The Myth Of Vanishing Masculinity
The fallacy in Jubliee's video "Is Masculinity Disappearing In America?"
tw: transphobia, homophobia, sexism, colonialism
Recently (read: in the last couple months) I watched a video that made me so angry I had to write about it. Titled “Trans vs Conservative Men: Is Masculinity Disappearing in America?”, the video is part of a series called Middle Ground from the popular YouTube channel Jubilee. While some of Jubilee’s content looks at divisions within communities (Christians, Republicans, adoptees etc.), the middle ground series brings together people on two different sides of an issue and prompts them with a series of questions. In this case, the groups consist of four out-trans men talking to four conservative men about whether masculinity is under attack. Over the course of the 45 minute video, both sides are in conversation with one another, responding to prompts like there is a right and wrong way to be a man; biology determines gender; and children should be able to transition.
To be perfectly honest I feel like I could write ten different essays about this one video alone since there is A LOT to unpack, including the ethics of platforming people with bigoted views and entertaining this notion of “traditional masculinity.” However, for your sake and mine I want to focus on the general argument made by the Conservative men, and why it doesn’t hold weight on a purely factual level.
The conservative men in the video don’t appear to be sourced from any one organization or institution, so while their takes don’t appear coordinated in specifics, they do coalesce into larger beliefs that bind their perspectives together. Principally, they all share a kind of gender determinism. These men preach that there are essential traits that go hand-in-hand with manhood that are so ingrained into the masculine self that to deny or contradict them is a serious affront to human nature. One man, Max, defined masculinity as “big beards, hairy chests, being stoic and rugged,” citing “John Wayne, Martin Luther King, Sean Connery” as its exemplars and “Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet” as its deviants. Another, Brandon, emphasized the importance of men as leaders in the household and withholding emotion to maintain an image of strength.
What I find fascinating is that these men frame an argument about social norms in an almost biological way. These traits are as unquestioned by their proponents as the human need for lungs and a beating heart, as if traditional masculinity arrives with every male child like a package set. If these traits are really so inherently male and “traditional,” it implies they should be present throughout history without exception. One conservative man, Clarkson, even alluded to this when he responded to the idea of a broader definition of masculinity as “redefining a fabric in society that has kept the human race and got it to where it is today.”
To start, the idea that the stoic John Wayne-presenting masculinity has been a constant norm throughout history is false. In various other cultures and stages in history, it was customary for men to fall more on the Harry Styles end of the masculinity spectrum. In France prior to the Revolution, men wore heels, fur muffs and “mouches,” also known as faux-beauty marks. A GQ article detailing a brief history of men and makeup showed that the men’s use of makeup go back as far as Ancient Egypt with Pharaoh Ramses practicing an elaborate exfoliating routine with a “ Sephora-worth’s set of creams and potions.”
But the lacuna between today’s “traditional masculinity” and historical depictions of masculinity is more than just skin deep. Ancient literature is rife with examples of weeping men, indicating that the male tears were less stigmatized. French, Japanese, and Ancient Greek epics portray warriors in fits of emotion. The Iliad depicts an entire Greek army bursting into tears. The Tale of Heike, a touchstone for Samurai etiquette, views tears as a natural reaction to grief, stating “Of all who heard, friend or foe, not one but wept until his sleeves were drenched.’” Crying men have also been memorialized in art from a 1430 painting Saint Augustine to 19th-century paintings of a sobbing Ulysses and an anonymous man, lying prostrate with grief over a grave.
It’s rhetorically advantageous for advocates of traditional masculinity to ignore the fluctuations in socially acceptable masculinity across history. Recognizing the shifting landscape of manhood would reveal the deeper agenda in their argument. This masculinity isn’t a biological reality; It’s a social construct embedded with ideology. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a man reading this, I’m not saying you need to stop doing your push ups or watching your football. But the goal of narrowing masculinity to one specific form of self-presentation isn’t liberatory. It’s demanding participation in a social, political, ideology of gender that, in comparison to a lot of the examples I’ve used in this article like Ulysses and Ancient Egyptians, is relatively recent.
Part of this redefinition of masculinity came at the end of the 18th century, spurred by the French and Industrial Revolution’s emphasis on work, as well as Enlightenment thinkers who, for all their liberalism and purported open-mindedness, still emphasized physical difference between the sexes. The name of this period was coined by psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel in the 1930s as The Great Male Renunciation. Flügel argued that The Renunciation was an inflection point in which men stopped emphasizing beauty in their appearance. He wrote “Hitherto man had vied with woman in the splendor of his garments, woman’s only prerogative lying in décolleté and other forms of erotic display of the actual body; henceforward, to the present day, woman was to enjoy the privilege of being the only possessor of beauty and magnificence, even in the purely sartorial sense.”
About a century after the Renunciation, the Muscular Christianity movement gained popularity. Starting in the 19th century, men began to see Christianity and Christ-himself as a soft and overly feminine figure. This inspired men to redefine Christianity as more “masculine.” For Muscular Christians this meant renewed attention to exercise and the physical form. Though one could argue this movement carried its own appreciation for the beauty of the male body, proponents, like Theodore Roosevelt, conflated Muscular Christianity with westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the rugged outdoors. It appears the emphasis was not so much on beauty as power. An excerpt from one of Roosevelt’s biographies tracked his transformation from New York elite to wannabe cowboy. Author Sarah Watts explained, “With authentic cowboy and warrior accouterments, Roosevelt had remade the youthful, slim, decorated, and slightly feminized body of the studio photos into a battle-hardened man of action worthy of national acclaim.”
As an outdoorsman, Roosevelt carried gear, a “fringed buckskin outfit, complete with hunting cap, moccasins, cartridge belt, silver dagger, and rifle.” He was also a big fan of early Abercrombie and Fitch. But these dress codes were about more than just persona. Roosevelt was creating a myth for the American man that resonated nation-wide. Watts writes:
“More than any other he sensed that ordinary men needed a clearly recognizable and easily appropriated hero who enacted themes about the body; the need for extremity, pain, and sacrifice; and the desire to exclude some men and bond with others. In one seamless cowboy-soldier-statesman-hero life, Roosevelt crafted the cowboy ethos consciously and lived it zealously, providing men an image and a fantasy enlisted in service to the race-nation.”
Watts added that men’s magazines at the time started promoting a similar version of manhood. One that shifted the emphasis of masculinity away from reason and towards forcefulness. It framed men as “Napoleonic idols of power” enmeshed in a society governed by Social Darwinism.
It’s interesting to compare this version of masculinity with the examples of “traditional masculinity” mentioned in the video—Martin Luther King, John Wayne, and Sean Connery. All three men embody a degree of cowboy mythos. King, for instance is often watered down, remembered as a singular bastion of 60s Civil Rights, rather than a part of a much larger movement that relied on networks of organizers to achieve its goals. Connery and Wayne, on the other hand, are both known for playing lone rangers—womanizing, physically dominating heroes who take matters entirely into their own hands.
It’s no wonder that the men arguing for traditional masculinity all happened to be conservative. The legacies of these three men can all be twisted to promote a kind of libertarianism. Looking back on Roosevelt, it’s easy to see how this notion of the rugged individual carries implications of colonialism, violence, and rampant, unchecked capitalism. The kicker is that just like Roosevelt, King, Wayne, and Connery are all more myth than man in the American consciousness, whether that’s by self-fashioning or simply selective national memory. Connery and Wayne were literal actors for god sakes. It begs the question of whether traditional masculinity was ever really attainable to begin with or just, as Watts noted, “ a fantasy enlisted in service to the race-nation.”
As you could probably tell, I could go on forever, but what gets me so up in arms about this nonsense is that these talking points are being parrotted by actual politicians. The culture wars are seeping into the legislation that is actively trying to erase the identities of queer people, but especially queer youth. Conservatives have long operated with a myth that laws can expunge so-called “obscenity” from society. Don’t want women to get abortions? Make them illegal. Notice more genderqueer representation in pop culture? Pass the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. They are trying to legislate identities that have always been and always will be out of existence. People will never stop being gay. Some number of pregnant people will always try to get an abortion.
The irony is that while conservatives lament the loss of freedom for “biological men,” their target, queerness, is more biological fact than their beards and dry eyes ever were. If we want to argue that tradition, or existence throughout history, legitimizes identity, as these conservative men seem to, then queerness has actually been far more consistent than modern normative masculinity. There is evidence of trans people existing 3,000 years ago in Iran. During the Han Dynasy, bisexuality “was accepted by the royal courts and its custom widespread among the nobility.” In Indigenous North American societies, queer people were revered as two-spirit or Kuma Hina in Hawaii.
As I’ve already implied, acknowledging the longevity of queerness only diminishes the argument that masculinity is being “attacked.” Labeling the increased queer visibility as a new, aberrant phenomenon sets the precedent for fear mongering. What is the urgency to protect masculinity right now, if you acknowledge that queerness has always existed, albeit under different labels, since basically the dawn of human history? Will society really crumble from men wearing nail polish if heterosexuality and queerness have coexisted for literally millennia? It’s a glaring, purposeful omission designed to stoke hate, because ultimately that’s the purpose of the argument, whether these conservative men in Jubilee’s video know it or not. Although the argument may be couched in the logic of selflessness and pseudo-heroic “defense” of other men, those preaching the gospel of traditional masculinity are ultimately out to help no one but themselves.