Morning Comrades.
Ok, I’ll bite, for once and will get into a cultural discussion. I generally do not involve myself in culture war discourse for a plethora of reasons, predominately because I find them tiresome, reactionary and ultimately defensive in nature. The reason being that “culture” and the most recent so-called culture wars are most often started by conservative actors in pay of the capitalist class to obscure the actuality of class warfare and thus any and all response, energy, resources and so invested by us are defensive in nature, and quite frankly bound to be “lost” - for one, they have more money and more importantly, their “arguments” are never in good faith, let alone serious in any shape or form.
But for the sake of it, since too many “men” are nurtured into starting podcasts, the bane of all idiocy, that exist solely to sell you some form of a ponzi scheme, let’s talk about manhood, masculinity and what it is to be a man. Truth be told, not only does my skin crawl at the sheer reality of typing these words but I am also laughing inwardly at this topic. To be absolutely clear, the idea to define a gender is not only irrelevant to me but as far as I am concerned exists not only as a social construct but more poignantly, to sell you shit you don’t need. Sadly, it is as simple as that.
But since these conmen are crying about masculinity, let’s get into it. For simplicity’s sake one could argue that the bemoaned ideal type of masculinity that is threatened by modernism ( again, I am laughing hysterically ) is nothing but an invention of the US based advertising scene popularly portrayed by Mad Men. A fair argument but one lacking depth. There is some great literature on this subject and one work that specifically stayed with me since reading it at the start of my studies in 1996 was “The Image of Man” by George L. Mosse - who dug a lot deeper into our understanding of what masculinity is, and how it was manufactured.
Strap in, pun intended, and let’s talk about Manhood.
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