After Las Vegas, We STILL Need To Talk About The Dysfunctions Of White Masculinity

The movie Targets from 1968 may be the most prophetic in history

Sunday night I was thinking to myself about mass shootings, and about how we live in a society whose cruelty, lack of community, and worship of empty consumerism make it fertile ground for such things once easy access to firearms is put in place. I was thinking about this specifically in terms of white men. I know so many fellow white men who are middle class and seemingly doing okay for themselves who have his inexplicable nihilism. They seem obsessed with tearing a system down that benefits them, driven by intense resentments that they can't articulate. I sensed this nihilism in some of the folks I know who voted for Trump. "At least he will shake things up!" is easy to say when you're not the one being put in front of the firing squad. 

Sunday night I was also thinking about Puerto Rico, and the cruelty of a president and a nation so indifferent to the suffering of fellow Americans. I was remembering my time in Germany, and that as many things I did not like about German society, at least there was a sense of common good. Trump is the avatar of the worst of this country, its crass materialism and solipsistic selfishness. Those values are very powerful, and it is worth noting that they resonate especially with white men.

In any case, I went to bed Sunday night, exhausted but ready to face the week. I woke up Monday and immediately saw a news alert about Las Vegas. It freaked me out a little that I seemed to have had a premonition the night before. This shooting is, of course, the result of America failing to face many of its problems. One of the biggest is the dysfunction of white masculinity. I wrote the following essay in 2012 after Newtown. I am posting it again because every single word is just as relevant now as it was then.

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Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.

Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.

Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.

Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did. 

The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.

We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.

Obama, Biden, Trump, Pence, and Masculinity

Watching president Obama's farewell address last week I was struck, after a year of hearing Trump's bloviating, at how he has always performed a very positive version of masculinity. For eight years boys around this country have had a great example of how to be a man. Obama has allowed himself to feel emotion in public, perhaps most famously during his speech after Sandy Hook. He showed similar emotion last week when talking about Michelle, his obvious respect and love were displayed for all to see. This was a man in a relationship of equals, not the usual politician with the smiling, prop wife. While Joe Biden still has a lot of his generation's male bravado and, well, handsy-ness, he has also displayed a similar relationship with Jill. And speaking of Biden, he and Obama have an obviously deep connection to each other. This is part of a positive masculinity where men can be emotionally vulnerable and honest with each other.

President Obama has also modeled how to confront one's enemies without resorting to aggression and anger. He has used humor many times, including in response to Trump's birther allegations. He does not engage in the kind of dick swinging that practically ever other president in my lifetime indulged in. I am thinking here of Reagan's "joke" about ordering the missiles to be fired at the Soviet Union, George HW Bush's TV attack on Bob Dole to counter his "whimpiness," or the innumerable examples of George W Bush swaggering like a two-bit cowboy ("smoke 'em out of their caves," "ride herd," "watch this drive," etc.)  Obama is what you could call a savvy nerd when it comes to his masculinity, the thing I basically aspire to be.

With Trump and Pence taking the White House, we are seeing two very different models of masculinity. Let's start with Pence, since he's the easier one. He represents patriarch masculinity. This kind of masculinity, usually wedded to religion and nostalgic and inaccurate views of the past, sees men as the unchallenged head of the family and leaders of society. They are there to protect women and children, but in a relationship that is hierarchical. This type of masculinity is also tied together with a painfully serious affect, as if nothing is ever to be a laughing matter. I know a lot of men who subscribe to this kind of masculinity back home, and they are almost always insufferable.

This type of masculinity, as limiting and toxic as it can be, is not nearly as poisonous as Trump's masculinity. Almost all the strains of negative masculinity are contained in his personality. As is usually the case, this wretched personality was fed by the manure of paternal neglect. With a loving father Trump may have just become a garden variety asshole, but by craving his father's never present approval, he (with all the money he had as an assist) went into full blown megalomania.

Trump does not have Pence's pretense of protecting women, home, and family. He has an obvious contempt for women, something clear to see even before the Access Hollywood tape came out. As I have written before, his version of masculinity sees women as beings to be conquered, controlled, and displayed, all the while being feared. But his attitude towards other men also betrays his toxic masculinity. He does not appear to have any close male friends. He is incapable of having friendship, since that involves a give and take of emotional support that he simply can't muster. Other men are to be belittled and dominated. The slightest criticism of him leads to angry tweetstorms and unhinged ranting. For him anger and violence are the only tools used when confronted by opponents.

I could never imagine Trump giving the kind of heartfelt dedication to Melania that Obama did to Michelle in a million years. I could not imagine a moment between Trump and Pence like the one we saw between Biden and Obama for a million more. We have enough toxic masculinity in our society as it is, from the soft patriarchal kind to the violent, psychopathic kind as it is. We don't need it modeled (and implicitly validated) by the new occupants of the White House. It's our job to push our boys and young men to something more positive.

The Real Meaning Of "Drain The Swamp"

Let's take a break from speculating about Hillary Clinton's emails, shall we? I'd like to talk about the latest Trumpist meme: "drain the swamp." This slogan is meant to emphasize Trump's promise to go to Washington and change "politics as usual" with a slightly menacing overtone.

I hear it and get anxious. In the 1970s the German scholar Klaus Theweleit wrote a long examination of the writings of German proto-fascists, psychoanalyzing the authors. He found that they tended to subconsciously associate the leftists they hated with women, and for both used metaphors of rising tides to express their fears. The enemy was damp, wet, and threatened to drown out the "real men" of the Freikorps, who were hard and dry. It is fitting then that as David Blackbourn has shown in his research on environmental history, the Nazi occupying regime in Poland hoped to show German racial superiority over the Slavs by draining the swamps there. When I hear the cry of "drain the swamp" I hear echoes of fascist yearnings, to purge the society of all of those people deemed pollutants.

That has been at the core of the Trumpist message from day one. The Orange One started his campaign by calling for millions of people to be deported from this country. Since then he has also called for banning Muslims, who he discusses as a kind of infestation. (Disease metaphors, like swamp metaphors, set off alarm bells for me.) That depiction of Muslims as virus fits with the oldest tropes of anti-Semitism, an ideology that seems to have found a safe home in the fringes of Trumpdom. "Drain the swamp" also fits with Trump's well-known germophobia, which draws from his manifest disgust with bodily functions, especially those of women.

When attacking Megyn Kelly he famously decried "blood pouring from her whatever," obviously disgusted by menstruation. He had a similar disgusted reaction to Hillary Clinton taking a bathroom debate in one of the Democratic presidential debates. That disgust with women's bodies coupled with the desire to control and own them (which Trump most definitely has) is pretty much how Theweleit defined his subjects' outlook.

"Drain the swamp" is thus no mere slogan, it is the outward manifestation of a diseased and toxic form of fascist masculinity.

The Pathological White Masculinity Files: 4Chan and Feminists of Color

Editor's Note: After having written on this topic so many times, I am starting a series I am calling The Pathological White Masculinity Files.  Since the Newtown massacre I have kept pushing for a real, national conversation on the dysfunctions and pathologies of white American masculinity.  It's not just big events like mass shootings that show this problem, and so I plan on exploring less bloody but nonetheless horrific examples of white American masculinity at work.

In case you haven't heard, users of the 4chan site have basically admitted to creating fake Twitter profiles posing as feminists of color in order to sow discord among feminists and to embarrass the women's movement, in particular the non-white women's movement.  This included the manufactured hashtag #EndFathersDay, something that some people at Fox News actually took seriously.  Using the #YourSlipIsShowing hashtag, activists have been outing those fake Twitter profiles.

I don't know all of the details, but I do know that this is taking typical troll behavior in an even more dangerous and threatening direction.  Trolls are probably the worst thing that the internet has given us, and I have been lucky to only occasionally have been trolled.  (Those words still hurt, even if they were being lobbed by pieces of human garbage.)  Of course, I'm a white guy, and women and especially women of color commonly face violent, aggressive, threatening trolling intended to silence them that makes what's happened on this blog look like child's play.  The so-called "Operation Lollipop"attempted the same, but in a much more organized and systematic manner.  I've heard it compared to a kind of non-governmental COINTELPRO, and I think that's an apt comparison, since the FBI used agents provacateurs and informers to silence similar movements back in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the worst things about pathological white American masculinity is that it carries with it white supremacist assumptions.  Regardless of anything else, the fact that white men are to be the rulers of society is not to be challenged or questioned.  This is a big reason, naturally, why the fact of Barack Obama's presidency has caused unprecedented disrespect for the office and intransigence in Congress.  The same goes for the Internet.  The computer world has long been heavily white and very masculine, and the trolls at 4chan aim to keep it that way.  They just don't want black and brown people, and especially black and brown women, to be using "their" space.  Their upbringing and this society's assumptions about white masculinity make them feel not as if this is a terrible thing they are doing, but simply defending their birthright.

The pathologies of white masculinity are at their worst when white men feel cheated of the privileges they think are rightfully theirs.  This leads them to attack others whom they hold responsible, sometimes with words, sometimes with bullets.  Hence the actions of Elliott Rodger, who felt he was "owed" the sexual favors of women.  This pathology comes out with gunfire, but it also happens every day via rhetorical violence on the Internet.  Operation Lollipop is only one of many examples of what will be added to the Pathological White Masculinity Files.

Still Waiting For That National Conversation About White Masculinity

The death of Jordan Davis has rightly and obviously triggered discussion of racism, "stand your ground" laws, and our broken justice system.  In addition, it should also be prompting a discussion of white masculinity and its dysfunction.  Michael Dunn appeared to have been inflamed by some sort of slight to his masculine honor by black men, who also supposedly posed some kind of threat to him deserving of death.  I am having a hard time separating his easy readiness to dispatch violence in this manner from his sense of offended white masculine honor, but few out there have been commenting on this.

White American masculinity is seriously messed up.  It is based around fantasies of control, subjugating others, and using violence to solve problems.  I said as much in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook horrors, since white men disproportionately account for the perpetration of mass shootings.  These shooters are often failures who can't reconcile their inability to measure up to the expectations that white masculinity has laid out for them.

The case of Richie Incognito and his racist bullying has got me thinking about this, too.  White boys are  taught that they are the masters of the universe, and implicitly understand that they have the power and right to do violence to others to maintain their positions.  The justice system and institutionalized racism have had a lot to do with Michael Dunn's acquittal on murder charges, but the patterns of thought and lived behavior that allowed him to pull the trigger and then go about his business as if nothing happened ought to be critically examined, too.  Until we have that needed national conversation and start acting upon it, more will die.

It's Time to Talk About the Dysfunctions of White American Masculinity

Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.

Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.

Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.

Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did.

The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.

We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.