same time, the book argues that male supremacy is not the whole of the social world. There is also something that might be called ‘genuine humanity’, which provides a life-affirming force that resists the impositions and seductions of male supremacy. Five institutions are used to illustrate some of the ways in which male domination permeates the social world, institutions rarely, if ever, considered in terms of masculinity—capitalism, fascism, surrogacy, transsexualism and US ‘welfare reform’. All these institutions are interpreted in terms of their dissociation and arrogant male entitlement, even though at first sight they may appear to have little or nothing in common. This interpretation brings a new perspective to bear on the phenomenon of male supremacy and seeks to challenge the ideological subterfuges that maintain it. While it owes a debt to the many feminist writers that came before, by focusing on the system that does the oppressing the book undertakes to advance the feminist project that saw a resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chapter One: Introduction

We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people”—a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world (Chomsky, 2016).

There is something wrong with men—something obviously, undeniably, tragically wrong … the dictates of masculinity in their most concentrated form: Demand what you want. Use violence to take it. Destroy what you can’t have. This is the ideology of manhood … The liberal notion of “healthy” masculinity is either a distraction, or a lie. It can be ahistorical and meaningless, by turning masculinity into an empty term indistinguishable from “decent human,” or it can be a benign patriarchy that confirms the sex stratification at the heart of male power. But what it cannot be is an effective antidote to the militarized psychology of domination that drives male atrocities from mass shootings to genocide’ (Mix, 2016).

That the world is in a parlous state is well known (except by those in denial). Global warming is destroying the biosphere and inequality has reached unprecedented proportions. Men’s wars never cease; somewhere in the world there are always men killing each other en masse, along with any women and children within reach. Pornography has become mainstream, prostitution has come to be seen as just a job of work, and women and children are still being trafficked and enslaved to gratify men’s sexual desires and nobody seems to be able to stop it. Capitalist greed has wrecked national economies, deprived the home countries of the much-vaunted ‘jobs’ by taking them offshore, destroyed people’s livelihoods, impoverished billions while amassing obscene accumulations of wealth in the hands of the few, and now poses grave threats to the environment of all of us. The legacies of colonialism and the continued rapacious depredations of multinational corporations have devastated the Third World,¹ destroying the environment and entrenching poverty, and given rise to some of the vilest dictators the world has ever seen.

There are those who argue that things are improving. One commentator (Matthews, 2015), for example, gives us 26 reasons why ‘the world is getting much, much better’. There are falls in rates of maternal and infant mortality, increases in literacy, education and life expectancy, and reductions in rates of violent crime worldwide (including in the US). However, some of his claims of improvement are debatable. For example, he says that the incidence of violent crime against women has fallen, but it is not clear how he or anyone else knows that. One of his references for the decline in violence is Steven Pinker’s 2010 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In that book, Pinker says that ‘the women’s-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence of rape and the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends’ (Pinker, 2011). But until very recently, rape and the beating and killing of women by men in the privacy of their own homes was acceptable and nobody noticed, much less counted, not even when he killed her; and there was no notion of marital rape. Before the advent of the women’s movement, women’s injuries and deaths at the hands of men were not seen as a demographic fact and hence would not have appeared in official statistics. Thus there is no ‘before’ data with which to compare current figures.

To give another example, he says that ‘more and more countries are democracies’, but the actual policies and practices of so-called ‘democratic’ governments are anything but democratic. They routinely support powerful vested interests against the common good, gerrymander elections, ignore people’s protests, and rarely if ever consult with their constituencies. And then there is the oft-repeated claim that ‘extreme poverty has fallen’. As I argue later (in chapter 8), this claim is suspect because the criterion used to measure extreme poverty—‘the share of the world population living on less than is $1.25-a-day’—is meaningless. Moreover, he barely mentions global warming before hurrying on to say that it is getting cheaper to produce solar panels, and doesn’t mention pollution or environmental destruction at all.

But whether or not things are improving (and global warming, depletion of the earth’s resources and wild places, the resurgence of the rabid right wing, and the increasing belligerence and technological sophistication of the US war machine suggest otherwise), there are worldwide movements of resistance with a global awareness of the problems and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to solve them. Inspired by what I have termed ‘genuine humanity’ which works for the common good, that awareness has had little impact on the ruling elites—whether governments or corporations—who have the power to mend matters. But it does exist and we are not all going meekly to the slaughter.

There are many critiques of this state of affairs, the most relevant of which is the critique of neo-liberalism and the capitalist economy it serves to justify. I agree with these critiques (as far as they go), but I would add that behind the governmentality of neo-liberalism lies masculinity. The reality Chomsky refers to (above)—‘bitter and incessant class war’ waged by the ‘masters of mankind’ against everyone else—is what passes for normal. As normality, the fact that it is a war, and one waged by the powerful against the powerless must be denied. It must be called something else: ‘the market’ perhaps, or ‘freedom’, or, because the effects of that war are too obvious to be denied completely, ‘inequality’; and it must be purveyed as though it were in the interests of all: ‘jobs and growth’ perhaps.² What Chomsky did not acknowledge, although it is implicit in his terminology (‘masters of mankind’), is that the war against humanity is being waged by men made arrogant by the kind of masculinity needed to maintain the culture of domination that has brought us all to this point. That masculinity is characterised by an overweening sense of entitlement and an insane dissociation from humanity, their own as well as anyone else’s. As a cultural imperative, that masculinity can be resisted. But resistance needs to start by challenging the denial that disguises the true nature of the problem.

It is that denial I want to challenge in this present work, by excavating commonly-held beliefs about the way the world is, in order to expose them as justifications for male tyranny. The primary denial is the silence about the existence of male domination.³ For it is men who are destroying the earth. No, not all men, and perhaps not even most men, and some men are valiantly trying to halt the destruction. Men, after all, do have a choice. But, as Jonah Mix points out (see above), there is something about a certain sort of masculinity that, at the very least, is heedless of the wilfully-caused destruction, at worst, glories in it. That ‘something’, I suggest, is a dissociated and arrogant sense of entitlement working for the perceived benefit of (some) men (aided by the women who also embrace the system of male supremacy) at the expense of the rest of us.

I agree that the current desperate state of the world is a consequence of the standard operating procedures of the capitalist economic system. For that reason, I discuss capitalism at some length (in chapters 5 to 11), arguing that capitalism is the modern form of male domination and clearly displays its arrogance and dissociation. As well, I discuss another four institutions to illustrate dissociated masculine entitlement in action—fascism, surrogacy, transsexualism and US ‘welfare reform’. This is a disparate grouping, and at first sight it might seem that they have nothing in common. I argue, however, that what they have in common is a culture of masculinity that operates to privilege men at the expense, not only of women, but of humanity as a whole. In other words, male supremacy is bad for men too because it is dehumanising. But apart from capitalism as the current form of male power, there is no particular reason why I chose these other four institutions rather than any others to illustrate the prevalence of masculinity throughout culture and society. Institutionalised masculinity is everywhere. I could have chosen any number of other examples that are more obviously characteristic of male supremacy, such as the widespread occurrence of outright male violence against women, for example, or militarism, or US gun culture, or the rise and rise of neo-liberal governance and the right wing worldwide, or rape, or child sexual abuse, or pornography and prostitution and paedophilia and their acceptance into the malestream.⁴

I do have something to say about these issues, but I do not discuss them at any length because they have already been extensively criticised. The feminist critiques do not attribute the genesis of these phenomena to masculinity’s dissociation and arrogant entitlement, but they do identify men as the perpetrators. In contrast, the five institutions I discuss have rarely, if ever, been linked to male entitlement and dehumanised dissociation. There is a mainstream critique of fascism as an extreme form of masculinity (see chapter 12); there is also a feminist critique of surrogacy and transsexualism as male entitlement (see chapters 13 and 14); and US ‘welfare reform’ has been extensively criticised for its effects on poor women and children (see chapters 15-19) (although not in terms of the masculinity of its framers). But capitalism has not to my knowledge been addressed as a culture of masculinity. However, all five, I hope to show, more or less avidly embrace the meanings and values of masculinity, namely, dissociation from a common humanity by way of an overweening entitlement on the part of powerful men and concomitant disentitlement for those defined as less than human and either exploited or excluded from human rights altogether. Moreover, all are particularly pertinent at this point in time. Capitalism has created a level of inequality that threatens the very existence of society. Surrogacy and transsexualism are recent phenomena, products of two of male supremacy’s more triumphant confidence tricks: a neo-liberalism that reduces people to nothing but commodities, and a post-structuralism that sneers at notions of humanity, reality and truth. Fascism is always with us and it is rearing its ugly head again in many countries, especially the US. And so-called ‘welfare reform’ in the US is one of the most spiteful pieces of victim-blaming to be found in the Western world, devised by powerful men and imposed on economically powerless women. Its viciousness is surpassed only by the US military industrial complex, which kills women and children directly, rather than through the indirect method of starvation and exclusion from health care. In the case of ‘welfare’, there is nothing left for the Trump administration to do. The US has a ‘welfare’ system in name only; the reality has already gone.

What I have to say here follows on from what I have already written about male domination, but it also postulates another reality existing alongside the male supremacist world, a genuinely human one that is a source of resistance to male domination. The notion of the ‘genuinely human’ is intended as a contrast to the dehumanisation of male supremacy, and as an acknowledgement that male domination can be challenged and resisted (see chapter 3).

Both personal and political

This present project is an attempt to theorise a feminist personal-political account of male domination, using a feminist focus to identify the sex-specific nature of social arrangements largely presented as gender-neutral.

The personal aspect involves a character structure by, for and about men, that both advantages men and creates the kind of men who believe they are entitled to all that the system promises them. One striking example of this personal aspect is Donald Trump (and the henchmen he surrounds himself with, including the women), brought to the world’s attention during the 2016 US presidential campaign and his subsequent election to the US presidency. Other examples (discussed in subsequent chapters) are the men who generate and profit from capitalism’s wealth accumulation, fascist men, those who exploit women’s bodies in the surrogacy industry, those who embrace the transsexual agenda to obliterate the category of ‘women’, and the right-wing men in the US Congress responsible for ‘welfare reform’.

The personal aspect also involves resistance. Domination is hegemonic as well as violent, i.e. it operates most efficiently to the extent that people ‘consent’ to its social arrangements (Chomsky, 1988). That ‘consent’ is elicited and managed through the meanings and values through which we come to understand the world. But if we can consent, we can also refuse and resist, even though that resistance might amount to no more than a reluctance to engage with what we are forced to be complicit with. For male supremacy is not the whole of social life. The more men are influenced by the genuine humanity of the common good, the less these personality characteristics hold sway. Humanised, such characteristics transmute into ordinary detachment and justified entitlement. Detachment is not pathologically oppressive—sometimes it’s simply the most appropriate response for both sexes. And there are certain entitlements we all share simply because we’re human. Nonetheless, the misogyny, dissociation and arrogant entitlement characteristic of male supremacist men is a cultural norm, far more widespread than the individuals who are its most brutal exemplars.

My primary concern here, then, is the political aspect, or more precisely the institutional aspect, of the system of male domination. Although it is men who are threatening life on the planet, it is not men as such but those men who embrace the meanings and values of male supremacy as their own (aided by the few token women who are allowed into the boys’ games as long as they play by the boys’ rules). I am not talking about what masculinity is (full stop), but about what masculinity is when it serves the purposes of male domination. I am using it in the sense alluded to by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, when she said: ‘I use both of these terms [feminine and masculine] to refer to roles/stereotypes/sets of characteristics which are essentially distorted and destructive’ (Daly, 1978: 26). Or as Gena Corea (1985: 4) put it: ‘When I write the word “men” in this book, I am writing about some individuals, but also about the institution of masculinist politics, about men as a social category and dominant class’.

So the masculinity I am talking about is both the character structure required of men under conditions of male supremacy, and a cultural imperative of meanings and values comprising an institutional framework for organising the social world of all of us in the interests of the powerful. My emphasis on the cultural (see chapter 3) is intended to avoid individualising⁵ masculinity in any sense that implies that it originates in something inherent in male individuals. This tendency to see anything said about people in individualistic terms elides the social aspects of what it is to be human. Seeing masculinity as simply a characteristic of individuals identified as ‘men’ tends to understate the extent of the problem, even when those characteristics are acknowledged to originate with male supremacy. One cannot, for example, avoid this masculinity by avoiding interpersonal interactions with men, or, in the case of men, avoiding its worst manifestations, although that is a necessary part of any resistance. As meaning and value, that is, as culture, masculinity permeates the social world throughout, structuring institutions, creating the world-taken-for-granted, and presenting itself as a harmless ‘difference’ while disguising its true nature as the prerogative of men made powerful by a system whose reason for existence is to do exactly that.

I am talking about ‘masculinity’ in two senses—as a personality characteristic demanded of men by male domination, and as a cultural imperative structuring the everyday lives of all of us. I am saying that the male supremacist culture I call ‘masculinity’ is embedded within individuals (within men, but also within women although differently, to the extent that either sex subscribes to its meanings and values), an embedding that takes the form of such ‘subjective’ phenomena as ideas, feelings, emotions, understandings, etc. In saying that, I am saying that we are creatures of our social environment in a quite literal sense, in that the way we understand the world is created within us by the society into which we are born (just as the language we speak is). But my use of the term ‘masculinity’ is not confined to male individuals. I am more concerned with its institutionalisation, its imperative of dissociation and unwarranted entitlement that structures the moral and political environment and gives meaning to the social world. With the concept of ‘genuine humanity’, however, I am also saying that we are not only male supremacy’s creatures, that we do have choices.

In making these distinctions, I am not suggesting that my usage is correct and other usages are wrong. I am merely clarifying the way I use the word in this present work. ‘Masculinity’ meaning simply ‘ways of being a man’ without further qualification is the most widely accepted usage, and it will continue to be so, but that is not the meaning I am using. My usage is admittedly idiosyncratic. It is intended to go beyond the everyday usage by identifying male domination as the meaning both of personality characteristics and of institutions; at the same time it remains connected to that everyday usage by using the same term, because male domination is not something other than the everyday, but permeates the mundane existence of all of us.

The ‘masculinities’ literature

It might be assumed that the place to look for an account of masculinity is the literature on ‘masculinities’, but I have found this literature unhelpful for my purposes. Much of it does acknowledge male domination, but the focu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: A Question of Culture
• Chapter Three: Domination and its Other
• Chapter Four: Entitlement and Dissociation
• Chapter Five: Capitalism
• Chapter Six: Capitalism’s Origins
• Chapter Seven: Capitalism and Inequality
• Chapter Eight: Capitalism and Poverty
• Chapter Nine: Finance Capital
• Chapter Ten: On Money
• Chapter Eleven: Capitalism Redeemed?
• Chapter Twelve: Fascism
• Chapter Thirteen: Surrogacy
• Chapter Fourteen: Transsexualism
• Chapter Fifteen: US ‘Welfare Reform’
• Chapter Sixteen: PRWORA’s Innovations
• Chapter Seventeen: PRWORA’s Precursors
• Chapter Eighteen: Poverty and ‘Welfare Reform’
• Chapter Nineteen: Research or ‘Data Be Damned’
• Chapter Twenty: Conclusion
• Epilogue
• References
• Index