A friend posted early yesterday that when picking up her son, a middle schooler in a Red State, the school had been inundated by boys saying “your body, my choice” to the girls. The line references a tweet by noted Nazi fuckbag Nick Fuentes. It was schoolyard bullying fodder by lunchtime. The school officials are at a total loss as to what to do.
That is this election in a single snapshot.
In the previous post,I tried to give a small window into the underpinnings of this gestalt, the poisonous confluence of gamer culture, boomer shitbaggery, capitalist greed, and patriarchal power fantasy, fed by a media/propaganda machine and grifter economy that spiraled it all together into a political movement that speedran fascism to pwn the libs like they were in a CoD lobby in Hell.
The tweet says it all, though, really.
The ultimate male fantasy – when our construction of masculinity is taken to its toxic end point – is to sit upon a throne made from the skulls of your enemies in a palace surrounded by child brides and fawning slaves, performing cruelty simply because you have the power to do so, with no one left who has the power to stop you.
That sounds hyperbolic, but this is literally what happens when men gain that much power. Along with the Holocaust came sex slavery including children, death camps run like holiday resorts for psychopaths where sadists of all stripes flocked to do whatever they wanted to the unlimited supply of victims, and public demonstrations of cruelty and strength for the general population. The whole country was fed power fantasies to offset the national shame of the outcome of WWI.
What is more powerful than demonstrating that you can do anything you want, no matter how depraved or vile, to a helpless victim?
As ISIS controlled the Middle East at the height of their power, this austere, strictly religious, very serious and godly group I’m kidding, they captured schoolgirls to use as sex slaves and murdered literally everybody. There was no real endgame, no logical agenda, something we’ve seen with the Taliban, as shocked at winning as anyone.
Now, this is not a function of Islam. At all. It is just another power structure used by men to justify and validate this male power fantasy. Catholicism has been exactly the same way too. Heck, the moronic New Atheist dipshits addicted to Islamophobia and self righteousness support plenty of genocidal positions. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins have all expressed various violent responses to geopolitical events for years, feeding the Right with chest thumping smooth brains that use Atheism as the same type of reactionary ego fodder that the religious do.
Which highlights the real issue here: dudes suck. Like, suuuuuuuck. Globally.
Well, ok, technically “the patriarchal vision of masculinity that creates a monolithic, externalized male identity based on power, competition, violence, dominance, supremacy, and unwavering support for an oppressive hierarchical system” sucks. However, when you tell dudes that, apparently, they get suuuuuuper mad and do a fascism.
The long road of opposition to the rise of OMG WOKE has a bunch of bus stops along the way. From the reactionary response to men having feelings in the 90’s to yay war! in the ’00’s, to GamerGate and the rise of post-Fox Conservative media in the teens, we see that trying to teach dudes to be real boys, Pinnochio, has not worked out very well. Why? Because they seem to take it all very personally. Which feeds the loop of persecution and aggrievement that lies at the core of what this shitbag identity needs for its validation.
Oooooo we’re homing in on it now.
You’ll see this theme a lot going forward, but here’s a bit of a tl;dr. If humans do not do the work to examine and develop a healthy, internal sense of self, they are prone to creating or adopting external identities that they think will make navigating the world around them easier. These are not descriptor political identities, these are self-definitive costumes and target dummies we adopt to blend in, or to tank damage from the world around us. The problem with these external identities is that they are fragile, don’t do any real heavy lifting as far as actual human needs go, and need to be constantly validated by external sources. The extremes of this, we see as “personality disorders” like Narcissistic or Borderline or Antisocial Personality Disorders, but it exists as a spectrum, and we all do it to some extent.
When we talk about political identity, we are talking about sociopolitical gestalts that describe commonalities and larger trends visible in the larger systemic functions. For oppressed identities, these usually start, systemically, with the oppressor class’s construction of the supremacist identity. There is some conflict in the larger discourse about whether it is better to create a competing identity narrative or to dismantle the oppressor identity entirely to remove the taxonomy altogether, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment. (Racecraft:The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields is a good examination of this).
So, a recurring theme exists in history that is repeating: an extremist vision of masculinity that promises a Genghis Khan power fantasy rises, usually in response to anyone challenging the hegemony of patriarchal systems, inhibiting the construction of real, authentic, complex and internal selves and replacing them with an external in-group costume of pedowarrior Conans enforced by a bunch of dudes circlejerking to aggrievement porn, and they all become literally the worst.
Every response from these absolute fucking idiots on twitter bears this out. Oh, the Left didn’t fondle my balls enough, sorry, guess I’ll crash the economy. Again. The Dems lost young men because it made them feel bad. How dare you call us garbage, you fucking [homophobic slur][racial slur], I’ll fucking kill you. I can’t wait to rape everybody! Look out, world, I’m solving all of my problems with violence because my feelings were hurt by a girl in high school!
This isn’t hyperbole. This is what’s actually happening.
Why’d the Dems lose? Because a patriarchal fascist cult relentlessly promoting a toxic male power fantasy through oversized media reach seized the narrative, and the cowardly elites of the Party have done fuck all about it for decades, allowing this bad faith fuckwittery to poison every aspect of our culture for money and power. That’s it, that’s the list. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have no idea how to be happy, so they are cosplaying Hitler and making it everyone’s problem.
Any addressing of politics in the US or the global stage has to start with the effect this toxic vision of masculinity has on humans across the world, and how to oppose it. Without uprooting this partriarchal deathcult, no amount of good faith engagement is going to do anything but continue to empower these shitgobbling fuckbags.
Kelsoland.Institute 