Masculinity Trap

White men are perpetually trying to chase a sense of masculinity they wrote themselves out of when they decided that everyone else’s expression of said masculinity was either brutish or effeminate.

Let me explain.

I read “RFK Jr. Vs. the animal Kingdom” by Erin Vanderhoof over at Vanity Fair and it got me thinking of all those “how to be a man” boot camps that men have been paying for. If you don’t know what they are, they’re basically summer camp style retreats where men who need to “restore their masculinity” go to crawl in the mud, sleep in the dirt, and get yelled at by a beefy dude in hopes that said beefy dude will be their guide back to masculinity.

I’m not going to summarize the article itself since it’s pretty much a rundown of RFK junior’s animal obsession, but what I did find interesting is that it reminds us that this man is an enemy of settled science. And sometimes when he speaks, you can kind of hear that he may believe that this distrust of modern medicine is synonymous with a rugged manliness that men like him are constantly chasing.

Now, imagine if any national leader in the global south was spearheading an anti-modern medicine campaign. Would they not be classified as uncivilized, uneducated, or whatever alarming dog whistle they can find to ridicule them? It feels like men who carry around this sense of shame toward their masculinity often idealize the very things they bring up as signs that a certain group of people are “backward.” They make fun of Africans for things like living in huts, but are literally paying beefy men thousands of dollars to yell and torture them in the wilderness, hoping that they will eventually submit to masculinity.

This is like that trashy if you’re poor, classify is you’re rich meme. White men especially often get away with idealizing a sense of barbarism because they are insecure about their masculinity. And then fabricate conditions that will help them “return” to the same ruggedness they vilify. In their minds, they have assigned Black men the highest position on the masculinity totem pole and are making desperate attempts to reclassify themselves as the pillars of said masculinity. I find this hilarious because it was them who assigned everyone else the label of brutes in some cases, like with African men, and effeminate in other cases, like with Asian men.

This all goes to show that racism is a pathogen that convinces you to hate the things you actually crave. Things that may and likely will liberate you. That’s why whiteness will also always seek to borrow and steel from others, because it has always defined itself as being separate from everyone else, therefore dependent on everyone else’s existence. In a sense, whiteness trapped itself into oppression while the rest of us are learning to live free again without it.

Thank you for making it this far. Holding your time and attention means a lot to me. I invite you to stay if you’re open to receiving whatever I can give. — [ana]

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