Guest column: Code of masculinity can become an identity

The American male. Ankle-deep. Maladjusted. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. For better or worse, I’m one of them.

In the days following our recent election, there has been much debate over the various roles the American male played in the election of Joe Biden, and the attempted re-election of Donald Trump. This is not to downplay the role of American women in this year’s election but rather, to focus on the male psychology that seems to preoccupy so deeply on unbalanced notions of strength and love. A preoccupation created and sustained through years of social expectation and cultural support. The kind of support Mr. Trump received, both male and female, from his committed base.

Likewise, given the current state of the American male, the term “toxic masculinity” has also been receiving a lot of airplay in recent days. National magazines and big city newspapers have been discussing openly its cultural and historic implications. The term, coined during the mythopoetic men’s movements of the 1980s and ’90s, speaks to the unconscious suppression of intellect and emotion, and the open glorification of dominance and strength that are standard torchbearers of this false masculine ideal. The writer Andi Zeisler states, “The term ‘toxic masculinity’ does not mean all men are toxic. It refers to cultural norms that equate masculinity with control, aggression, and violence and that label emotion, compassion, and empathy ‘unmanly.’” It could be said that those same cultural norms are responsible, in many ways, for the current state of the union. President Trump, who has seemed psychologically incapable of appearing “physically weak,” has refused to wear masks as a rational safety precaution, and in so doing, has promoted the spread of the virus. Similarly, the battle over gun rights is partially based, and misapplied in our 2nd Amendment, on the apparent need for men to proffer weapons in the name of life and happiness. Our entire federal budget could be seen as a large-scale balance of military want over educational and health care need. And so it goes.

Even so, growing up on John Wayne and other proponents of the masculine agenda, my brother and I weren’t immune to its code. I shot rifles and lifted weights during my early years, and still do. My brother eventually became a Cook County sheriff after years of body building and martial arts training. In fact, he has quietly conceded that violence has played an oversized role in his life, for better and worse. Still, there are those who will say that those adolescent activities are just part of growing up as a boy, and they might be right. But like everything else, it is always a matter of degree. Like it or not, there is a psychological hat that sometimes gets hung on these unconscious norms. It becomes a way of seeing and thinking about the world, and eventually, a way of responding to it [not dissimilar from young Muslim terrorists]. It can, in the proper environment, become an identity. A case study in arrested growth.

In Amanda Zackem’s 2017 documentary, “American Psychosis,” the journalist Chris Hedges states, “Totalitarian societies are, by their nature, hyper-masculine cultures, and seek to banish empathy. They not only ignore the vulnerable and the weak, but they ridicule them and persecute them. They celebrate supposed values of force, strength, violence, and empathy is seen as weakness.” In some ways, this is the bestial core of Trumpism - the willingness to self-destruct in the name of misbelief. If President-Elect Biden and his team are looking for a primary obstacle to overcome, this is it. Our democracy may well depend on it.

Paul Wheeler is a former Write Team member from the Ottawa area. He can be reached through tsloup@shawmedia.com.