Masculinity and the #MenToo movement
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Jan 26
Masculinity and the #MenToo movement: The Cut
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Jan 26
And also regarding worrisome aspects of contemporary expectations of masculinity, here's my exploration of "bro"-culture in recent films:
I don't think there is any doubt that for some time we will see what we saw happening with the Golden Globes this year concerning the effects of #MeToo. Without doubt, we are going to see women, who, even if they end up bearing characteristics we might later use, in a slightly different climate, against them -- as slightly monstrous, or overbearing, for example -- will pass our current smell test of "strong, empowered women." Without doubt, these will be the films that will win awards, and that everyone will show their eager association with. But how will we know that this means that as a culture, at least we ourselves have done the deep thinking into the matter of how sexual abuse has been tolerated and hidden, how victims have been made out to be guilty ones, to carry, even over much a lifetime, what is properly others' guilt, that for example John Oliver claimed he couldn't actual hear out of Dustin Hoffman's own claims of having done so?
Since it largely won't come from how women are portrayed in film, perhaps what we ought to do is remind ourselves that the #MeToo movement is as much about how everyone deserves to be treated as feminism is. Neither of these movements is about enfranchising women and ignoring any other group, but about making sure that no one alive anymore gets to be waylaid in life by popularly held assumptions of how it is ostensibly okay to treat people that has historically really meant cruelly holding back development and crushing souls.
Thinking along these lines, we might note whether or not there is in the developing film culture also a trend to challenge, not how men seem permitted to treat women, but how for example they seem permitted and encouraged to treat one another... of what is involved in making a man become the best man he can be. Does all that hate that used to be allowed onto women and that we used to justify as something they needed to learn how to handle, or to excuse as just clumsy flirting on men's part that women were oversensitive to, get re-allocated so that it actually inflates the validity of the kinds of treatment that actually has shut down many a man? Does it work to actually enhance male-bro culture, and pass our notice, because it looks or can pass off as evolved because it's now some man, finally this time ostensibly suffering the kind of abuse women have traditionally had to carry, a justified turn of events? And might this re-allocation end up proving temporary, as a culture that isn't as truly with #MeToo as it is pretending, builds the scaffolding for an ostensibly justified reason to revenge against the women that have temporarily resisted their previous uninterrupted and ongoing efforts to make use of them as props in which to dispel their anxieties and thereafter dispatch them.
In "Three Billboards," Sam Rockwell's character, Dixon, becomes a strong patriot to the empowered female avenger, but it comes through his willingly letting a man whom he could otherwise destroy, beat him into a pulp. He is not someone who is mentally broken by the abuse, someone whose intended plans, are actually thwarted thereby as he proved incapable of maintaining the stoic stance through the extreme effects of the torture, but someone whose intentions are fulfilled through them -- a man of will.
In "Moonlight," the young man, Chiron, who is repeatedly bullied through high school, ends up being incarcerated for an act of physical violence -- yes. But this violence was the successful annihilation of the very dominating man who'd been assaulting him -- and who quite frankly, scared us -- and seems a component of his being a pleasing powerhouse later, making it hard at some level to really believe that the bullying was actually not in the end helpful to him: it enabled his being able to make a final triumphant turn against an enduring compromised state of lasting fretfulness and fear.
"Dunkirk:" young men demonstrating that enduring conditions of assault has worth, for it meaning demonstrating that they were willing to endure experiences of apocalyptic terror and helplessness... and therefore anything at all for a country that has to have someone willing to feel all their own compromised emotional states, the intolerable anxieties of suspected catastrophic attack that had come to haunt them. Counting oneself amongst the abused for awhile has worth, for the country will laud you for it -- you'll experience the delight of a thousand trumpets, as a country in chorus cheers you unexpectedly as heroes and chases away any shame you might have been feeling -- and so conversely denying them an assemblage of abused young men is bad, for it means they'll hate you for requiring it to double-back onto them.
"Get Out," a film where conspicuously the main character, Chris Washington, does NOT become the emasculated attendee that represented the fate of the first abductee, but one who after torture, ably dispatches them all, dispatches his crazy user girlfriend, and is back amongst the one person he can count on, his "bro"-friend Rod.
"Logan," a man deteriorated in terms of pain, but never really someone who has to wear the humiliation of being reduced from superhero to limo driver -- it's all a chuckle, as it's means towards an end -- and remains throughout a counter to the really impossible-to-consider fate: being rendered akin to the albino "truffle-digger," who not only is the one who dusts and cooks, and insistently brings up -- that is, nags about -- household concerns the other is ignoring, but who turns turncoat quickly once childhood tortures become applied to him.
"Last Jedi": the pretentious and preening, the full-of-themselves, Finn, newly joined in a pantheon of heroes, who's suspect for perhaps getting off on his new status rather than keeping faith with his common-sort roots, Bo, the cocky guy who thinks his skill means everyone should bend to him, and that because he's special, he can bend rules everyone else has to abide, Hux, the evil young commander who seems to enjoy too much his being in the spotlight, and who doesn't understand that he's just a mere vehicle that a greater power is using, get deflated back into "proper" measure through instances of humiliation/ridicule and torture we are encouraged to take humour in. They ostensibly needed to be taken down a few pegs; it'll be good for them. Is this really a #MeToo film because women in the film gain greater space? Are we sure we should let it pass as bearing our new more evolved sensibilities, and not actually as hosting, with its validating brutally taking down anyone who can be set up as someone whose previous injuries are long past worth considering and who's now just verging on being a pretentious ass, a Trojan Horse of retrograde sympathies?
Some would argue that the very conditions that have served to destroy women -- environments of harassment and abuse -- logically should be understood as doing no less to men. And if films really are no longer for the kind of attitudes that have been applied to women, if we're seeing reform in the portrayal of women built out of deep consideration of the attitudes that previously sustained them, we should be seeing in films an acknowledgement that shaming and humiliation turns men into the kinds of reduced subjects that can make them prey to yet further assaults: that in every way, it's all kinds of bad.
We should not in films find our being drawn away from their fates, find ourselves through being able to identity with some other stronger character in the film successfully defending against what they were rendered into, so even as we ostensibly are only empathizing with and regretting their position they actually function in carrying a dreaded fate we actually enjoy seeing ourselves distinguished from.
We should register the assaults and humiliations the male characters have to endure as evidence as to why we need a therapeutic and caring climate nurtured for them as well. Men who are warm with one another, as heroes: micro-effects of goodwill, building macro-change. Men as those who are willing to do the REALLY unpopular thing, the thing that might make them truly loathed -- acts which are genuinely heroic but bear no signs of traditional bravado, like acknowledging that abuse hasn't tested and bettered you but made you someone who's actually come to enjoy pleasing his predators (a fate that often happens), and that it didn't come out of war, or some venture that leaves your initial status as a man ostensibly incontestable, but elsewhere, maybe some place humiliatingly domestic, making you actually akin to the sad dish-washing albino gorilla in "War for the Planet of the Apes," who, unlike his compatriot in crime, the gargantuan gorilla Red Donkey, is allowed no redemption at the end through "masculine" display of awesome strength and explosive violence.
Men shown breaking ranks in terms of traditional expectations of how men are supposed to comport themselves that leaves them unbearably blatantly exposing our own need for love, our own vulnerability, but not allowed to be categorized for dismissal as pretentious, as not-"I," but rather redeemed, so we are forced, as it is enabled to stand out in broad daylight so we can't turn away, to endure full memory of what had once happened to us too -- a first step towards stepping out from being an advocate for the oppressor, for we're with "him," to avoid our own shame, and if we're not destroyed in forced remembrance of it, we'll have to face up to that fact.
(Note: #MeToo can be subverted, and actually be used to further denigrate the women whose lives are now being somewhat recovered. I'll get to that sometime in another post, as I think the means towards it are already manifesting through certain links the are being made, in popular culture, in film, that'll work to make them seem egotistical -- as those who may know hurts but who don't ostensibly don't know what real pain is -- and pretentious -- those who think society shares their victory when they're earning the same number of millions their male compatriots do -- and ungrateful: Paglia's, "the world women enjoy was built out of the unregistered and unadministered, massive physical sacrifices of working class men." As a hint, it involves all those stories we're now hearing of women from war-afflicted regions risking life and limb for projects they'll never see a cent from, and, Ã la "Downsizing," the downtrodden male's -- who might himself know himself to have been a predator, and who's now ever-worried his own time might be up -- urgent eager affiliation with them.)
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BRIAN
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arniedr
Jan 25
http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/2018/01/22/militarism-machismo-and-the-regulation-of-self-image/
Arnold Richards
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Jan 25
By successfully making psychohistory more sciencey, are we distracting ourselves from other more fundamental problems? Brian's article does not explore the possibility that the key reason men feel troubled by their feeling feminine isn't because it's a highly suspect state to find oneself in in a macho culture, but because what "feeling feminine" really is is having experienced enveloping, incestuous, lengthy contact with isolated and love-denied mothers: it's feeling a victim of abuse by one's mother, a much bigger concern that if society might seem it might shun you because you spent quite a bit of time around your possibly very decent mother, and so felt a bit of a traitor (poor self-reference) to the ideal. It's rather a worse thing to feel an object of incestuous use than to feel like you don't properly fit a preferred social standard, which one would think might not even amount to much at all if you didn't have "authoritarian" parents (not yet discussed at that point in the article) but actually rather splendid ones who gave you plenty of support and love within your own particular "pre-odipal dynamics," and, to me, much more convincingly associated with macro things that involve either denying millions the resources they need to survive or squashing an equally countless number to death. (For those who read the article, do you experience the same sense I had that "militarism" at first looked like it would be built entirely out of boys feeling compromised owing to society's expectations of macho, a temporary escape from the double-bind through loud declarative displays of pure macho, to be repeated over and over again, but then that it seemed as if it required the additional component of "authoritarian parenting" to seal the deal? Once "authoritarian parenting" gets discussed, one dips back into the article and wonders how it all works if the mother and father involved in socializing the children in "proper" gender dynamics weren't authoritarian ogres but actually sublimely wonderful and kind people, simply doing as society has indoctrinated them into... which seemed nevertheless sufficient to cause huge macro disorders like war.) I remember Masterson saying that the science was in regarding the importance of the mother in the formation of the personality disorders, but considered that the lack of impact of this fact on other researchers "may be [because they are] under the sway of the almost universal tendency to hold on to the positive image of the 'mother.'" Here he echoes deMause's complaint against Clio, by the by.
I do think that some readers might be in for a surprise when they hear Brian account that militarism cannot be reduced to individual psychology ("Militarism only exists in relation to states and large-scale political-economic processes, and cannot be reduced to the psychology of individuals and their psychobiographies in families and small groups"), for it appears the kind of statement that lends weight to the preferred conception of societies being a wholly different beast from individuals -- and that they do all the important "causing" -- only to find that what he actually does mean for us to understand IS ACTUALLY THAT individual psychology determines such grand and lofty things like domestic and foreign policy goals; determines the macro. So militarism not being reduced to individual psychology, doesn't mean aggregate childrearing -- individual psychology -- doesn't mostly determine whether or not your nation functions as a great angry he-man beast, as it pounds other smaller countries to smithereens. And whatever this means, and however that works, somehow "psychology of individuals and their psychobiographies in families and small groups" seems to stand a bit taller after the article, and the "states and large-scale political-economic processes," a bit more pulled back; less stately and "serious."
Helping make this conception bear fruit, might actually be of more use to psychohistory (and to society... and to people) than if Brian succeeds in making the discipline function more as a science. It might indeed help our science: Does this mean that psychohistory reduces all of its subject matter to “psychological motives?” Yes. Only a psyche can have a motive, a group cannot, a factory cannot, a gun cannot. Is psychohistory, then, “history reduced to merely personal motives?” Yes again. All motives are personal, though the “merely” is a denial of their importance. And the charge of “reductionism,” often leveled against psychohistory, is simply misplaced, since it is not a failing but a scientific goal to reduce seemingly complex and disparate processes to simpler and more basic forces and principles. MI other sciences long ago learned that the universe of available “facts” is near infinite; only historians still believe they can learn something just by conti-nuing to pile up more and more narrative “facts.”
Anyway, that's my go. Anyone else?
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bdagostino2687
Jan 25
RE: [cliospsyche] Re: BRIAN
Arnie, thanks very much for posting my article on International Psychoanalysis.
Patrick, I have never purported to reduce psychohistory to science (in the sense of measurement, quantitative data, and statistical hypothesis testing). Like Freud, I believe it is potentially a science, but not ONLY a science. I am not challenging you and other humanists to abandon the humanities and become scientists; psychohistory has traditionally been and always will be part of the humanities. It is nothing if not an interdisciplinary enterprise, and that includes neuroscience, Perceptual Control Theory, Terror Management Theory, and much more. Psychohistory cannot be reduced to any one of these approaches, or to any humanistic approach, given its interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary?) character. I adopted perceptual control theory in this article and connected psychoanalytic ideas to a theory of how the brain may be organized, but that doesn’t preclude humanistic approaches, and in fact I also appropriated Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, which comes out of the humanistic tradition. Why can’t we walk and chew gum? Why can’t things be “both/and” rather than “either/or”?
I should not have to, and will not, apologize for designing survey research, collecting data, and doing a statistical analysis, especially in an academic discussion group. Lloyd deMause liked to say that psychohistory is a science, but he never did any of these things or any other kind of systematic, empirical research and limited himself to arm chair speculation, which he equated, by fiat, with “science.” You also seem to be more comfortable with speculation than with reasoning about data. So be it. This group and the field of psychohistory is big enough for all of us! You raise some interesting and important substantive issues that I don’t have time to respond to right now because I’m juggling a lot of other balls. But thanks for taking the time to respond, and I plan to comment further when my time permits.
On the question of whether and in what ways psychohistory can be considered a science, I also refer members of this group to a pair of articles in Psychohistory News that distilled some of our previous conversations on this listserv: “How Much Does Child Rearing Really Impact History?” (Spring 2015) and “Is Psychohistory a Science?” (Winter 2015); these and other back-issues of the newsletter can be downloaded from: http://www.psychohistory.us/archive.php
Brian
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From: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com [mailto:cliospsyche@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2018 1:19 PM
To: Clio’s Psyche
Subject: [cliospsyche] Re: BRIAN
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Jan 26
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: BRIAN
"You also seem to be more comfortable with speculation than with reasoning about data."
This is no doubt sincerely meant, but speaking of erroneously reinforcing norms of masculinity, socially reinforced fit self-perception, doesn't this fit type?
What I thought I was doing was pointing out that if what we are studying is the effects of our mothers upon us, we can't just produce scientific studies and presume we'll have an audience that will naturally cowtow to whatever the results so long as they're valid. We need to "speculate" as to whether most of our audience is still lorded over by their predatory terrifying maternal alters, and if this seems likely, work, perhaps through attention to our rhetoric, to nevertheless speak to the courage in a person to resist Her and not find some way to disown the findings if one sensed she wasn't liking the direction the results of studies would seem to portend.
The angry maternal alter, by the way, would have little trouble with your experiments, for it's patriarchal culture and authoritarianism (which in common parlance, common understanding, is currently safely identified with the patriarchal father, with patriarchy, rather the pre-oedipal mother, no matter how much you point out that it could be either mom or dad who was the authoritarian -- an allowance which actually grants nothing) that gets targeted. Changing child-rearing norms, your advice, scares no one, because it makes people seem simply under tutelage of what they were taught. If it was phrased differently, like saying, we need to provide more social support for mothers because, one, they deserve it, and two, because it will mean they are much less likely to end up changing the brain structures of their boys so they carry, not "maternal introjects," but Terrifying Mother altars within them, which will later drive them to want to war against "guilty" vulnerable children in other countries, then we'd of had to contend with some part of ourselves informing us that, no matter the proof of it, "you accept this study and you'll be rejected of my love forever." My sense is that would quail acceptance of the study, with people ostensibly finding all sorts of flaws built in to the study which show it up as fraudulent, even if they're aren't any, or they're minor.
We have to make sure we have the superior scientists we need, before we dig into data, is my sense. (We must test this.) You don't just offer scientific proof to medieval magicians and alchemists; you create the scientists first. Try re-writing this, yes, difficult article in actually a more substantially less of a people-pleasing way -- the suggestion that we need to learn to be more comfortable with androgyny, is another of these that goes down so easy -- and we might have gotten to whether we've got a larger fight on our hands than securing proof.
Clio's Psyche Call for Papers on Psychology and History of Sexual Violation. Normal, then amended
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Feb 1
Clio’s Psyche Call for Papers on Psychology and History of Sexual Violation Special Issue
Papers are due March 15, 2018 for Spring 2018
Clio’s Psyche seeks psychological insights on these and related subjects:
· Why in America have the barriers to making these issues public broken down?
· To what extent is the openness about these abuses related to the Trump presidency?
· The varied response to charges of sexual abuse
· The “casting couch” in Hollywood and the Weinstein case
· Therapies for sexual misconduct and their effectiveness
· Charges for political purposes and fantasies of sexual intrusion
· How celebrities, politicians, therapists, and the wealthy deal with the erotic transference
· Sexual abuse and sexual fantasy in the Freudian tradition
· The #MeToo movement
· The complexities of gender & sexuality, denial as well as the rush to judgment
· Cases of a rush to judgment without due process, ruining a person’s career
· Sexual privilege in the Middle Ages and throughout history
· Specific cases: Conyers, Franken, Franks, Moore, Trump, Thomas, Weinstein, etc.
Clio’s Psyche seeks psychological insights on these and related subjects:
· Why in America have bullies, abuse-apologizers, and the middle-way failed to any longer intimidate a public from exposing the massive prevalence of sexual abuse?
· To what extent is the openness about these abuses related to the emergence of more evolved populace who won't cover for the Bill Clintons of the world, even if their policies are or were to our preference?
· The varied responses to no longer having cover for your ongoing sexual abuse, or to experiencing the withdrawal of those you unconsciously sensed were executing your own sexual predations upon powerless victims for you
· The “casting couch” in Hollywood, and how we use similar socially sanctioned levers for abuse on those under our power (eg., Carville's "drag a hundred-dollar bill...") to justify our overlooking our own Weinsteinish / Bill Clintonish behaviour
· Therapies for victims of sexual assault and their effectiveness
· Deflecting mal-attention away from predators you like and onto the victims bringing them to justice, by encouraging conceptions of them as politically motivated and full of their own fantasies
· How Weinstein dealt with the erotic transference, or if it's too early to discuss this
· Leadership in not covering for abusers, in the Freudian tradition
· The #MeToo movement
· The complexities of gender & sexuality, denial as well as more savvy means to impede the forward momentum of a progressive turn that has you feeling your own balls might be cut off, like implicating it as crazy and out of control
· Cases of insinuating a movement as rushing to judgment or as a witch-hunt, successfully working to turn the public anger against the abused and to discourage subsequent victims from speaking out, while letting you breathe easier
· Sexual privilege and child rape in the Middle Ages and throughout history, and why we continue to cover for these abuse-ridden times by arguing them nevertheless essential to study, and those who continue to appreciate their "worth," as respectably engaged rather than pornographic voyeurs
· Specific cases: Allen, Clinton, Conyers, Franken, Franks, Moore, Trump, Thomas, Weinstein, Wiesel, etc.
Why are these many unprecedented event now happening?
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Joel Markowitz
Feb 5
Why is this happening?—- the flood of #METOO allegations; the attack on powerful men; — and more women quitting high-level jobs because they earn so much less than do men in similar positions… ?!
For answers— look to psychohistory.
And consider that group-minds— those giant, evolving, COLLECTIVE HUMAN MINDS— have been dragging their populations “upward” in development— toward higher psychosexual levels— ever since humans first
existed.
The Human Condition has been continuously maturing PSYCHOSEXUALLY — for its 180 thousand years. And counting.
The search for JUSTICE is a human trait. But Natural Selection has always insisted that WORKABILITY take priority over justice.
Many groups no longer exist because they minimized WORKABILITY relative to some other motivation.
Our very young species — and our still-younger civilization-- have used WAR thus far as a fundamental determinant of human Natural Selection. And when armed men attack, one feels a strong temptation to run away.
To survive, group-minds have had to identify as strongly as possible with the masculine stereotype. Men had to learn to identify with hyper-masculine values. To motivate men TO ATTACK those attacking armed men, groups had to strongly cathect MACHISMO.
And they had to strongly suppress empathy; sympathy; compassion, and other STEREOTYPICAL FEMININE attitudes— by every possible means. Consistent with the suppression of femaleness, WOMEN had to be denigrated-- and otherwise controlled.
A ceahexis of female values wold weaken (“feminize”) the group ...
All major surviving groups debased female values and women. Burning many thousands of women as witches was only one of many ways women were warned to obey traditional controls.
[ However unjust they evidently were, slavery and primogeniture were among many other useful selective devices.]
[ I remember the debasing of femaleness in the hyper-masculine conditioning of special forces during WWII. The goal was to create an exaggerated emphasis on masculinity. There wa a continuous attack on generic femininity.
[ One example: a marine sergeant was lecturing his troops about their visiting their families prior to being sent overseas. He said, “And when you visit your Suzy Rottencrotch …" ]
———————————————————————————————————————
But we are now living during the third of our great psychosexual transitions. We have evolved through our PRE-OEDIPAL (gatherer-scavenger-hunter) period.
And through our ACTIVE-OEDIPAL (phallic; pagan) period.
We are now experiencing our LATENT-OEDIPAL (“Christian Era”) development.
And we’re BEGINNING to transition into our Early Mature period. The LATENT-OEDIPAL ( “pre-adolescent”) rejection of sex and women is giving way to the MATURE valuing of sex and women.
Only VERY recently— i.e., during the late 1960s and the 1970s— did we see the (seemingly) sudden emergence of a REVERSAL of those LATENT-OEDIPAL Christian Era attitudes.
This reversal was announced by The Youth Rebellion; The Sexual Revolution; Women’s Libration; the acceptability and equality of all races and ethnicities …
We should not be surprised by the intense ongoing conflict between the advocates of the dying era and the advocates of the period that is struggling to emerge.
Among the dying values are: total dominance by powerful men; and the collective acceptance of their limited privileges; and the control and denigration of women and of stereotypical female attributes …..
Our search for justice is advancing— and not primarily for moral reasons. More fundamental is the fact that what we consider “justice” today in now more “practical” than some prior “injustices.”
More WORKABLE in our more-evolved world. Natural Selection now depends increasingly on these new devices.
Workability s still the primary determinant of natural selection As has always been the case.
Joel 2/4/18
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Feb 5
Our very young species — and our still-younger civilization-- have used WAR thus far as a fundamental determinant of human Natural Selection. And when armed men attack, one feels a strong temptation to run away.
To survive, group-minds have had to identify as strongly as possible with the masculine stereotype. Men had to learn to identify with hyper-masculine values. To motivate men TO ATTACK those attacking armed men, groups had to strongly cathect MACHISMO.
This is going to sound flip, but if I had a mob of angry men about to attack me, I'm not sure if my first choice would be to summon male machismo. I mean, wouldn't this work just as well -- a summoning of the remembered pre-Oedipal mother:
If a boy of theirs commits a slight fault, they do not resort to simple blows, but they pursue him on a public street and bite him on the face, the ears, and the arms until they draw blood. In those moments even a beautiful woman is transformed in physiognomy, she becomes purplish-red, with blood-shot eyes, with gnashing teeth, and trembling convulsions, and only the hastening of others, who with difficulty tear away the victim, put an end to such savage scenes (deMause, War as righteous rape").
Surely one would feel that the odds of even a large party of ravagers could be laid to waste, in one simple group-mind summoning of her... "femininity".
Machismo as acquiring distance not from one's memory of one's mother as herself feminine, but acquiring distance from one's own felt experience of what it felt like to be in her embrace: weak, scared, all-feeling, all-exposed. They didn't overtly do "motherismo" because masculinity was their break into some kind of individuated existence. But de facto, they nevertheless did, as deMause has argued, with Medieval knights, drawing upon her power, dressed in the colours and fabric of their mothers.
Anyway, that's my counter. To me your version of how machismo is getting supplanted, bears a strong trace of what would aim to keep it going. The gargantuan strength and power of the pre-Oedipal mother, must be quailed, and so military strength to fight, cut, and kill, identified with the Father.
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