Masculinity and the Ruling of the World

‘The new Women’s Liberation Movement that has been developing in the last few years badly needs feminist theory. This book is very welcome. With all her usual clarity and readability, Denise has set out to create a thorough analysis of the workings of male domination fit for our times. This is an excellent compendium of insights that can be returned to again and again to shed light on how the system works, and therefore provide some hope of how to begin dismantling it’.

Sheila Jeffreys, author of Gender Hurts: a Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (2014) and The Lesbian Revolution: Lesbian Feminism in the UK 1970-1990 (2018).

‘Denise Thompson’s new book Masculinity and the Ruling of the World is an important book. Many scholars and activists have exposed, analysed, denounced and sought to correct systems of oppression, but what most of them do is either

•ignore or misidentify what it is that oppresses in the first place;

•consider manifestations of oppression as aberrations from an already-accepted norm, either individual (through words or acts) or group (through ideological tenets and systems);

•treat ideology, structure, culture and society as somehow discrete entities; or

•think in terms of concurrent and/or intersecting systems (race, ‘gender’, class, capitalism and so on).

What Thompson’s book does is provide an in-depth and historically, experientially and theoretically grounded analysis of masculinity as systemic and totalising, as the ruling principle that underpins all logics and practices of domination. An essential read for anyone who wishes to better understand both male domination and feminism’.

Bronwyn Winter, Professor of Transnational Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney.

‘This impressive tome gallantly explores the threat posed to humanity by masculine entitlement in various manifestations. Thompson has the honesty and courage to expose the trans juggernaut for the fraud that it is. Thompson is a sane voice of resistance at a time when the very definition of woman is imperiled and our sex-based rights are being rapidly eroded’.

Anna Kerr, Principal Solicitor, Feminist Legal Centre, Sydney

by the same author

Reading Between the Lines: A Lesbian Feminist Critique of Feminist Accounts of Sexuality

(1991, Spinifex Press, Melbourne)

Against the Dismantling of Feminism: A Sudy in the Politics of Meaning

(1996, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales)

Radical Feminism Today

(2001, Sage)

http://users.spin.net.au/~deniset/index.htm

Masculinity

and

the Ruling

of the World

DENISE THOMPSON

Sydney, Australia

2020

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism review or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

The moral right of Denise Thompson to be identified as the author of this work is hereby asserted.

© Denise Thompson 2020

Cover design: Ally Taylor (allymosher.com)

Book design: Robbie Daley and the author

Publisher: The author

ISBN: 978-0-6488036-1-4

Subjects: radical feminism, male domination, masculinity, culture, right wing, entitlement, dissociation, sex differences, capitalism, socialist feminism, feminist economics, wealth, accumulation by dispossession, inequality, tax havens, poverty, finance capital, Modern Money Theory, fascism, surrogacy, transsexualism, US welfare reform, PRWORA, TANF

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Robbie Daley, not only for his help in getting this book out, but also for many insightful conversations over the years.

My gratitude also to those feminist authors whose writings defined the ‘second wave’ of feminism, among them: Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller, Mia Campioni, Phyllis Chesler, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn French, Marilyn Frye, Germaine Greer, Susan Griffin, Sarah Hoagland, Sheila Jeffreys, Gerda Lerner, Catharine MacKinnon, Maria Mies, Kate Millett, Robyn Morgan, Mary O’Brien, Carol Pateman, Julia Penelope, Janice Raymond, Adrienne Rich, Joanna Russ, Diana Russell and Bronwyn Winter.

The Ruling of the World is borrowed from the title of Dorothy Dinnerstein’s book, The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World.

And special thanks to Margaret Roberts, my friend for life, who listened until she understood and then continued the dialogue.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Prologue

Chapter One: Introduction

Both personal and political

The ‘masculinities’ literature

‘Gender’

‘Masculinities’

Feminism and male domination

Chapter Two: A Question of Culture

Culture and social order

Symbolic violence

A culture of masculinity

Character structure

‘A huge thing’

The right wing

Two right wings

The right-wing and the subordination of women

The right wing and masculinity

Chapter Three: Domination and its Other

Harm

Another reality—the genuinely human

Feminism and humanism

Personal integrity

Respect for others

Conduct of conduct

Chapter Four: Entitlement and Dissociation

Entitlement

Rights

Disentitlement

Male entitlement

Dissociation

Psychiatric concept

Feminist theories

The separative self

Feminist object relations

Conclusion

Chapter Five: Capitalism

Feminism and capitalism

Globalisation

Socialist feminism

Feminist economics

The sex of wealth

Private ownership

Chapter Six: Capitalism’s Origins

Enclosures

Polanyi

Slavery

Accumulation by dispossession

Chapter Seven: Capitalism and Inequality

Tax havens

The consequences of tax avoidance/evasion

Chapter Eight: Capitalism and Poverty

Poverty decreasing?

Measurement—$1.25

WB reply

Measurement—$10 to $20

Not only income

Reliability

Comparisons

Causes

Conclusion

Chapter Nine: Finance Capital

Fictitious capital

Commodities

Credit default swaps

Subprime mortgages

Chapter Ten: On Money

Modern Money Theory

Value and social relations

Money and the state

Taxation and government spending

The functions of taxation

The myth of the balanced budget

Government debt and the Memorable Alliance

Money and domination

Conclusion

Chapter Eleven: Capitalism Redeemed?

Chapter Twelve: Fascism

Capitalism and fascism

The centrality of masculinity

The male body

‘Male Fantasies’

Attitudes to women

Wives

Mothers

Sisters

Sex and violence/murder

Obliteration

‘Communism’

Characteristics of the soldier males

Mother-blaming

Oedipus complex

Dissociation

Entitlement

Both

Continuities

Virginia Woolf

Fascism and the US

Conclusion

Chapter Thirteen: Surrogacy

Introduction

Terminology

Positive spin

The Akanksha clinic

Officialdom

Choice?

‘Altruistic’ surrogacy

‘A few disgusting cases’

Gammy

The law

Australia

Israel

Elsewhere

The push for legalisation

Suggestions

For men at women’s expense

Baby M

Some women

Gay men

‘Infertility’

Harmful medicine and the IVF industry

‘Egg harvesting’

Harmful procedures specific to surrogacy

‘Success’ rates

Conclusion

Chapter Fourteen: Transsexualism

Introduction

Female-to-‘male’

Male entitlement

Terminology

‘Entryism’

‘Cotton ceiling’

Malestream recognition

Censorship

‘No-platforming’

Abuse

Explanations

Conclusion

Chapter Fifteen: US ‘Welfare Reform’

‘An unqualified success’?

Dissenting voices

PRWORA and the culture of masculinity

Racism

‘Welfare queen’

‘Welfare reform’ and the slave-owner mentality

PRWORA’s meanness

Children and their mothers

Reauthorisation

Other social-assistance programs

The principle of ‘less eligibility’

Truth, the first casualty of ‘welfare reform’

A national crisis: ‘born out of wedlock’

Chapter Sixteen: PRWORA’s Innovations

Time limits

Block grants and devolution to the States

Disentitlement

Bureaucratic disentitlement

Declining ‘welfare’ rolls

Reasons for the declines

Sanctions

Entry denied

Workfare

Not about work

Privatisation

Non-profit and for-profit

The decline in ‘welfare’ caseloads

W-2

Privatisation and corruption: the case of W-2

Chapter Seventeen: PRWORA’s Precursors

Early history

Waivers

Privatisation

Children and their mothers

Bureaucratic disentitlement

‘Quality control’

Workfare and the perennial war against welfare

WIN

OBRA

FSA

Failure

The ‘disconnected’: neither work nor welfare

Conclusion

Chapter Eighteen: Poverty and ‘Welfare Reform’

Measuring poverty

Food stamps

Chapter Nineteen: Research or ‘Data Be Damned’

MDRC

Chapter Twenty: Conclusion

Disentitlement

Dissociation

Twenty years on

Not inadvertent

Epilogue

References

Index

Abbreviations

Prologue

Masculinity & the Ruling of the World argues that male domination not only subordinates women, it distorts the whole of the social world. It is the root cause of the current parlous state of the world. Male domination creates a culture of masculinity that breeds arrogant dissociated men who are the prime culprits in the depredations that have brought humanity to its present grievous condition (aided by those few women allowed into positions of power because they embrace the same system despite the misogyny at its core). At the same time, I argue, male supremacy is not the whole of the social world. There is also something I’ve called ‘genuine humanity’, which provides a life-affirming force that resists the impositions and seductions of male supremacy.

In order to illustrate some of the ways in which male domination permeates the social world, I have chosen to discuss five institutions that are rarely, if ever, considered in terms of masculinity. The first and most relevant of these institutions is capitalism, the economic system that is the form currently taken by male power. Among other things in this context, I discuss the male ownership of wealth, capitalism’s origins in destruction, despoliation and slavery, ‘inequality’, poverty, the finance industry, and a theory of money (Modern Money Theory) that has the potential to democratise that crucial element of male wealth and power. I then discuss fascism, arguing not only that the fascist ethos centres around a particularly virulent form of dissociated masculinity, but also that it is compatible with capitalism. Just as fascism creates categories of people defined as ‘non-human’ and hence undeserving of any right to life, so capitalism creates categories of people who are ‘superfluous’ to its requirements, and hence undeserving of those resources necessary for human existence.

The other three institutions I discuss are surrogacy, transsexualism and US ‘welfare reform’. Like capitalism and fascism, surrogacy, transsexualism and US ‘welfare reform’ display the arrogant entitlement and crazed dissociation from reality characteristic of the male supremacist culture of masculinity.

Surrogacy gives men permission to take advantage of women’s poverty and desperation to exploit their bodies as production-line incubators, obliterating women’s knowledge of what bearing a child means to themselves and to the babies they give birth to. Although there are women who have availed themselves of surrogacy arrangements—as women have availed themselves of other male supremacist institutions of one form or another—there are indications that the surrogacy institution is by, for and about men. Certainly, it manifests those typical male supremacist values of overblown entitlement (for men) and dissociation from not only the reality of women, but also of their own humanity. To use women as objects for male satisfaction without any consideration of what women might need—and let’s not forget the children who will never know their birth mothers, or their genetic mothers in most cases—is classic male supremacy.

Transsexualism (or transgender or just ‘trans’) gives men permission to say they are women. It is true that such individuals constitute a miniscule proportion of the population (although their numbers are growing fast, as are the numbers of young girls insisting they are boys) (Littman, 2018). The problem arises from the enormity of the influence of the transsexual agenda on the social world of all of us: the legal system (e.g. the UK Gender Recognition Act; the falsification of birth certificates); the justice system (e.g. crimes committed by ‘transwomen’ recorded as crimes committed by women; men being put into women’s jails); the education system (e.g. pro-transgender resources being introduced into schools; universities and other organisations censoring critics of transsexualism); the health system (the acceptability of medical, surgical and chemical mutilations of healthy bodies); the anti-discrimination system (e.g. men claiming, and being given, access to positions reserved for women); the mass media, including social media, giving a positive spin to the transsexual agenda and its ‘transitioning’; and the very meaning of what it is to be human.

And US ‘welfare reform’ (that is neither welfare nor reform) must be one of the cruelest (and most spiteful) pieces of legislation ever passed by the legislature of a so-called ‘developed’ country. The US ‘welfare’ system has always been woefully inadequate. But even that inadequacy was made infinitely worse by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act passed in 1996 by the Bill Clinton administration. Powerful wealthy men deliberately set out to step up the financial abuse of the poorest people in the land, those already victimised by the system that made those men so rich at the expense of most of the citizens of their own country.

It might seem at first sight that these five institutions have nothing in common, either with each other or with masculinity. But I argue that all of them are characterised by male entitlement and dissociation from reality. There is no particular reason why I chose these institutions rather than any other forms of institutionalised masculinity to illustrate its prevalence throughout culture and society, apart from the fact that they are all of particular relevance at the moment. I could have chosen any number of other examples that are more obviously characteristic of male supremacy, such as the widespread occurrence of outright male violence against women, for example, or militarism, or US gun culture, or the rise and rise of neo-liberal governance and the right wing worldwide, or rape, or child sexual abuse, or pornography and prostitution and paedophilia and their acceptance into the mainstream. But the five institutions I do discuss are just as male supremacist as these more obvious examples, and they have received little attention as forms of male supremacy.

These five institutions are not the whole of male supremacy. But they do illustrate the callous brutality of the world men have made by obliterating the humanity of women. In a world of common human decency, none of them would exist (and neither would other bastions of male supremacy: war; rape; prostitution; pornography; sex trafficking; sexual abuse of children; etc.). Male supremacy does not have it all its own way, and common humanity can be found under even the worst of conditions. But male supremacy is still powerful enough to destroy the earth, and lethal enough to try. The first step in resisting it is to expose it for what it is—make it take off its disguises and show its ugly face.

What I have to say here follows on from what I have already written about male domination, while insisting that male domination is not the whole of social reality. If it had been, the human race would already have ceased to exist because male domination is lethal. These days the ruling of the earth is in the hands of arrogant, dissociated men for whom power over others is the supreme motivating force, including the power of brutal violence and destruction. It looks as though humanity has finally reached the point where either male supremacy ends, or civilisation does.

Chapter One: Introduction

We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the masters of mankind, as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the vile maxim to which the masters of mankind are dedicated: All for ourselves and nothing for other people—a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world (Chomsky, 2016).

There is something wrong with men—something obviously, undeniably, tragically wrong … the dictates of masculinity in their most concentrated form: Demand what you want. Use violence to take it. Destroy what you can’t have. This is the ideology of manhood … The liberal notion of healthy masculinity is either a distraction, or a lie. It can be ahistorical and meaningless, by turning masculinity into an empty term indistinguishable from decent human, or it can be a benign patriarchy that confirms the sex stratification at the heart of male power. But what it cannot be is an effective antidote to the militarized psychology of domination that drives male atrocities from mass shootings to genocide’ (Mix, 2016).

That the world is in a parlous state is well known (except by those in denial). Global warming is destroying the biosphere and inequality has reached unprecedented proportions. Men’s wars never cease; somewhere in the world there are always men killing each other en masse, along with any women and children within reach. Pornography has become mainstream, prostitution has come to be seen as just a job of work, and women and children are still being trafficked and enslaved to gratify men’s sexual desires and nobody seems to be able to stop it. Capitalist greed has wrecked national economies, deprived the home countries of the much-vaunted ‘jobs’ by taking them offshore, destroyed people’s livelihoods, impoverished billions while amassing obscene accumulations of wealth in the hands of the few, and now poses grave threats to the environment of all of us. The legacies of colonialism and the continued rapacious depredations of multinational corporations have devastated the Third World,¹ destroying the environment and entrenching poverty, and given rise to some of the vilest dictators the world has ever seen.

There are those who argue that things are improving. One commentator (Matthews, 2015), for example, gives us 26 reasons why ‘the world is getting much, much better’. There are falls in rates of maternal and infant mortality, increases in literacy, education and life expectancy, and reductions in rates of violent crime worldwide (including in the US). However, some of his claims of improvement are debatable. For example, he says that the incidence of violent crime against women has fallen, but it is not clear how he or anyone else knows that. One of his references for the decline in violence is Steven Pinker’s 2010 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In that book, Pinker says that ‘the women’s-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence of rape and the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends’ (Pinker, 2011). But until very recently, rape and the beating and killing of women by men in the privacy of their own homes was acceptable and nobody noticed, much less counted, not even when he killed her; and there was no notion of marital rape. Before the advent of the women’s movement, women’s injuries and deaths at the hands of men were not seen as a demographic fact and hence would not have appeared in official statistics. Thus there is no ‘before’ data with which to compare current figures.

To give another example, he says that ‘more and more countries are democracies’, but the actual policies and practices of so-called ‘democratic’ governments are anything but democratic. They routinely support powerful vested interests against the common good, gerrymander elections, ignore people’s protests, and rarely if ever consult with their constituencies. And then there is the oft-repeated claim that ‘extreme poverty has fallen’. As I argue later (in chapter 8), this claim is suspect because the criterion used to measure extreme poverty—‘the share of the world population living on less than is $1.25-a-day’—is meaningless. Moreover, he barely mentions global warming before hurrying on to say that it is getting cheaper to produce solar panels, and doesn’t mention pollution or environmental destruction at all.

But whether or not things are improving (and global warming, depletion of the earth’s resources and wild places, the resurgence of the rabid right wing, and the increasing belligerence and technological sophistication of the US war machine suggest otherwise), there are worldwide movements of resistance with a global awareness of the problems and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to solve them. Inspired by what I have termed ‘genuine humanity’ which works for the common good, that awareness has had little impact on the ruling elites—whether governments or corporations—who have the power to mend matters. But it does exist and we are not all going meekly to the slaughter.

There are many critiques of this state of affairs, the most relevant of which is the critique of neo-liberalism and the capitalist economy it serves to justify. I agree with these critiques (as far as they go), but I would add that behind the governmentality of neo-liberalism lies masculinity. The reality Chomsky refers to (above)—‘bitter and incessant class war’ waged by the ‘masters of mankind’ against everyone else—is what passes for normal. As normality, the fact that it is a war, and one waged by the powerful against the powerless must be denied. It must be called something else: ‘the market’ perhaps, or ‘freedom’, or, because the effects of that war are too obvious to be denied completely, ‘inequality’; and it must be purveyed as though it were in the interests of all: ‘jobs and growth’ perhaps.² What Chomsky did not acknowledge, although it is implicit in his terminology (‘masters of mankind’), is that the war against humanity is being waged by men made arrogant by the kind of masculinity needed to maintain the culture of domination that has brought us all to this point. That masculinity is characterised by an overweening sense of entitlement and an insane dissociation from humanity, their own as well as anyone else’s. As a cultural imperative, that masculinity can be resisted. But resistance needs to start by challenging the denial that disguises the true nature of the problem.

It is that denial I want to challenge in this present work, by excavating commonly-held beliefs about the way the world is, in order to expose them as justifications for male tyranny. The primary denial is the silence about the existence of male domination.³ For it is men who are destroying the earth. No, not all men, and perhaps not even most men, and some men are valiantly trying to halt the destruction. Men, after all, do have a choice. But, as Jonah Mix points out (see above), there is something about a certain sort of masculinity that, at the very least, is heedless of the wilfully-caused destruction, at worst, glories in it. That ‘something’, I suggest, is a dissociated and arrogant sense of entitlement working for the perceived benefit of (some) men (aided by the women who also embrace the system of male supremacy) at the expense of the rest of us.

I agree that the current desperate state of the world is a consequence of the standard operating procedures of the capitalist economic system. For that reason, I discuss capitalism at some length (in chapters 5 to 11), arguing that capitalism is the modern form of male domination and clearly displays its arrogance and dissociation. As well, I discuss another four institutions to illustrate dissociated masculine entitlement in action—fascism, surrogacy, transsexualism and US ‘welfare reform’. This is a disparate grouping, and at first sight it might seem that they have nothing in common. I argue, however, that what they have in common is a culture of masculinity that operates to privilege men at the expense, not only of women, but of humanity as a whole. In other words, male supremacy is bad for men too because it is dehumanising. But apart from capitalism as the current form of male power, there is no particular reason why I chose these other four institutions rather than any others to illustrate the prevalence of masculinity throughout culture and society. Institutionalised masculinity is everywhere. I could have chosen any number of other examples that are more obviously characteristic of male supremacy, such as the widespread occurrence of outright male violence against women, for example, or militarism, or US gun culture, or the rise and rise of neo-liberal governance and the right wing worldwide, or rape, or child sexual abuse, or pornography and prostitution and paedophilia and their acceptance into the malestream.⁴

I do have something to say about these issues, but I do not discuss them at any length because they have already been extensively criticised. The feminist critiques do not attribute the genesis of these phenomena to masculinity’s dissociation and arrogant entitlement, but they do identify men as the perpetrators. In contrast, the five institutions I discuss have rarely, if ever, been linked to male entitlement and dehumanised dissociation. There is a mainstream critique of fascism as an extreme form of masculinity (see chapter 12); there is also a feminist critique of surrogacy and transsexualism as male entitlement (see chapters 13 and 14); and US ‘welfare reform’ has been extensively criticised for its effects on poor women and children (see chapters 15-19) (although not in terms of the masculinity of its framers). But capitalism has not to my knowledge been addressed as a culture of masculinity. However, all five, I hope to show, more or less avidly embrace the meanings and values of masculinity, namely, dissociation from a common humanity by way of an overweening entitlement on the part of powerful men and concomitant disentitlement for those defined as less than human and either exploited or excluded from human rights altogether. Moreover, all are particularly pertinent at this point in time. Capitalism has created a level of inequality that threatens the very existence of society. Surrogacy and transsexualism are recent phenomena, products of two of male supremacy’s more triumphant confidence tricks: a neo-liberalism that reduces people to nothing but commodities, and a post-structuralism that sneers at notions of humanity, reality and truth. Fascism is always with us and it is rearing its ugly head again in many countries, especially the US. And so-called ‘welfare reform’ in the US is one of the most spiteful pieces of victim-blaming to be found in the Western world, devised by powerful men and imposed on economically powerless women. Its viciousness is surpassed only by the US military industrial complex, which kills women and children directly, rather than through the indirect method of starvation and exclusion from health care. In the case of ‘welfare’, there is nothing left for the Trump administration to do. The US has a ‘welfare’ system in name only; the reality has already gone.

What I have to say here follows on from what I have already written about male domination, but it also postulates another reality existing alongside the male supremacist world, a genuinely human one that is a source of resistance to male domination. The notion of the ‘genuinely human’ is intended as a contrast to the dehumanisation of male supremacy, and as an acknowledgement that male domination can be challenged and resisted (see chapter 3).

Both personal and political

This present project is an attempt to theorise a feminist personal-political account of male domination, using a feminist focus to identify the sex-specific nature of social arrangements largely presented as gender-neutral.

The personal aspect involves a character structure by, for and about men, that both advantages men and creates the kind of men who believe they are entitled to all that the system promises them. One striking example of this personal aspect is Donald Trump (and the henchmen he surrounds himself with, including the women), brought to the world’s attention during the 2016 US presidential campaign and his subsequent election to the US presidency. Other examples (discussed in subsequent chapters) are the men who generate and profit from capitalism’s wealth accumulation, fascist men, those who exploit women’s bodies in the surrogacy industry, those who embrace the transsexual agenda to obliterate the category of ‘women’, and the right-wing men in the US Congress responsible for ‘welfare reform’.

The personal aspect also involves resistance. Domination is hegemonic as well as violent, i.e. it operates most efficiently to the extent that people ‘consent’ to its social arrangements (Chomsky, 1988). That ‘consent’ is elicited and managed through the meanings and values through which we come to understand the world. But if we can consent, we can also refuse and resist, even though that resistance might amount to no more than a reluctance to engage with what we are forced to be complicit with. For male supremacy is not the whole of social life. The more men are influenced by the genuine humanity of the common good, the less these personality characteristics hold sway. Humanised, such characteristics transmute into ordinary detachment and justified entitlement. Detachment is not pathologically oppressive—sometimes it’s simply the most appropriate response for both sexes. And there are certain entitlements we all share simply because we’re human. Nonetheless, the misogyny, dissociation and arrogant entitlement characteristic of male supremacist men is a cultural norm, far more widespread than the individuals who are its most brutal exemplars.

My primary concern here, then, is the political aspect, or more precisely the institutional aspect, of the system of male domination. Although it is men who are threatening life on the planet, it is not men as such but those men who embrace the meanings and values of male supremacy as their own (aided by the few token women who are allowed into the boys’ games as long as they play by the boys’ rules). I am not talking about what masculinity is (full stop), but about what masculinity is when it serves the purposes of male domination. I am using it in the sense alluded to by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, when she said: ‘I use both of these terms [feminine and masculine] to refer to roles/stereotypes/sets of characteristics which are essentially distorted and destructive’ (Daly, 1978: 26). Or as Gena Corea (1985: 4) put it: ‘When I write the word men in this book, I am writing about some individuals, but also about the institution of masculinist politics, about men as a social category and dominant class’.

So the masculinity I am talking about is both the character structure required of men under conditions of male supremacy, and a cultural imperative of meanings and values comprising an institutional framework for organising the social world of all of us in the interests of the powerful. My emphasis on the cultural (see chapter 3) is intended to avoid individualising⁵ masculinity in any sense that implies that it originates in something inherent in male individuals. This tendency to see anything said about people in individualistic terms elides the social aspects of what it is to be human. Seeing masculinity as simply a characteristic of individuals identified as ‘men’ tends to understate the extent of the problem, even when those characteristics are acknowledged to originate with male supremacy. One cannot, for example, avoid this masculinity by avoiding interpersonal interactions with men, or, in the case of men, avoiding its worst manifestations, although that is a necessary part of any resistance. As meaning and value, that is, as culture, masculinity permeates the social world throughout, structuring institutions, creating the world-taken-for-granted, and presenting itself as a harmless ‘difference’ while disguising its true nature as the prerogative of men made powerful by a system whose reason for existence is to do exactly that.

I am talking about ‘masculinity’ in two senses—as a personality characteristic demanded of men by male domination, and as a cultural imperative structuring the everyday lives of all of us. I am saying that the male supremacist culture I call ‘masculinity’ is embedded within individuals (within men, but also within women although differently, to the extent that either sex subscribes to its meanings and values), an embedding that takes the form of such ‘subjective’ phenomena as ideas, feelings, emotions, understandings, etc. In saying that, I am saying that we are creatures of our social environment in a quite literal sense, in that the way we understand the world is created within us by the society into which we are born (just as the language we speak is). But my use of the term ‘masculinity’ is not confined to male individuals. I am more concerned with its institutionalisation, its imperative of dissociation and unwarranted entitlement that structures the moral and political environment and gives meaning to the social world. With the concept of ‘genuine humanity’, however, I am also saying that we are not only male supremacy’s creatures, that we do have choices.

In making these distinctions, I am not suggesting that my usage is correct and other usages are wrong. I am merely clarifying the way I use the word in this present work. ‘Masculinity’ meaning simply ‘ways of being a man’ without further qualification is the most widely accepted usage, and it will continue to be so, but that is not the meaning I am using. My usage is admittedly idiosyncratic. It is intended to go beyond the everyday usage by identifying male domination as the meaning both of personality characteristics and of institutions; at the same time it remains connected to that everyday usage by using the same term, because male domination is not something other than the everyday, but permeates the mundane existence of all of us.

The ‘masculinities’ literature

It might be assumed that the place to look for an account of masculinity is the literature on ‘masculinities’, but I have found this literature unhelpful for my purposes. Much of it does acknowledge male domination, but the focus still remains on male individuals. This is of course the corollary of feminism’s focus on women, and it is only to be expected given that men are the bearers of masculinity however characterised. This work has produced some important insights.⁶ But important as it is to account for male implication in the social relations of male supremacy, it needs to be complemented by a perspective based on the premise that masculinity manifests institutionally as well as through individual behaviour. In that sense, it becomes an issue not only for men (although it is that), but also an issue about the way society is structured and about the meanings and values which inform and shape the institutional realities we all live under. While it is true that masculinity is a characteristic of individuals, a political analysis needs to investigate it as an institutional phenomenon as well. The ‘masculinities’ literature tends to focus simply on ways of being a man, on how male individuals are shaped by society or (in a more feminist vein) by male domination (or ‘gender inequality’). There is too little emphasis on the meanings and values that animate both personalities and institutions, that permeate the whole of society (notwithstanding investigations of the media and educational practices). Keeping the analysis at the level of the personality characteristics or behaviour of individuals, even when they are acknowledged to be the result of male domination, is too narrow a focus.

However, another reason why the ‘masculinities’ literature is unhelpful is its use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘masculinities’.

‘Gender’

The ubiquitous use of the word ‘gender’ is something the ‘masculinities’ literature has in common with both feminism and the malestream. The ease with which ‘gender’ has been adopted as a designator of the feminist enterprise should be a source of unease within feminism (as indeed it is, within radical feminism). It does nothing to expose the continued widespread existence of all the male supremacist evils exposed by feminism, much less curb them. The term’s popularity neither guarantees its usefulness in clarifying what is at stake, nor its accuracy in identifying the problem. For a number of reasons, I would argue that it is meaningless: it falls into the same essentialist trap it was supposedly designed to avoid; it has so many meanings it is often unclear what is being appealed to; and, most importantly, it euphemises the real subject of feminism—male domination.

The distinction between sex and gender was supposedly designed to make the point that the differences between the sexes were socially constructed, not the result of biology. But by separating ‘sex’ out from ‘gender’ and assigning the social aspect of the relationship between the sexes to ‘gender’, the sex/gender distinction implies that sex isn’t social—only ‘gender’ is. At the time the sex/gender distinction was being established, there was still a tendency to appeal to biology as the truth of sex differences, and they could be argued away if it could be shown that they didn’t have a biological basis (Thompson, 1989, 1991a, 2001). More recently, with the arrival of the transsexualism phenomenon, it might seem as though biology has finally been vanquished. ‘Gender’ reigns, emotional feelings override any other kind of reality, and the biologically sexed body is argued away by changing the terminology—‘he’ becomes ‘she’, the penis becomes female, etc.—and by bullying the reluctant into compliance.

This process has been enabled by liberal use of the word ‘gender’. Unhooked from any reference to biological sex, it can mean anything. Because it has so many meanings it’s often difficult to decide which one is being referred to: whether it’s a synonym for ‘sex’ (‘the gender of the fœtus’), or a substitute for ‘women’ (or more rarely, ‘men’) or for ‘sex differences’ or ‘relations between the sexes’, or whether it’s a direct euphemism for male domination, or whether it denotes either some variety of misogynist ideology or alternatively, a feminist discourse. So malleable is the term ‘gender’ that its connotations are seemingly endless.

Whatever its referent, the main reason ‘gender’ is meaningless is because it obliterates the real political problem—male domination. The social problem uncovered by feminism is male supremacy, not ‘gender’ (or even ‘women’). ‘Gender’ waters down the feminist message to incoherence. It may be that using ‘gender’ has enabled some of the more anodyne aspects of the feminist message to enter the mainstream. But without the concept of domination, at the very least it leads to confusion. Just being a man (or a woman) is not in itself a problem, and neither are relationships between the sexes. At worst, ‘gender’ allows anti-feminism to masquerade as feminism because it deletes the reason for the feminist enterprise. ‘Gender’ may not frighten, but neither does it enlighten.

‘Masculinities’

Another reason why I find the ‘masculinities’ literature unhelpful is the use of the term ‘masculinities’ itself. The postmodern tendency to cast important words into the plural (‘feminisms’, ‘sexualities’, ‘knowledges’, ‘logics’, ‘positionings’, ‘learnings’, ‘violences’) trivialises and diminishes their significance. As Susan Hawthorne noted, ‘What is presented as postmodern feminisms is a massive distortion of feminism and of the history of feminism’. This, too, has a euphemising function. It is, as Hawthorne pointed out, as though ‘we are begging to be accepted’.⁷ (See also: Hawthorne, 2016). It serves to soften references to a harsh reality by dissolving the phenomenon under discussion into fragments that disallow any overarching framework through which that reality might be named and challenged. As Schrock and Schwalbe said, it ‘make[s] it hard to see what it is that masculinities have in common’ (Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009: 280). These authors also point out that it ‘has fostered a kind of categorical essentialism in studies of men’, by sorting men into ‘conventional categories of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, or class’.

More importantly for my purposes, the use of the term ‘masculinities’ does not allow any distinction to be made between the masculinity required of men by male supremacy, and masculinity as simply a characteristic of men because they’re men. R. W. Connell said that using the term ‘masculinities’ meant it was possible to ‘recognize more than one kind of masculinity’ (Connell, 1995: 76), but it is not clear on the face of it why that might be a political enterprise. The political task is not to identify ways of being a man since, in and of itself, being a man (or a woman) is not a social problem. The fact that men are different from each other is trivially true, i.e. it has no political implications. The political problematic is male domination, and the political task of analysing masculinity as a personality characteristic of male individuals is to identify only those ways of being a man which are complicit with domination. The concept of genuine humanity which I have introduced accepts the existence of male ways of being human which are not complicit with masculinity in the male supremacist sense. But these ways of being male and human do not need to be theorised because they have no relevance for an analysis of domination. The ‘masculinities’ literature tends on the whole to confuse the two—male supremacist masculinity and ways of being a male human being—and hence misrepresents the political project of identifying and resisting domination. Because the focus in this context is on the logic of domination which remains coherent no matter how multifarious its manifestations, the singular term, ‘masculinity’, is more appropriate.

Feminism and male domination

I regard this present project as an exercise in feminist theory because it follows on from a vast body of feminist work. However, this project differs from most of that prior feminist work because my focus is not primarily on women.⁸ I do not ignore the harm done to the female half of the human race by the male supremacist system and the men who embrace it. The feminist focus on the harm done to women by men in, for example, rape, femicide (the murder of women by men because they can, and the leniency with which it is treated by the law), prostitution, pornography, the euphemistically termed ‘domestic violence’, exposes the system and its denial by the malestream. It is an important and necessary focus, and it does bring public attention to bear on the most violent and degrading effects of the system. My primary focus, however, is on the system that wreaks the harm, a system that, while it oppresses women, is primarily concerned with stoking male power, often without any reference to women (e.g. that chief modern form of male power, capitalism). The feminist focus on women is perfectly valid, indeed vitally important, given that women are male supremacy’s primary target of attack and exploitation. The very word ‘feminism’ means ‘woman’ after all (from the Latin word ‘femina’). But the focus on concern for women can displace attention away from male domination as a system.

Moreover, as we’ve discovered, the malestream can acknowledge women and even the harms, as well as the need to do something about it, while ignoring the real problem. Take the example of ‘domestic violence’ (sometimes referred to as ‘family violence’, or worse, ‘intimate partner violence’). Every government in the world, developed or developing, along with the United Nations, has taken it on board with policies, programs, projects, initiatives, political commitments, joint efforts, state responsibilities, etc., supposedly for dealing with it. But there is little or no discussion of the culture that condones and even encourages the violence. Of the systematic ways in which men are given permission to treat women with contempt—with pornography, prostitution, pop culture and advertising filling public spaces everywhere you look—little or nothing is said in the context of ‘violence against women’, much less anything done to change those cultural imperatives.

Even the fact that the perpetrators of ‘domestic violence’ are men is often absent from the policy discourses. For example, The NSW government’s domestic violence ‘blueprint for reform’ (NSW Ministry of Health, 2016) lists ‘women, men and children’ as the victims whose lives are supposedly to be made ‘safer’ by this government initiative. But the text reveals the reality. ‘Male victims’ appears only once (on p.2), and there is no mention of whom they are victimised by (women? other men? the children? the furniture?). But there is a fairly large section devoted to ‘men’s behaviour change interventions’ (p.3), in accordance with the reality that the main ‘domestic violence’ problem is the violence of men. In accordance with that same reality, women are not mentioned in this context of ‘behaviour change’, except for Aboriginal women (p.3). So the only female perpetrators of ‘domestic violence’, according to the NSW government’s Ministry of Health, are Aboriginal women. Presumably the authors of this document were oblivious to this instance of racism. Men are finally acknowledged as perpetrators on p.7, in the section on ‘Holding perpetrators accountable’, which does not mention women at all. An earlier NSW government web page had not only explicitly denied that the systematic problem was the violence perpetrated by men, it even denied that women were the main victims. ‘Domestic violence can happen to anyone’, it said in a bold typeface headline,⁹ thus expunging the system of male culpability and female victimisation altogether.

The United Nations is somewhat better. The description of the UN study of violence against women, Ending Violence Against Women: from Words to Action. Study of the Secretary-General,¹⁰ launched on 9 October 2006, does include the phrase ‘male violence against women’ (once). But most of the time it is simply called ‘violence against women’ with the male agency deleted. Given this bowdlerisation and euphemisation, while the feminist focus on the harms to women was (and remains) important, there is a need to move beyond it as well, to expose every aspect of the system of domination that continues to harm not only women, but the whole human race, indeed, all life on the planet.

The recognition of male domination as the system that oppresses women is not absent from feminist accounts, of course. That is where I found it after all. As Mary O’Brien said: ‘It is an axiom of feminist understanding that the dogmas of male supremacy invade all human institutions and pervade all modes of discourse’ (O’Brien, 1986: 16). It is usually clear in feminist accounts (although surprisingly, not always) that the cause of women’s oppression is male domination and the men who treat women with the violence and contempt mandated by the system. But I don’t find feminism, even so-called ‘radical feminism’,¹¹ entirely adequate as an account of male domination, despite the fact that it was feminism that discovered the phenomenon.

Male violence against women is not the whole of male supremacy. Male domination is not always violent (although it is always corrupt and corrupting). It also seduces and presents itself as normality while disguising the harm it does by defining it as necessary, or even beneficial. The feminist critiques of the five institutional manifestations of male supremacy I discuss critically in what follows tend to focus on the harms done to women, and necessarily so, given how severely men exploit and harm women in these institutional arrangements, and how little women’s interests are taken into account. My emphasis, however, (and it is an emphasis, not a disagreement or a criticism) is on the institutions themselves, sometimes on the ways they harm women (and humanity overall), but also on the fact that these institutions owe everything to the culture of masculinity that embraces the values of arrogant dissociation that create the kinds of men that wreak the harm.

Chapter Two: A Question of Culture

In talking about a culture of male supremacist masculinity, I am using the term ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense of a symbolic universe of meaning, not in the ordinary language sense of something other than, and superior to, everyday life. When I say ‘a universe’ of meaning, I don’t mean something absolute. I use the term ‘universe’ to indicate something all-encompassing, certainly, something like Habermas’ ‘life worlds’, Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ or Bourdieu’s ‘fields’. But its comprehensiveness does not mean that there are no alternatives, but rather that it is systematic, coherent and influential, and manifests itself in similar if not identical ways in individuals who have no tangible connection with each other. Culture is the common understanding of our shared reality, how we interpret what is happening and what we do.

The literature on ‘culture’, in anthropology, sociology and (more recently) cultural studies, is vast, and the debates about the concept’s meaning, usage, scope and nature are by no means resolved to this day. I do not intend to review this literature.¹² In referring to masculinity as a kind of culture, I am not concerned with, for example, the foundational role of Marxism in the debates, with questions about the ‘relative autonomy’ of culture (‘the superstructure’) from the economic ‘base’ (in the Marxist version) or from ‘society’ (in the liberal democratic version) (e.g. Alexander, 1990; Sahlins, 1976). Neither am I concerned with the ‘woman=nature’/‘man=culture’ debate, although I do think there is some truth in the latter homology. As far as I know, every culture that has ever existed has been male supremacist in the sense that its central organising principles revolve around what men want, or rather, what they should want in order to maintain masculinity as the ‘human’ norm. This is not inevitable. There are feminist accounts presenting evidence of early, pre-patriarchal societies where the culture was not male supremacist (e.g. Dexter, 1990; Gimbutas, 1989, 1991; the work of Max Dashu).¹³ But we are all cultural beings anyway. We all make sense of the world through the meanings and values we are familiar with, and the genuine humanity I mentioned above is also a cultural phenomenon. So I am using the word ‘culture’ in a neutral sense, signifying simply meanings, values and understandings, i.e. the domain of the symbolic. In that sense, both feminism and the malestream are cultural.

Calling masculinity ‘cultural’ is intended to emphasise the fact that, like women, men are made not born. Or rather, masculinity is like femininity in that both are social phenomena not biological drives. Masculinity has nothing to do with hormones, for example (the usual culprit when one or another instance of egregious male behaviour is under discussion), and everything to do with how maleness is understood, valued, required and sanctioned. Calling it ‘cultural’ is more precise than calling it ‘social’ because of the importance of meaning and value in structuring worldviews, including that of masculinity. My purpose in using the term ‘culture’ rather than ‘social’ as a description of what masculinity ‘is’, is simply to underline the fairly limited point that what is at issue is a system of meanings and values—the symbolic. The term ‘social’ is not inappropriate for this purpose, but the term ‘culture’ is better.

This means that both the masculinity I am talking about and the genuine humanity are understandable only as social phenomena. Men are not violent and destructive because of something inherent in them. Violence and destruction are a consequence of a social environment of domination which gives men an inflated sense of their own importance (because they aren’t women, the proof of which is their penis-possession), and denies them any grounding in genuine humanity. Men exercise violence for a variety of reasons: because they can; because the connection between violence and masculinity is encouraged even though it is also deplored; out of aggrieved resentment that they are not being given what they feel they’re entitled to—sex or money or power or prestige; because violence is the default option in response to insult, real or perceived. Men’s violence is a question of meaning and value, of choice and responsibility. There is always an alternative based in genuine humanity, if only they could see it.

Culture and social order

It is generally agreed that culture involves the establishment and maintenance of social order. To quote just one of the many commentators on this issue, Ernest Gellner: ‘Social order requires a shared culture …

any culture is a systematic prejudgement. Society needs entrenched paradigms … No society without culture, no culture without enforced prejudgement. Prejudgement alone makes social life and order possible’ (Gellner, 1994: 32).¹⁴ But a social order that needs to be enforced is a precarious one. Gellner did not discuss the implications of his use of the term ‘enforced’. On the contrary, in true liberal fashion he remained focused on what he believed to be the bright side, the good society he called ‘Civil Society’ (caps in the original), i.e. the modern capitalist social democratic nation state. He argued that this was the kind of society where the prejudgement required for social order was less brutal than in any previous social arrangements. It ‘was made milder and flexible, and yet order was maintained’. He referred to this as ‘a miracle’ (Gellner, 1994: 32).

However, Gellner’s assumption that social order needs to be enforced is based on the belief that men (and it is men) need to be controlled. This belief is expressed in Hobbes’s idea that man’s natural state is a ‘war of all against all’ in which men would be constantly killing each other in struggles for ascendancy. This primal state of affairs is curbed by ‘Leviathan’, the strong central state which has the power to deter wrong-doers by imposing legitimate sanctions. The sociological question asked from this Hobbesian starting point is: ‘How is social order possible?’ (Gellner says it is enforced; other liberal theorists have said it comes about through a ‘contract’, a general agreement entered into when men realise that living together peaceably is preferable to constant strife). For example, Dennis Wrong couches the sociological question thus: ‘How are men capable of uniting to form enduring societies in the first place? … How is man’s animal nature domesticated by society?’ (Wrong, 1961: 184). Wrong’s assumption is that, if men need to unite then their original condition must be separation; and if they need to be domesticated, then they must originally be wild. The first question assumes that divisiveness not unity is the primal human condition; the other assumes that there’s an animal aspect to being human that is prior to society and that needs to be ‘domesticated’ and therefore must be savage and dangerous.

This kind of questioning about the nature of society focuses on social order as the problem to be addressed (‘How are men capable of uniting to form enduring societies in the first place?’), while finding the breakdown of social order theoretically unproblematic—that’s just what men are like, or what they would be like if it were not for that puzzling ability they have to live together peaceably. It is theorising that is shaped and motivated by the symbolic violence of the culture of masculinity. It assumes that men are each others’ natural enemies, and that Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ is perfectly understandable (if reprehensible) and there is therefore no need to question it any further. This kind of theorising finds peace and goodwill curious and inexplicable, and violence, hatred, contempt and vicious conflict for control of ‘scarce resources’ only what is to be expected of men. It participates in masculinity’s dissociated detachment by ignoring everyday existence where infants normally grow into social beings without the imposition of any strict methods of social control, and where people, men and women, get along together fairly well most of the time. And it participates in the inflated sense of entitlement by insisting that aggressive competitiveness is natural to ‘human beings’ (read: men), and hence that it is understandable that they might behave violently to get what they want, even though that violence must be restrained for the collective good. It regards the character structure of masculinity, with its ‘unlimited resort to fraud and violence in pursuit of their ends’ (Wrong, 1961: 185), not as the product of socialisation, but as a result of its failure.¹⁵

In contrast to the Hobbesian assumption of an innate lethal competitiveness, it is possible to assume instead a basic sociability that is disrupted by varying degrees of violence and aggression. The question then changes from ‘How is social order possible?’ to ‘Why does social order break down?’ Assuming an original cooperativeness is as plausible as assuming an original aggressiveness, if not more so, as anyone who has ever had any extended connection with infants would know. Alison Jaggar (among others) refers to this as ‘human interdependence’, pointing out that human infants need a long period of dependence on others within cooperative communities if they are to survive. If this were to be taken as the starting point for theorising society (she is speaking particularly of liberal theories of society), it would be ‘egoism, competitiveness and conflict’ which would become ‘puzzling and problematic’, not cooperation and community (Jaggar, 1983: 41. See also: Flax, 1983; Hartsock, 1985: 42; Hoagland, 1988: 250).

In contrast to the male supremacist assumption of inherent aggression, it is possible to take the assumption of an original cooperativeness as a starting point. Instead of assuming that human beings need to be tamed and domesticated, we can assume that we have an inherent propensity for sociability (men too), just as we have an innate propensity for language (and perhaps they are different aspects of the same thing). I do not intend to argue for this—it is just as plausible as the opposite assumption of inherent aggression. Neither is empirically testable because they are both assumptions about the whole of humanity and there is no control group.

But anyway (as Wrong points out), it is not a question of either/or—either human beings (or men) are innately aggressive, or they are innately sociable. Hobbes’ question is the wrong question. That it should continue to be so influential is a consequence of the continuing influence of male supremacist beliefs about what men are like. The question is neither: what makes social order possible? nor: what makes social order break down? at least in part because social order and the culture which sustains it is not always a good thing. The term ‘culture’, as I am using it, does not necessarily refer to a pacifying and peaceable influence. It refers simply to a coherent structure of meanings and values. Sometimes the coherent culture can serve bad purposes. Capitalism, for example, is a source of exploitation and degradation, and yet it is coherent and influential. Dehumanisation can be embraced as a virtue, rather than being condemned as evil; and prevalent, widely accepted meanings (that is, ways in which the world is understood) can justify exploitation, oppression and degradation.

To take another example, slavery in the US was justified by appeals