Parasocial Masculinity

Second political post in a row, I shall find something obscure and philosophical to kvetch about next I promise. In any case, today I'll offer some observations and plea for my fellow soft-handed intelligentsia men to maybe chill a bit.


Here is a phenomenon I have seen a lot of. Men doing some sort of intelligentsia job - in academia, in media, in the vaguely defined world of NGOs and staffers and aides that surrounds houses of power - get really enthusiastic about other men who display certain markers of masculinity. Those markers are the ones typically associated with what-they-imagine-to-be working class cultural signifiers. So among the more innocent of these are being well-muscled or at least having a physique that suggests they could do regular difficult physical labour; being somewhat gruff or blunt in tone or affect; eschewing highly elaborate theoretical modes of speech or explanation when called to account for things. And among the less innocent include: a certain heterosexual sexual braggadocio and associated disregard for women’s welfare, status, or agency; an impatience with etiquette or moral norms, especially those considered newfangled or woke, that might prohibit things like slurs or casual bigotry against disfavoured ethnic or sexual minorities; a taste for violence and willingness to threaten or deploy it at relatively light provocation. Call this the Burly Masculinity Archetype.

Among the concrete specific men I have seen garner fandoms among specific subsets of intelligentsia men in this regard are - the American politicians Graham Platner and John Fetterman, and even (albeit typically in a more tortured and wish-casting-he-was-a-bit-different-way) Donald Trump. We can also see it with entertainment figures such as the podcasters Joe Rogan and Hasan Piker, or the brief enthusiasm for the bloke who sang Rich Men North of Richmond. In fact it was also in a somewhat-but-not-entirely-similar vein that Russell Brand was once garnering some support along these lines. And in a more generic less concrete way one can clearly recognise something like this in the way that certain UK Labourites will talk about “hero voters” or who they imagine people in former-mining communities to be, or the way US politicos will discuss the mythical figure of Joe The Plumber or US journalists will occasionally make pilgrimage to random truckers in Ohio diners as the font of all political wisdom. At least in the real cases these concrete exemplars rarely match literally all of the features of ideal Burly Masculinity Archetype, but it seems true to me that by exhibiting enough of them you can reliably get a subset of intelligentsia men to Stan for you.

I think this phenomenon is sometimes disastrous and always embarrassing. Disastrous because even the more innocent of the traits involved are ethically neutral at best. Sure there are some perfectly nice chaps who happen to be burly and plain spoken, but there are equally nice loquacious dandies. Selecting for the former over the latter in how you decide who to befriend and esteem is at best arbitrary. But actually it is worse than that, because it often seems that the thrill of vicarious social transgression against stifling bourgeois norms is what most attracts intelligentsia men to the Burly Masculinity Archetype. Which means that it’s often swaggering cruelty to women or the joys of (thankfully, usually, imagined) violence against their enemies that is really driving the admiration. On a personal level it just flat out makes you a worse person to look up to this latter sort of thing, and to whatever degree you emulate your heroes in these regards you are thereby corrupted. And in a true case of the personal and the political being thoroughly intertwined, the sort of spaces you make of your environment will thereby select for insecure and somewhat reactionary young men and, well, I just don’t think collections of insecure reactionary men reliably generate good political movements. And if we are to judge a tree by its fruits… then… welp. Quite.

But even when it is not quite so politically pernicious it is always, invariably, utterly cringe. It is always, always, incredibly obvious that driving such support is some sense that the Burly Masculinity Archetype represents a kind of authentic volk masculinity that the enthusiast themselves falls painfully short of. And by being so clear this is what is going on it of course only highlights the differences, renders them more salient. (Which, I am sure, so far as the enthusiast is aware of this dynamic itself drives further insecurity, feeding the cycle.) Because these enthusiasms are always, from the outside, incredibly obvious attempts to manage a felt inadequacy they end up feeling something like the intellectual equivalent of a recently divorced middle aged man getting a sports car. And, to emphasise; it never works, it never ever makes the person seem more in touch with the Real Men they aspire to, it always in fact only highlights the obvious differences and (perceived) deficiencies that would make you think you have to pretend to like this stuff. Men who are secure in themselves don’t pretend that a Nazi tattoo is just something any normal lad might get on a lark that no one could seriously object to. It’s only if you are so desperately afraid that one’s own judgements are inauthentic and out of touch and taking wild guesses at what The True Volk care about that you claim that a wee bit of Naziism is no big deal. In the end it’s just like how the bully’s threatening aura never really transfers to the sniggering little snivelling wretch who follows him round acting as a yes-man. Masculinity just doesn’t work like that; for good or bad, there’s no ersatz or parasocial version of it available to be had by proxy. 

So what are they doing? In fact, let’s be real (and get to why I am even writing this)… soft-handed male intelligentsia urbanites approaching middle age farcically dealing with the insecurities such a position might induce…. What are we doing here? Just what is going on? 

I am reminded of a different phenomenon I sometimes observe among undergrad students. A very clever but somewhat socially awkward young man finds that in the seminar room, maybe more generally in the right kinda social circles in academia, suddenly being detail orientated and logically incisive gets you to the top of the social hierarchy. No more is their intellectual capacity and enthusiasm a disreputable nerd trait for which you have to carefully manage how it is perceived socially, now it is the source of esteem, the means by which one gets one’s peers to look up to you. And they just become kinda awful. Briefly, usually. I can look upon this with kindness because it really does not usually last. But for a brief period, upon discovering this new social reality, they start to revel in Epic Put Downs and Destroying Opponents With Facts And Logic and generally displaying Mastery by confidently opining on whatever the reading or topic of the day is. Always in such a way as to make very clear that they are the smartest person in the room at all times. Obviously as a teacher one has to manage such people carefully, encourage them in their best aspects while preventing the more obnoxious behaviour from disrupting or spoiling the learning experience for others. But the very fact that it is frequent enough to require some conscious strategies for classroom management has led to me thinking about it, what causes this and what could be done about it.


And my take on that was: of the various masculine archetypes available, the sort typically valorised at the secondary school level is a fairly restricted set. So even though society more broadly has room for various ways of being highly esteemed man - being Good At Sports and being A Good Husband and Father and being a Successful Businessman and being an Intellectual Leader are all recognised ways of succeeding at masculinity which may or may not overlap - in secondary school a few of these (basically related to being confident and physically impressive) massively dominate. So, for those who fall outside those bounds, often university is a young man’s first taste of gendered-affirmation. They don’t always respond well to that because sudden changes in fortune are just per se hard to respond to with grace. And, what’s more, gendered-affirmation can be a bit of a poisoned chalice anyway from a moral perspective. Being a good man and being a good person do not overlap with sufficient reliability.

But even though I still think this is broadly correct for those students, thinking about older male intelligentsia has made me realise the limits of this explanation. Because the intelligentsia men becoming enthusiastic about exemplars of the Burly Masculinity Archetype are at an age where they should have easily grown out of that, and occupying roles where they can easily access perfectly recognisable ideals of masculinity. It’s not like our society doesn’t offer up idealised types of a man who is a gentle intellectual - think of Sting’s Englishman in New York or Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch. Even specifically in philosophy and political theory, Rawls is often remembered very fondly precisely for being This Kinda Guy! So I do not think it is sheer lack of available gender ideals or unfamiliarity with the possibility of being esteemed for anything other than the Burly Masculinity Archetype that is driving this behaviour. So it would be naive to think that simply making available less noxious notions of masculinity will solve the issue. Even when men have alternatives available they still seem to pick an unusually perverse ideal. Why is that?

Well, the Augustinian in me can’t help but suspect it is because Burly Masculinity Archetype valorises obviously immoral behaviour that it is able to so consistently garner support from men like me. It is not just the thrill of transgression against local norms, but specifically because those particular norms are obviously moral that men like me look for some excuse to violate them. Parasocial masculinity with the Burly Masculinity Archetype allows us to tap into a socially valorised excuse to simply be awful. Indeed something about masculinity makes men feel actively worse about ourselves if we are not being awful. I can’t really say why this is, why men are liable to feel insecure if we do not exhibit masculine ideals that specifically induce morally outrageous behaviour, though I am sure if I read enough feminist theory there will be plenty of explanations available to me since I do not think these observations are especially original. (For what it’s worth I think I am unusual in basically thinking that Pateman’s Sexual Contract is a pretty good basis for a descriptive theory of how a lot of male socialisation works even where I disagree with her on a lot of the details, so I think we should start there. I also suspect, and here I would like to thank my student Zoé Barret for suggesting this to me, that there are many men who see moral restraint as an intrinsically feminised constraint, “HR lady politics”, and thus identify masculine autonomy with id-indulging boisterous immorality.) But for whatever reason, it means that even men, such as male intelligentsia, who have available forms of gendered validation are liable to feel inauthentic or insecure unless we are specifically one of the kinds of man who would do bad things and brag about it. Somehow such men are more manly, greater expressions of a masculine ideal than more gentle counterparts. And we feel this even if we are too squeamish (which of course in this context is admirable and appropriate!) to actually live out the immoral fantasies ourselves. As I said above, I don’t think it actually works - I don’t think that rhetorically associating oneself with the Burly Masculinity Archetype actually suffices to make the male intelligentsia less insecure. But I think people hope it does, or at least I suspect as much, and think that if this is so it explains why there is a persistent vein of support for it among men like me.

The availability of the Burly Masculinity Archetype provides valorisation of obviously awful behaviour, and via its imagined aesthetic coding as working class even lets the generally leftist-inclined urbanite intelligentsia feel egalitarian in so esteeming it. It squares the circle, permitting obviously awful behaviour without requiring one admit of oneself that one is awful. Masculinity seen as such is best understood as a temptation. Even when one has available positive male ideals (being a good husband is a clearly gendered ideal and one of my most cherished aspirations) something about the social role of masculinity apparently produces a constant pressure towards endorsing much of what is worst in human nature. Through such masculinity we come to love our own errors—not that for which we err, but the errors themselves.