FEMINISM SHOWS THE WAY: On Shame, Masculinity & Spoiling For A Fight

The recent reprint of Dutch press Plural’s collected journal on the topic of male shame comes at a vital time. The male ego and the destruction it trails in its wake drives instability and chaos wherever it reigns – whether in the personal or the political sphere.

From the tech broligarchy’s support of the Trump renaissance to the increasing and worrying reach and relevance of ‘manosphere’ influencers like Andrew Tate, it can be tempting to enter the territory of this discourse about male identity through the gates of ’toxic masculinity’.

The term, coined in the 1980s by psychologist Shepherd Bliss, has been thoroughly co-opted, expanded and stretched since then. It’s now a catch-all for everything from relatively minor sexist microaggressions to the horrors of rape culture.

Instead, Ernst van Alphen’s thoughtful collection of essays, art reproductions and confessional autofiction engages with the root of such toxic behaviours – shame, how it is inculcated into men, and what that means for society.

This engagement with misogyny as a direct result of the shaming of men is also what drives the astonishing new book by documentarians Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea. Clown World: Four Years Inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere tells the story of the time they spent embedded in Tate’s organisation, known as the ‘War Room’.

Where van Alphen and his contributors offer theories and representations of shame, Tahsin and Shea vividly show its ultimate destination, and consequences – from the sex trafficking of women to the inculcation of yet more shame in vulnerable, easily exploited men.

Shea and Tahsin are honest about the way they are sucked into Tate’s calculated shame bargain. Mocked for being weak and scrawny, Shea looks to prove himself by taking part in a mixed martial arts fight organised by Tate. To his surprise, he feels validated when the beating he takes is less terrifying than he anticipated.

The authors even display compassion for the vulnerability of Tate, who emerges as the alter ego of a scared little boy who loved Daddy too much. In common with some of the analyses on offer in van Alphen’s journal, Shea and Tahsin conclude that the cycle of male shaming, violence and ego formation begins with our attempts to live up to, replace, please or imitate our fathers.

They propose that this fatherly relationship could be both the source and the cure for the wound. This echoes something that the writer Nina Power proposed in her book What Men Want. Power argued that we have exited the traditional structure of a patriarchal system:

Today, the myth of ‘killing Daddy to become Daddy’ no longer exists. Despite claims that we live in or under patriarchy, we no longer live in a ‘paternalistic’ society. We are all somehow ‘fatherless’.

Whether Nina Power has rung the final bell for patriarchy or not is a matter of some dispute, of course. But her point – that many men today are shaped more by the lack of strong male role models remains crucial. If we have exited patriarchy for more dangerous, fraught terrain, its absence still shapes our realities.

We still live with its historical legacy, which is older than the written word. Van Alphen and his contributors unpack many versions of the definitions, depictions and histories of male shame, and of shaming rituals men enact on one another. Of particular interest is Lorenza Benadusi’s analysis of the Olympian statuary of Mussolini’s early Fascist Italy. Benadusi observes:

. . .this bodily representation of the ideal Fascist man scarcely corresponded to the actual physical build of Italians: these Herculean marble sculptures were greatly different from many Fascists, who were scrawny, short, and little accustomed to sport . . The Fascist representation of a male youth, marching in uniform, acted as a counterpart to this other Italian, who was tired, weak, and emaciated from poverty and hard work.

The idealised male forms of the statues served to both shame and empower Italy’s Fascists in much the same way Andrew Tate shames his followers into action by displaying the hallmarks of wealth, extreme fitness, and his dominance over women. Tate’s followers are simultaneously empowered by the vision that they could ‘escape the Matrix’ and be like Tate, and shamed by comparison to him. This is the hook Tate uses to influence young men, as Tahsin and Shea learn firsthand:

If you want to understand the itch that Andrew Tate and the War Room have been scratching in young men, then this is it. Men desire conquest. The longing to go through some kind of hardship . . .and emerge on the other side victorious, is crucial to many men’s sense of self. This can be healthy, but in men who suffer from insecurity, it’s dangerous.

Like Mussolini, Tate promises that passage through the rituals of the War Room will grant the faithful follower the same power, respect and money that Tate professes to have. These rituals often revolve around the shaming of those who back out, or fail a task; or the persecution (through shaming) of those outside the group.

What is surprising is not the depth of this appeal to lost young men, but rather, how few of them are put off when the true goal of Tate’s project is revealed to be a shabby pyramid scheme of sexual exploitation, secured through violence and domination of women. Benadusi goes on to point out:

The concept of hegemonic masculinity . . .or rather a connotation of man that is hyper-virile, traditional, misogynist, homophobic, and aggressive, that stigmatizes any different form of self- expression, refers to an ideal type that is valid more as an ideal model than as a realistic example.

In this context, the fakery that goes into the production of Tate’s obstreperously lavish lifestyle, and even the calculated offensiveness of his online engagement, has less to do with truth and more to do with effect. The cars and Rolex watches are hired, the women intimidated and coerced, the so-called mansion or compound merely a converted warehouse space buried deep in the quotidian suburbs of Bucharest.

Tate offers the illusion, but also the keys to it. He can teach you how to exploit your way to appearing to be at the top. This is also his defence in his forthcoming trial on charges of sex trafficking. Tate argues that he was playing a character. None of the businesses were real, and if they were, he had nothing to do with them.

In his introduction to Shame! And Masculinity, Ernst van Alphen writes: “The construction of masculinity is more vulnerable to the denial of respect and dignity than that of femininity,” a point that other contributors echo. He continues:

. . .shame is not a static affect, it is a dialectical process that evokes pride, dignity, and even shamelessness. What these dialectical opposites have in common is that both can result in anger. Shaming somebody or a specific group is often related to anger; people use shaming in order to punish people.

The question of punishment is inherent in discussions about how to treat ideas like Tate’s, and men who follow them. If we could punish people who found his ideas appealing, or shame them into truly seeing the hate that powers such an ideology, then we would already have found our way to a solution. The anger that Tate rightly provokes is also a source of his appeal for those who feel disenfranchised or oppressed by the system.

This is as true of Trump voters as it is of manosphere followers who say they feel oppressed by a feminism which has ‘gone too far’. The vicissitudes of patriarchy harm men as well as women, but this has been historically difficult to communicate to men in a meaningful way. Rather than being the problem, more feminist liberation and not less is the answer.

In a similar turn, the economic backlash the Trump surge represents is unlikely to be resolved in favour of the economically under-privileged, because Trump is an oligarch first, and a populist second. As Benadusi writes in the essay on Italian Fascism:

After rising to power, Fascism had to curb its original anti-conformist and rebellious tone in a difficult compromise between revolutionary thrusts and the maintenance of established order. In terms of virility, it was not easy to synthesize the ideal type of the strong and courageous warrior, thirsty for blood and in the grip of his own virile fervour, and that of the bourgeois who was frugal, hardworking, attentive to decorum, and in control of his passions.

A similar identity crisis may be coming for Trump and his cadre; a reckoning that either sees his more swivel-eyed authoritarian impulses curbed due to their unpopularity, or his economic project curtailed by stronger resistance than anticipated from the mono-block of neoliberal economic interests.

In terms of how Tate’s malign influence might be countered, it can only be hoped that a jail cell will firmly limit his reach. Perhaps Shea and Tahsin’s Clown World will help, by showing both his empire, his businesses and his ideas to be an elaborate pyramid scheme. The journalists sound a note of caution however. By design, Tate’s movement has produced many potential heirs to his malign influencer crown.

Maaike Meier’s essay in Shame! And Masculinity compares recent theories of male psychological development, including those of conservative Dutch practitioner Frank Koerselman, who calls for a revaluation of traditional fatherhood. Koerselman argues it is not the old patriarchal society that produces shame, but on the contrary, the feminised, post-patriarchal world. Meier argues against this reactionary turn, eventually coming to a conclusion that centres the notion of the father-as-nurturer:

Courage, wisdom, generosity, honesty, the guts to give your fellow men a good talking-to about their reluctance – what happened to those beautiful ‘masculine’ features that had made a redistribution possible? That’s where the problem lies.

Rather than see such features as ‘feminine’, she argues for a relational concept of parenting rooted in communitarianism to both give meaning to revitalised masculine cultural norms, but also to police them. As van Alphen observes: ”Shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does.”

We may already be (or may yet become) parents, either of future generations, or merely as stewards of nature, culture and society. We will struggle to value ourselves for the generosity and kindness of our actions if we continue to measure them against the fascistic male norms still offered as entry and prize material for the Ponzi schemes of Tate-lite figures, and more significant fascist demagogues.

As the feminist writer bell hooks put it, in her book The Will to Change: “Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving . . .To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.”

Perhaps the question is as much about how we might feel pride, as how we might stop feeling shame. This is also the conclusion Matt Shea reaches, having undergone a rollercoaster of shame, victimisation, and adrenalised violence as a participant in Tate’s War Room.

Shea acknowledges that in many ways, Tate’s shaming tactics worked on him. He allowed himself to be goaded into participating in the War Room programme. He acknowledges that the experience of enduring a physical ‘crucible’ to build character was powerful, and even meaningful. But the subsequent truths bravely revealed by survivors of Tate’s aggression and exploitation proved to be the stronger narratives. Tate, ultimately, was revealed as weak. As Shea writes:

Was this masculinity? Walking out of a sports car, muscles bursting through your suit, blowing cigar smoke in the face of reporters who ask you about rape allegations? Many men have at some point tried to appear more masculine; few have committed this much to the performance. I have often felt insecure about my own masculinity. But watching the Tates flounce into the courthouse to be formally indicted for human trafficking, I found myself thinking for the first time, ‘Actually, I’m alright.’

Perhaps this gives us a clue to what lies beyond the false horizons of far-right Faragist politics and ultra-masculine Trumpian rhetoric. We may not know what a positive masculinity looks like when we see it, but the lies of the toxic can be exposed. Their ideologies, actions and projections look shabby and false once brought to light.

The appeal of the strength, virility and wealth they fetishise, like the Fascists before them, is too disconnected from the reality most of us inhabit. This version of masculinity will tire itself out, like a tantrum-throwing toddler screams itself to sleep. What comes after, even if it is only marginally better, will be up to us. Perhaps for now it is enough to say it must be different, so it will be different.

Male shame and violence are inextricable, as Shea and Tahsin’s honest reporting shows. We can’t fix male shame until we are all able to be proud of different things. Right now, we are vulnerable to the lies of authoritarian pseudo-patriarchs. People worship Tate because to be him is impossible, and we hate to see ourselves as lowly or unimportant.

We’re in love with our shame, and the strong emotions it evokes. That’s how we were conditioned. We shame each other, as Valerie Solanas wrote in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto, uncannily and presciently describing the misogyny and homophobia that are the hallmarks of Tate’s ideological pyramid scheme: “Differentness in other men, as well as himself, threatens him; it means they’re fags whom he must at all costs avoid, so he tries to make sure that all other men conform.” Men crave pride, even when the source is shameful, and the cost is the shaming of other men.

Male violence is the purest product of this process of rooting out difference. That violence must be understood as displaced self hatred, created by shame, not pure, abstract, innate evil, or some version of the Christian ‘original sin’.

We do not live in a world of moral blacks and whites. To address male shame, we need a version of male pride that celebrates other virtues. Feminism shows the way forward. Women broke free of their historical social programming, to a degree, by modelling alternatives and becoming explorers. They did this by celebrating womanhood, not leaving it behind. A founding tenet of the feminist movement was the rejection of shame. This project, understandably, did not extend to men, as bell hooks also acknowledged in The Will to Change:

. . .the feminist rhetoric that insisted on identifying males as the enemy often closed down the spaces where boys could be considered, where they could be deemed as worthy of rescue from patriarchal exploitation and oppression as their female counterparts . . .Feminist theory has offered us brilliant critiques of patriarchy and very few insightful ideas about alternative masculinity, especially in relation to boys.

The researcher and writer Richard V. Reeves would most likely agree. His book Of Boys and Men outlines with chilling clarity how the hangover from centuries of patriarchy still harms young men as they develop. He points at emerging statistical and demographic trends that show boys are struggling in education, in work, and with their mental health.

It is an eye-opening read, and comes with moderate and sensible policy proposals that might go some way towards closing the gap between the great strides feminism has made towards redefining women’s role in society, and the lack of an equivalent movement for men beyond the toxic shame culture of Tate, incel forums, and more commonplace forms of everyday sexism, violence and competition.

Audre Lorde wrote in her seminal essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House: “Divide and conquer must become divide and empower.” She wrote this in the context of a struggle within the movement itself, between privileged white feminists and their black counterparts. But the logic can just as easily apply to the linked, parallel struggles over male identity and solidarity. The challenges are just as steep, the questions raised just as complex.

Could a men’s movement jettison shame without reverting to conservative, patriarchal traditionalism? If they cannot be controlled or overcome, how best to channel men’s latent instincts towards violence and aggression, their need to compete? These are difficult questions for me, as a man. What to be proud of? I don’t know. Like most men, I still have so much to be ashamed of. I carry my guilt, my bitterness and my grievances like a suit of armour . . .and deep down, I’m still spoiling for a fight.

Shame! And Masculinity is available now from Good Press Glasgow.

Clown World is published by Quercus Books and is available from the publisher and good booksellers.

This is part of a collaborative project between Glasgow Review of Books and Bella Caledonia. The Glasgow Review of Books is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. They accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots.