The Self-Made Man
As Charles Taylor notes, personal autonomy is central to understanding cultural notions of selfhood and respect in the West.[1] This well-hewn point stands in contrast to a key insight of feminist critical theory, that is, that masculinity is only meaningful in relation to categories it claims to exclude—the feminine, the childlike.[2] A brief overview of the course of post-Revolutionary American cultural history shows that this purported binary has been anything but stable.
The roots of masculine self-performance in the United States can be traced to the Puritanical colonies of New England, wherein “the thickness and density of social networks made words into a kind of currency: a measure of character, a barometer of community membership, and, not least, a vital component of gender identity”[3]. The budding entrepreneurs of New England had to depend on “juggling existing languages of masculinity and gender according to the tactical requirements of preserving or earning the trust of other men.”[4] Such insight on pre-Revolutionary social relationships speaks to an experience of settler-colonies, wherein the tendency to form community must not only contend against forces of geographic and genealogical estrangement; it actively structures its affinities through a shared condition of existential homelessness.[5] The American experience of such ‘thrownness’[6], in turn, would foster the rise of associationism and fraternities which Alexis de Tocqueville had ambivalently noted as products of American democracy as early as 1835.[7]
Yet at the threshold of the Republican era, another aspect of the formative contradictions of 18th Century social structure in the colonies rested on the relationship between gender identity and political community, defined as a revolutionary program of decolonization. In the absence of a British-style social structure—whose class-system provides explicit norms and networks of socialization—came a concern with personal reputation and the qualifications for validating such reputation. Without explicitly codified institutions by which to assert such personal qualities, identity and virtue came to be anchored through the strengthening of gender stereotypes: “[men] frequently triangulated their position with reference to a heavily symbolized femininity… violated, weeping victims and harpies. These images were the negative counterparts of the good merchant and so helped define him” (Ditz 54). The counterpoint to such fetishism of reputation was, of course, the accusation of duplicity: a predatory rapaciousness attributed to ‘confidence men’ and those whose business dealings went awry. These fears were articulated according to Gothic metaphors of the possessed body, which themselves turned on assumptions of the ‘nature’ of gender: “The image of the harpy, embodying restless, predatory passion, suggests a carnivalesque transgression of the boundaries that conventionally associated potency with virility” (Ditz 60). This American predicament—a tradition of fetishizing reputation despite quintessentially fluid social ties—recalls the insights of postcolonial social theorists who sought to understand an analogous problem: the assertion of identity after, and on the grounds of, the post-revolutionary ruins of Empire.[8] But the production of a scapegoat to resolve the contradictions in social structure can only be a transient and ultimately unsatisfactory solution. Moreover, the problem of identity is simply transposed into a different register: if masculinity is articulated by the projection of gender polarity, yet these same voluble men must continuously distance themselves from the menacing specter that homosociality (the male-male relations within which gender stereotypes are circulated) becomes confused with homosexuality. As Ditz writes, “the problem was to distinguish servile, effeminate supplication from honorable, manly mutual service and connections” (72).
At the same time, this division between inner and outer personality, coupled to the notion of a ‘performing’ or theatrical self, prepares the epistemic ground for the flourishing of modernist understandings of selfhood and psychoanalytic attempts to realign the two sides according to the repressive hypothesis, as would happen within the emergent biopolitical regimes of knowledge of the 19th Century and their new relations of industrial production. With the rise of factories of mass-production, the demographic shifts from rural farms to urban centers, and the swelling of the ranks of a semi-skilled bureaucracy, norms of gender identity were open to unprecedented contestation. Typically modern fears over the effects of urbanism would replace community by depersonalized, transient, and thus immoral forms of connectivity were widespread: “Country boys, new to commerce, new to the cities…it was feared they felt few loyalties…They ate in restaurants, drank in saloons, sought sex in irregular alliances. …They were at one and the same time frightened and frightening figures”.[9] A bourgeois discourse of urban management arose in order to typify the civil from the unruly mob. Exemplified by aristocratic European social scientists such as Gustav le Bon, it relied on sociological measures of deviance deployed to regulate crime and immigration. In its effect on understandings of gender, however, this moral evaluation of behavior took reactionary form as a defense of class privileges via attempts to sequester women, under ideologies such as the Myth of True Womanhood: “Cleanliness, temperance, and frugality became indistinguishable from godliness. Monogamous and reproductive sexuality emerged as the only ‘natural’ form of sexual expression. Women’s biology dictated a homebound maternal role for women” (Smith-Rosenberg 87).
Yet the process of propriety—of marking and excluding individuals according to valuations of character—was a fitful one. It instilled the very need for alterity in the social body that it sought to exclude, offering through its rigidifying ideal-typologies a political platform for social movements that disrupted 19th Century civil society—dissenting groups such as the Shakers, Mormons, and Oneida Perfectionists. More pointedly, it framed insecurity at the heart of the social construction of a bourgeois male experience that sought to authorize itself as transcendent. As Michael Messner remarks,
“Changes in work and family life brought on by modernization led to ‘fears of social feminization’, especially among middle-class men. …Masculinist responses to men’s fears of social feminization resulted in men’s creation of (or in the case of the military, attraction to existing) homosocial institutions in which adult men, separated from women, could engage in ‘masculine’ activities, often centered around the development and celebration of physical strength, competition, and violence”.[10]
In other words, the fracturing of community under the developing forces of capitalism would produce a swerve not just in regimes of entertainment and popular mythology, but also in forms of civil society and associationism that would seek to frame new standards of gender identity. This manifested in the anti-ritualism of the Second Great Awakening, whose leaders would espouse a form of Protestantism that merged ever more closely to the demands of self-management under the class ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, as Smith-Rosenberg notes in the theology of revivalist Charles Finney: “Salvation, no longer the gift of an arbitrary God, had become the ‘business’ of men. Finney’s new saint was the self-reliant individual…To this doctrine of optimism, goal orientation, and self-reliance, Finney added a psychology of delayed satisfaction and control” (153). In the light of feminist New Historicist research, such ideologies can also be seen as linking devices—between the obsolete form of the rural-patriarchal family and new forms of women’s independence that would emerge in the late-19th Century (characteristic of the ‘new bourgeois woman’, Smith-Rosenberg 175)—that would seek to buttress a threatened sense of masculinity in flux.
Fears of emasculation through immoral forms of urbanism, then, were counteracted by the production of semi-private enclaves. Yet here, too, was a rub; socializing experiences for male character-building were compromised by precisely those urban experiences of consumerism (and consequent fears of masculine vitiation) that seemed to compromise the desired standard of autonomy as a guarantee for masculine gender identity.[11] The resolution of this contradiction itself took shape—and temporary resolution—through those very same forms of modern consumption that seemed to portend ‘emasculation’. It took shared narrative form in newspaper serials,[12] for instance, in the popular mythology of figures such as Davy Crockett—unruly youth, cannibal, and wild man of the Western frontier. As Smith-Rosenberg remarks on the popularity of this archetype in Jacksonian America,
“At the very time that the Crockett myth praised the young man beyond institutional boundaries, formal institutions, indeed state institutions, had increasingly begun to replace the informal and domestic modes of social control which had characterized traditional 18th Century society. America had never been so mythically free and so actually institutionalized” (108).
Shifting standards of masculine self-understanding would be more explicitly challenged in the later 19th Century, in the form of emergent gender-based activism in civil society. Newfound access to capital and urban independence characterized the emergent bourgeois woman, as in turn,
“the second generation of New Women fused their challenge of gender conventions with a repudiation of bourgeois sexual norms. They fought not in the name of a higher female virtue…but for absolute equality. They wished to be as successful, as political, as sexual as men. Their mannish bob, cigarette smoking, boyish figures symbolized their rejection of gender distinctions” (Smith-Rosenberg 178).
In response to such challenges, what language was available for men to assert the self-evidence of their claim to power? The answer duly arrived in the form of institutionalized medicine and biological sciences, purportedly neutral and secular discourses that were in fact deployed to rationalize immoral behaviors with unbecoming gender roles according to the Victorian association of masculinity with culture and femininity with nature. Such emerging sciences radically reoriented existing relations of exchange between public and private spheres, compromising the ideal of autonomy in masculine gender-identity. Accordingly, they fixated on the question of gender deviants and gothic imaginaries of possessed bodies, liminal subjects who straddled the boundary that the biological sciences were making increasingly unclear. ‘Gender deviance’ appeared in the figure of hysterics and of the lesbian as social type—“linked... to the rejection of conventional female roles, to cross-dressing, and to ‘masculine’ physiological traits” (Smith-Rosenberg 271). More specifically, medical exegesis signaled the lesbian in terms approximate to spirit possession: “The mannish lesbian, the male soul trapped in a female body… An intermediate sex, neither male nor female, she literally embodied the New Woman’s demand for a role beyond conventional gender” (Smith-Rosenberg 287). Critically, such a person was thought to be sterile, that is powerless according to the metaphorical labor of sexuality in indexing social relations. Such was also the case of the female hysteric, often thought to symptomatize the contradictory role-expectations of New Women between standards of domesticity and modern assertiveness.
These new social forms of accusation—attempting to fix the woman as patient, against the grain of her own positional liminality in Victorian society—bear much in common with pre-secular forms of gender-based accusation, such as discourses of witchcraft[13] and spirit possession.[14] The issue at stake, therefore, has to do with the notion of the occupied body, the other-as-self. Paul Christopher Johnson, in an essay titled An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession’, examines Western discourses of rationality and free-will from the colonial project and its requirements: the disciplining of a labor-force for the machinations of capital, and the construction of a political franchise premised on the exclusion of those denied citizenship. He writes that “the silhouette of the propertied citizen and free individual took form between the idea of the automaton—a machine-body without will—and the threat of the primitive or animal, bodies overwhelmed by instincts and passions”.[15] Notwithstanding the fact that this is an episteme most directly applicable to the colonial milieu, it appears in these terms as a problem germane to the emergent bourgeois order of capitalism—that is, to the necessity of contractual ties between parties engaging in commerce:
“contracts required the production of equivalence, not only in the sense of exchange-value between different metals and things, but also the means of translating ideas of ‘persons’ and their internal powers, the authorship of their acts. Spirit possession marked and emerged in relation to the problem of the contract-worthy partner” (Johnson 408).
While conceptually indexed to religious practices of subaltern communities, the discourse of ‘spirit possession’ can in this way be seen to illuminate concerns that were at the forefront of the communities and self-understandings of the male bourgeois order seeking to institutionalize its class- and gender privileges.
With the public iterations of various sorts of deviant ‘others’—whose role was to anchor the claim of masculine power by their status as licensed victims—came questions of correct diagnosis and the authenticity of the woman as a sufferer; questions which necessitated the fragmentation of the family and the inversion of public and private, as doctors became critical intermediaries in the relation of the patient to her family members. In this way, on the threshold of the 20th Century the intimate domain of family and gender identity becomes the domain of special technique and expert knowledge. The New Historicist research discussed above had shown that much of the value of gender identity was gained in the projection of semiotic ideologies which risked constant slippage in the carnivalesque collapse of distinctions between self and other. With the mainstreaming of therapy accompanying the atomization of nuclear families in the post-World War II era, explanations of gendered character come to rely ever more strongly on the problematic relationship between individualism and autonomy, now conceived within the optic of capitalism as ‘consumer choice’.
[1] Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1992) Pg. 12.
[2] Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’, in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke University Press (2012).
[3] Kamensky, Jane. ‘Talk Like a Man: Speech, Power, and Masculinity in Early New England’, in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender. New York: NYU Press (1998). Pg. 24.
[4] Ditz, Toby. ‘Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia’, in The Journal of American History 81:1 (1994). Pg. 53.
[5] As Margaret Mead would write, ““Thin and empty as is the ‘home town’ tie, substitutes for it must be found; other still more tenuous symbols must be invoked”. And Keep Your Powder Dry. New York: Berghahn Books (2000). Pg. 21.
[6] To appropriate the term of Martin Heidegger.
[7] Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Classics (2003).
[8] More specifically, the work of Achille Mbembe, The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony. This is, of course, derived from the gender concerns of postcolonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon, whose masculinized vision of subjugation and emancipation is relayed in The Wretched of the Earth.
[9] Smith-Rosenberg, Carol. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986). Pg. 81.
[10] Messner, Michael. Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements. London: Sage Publications (1995), pg. 9.
[11] Christopher Breward discusses the embedding of consumerism in the masculine dandy ethic in 19th Century London. Breward, Christopher. The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City Life 1860-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press (1999).
[12] To recall the understanding Benedict Anderson develops in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; that is, of new patterns of media consumption as indexical of new cultural solidarities, as well as of particular gender understandings in a capitalist ‘public sphere’.
[13] Larner, Christina. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. New York: Basil Blackwell (1984).
[14] De Certeau, Michel. The Possession at Loudun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2000).
[15] Johnson, Paul Christopher. ‘An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession’’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 53:2 (2011).
[16] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage (1977).
[17] Herman, Ellen. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press (1995). Pg. 22.
[18] Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave MacMillan (2008).
[19] Perry, Ralph Barton. ‘The American Cast of Mind’, in Characteristically American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1949).
[20] Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene (2001).
[21] As David Schneider has shown, this mythologizing of the middle-class norm is representative of much social scientific thinking about American society; not least about axiomatic criteria of identity such as gender and kinship (Class Differences and Sex Roles in American Kinship and Family Structure).
[22] Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton (1991).
[23] Marx, Karl. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
[24] Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2002).
[25] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press (1985).
[26] Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. Rutgers University Press (1990).
[27] Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky. The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: NYU Press (2001).
[28] Ortner, Sherry. Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream. Durham: Duke University Press (2013).
[29] Gusterson, Hugh and Catherine Besteman. The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It. Berkeley: University of California Press (2010).
[30] Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso (2006).
[31] Costs, in Messner’s view, include statistical data on income disparities, morbidity, and mortality and other criteria.
[32] In the account given by Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. New York: Routledge (2006).
[33] Schwalbe, Michael. Unlocking the Iron Cage: The Men’s Movement, Gender Politics, and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996). Pg. 65.
The post-World War II era up until the late 1960s would be defined by a conservative reassertion of family and archetypal gender norms, under the aegis of a mainstreaming ‘consumer society’. Social theory of the time—as channeled by critics such as David Riesman, Charles Reich, and Christopher Lasch—reflected social-scientific concerns with the commodified personality (originally extended by the Frankfurt School critiques of power as media-institutional domination). Behind the polemics decrying conformism, counterposed by those proclaiming widespread narcissism, lies a basic interest in social ethics. The interest of such an ethical orientation to the problem of ‘disenchantment’, is that this value exists alongside of a form of law that functions increasingly through disciplinary (modernist) and normative paradigms of management—that is, through the surveillance of self and other.[16] As Charles Taylor notes, in the American experience this second paradigm, what Foucault views as the interiorization of surveillance (and no less than the creation of one’s soul), was empowered precisely by its resonance with themes within the Protestant tradition: “With the reformation, we find a modern, Christian-inspired sense that ordinary life was on the contrary the very center of the good life. The crucial issue was how it was led, whether worshipfully and in the fear of God or not” (Taylor 13).
In this second respect, critiques of character formation confronted the effects both of new disciplines of self-critique (especially psychoanalysis) as well as the impact of new scales of organizational technology on the conduct of personal relations, and norms of social ethics. Ellen Herman, for example, traces the popularization of psychoanalysis as a normalizing technology in the post-war era, arguing that it served a valuable purpose in “blurring the line between the individual and the collective, the personal and the social, and [creating] the potential for camouflaging clear political purposes as neutral methods of scientific discovery…”[17] This analysis is in line with Foucault’s account[18] of a new form of social power that works by normalizing social functions within a population, what he referred to as biopolitics. Foucault, like Herman, therefore privileges the perspective of state power in stating their genealogy of the therapeutic tradition.
Notable cultural accounts of the paradoxes of American character during this period rested on such concepts as ‘collective individualism’[19] and ‘other-direction’[20]. These were psychologized attempts to distil the elective affinities of the American character, whose generalizations often veiled inattentiveness to class, race, and demographic differences—in other words, betraying a tendency to sublimate the experience of Anglo-Saxon upper-middle class as the experience of all Americans:[21]
“What is common to all the other-directed people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual—either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media… The other-directed person is cosmopolitan. For him the border between the familiar and the strange…has broken down. As the family continuously absorbs the strange and reshapes itself, so the strange becomes familiar. While the inner-directed person could be ‘at home abroad’ by virtue of his relative insensitivity to others, the other-directed person is, in a sense, at home everywhere and nowhere…” (Riesman 21).
Riesman’s analogy between other-direction and manipulability bears interesting resonance with precisely that accusatory discourse leveled against ethnic enclaves in American modernity; the claim that, as Linda Alcoff puts it, “Strongly felt ethnic or cultural identities will inevitably produce a problem of conflicting loyalties within a larger grouping…[and] Identity politics ‘encourages the reification of group identities…which in turn leads to ‘conformism, intolerance, and patriarchalism’” (Fraser in Alcoff 37). Riesman’s position could thus be read through a psychoanalytic lens, as an almost anthropophagic appropriation and inversion of the fears of ethnic alterity and sectarian identity claims in the 20th Century American public sphere.
And yet, the denaturing of personality takes on a redemptive slant following the political unrests of 1968. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, for example, presents an account of so-called ‘Consciousness III’ as the weltanschauung of a youth-culture whose members have taken the insights of the marginal (racialized) members of society in order to disabuse themselves of the mystifications of corporate America. What appears as redemptive anthropophagism thus takes on a millenarian quality, and would come under attack in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. In Lasch’s view, by contrast, a combination of media-saturation in everyday life, coupled with the biopolitical regimes of postmodern political power (effects of the security state and the globalization of warfare as the obverse-face of empire), transformed the public sphere and the promise of radical openness offered by ‘Consciousness III’ into a consumerist utopia. As Lasch puts it, “Contemporary hedonism, of which [the prostitute] is the supreme symbol, originates not in the pursuit of pleasure but in a war of all against all, in which even the most intimate encounters become a form of mutual exploitation”.[22] Interpersonal relations become predicated on simulacra and ‘all that is solid melts into air’.[23]
Later Marxist theorists (especially of the British Cultural Studies school) would show that it is not enough to posit a finite subject whose capacities to Action are positively increased or diminished by institutional constraint; rather, the effects of space-time compression on conceiving masculine identity as autonomy must be reconsidered together with the development of gender liberation movements in civil society. This ferment evokes many of the concerns that shaped the emerging bourgeois hegemony in the 19th Century (as discussed in detail by Carol Smith-Rosenberg)—in particular, the dialectical relationship between oppositional gender identities built around some articulation of ‘anti-structure’ (moral and communal dissension from the norm), and the gradual colonization of that liminal zone by social coalitions (supported by certain institutional apparatuses) able to assert cultural hegemony. Since the 1980s, for example, groupings in civil society have mobilized around medicalized identity precisely in terms of its emancipatory potential (as Altman shows in the development of gay liberation movements[24]) More specifically in terms of heterosexual male groups, the biomedicalized ‘insurgent citizenship’ pioneered by the gay movement can also be seen (in a heterosexual framework) in the ideology of the New Men’s Movement in the United States, which raised supposedly biological characteristics of masculinity to the level of mystical bonding. For R. W. Connell, these movements have destabilized the pretensions of gender as a project of binary differentiation, creating existential ambivalence within the category of masculinity as self-evident: “Relations of cathexis have visibly changed with the stabilization of lesbian and gay sexuality as a public alternative within the heterosexual order” (Connell 85).
Of particular interest is the relationship in the emergence of the sexual onto the political stage is the relationship between forms of insurgent citizenship and the normative elaboration of biopolitical regimes in the United States. In particular, the relationship between the Gay Male liberation movement and so-called hegemonic masculinity is of central importance, since as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, prior to the 20th Century there was no distinct category of homosexuality as identity.[25] As Messner remarks,
“Gay liberation has come largely to define itself in the liberal language of individual equal rights and assimilation into a commercial, capitalist order. And rather than challenging or undermining hegemonic masculinity, this assimilationist tendency…has attempted instead to broaden the definition of hegemonic masculinity to include same-sex sexual relations” (Messner 81-2).
In the face of challenges to the movement on behalf of the religious right, this shift came to embrace “’family values’, private consensual sex, and conventional gender roles (albeit expanded to include same-sex sexual relations)” (Messner 82). As Lynne Segal puts it, in many cases “gay men could be distinguished by their more masculine appearance. Meanwhile many heterosexual men were displaying a perfumed, fashion-conscious, more narcissistic and androgynous masculinity”.[26]
Such civil actions would integrate the biopolitical notion of generalized Human Rights with the category of masculine gender identity that had previously been linked to patriarchy and exclusive rights to property and polity. These developments have also taken place together with the fracturing of hegemonic class-values associated with the post-War generation within a context of increasing polarization of wealth, and the decline of the middle-class, in the United States class system.[27] Furthermore, despite the growing body of college-educated young people referred to as Generation Y,[28] Desires to embody national mythologies of auto-transformation such as the ‘self-made man’[29] have been replaced by fears of downward mobility: loss of home, social identity, and the healthful body—counterbalanced by the growing fetishism of security.[30]
These events set the stage for set the stage for the post-feminist men’s movements in politics that have occupied the public sphere in the late-20th Century. This began in the 1970s with so-called ‘men’s liberation’ groups, which relied on sex-role theory to affirm that gender identities (and the values associated with these identities, such as the prevalence of rational stoicism among men) were socially scripted, and not biologically innate. In this way, the Men’s Liberation movement gave equal weight to the costs of gender roles distributed among men and women[31] (Messner 39-40). Yet, by articulating its discourse through the personalizing and depoliticizing trend of the therapeutic movement, this movement created a split between so-called Men’s Liberationists and the more conservative, reactionary Men’s Rights Movement. Men’s Liberationists came to embrace a critical pro-feminist stance that acknowledged patriarchy. As formulated by leaders such as John Stoltenberg, the necessary course of action required not the reformation of masculinity, but “to do away with gender distinction (and thus, inequality) altogether” (Messner 53). Such a position brings the politics of pro-feminist men’s movement in line with the more Radical Feminist view of intellectuals such as Andrea Dworkin,[32] who perceive the project of gender differentiation as the prime axis and motive force of social inequality. However, this discourse generated certain insurmountable complications—a male subject position in a stance of guilt, and the subsequent attempt to renounce masculinity in the form of a gift or apology—which failed to mobilize widespread support among men. The contradictory position of the masculine subject as sexed protagonist within Men’s Liberationism provided a platform for the Men’s Rights movement. These men advocated to reverse the gains of the feminist movement by holding men as victims of the social construction of masculinity—one that (as opposed to the Men’s Liberationists) does not benefit from feminism.
A third path arose in the 1980s with the Mythopoetic Men’s movement, which eschews an explicit racial or religious cause in its proclamation of essential masculinity. Rather, it provides a ritual structure within which the ‘loose essentialism’ of masculinity[33] can be explored according to an ideology of agency and self-fulfillment that aligns with the individualistic inheritance of Freudian (more specifically, Jungian) therapy. Its language is emancipatory and offers a reversal of the classic Western binary-opposition of autonomy and entrapment. That is to say, for these men, the legacy of Enlightenment rationality—and indeed, the emplacement of the male subject as the protagonist of this disenchanting rationality—is itself a form of violence against men; a catch-22, in which the status and power that accrue to their normative social position as men is won at the cost of expressive mutilation—their estrangement from emotional and affective wholeness.
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