73: Dance of contempt

The ability to assert control over other people may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison

Mar 06, 2021

One of the eternal frustrations in trying to make any kind of widespread change is that people with even a teensy bit of power or control generally do not want to fuck with the program if it means they might have to give some of that up. Not only that, they are so terrified about having to give something up, they will often refuse to even interrogate whether the way things are set up now is serving them very well in the first place. Whether it’s in climate change, housing, transportation, education, public health, whatever, these sentiments seem to rear their heads at the end of practically every story of failed attempts toward progress.

It’s the reason rich parents will campaign for desegregated public schools and then send their kids to a private school. It’s the reason white people will march in the streets for Black lives, but won’t challenge police with much more than a body cam. It’s the reason liberals support affordable housing in theory, but not anywhere near their own neighborhoods, no thank you hard pass. It’s the reason public transit is considered a burden and free parking is considered a right. It’s such a stubborn tendency, in fact, that the inherently conservative principle that people will always act in their own best interests steers even progressive organizing efforts, wherein we identify and leverage the pockets of power where individual interests overlap.

There is a statement that I believe originated with author Lauren Morrill in 2017, that goes, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” and has since been repurposed and reattributed, most recently to Anthony Fauci and you can even get it printed on a mask which I’m sure would make you very popular in your local grocery store. It’s become a kind of refrain for people frustrated by a lack of empathy in American policy and politics. As much as I understand that frustration and am generally a fan of empathy, team empathy over here, there is something about the sentiment that feels disjointed to me, like it’s establishing this split between a person who cares and a person who needs to be cared for. When to get the really big change, you know the good shit, we have to take it a step further than that, to the point where we realize that caring for other people is actually the the same thing as caring about ourselves.

I did not make this idea up as many of you will be well aware, this is more or less a social justice 101 concept of collective liberation. But I feel like even for those of us who intellectually understand this fact, it can be a challenging concept to fully take in. That is why I really loved a book I just read that masterfully explains this idea, called The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks, from 2004.

It is based on the premise that all of us are steeped in patriarchy—that it hurts everyone regardless of gender, it can be perpetrated by everyone regardless of gender, and it can’t be dismantled without men being willing to take up the work. It is a beautiful response to the false but stubborn notion that feminism is pro-woman and anti-man; hooks writes lovingly about the men in her own life, how much she needs them, and her painful struggles with them. She makes the important distinction, “The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.” What exactly does that mean? Here you go it means this:

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

Again, that patriarchy hurts people of any gender is an idea you hear a lot, but it’s not always an intuitive one. (And I will acknowledge for a moment here that the gender binary is a tool of patriarchy in the first place.) Personally, it’s hard to dwell on or talk about myself as a victim of patriarchy, mainly because of all of the surface-level ways that I benefit from it. It feels a little ridiculous to say “I, a man, am a feminist because I feel like us we men are really getting a raw deal and it is time we finally put an end to it.” hooks notes that even speaking openly about patriarchy itself often invites discomfort or even laughter. “The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism,” she writes. “It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named.”

But she breaks down what patriarchy really is, at the political, relationship, family, and psychological levels. She describes it as a violent construct that leads to both boys and girls being afraid of their own fathers, and hinders loving relationships in adulthood. It “demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples” and “denies men full access to their freedom of will” by forcing them to live within constraints of a harmful definition of masculinity. It also suppresses the potential gentleness that exists in all of us, and elevates the potential abusiveness that also exists in all of us. On this point, hooks quotes therapist and author Terrence Real:

Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.

Even when the idea of patriarchy is taken seriously, it’s often limited to its political dimension—laws and leaders that protect men who do harm or dole out human rights to women only as they see fit. These are the cruel, visible manifestations of patriarchy, but they don’t capture how all-consuming its harms are. And for men to find the will to change ourselves and the system, hooks argues, we must recognize that the power patriarchy has ostensibly given us is not serving us well. It’s a deep and nuanced book that I recommend in its entirety, but there is one other part on this topic in particular that I thought was so good I had to read it like three times.

Here, hooks is largely criticizing other authors (including feminist author Susan Faludi) on the topic of why men seem to be in crisis, including job dissatisfaction, drug abuse, suicide, depression and other problems plaguing American men, in particular. One common narrative is that men feel they are losing something they once had and have not been able to deal with that loss, and that is at the core of their modern struggles. hooks writes that this doesn’t adequately name the problem:

[Faludi] never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is false. Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives…would not exist.

The point hooks makes here (my emphasis above) is one of the most powerful in Will to Change: That well-being is not the same as feeling powerful because of the ability to assert control over other people. It may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison. She goes on:

Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health. Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation.

So what does this all have to do with climate change, or housing or policing or all those other things I mentioned earlier? Well, an underlying point here is that hooks is not merely talking about the struggle to end sexism or gender inequality. Rather, patriarchy is tangled up with all iterations of dominance that control and subjugate others, the “one-up, one-down” world view that you must not get something so that I can have it.

The root causes of climate change—extractive fossil fuel industry, colonialism in pursuit of resources, even the ever-expanding tonnage of our personal vehicles—are deeply rooted in this underlying system of control and domination. As Eric Holthaus once wrote:

Climate writers often slip into a war metaphor. But climate change is not a war, it is genocide. It is domination. It is extinction. It is the most recent manifestation of how powerful men throughout history have sought to steal from the less powerful, and dismiss them as merely inconvenient. Understanding climate change in this way transforms everything.

In addition, the way hooks describes men as both victims and necessary allies in the fight against patriarchy strikes me as an enormously powerful way to think about people who are opposing necessary change and our own role in either challenging or upholding current systems. That includes considering the damage often being inflicted on people by the very systems they may be a part of or are currently trying to protect. It also means reconsidering what existing power structures we all are reluctant to abandon because of the false sense of control they instill in us, and how, by letting them go, we might become fuller, freer human beings.

Super-Link

This week’s super-link is actually two links about net-zero emissions, one of those climate concepts that can be benign and useful, but quickly become malevolent. The dark side of net zero is really wreaking havoc, as big corporate and government pledges are being executed using basically bullshit math that frees them up to continue burning fossil fuels.

All that the major oil companies have done (with tacit support from many governments) is shift their public narrative about the climate crisis from denial to delusion. They’re no longer insisting there’s no problem, because they lost that argument. “Net zero” is their attempt to continue business as usual without addressing what they’re doing to people and the planet.
If it wasn’t so serious, the premise would almost be comical: oil companies are claiming that not only can they keep their current levels of production, but expand their operations that extract and refine fossil fuels. They would have us believe that by planting trees and using largely unproven, expensive, and thus far inefficient carbon-capture technologies, they can reach “net-zero” and solve the climate crisis – all while continuing to grow fossil fuel production.

Global oil companies have committed to 'net zero' emissions. It's a sham

The climate crisis can't be solved by carbon accounting tricks

Listening

King Princess, Cheap Queen but really any song on this album of the same name or her EP Make My Bed. Heavy rotaysh.

OK that’s it for today, a review of a 15-year-old book, classic Crisis Palace, chef’s kiss. I hope you enjoyed it or maybe it just got your hackles up for a few minutes there got the old blood flowing.

Anyhoo did I say I got a treadmill I did it’s alright. The other day I got on it after dinner and I had like a half a glass of wine left so I just walked on the treadmill and drank wine like some kind of parenting blog facebook meme. I call it “sip and stride” a new paradigm for home fitness. Honestly I probably wouldn’t recommend it, at least not very often. Just as a treat.

Well readers, I hope you are both getting your strides and your sips in, whatever form they may take. Sometimes you gotta stride, sometimes you gotta sip. And I believe you have the power to know when each is appropriate. Bless,

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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