The Right’s Pre-Modern ‘Masculinist’ Fantasy
The new masculinist movement has gone mainstream on the right.
The prominent voices in this movement yearn for an earlier time, when men were men and women were women. Sometimes that time seems to be the 1950s, like when Tucker Carlson extols a world where men go to work and women stay at home. But sometimes it goes way farther back. The pastor Doug Wilson advocates household voting, in which men vote for their wives. And Costin Vlad Alamariu, better known as Bronze Age Pervert, harks back to the Bronze Age — specifically the ancient Hittite and Mitanni Empires.
Helen Lewis wrote a recent cover story for The Atlantic about this new antifeminist backlash, which she calls “the single most important force holding together the American right.” So I wanted to have her on the show to talk about these ideas, the political program of this movement and how seriously we should take it.
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Potentially interesting questions but really profoundly uninterested in what a professional transphobe has to say about the leopards turning around to eat her gender roles. :-/
On the lack of actual virtues in the masculinist movement, this ties in with the obvious lack of valour in MAGA militancy which joys in grotesquely asymmetric orgies of force, the barely-impeded bombings of civilian targets, the atrocities of settler colonialism, the massive security for leaders, and so forth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of valour, and extent it requires underdog status, or at least leading from the front. Who plays the game of life on the hardest levels, and who pays the greatest cost of conflict.