Rambutan!

I want to keep talking a bit about the point in which I finished my last post, especially this excerpt from the very last paragraph:

"Is this what we really value, as a society, a strict and rigorous (masculine) power who dominates anything soft and understanding through impetus and violence? Is this what we think should be preached and practiced as virtues, an affirmation of oneself through storm and stress? Wouldn't we have a much more benign, soft, easygoing and carefree world if we could invert this relation, if we could really hail the said feminine qualities as true distinctions?"

Just to stress a detail which will be very important for understanding this entire text: although I'm using words such as masculine and feminine, I'm doing it out of necessity. I want to transmit what they usually convey, but I don't believe they have anything to do, truly, with gender – I understand them more as two different paradigms on power and how to use it: the individual, egotistical, domineering, ruthless and inconsiderate one (historically associated with "being a man") versus the communal, friendly, kind, careful, outward-bound (usually associate with femininity).

Why I say these power dynamics have nothing to do with gender, when they are even named after the two sexes and have been historically associated with them? Because, from the point of view of power, the gender of whoever performs these paradigms is indifferent. For example, I think masculinity is what women are also taught to enact when they try to achieve power, like I said in my last post linked above. So said "male" and "female" attributes aren't really exclusive to one gender or another. What I do believe is that "masculine" refers to a group of characteristics and qualities usually associated with (white heterosexual) men for their artificial dominance over most women, LGBT+ people and racial minorities. Please read the sentence above with emphasis on "artificial". I don't believe these behaviours for the part of men are natural or innate – for my problem with the natural argument, please check this other post I made, first section (I. Doing the Dishes and Enjoying It). I believe they were arbitrarily picked by the male group exactly because they were so efficient in attaining and maintaining power, and only afterwards they were naturalised as "masculine".

Now, the fact that this assimilation of power-grabbing tactics by men happened so long ago in human culture that it's pretty much undocumented and practically universal may appear as yet another reason for assuming this artificial dominance as "natural", but it doesn't need to be so. Simon Beauvoir, in the second chapter of The Second Sex, uses a phenomenological approach to make a really good point about the universality and the antiquity of these relations. She says:

"At any given period, technology and the economic and social structure of a group reveal an identical world for all its members: there will also be a constant relation of sexuality to social forms; analogous individuals, placed in analogous conditions, will grasp analogous significations in the given; this analogy is not the basis of a rigorous universality, but it can account for finding general types in individual cases. A symbol does not emerge as an allegory worked out by a mysterious unconscious: it is the apprehension of a signification through an analogue of the signifying object; because of the identity of the existential situation cutting across all existents and the identity of the facticity they have to cope with, significations are revealed to many individuals in the same way; symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality that is at once Mitsein and separation[.]"

So some symbols – and thus some mental categories which we use to organize the world – seem to be natural for their universality, but only because the factual human existence presents some objects and some situations pretty much universally. Now, how exactly does this explain the aligning of men with the positive pole of power dynamics? Heck, I don't know. I'm thinking about these things little by little as I write – please remember I'm a mere undergraduate student and I'm not even majoring in philosophy or psychology or any other area that has anything to do with this topic, really. I'm only writing out of interest for the issue. But I feel this phenomenological approach that Beauvoir takes in this paragraph would be a great starting point for an explanation, and I hope to write more about it soon, after some more research. Without a doubt, I'll need some good insight into the daily life of the first humans – how exactly their body constitutions and the fact of women being the only ones with the burden of gestation affected their activities, for example – to propose an universal situation that could shed some light in all this.

Like I said in the passage highlighted in the beginning of this post, I really can't see why we should value masculine qualities over the feminine ones in our current society. Yet we can pretty much be said to live in an era of hyper-masculinity. The most obvious and poignant symptoms of this are the manosphere and all the manfluencers preaching misogyny and radicalizing young boys; the tradwife phenomenon (and all its associated aestheticization of dosmeticity) conforming women to the submissive pole of power dynamics; the self-made man legend of capitalism teaching that success depends only on one's own capacities, thus portraying power (economically at surface level, but economic power buys all other nowadays) as an individual conquest in a ruthless world marked by deficit of all resources, especially women and money (financial deficit is another classic myth of current capitalism, but we can talk about it another time); the meritocratic lie of neoliberalism (that complements the self-made man: one says the powerful are meant to be successful and the other says the successful are meant to be powerful); etc. However, a myriad of other minor signs of this hyper-masculinity are everywhere to be found. The gym frenzy we have been passing through is a great example (physical prowess is one of the most primitive and vulgar signs of individual power, and nowadays fitness appears an imperative both for men and women: being healthy doesn't mean merely being free of diseases, but actively being strong – but only physically). The great success of gambling business is another sign of the extraordinary virility of our times: the chance of achieving great financial power with such small efforts, even if there's a much greater chance of further losing your already limited economic situation, can only appear as a good deal in a society obsessed with concentrating power in the individual.

The causes for this hyper-masculinity are certainly more than one, but I want to keep making my analysis through economic and political lens, so I'll propose a possible (though admittedly partial) explanation. For much of its first centuries, even with the increase of class conflicts, the fights our bourgeoisie elites had to go through were vastly ideological. In the inception of modernity it couldn't be different, since the ascending bourgeoise needed to challenge the established order of feudal and aristocratic power in order to make themselves the favoured class. So much of the effort backing then for consolidating and legitimising the powers of capitalists over that of nobles or the clergy was about communicating, theorizing, spreading ideas. The bourgeoisie taking over of Europe didn't happen through military domination, but merely through sociopolitical changes – for example, the adoption of democracy as the preferred mode of government, notably in the United States, the land of Capital par excellence. The feminine qualities of communicating, creating and caring were extremely disseminated and valued. In here we have another interesting example of how feminine and the female (the same applies for masculine and the male) have nothing to do intrinsically with one another: the centuries of bourgeoisie ascension were a time of rampant misogyny and sexism, but it was also the days of celebrating a lot of feminine attributes: dandysm; romantic poetry; much debate on the lyrical, beauty and the sublime; a huge interest in connecting with nature in both its physical and supernatural dimensions; and let's not forget high stockings and high heels for men.

But a lot has changed since the first flights of the bourgeoise towards world domination. Democracy spread all over the globe (sometimes even in disfavour of the countries receiving it, like in Libya), pretty much every corner of the planet is open to international markets (the idea of a "free" market itself was possibly the most important commodity that Europe and the USA ever exported¹) and mass media was put entirely under control of giant multibillionaire companies (in the United States, for example, the 5 major film studies dominate 90% of total box office revenue). Capitalists don't need to convince society of operating in their ways anymore. There is no more feudal nobility or clerical elite to compete against – none of these secular or religious titles will bestow upon their bearer any power if they don't have vulgar amounts of money. The capital doesn't need any of that diplomatic rubbish anymore. After much negotiation, finally they have the control in their hands, and their current goal is not allowing anyone taking it off them. Now, the only field in which they may obtain more power is fighting against each other, which is exactly the game they orchestrated for themselves – democracy and communication have little or nothing to do with this, we live in the era of efficiency. It's only through forever reducing costs, improving revenue and increasing margins that more power can be obtained. There is no more space for concessions or negotiations, only competition: and, in a world of "limited resources", one can only get a bigger piece of cake for themselves by taking some out of someone else's slice. Communication here is at best unneeded, but mostly unwanted: the longer Capital can keep everyone out of the throne room, the harder it will be to dethrone it.

From the point of view of efficiency, violence and aggression are the preferred procedures. They are so simple, effective and straight to the point! Democracy, on the other hand, is complicated, multilateral, exhaustive – and, more importantly, not at all efficient. It should come as no surprise that most if not all of the current power empires lean authoritarian (Putin in Russia, the CCP in China – and is it too early to say Trump in the US?) and some of the fastest growing economies in the globe have clear humanitarian crisis and/or leaders way too comfortable in their chairs (like the already mentioned Lybia, but also Kyrgyzstan, Benin, Paul Kagame's Rwanda, Narendra Modi's India and Salva Kiir's South Sudan). In most of these countries, like I'm exemplifying by citing their names, the Estate apparatus is thinned down, putting emphasis on the authoritarian central figure.

Another great source of power in our current times are big companies, that sometimes get to be more valuable and powerful than entire governments. Some of the richest among them are also being quite personified in the figure of a CEO: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman, Ellison and Hwang are all good examples. They are some of the most influent individuals in the world, forcing their interests into regulations and elections from countries all over the globe – but they achieved it all through a much greater collective effort (of their workers, theirs donors, their regulators, etc) that gets forgotten when we talk about them.

This change in paradigm between the collective debate of ideas and the individual obsession for efficiency, between democracy and totalitarianism, is in my opinion one of the main causes for the hyper-masculine times we live in (because let's remember that "masculine" is nothing but this, an aggressive and individualistic approach to power) and for all the societal misfortunes it brings us: rates of hates crimes that never decline; the impossibility of healthy relationships (romantic or sexual), or at least ones that aren't based on power dynamics; the perseverance of capitalist ethos through the myth of deficit and of meritocracy; all the self-made man bullshit that keeps people locked in the lower financial strata of society daydreaming silly individualistic utopias; the absolute radioactive ambient of most internet social spaces (that are more and more the only social spaces in existence); the radicalization of our youth; etc. But, in a world of such complexes and interconnected societies, more than the (said masculine) virtue of one dominant sovereign, we need to value the (said feminine) virtues of communities: kindness and care should be above assertiveness or prowess. We need to detach ourselves from an idea of individual capacity, of being capable of proving oneself stronger and better, in favour of a communal conception of it, like being able to live peacefully in a community, caring for your neighbours while strengthening connections with the land and the people. This way, we could handle better so many of the great problems of our times: the corrosive effect of the Capital on moral and ethics (a production system for the benefit of the few against the vast majority wouldn't be possible if we cared for our communities more than we care for the vulgar power expressed in symbols of luxury – mostly described as "phallics" by psychoanalysts and neo-Marxists alike) and major struggles dependent on systemic and social changes (i.e. climate crisis, economic inequality, etc). If we want to see our society advancing in any communal, cooperative, solid way, I really think it's time for us to start theorizing and thinking about a 180º transvaluation putting the supposedly feminine atributes above the masculine ones – in summary, we should start talking of a post-masculine world.

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Notes

1. Eduardo Galeaño, in his Open Veins of Latin America, cites the german economist Friedrich List as the author of this thesis.