Rev Left Radio - Right Wing Moral Panic: "The Crisis of Masculinity"

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

UNLOCKED: Adnan Husain and Breht O'Shea from Guerrilla History discuss the current moral panic on the political right around issues of masculinity, dropping testosterone levels, and family formation. Together they discuss how the Right obscures the role of under-regulated corporations in poisoning us and the role capitalism plays in destabilizing human life in general, and instead blame scapegoats like life-saving vaccines, innocuous food stuffs like soy, feminism, LGBTQ people, and liberal elites (but never reactionary ones ofc). In addition, they try to think through what masculinity actually is, how it might express itself in healthy ways, what the left can offer young people in general, how reactionary notions of masculinity are rooted in profound fear and insecurity, and how misogynistic figures in the manosphere actually hamstring and poison the minds of young men trying to find a good partner and build a meaningful life. 

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global left and proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host Adnan Hussein, joined by one of my usual co-hosts, Brett O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio. How are you doing today, Brett? I'm doing quite well, quite well. Excellent. Henry isn't with us today. He'll be back for the next episode, probably very very. very soon. And we look forward to involving him in our next discussion. But I'm a director of

the School of Religion and host also of the Mudgellis podcast. And today we've got a really interesting topic that, you know, comes up in today's culture and the contemporary right. Brett, why don't you tell us a little bit more about the issue? Yeah, one of the issues that if you've paying attention to politics at all, the culture war in particular, a big trope that is going around and has been going around for quite some time on the reactionary right in different countries. I mean, this is not just an American thing. This is very much now a global thing, apparently, which is this idea that masculinity is in crisis, and this takes this sort of moral panic around, masculinity takes many different forms, whether that's Jordan Peterson

crying about what are we going to do without men, Joe. Rogan predicting that soon there will be a world so hostile that straight white men can't walk out of the hats and Tucker Carlson talking about the need to, you know, tan your balls and get your testosterone levels up. But a lot of it comes, it circles around this fear, which is somewhat ambiguous, but starting to become clear in the scientific literature that there seems to be a drop in overall testosterone. And this is, you know, just that alone. is fodder for the right to start making all of their usual and normal arguments and attacking the usual cast of people they like to attack.

And I just kind of wanted to explore it a little bit, kind of contextualize it, and see if we can come up with some interesting things to talk about. And one of the things to say up front is, of course, this moral panic arises in a social context in which, for many years, feminism, and it's a liberal and more, forms has been on the march. You see these social movements for the LGBT community in general advancing, making progress, becoming more normalized in our society. You also have the anxiety-inducing realities of late capitalism and men being less and less able to do what they used to do, right? Provide for your family, having a job that gives

you a sense of self-worth, you know, being able to be the breadwinner and all of the self-esteem and the traditional patriarchal concepts of masculinity that come with it. And certainly there are some legitimate issues here, particularly for us, it would be around capitalism's devouring of opportunity and the stripping away of people's self-worth when they don't have a good job with a good wage that they can rely on and the questions of self-doubt that those generate. But of course, we also have to understand this as a period of reaction coming on the heels of years of feminist at LGBTQ advancement. And so all of these things are at play here.

But one of the things, and this is probably something we can just kind of start the convo and then odd and on, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things that I was kind of thinking about recently is the way in which when reactionaries are talking about the crisis of masculinity and specifically the lowering of testosterone in men, what do they blame it on? Well, they blame it on primarily, well, this idea of a soy boy, right? So first and foremost, you have this rather innocuous. widespread food product that people around the world use soy and there you know it's it's tied with veganism and vegetarianism and you know so so men certain sorts of reactionary men are going to place that in to this overall problem soy is the problem one of the problems decreasing our testosterone rates the other one that's often bandied around covid vaccine this plays right into

reactionary conspiracy theories about covid about the vaccines how the vaccines are more dangerous in the goddamn disease itself and there's continued discussion in reactionary circles about how COVID has sterilized or half sterilized men and women. There's now new markets that are emerging

looking for non-vaccinated sperm for women who want to you know be fertilized with sperm that have not been contaminated by the vaccine right? So this is insanity. You have the drag show stuff and that ties into the anti-trans hysteria more broadly. We know that drag shows are not trans people. Drag shows are theater.

Trans people are human beings expressing themselves and living their life in a way that is genuinely, you know, correlative to how they feel inside. But of course, they're being blamed as well. And all of this stuff is now put into a big pot, stirred, and said, this is the problem. We don't have men. Men are losing their testosterone. They're becoming girls. You know, the COVID vaccines are sterilizing us. Um, these, any attempt to move away from meat as the primary source of one's dietary protein or whatever is synonymous with the soy boy atrope and all of these insecurities around here. And I just wanted to kind of point out that even though the science is sort of ambiguous,

there is some data that shows that testosterone levels, for example, have went down over the last several decades. And sometimes you'll look at these charts and it seems quite stark and even sort of spooky. Like, wow, that is a problem. them. And so if we just assume that that is a problem, let's just say, you know, even though there's still debate within the scientific community, let's just say generally this is a trend that is happening. What is the actual cause? Is it trans people? Is it soy? Is it vaccines? No. If anything, it is the sort of endocrine disruptors that we are found in common household items, the plastic that wraps our food, the plastic we microwave our food in that leeches into the

system, right? These are often thought scientifically that if this is a problem, it is these things that are likely causing it. And those things, of course, are what, a result of under-regulated corporate power? Foods that you can eat in the U.S., you cannot eat in places like the EU, for example, because many of the chemicals we take for granted are seen in other countries as, you know, with good scientific backing, unsafe for human consumption. But because in the U.S. in particular, capital is so deregulated. These things are definitely being pumped into us of our families. But what do reactionaries do?

They take your eyes off the ruling class, off of corporate power, and they displace blame onto marginalized groups or, you know, conspiratorily, it's nice to blame it on vaccines because that already fits into a pre-existing conspiracy theory. And so I just kind of wanted to bring that to the forefront, show how if this is happening, the real causes are almost certainly under-regulated corporations. poisoning us and our families for profit and how the reactionary right almost never brings that up and instead blames it on various scapegoats that fit into their reactionary worldview. And so I just wanted to make that point. And then, yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on those issues or anything surrounding it. Well, I think that was a very comprehensive, you know, initial analysis of what's going on here. it is interesting that, I mean, we probably need to have an update on a right-wing conspiracy theory

IB. We had one a couple years ago, and there's been a lot of developments since then. I actually heard a talk recently by somebody who teaches at university here in Canada about conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial technology, and the intersection between a kind of right-wing you know right-wing conspiracy orientation and like health and wellness discourse and so I think this actually fits very solidly into that idea about people being you know there's already a whole cultural movement that occurred you know the 60s and 70s which is like natural foods and you know other components of you know cultural disenchantment with aspects of modernity and modern life and the estrangement from nature that led

people to think that we should just use natural, you know, fibers and fabrics and not all of these chemicals. And then we should be very concerned and careful about what we put in our bodies because our health is really, you know, dependent not just on, you know, kind of disease as an external force that, you know, invades the body, but actually also what we do and whether we have a balance and are eating the proper things and whether chemicals are degrading our immune systems and so on. So this discourse has already got longstanding alternative medicine, alternative kind of approaches to health and wellness that of course are also increasingly established with scientific evidence of the detrimental effects of, you know, chemical byproducts of so many

aspects of modern life. That's already kind of there. What's interesting is the way in which there is an assumption that the cultural factors are also contributing. I don't know if, like, maybe you can elucidate for me whether the logic is really about, you know, these as manifestations of, you know, kind of these medical kinds of changes, or if they really feel, that these are causes like you know is um you know how well it's just how can drag shows be causative of like a loss of so this is what i think is interesting is if they really are claiming that cultural changes and social changes are degrading not just a kind of idea cultural idea and social idea of masculinity but are contributing somehow to

physical, you know, physically lower levels of testosterone, higher levels of infertility and so on. That is a truly bizarre argument. It's a kind of cultural somatic, you know, argument. And that seems to me that the main point here is the way,

and that you made, I think, is the main point is that they may identify, I think there have been changes to what it means to be a man, you know, like, you know, culturally, that's a culturally constructed notion. It may arise from all kinds of, you know, primordial experiences that are then, you know, related to cultural forms of different sort of gender roles, observations on sexual difference between male and female and various things. So they may have a basis in some kind of. historical or biological reality, but really what it means, you know, masculinity and what was behind these conceptions and these anxieties is a cultural construct, right, and a whole set of investments in the proper way to be a man. And they, you know, are really theorizing, it seems

that this crisis, and I think there are changes. So, like, we should probably talk about some of those changes that have happened. It's really the response and the reaction where they put their analytical, if we can even use that word, emphasis of explanation. And it is never in the broader structural conditions. It is always on these kind of social and cultural changes that are being, that are rejected and seem to have like an inimical force. So they seem to grasp, I think, there's a reality that they're grasping that there is something that's been happening that's serious and changing in our society and culture about gender roles and that does definitely put you know pressure on what it means to be you know a man and it just reminds me

of a really good book um by susan feludi which i haven't looked at for a really long time and She originally wrote backlash, the undeclared war against American women. And it was a really important book that came out, I think, in the 1990s at some point. She wrote a follow-up to the study of women in America called Stift, the betrayal of the American man in 1999. And, you know, what she looked at is a lot of both cultural but also. economic changes that had happened in post-industrial U.S. society, the things you were alluding to, that you no longer had the possibility of a one-income family to be middle-class in America. And in fact, it's possible to have, you know, double income and not be middle

class in America as things have worsened. But the big shift was not just in World War II, where you had a kind of, you know, change in the labor force because men were sent to the, you know, to the war in Europe and women took over the Rosie the Riveter, but a larger social and economic transformation that started to happen through the 60s and 70s with deindustrialization or unions under pressure, you know, unions no longer having the same kind of force that they had before liberalization of the economy, deregulation, and these economic changes ended up meaning that, you know, one income wasn't going to be enough to sustain Americans with a middle class lifestyle. And that obviously has meant that women started achieving, even though

they were much more exploited and had, you know, so many inequities in pay and, and other other things in the workforce, but that nonetheless, women were entering the workforce. This inevitably created stresses in the family, renegotiations of gender roles. It undermined the exclusive kind of economic and cultural power of the male as head of household. And, you know, I think the whole conservative right wing and Christian movement is something like a something of a backlash against that fundamental change that's been happening for a very long time. So it's so interesting to see how they've invented new dimensions. I mean, they've been complaining about this kind of a phenomenon for decades now. So to seize upon soy, the rise of like one particular like food product, which let's, you know, point out, soy is a key part

of the Asian diet. And there are certain already presumptions, you know, about, you know, Asian men as being less virile, less masculine than the European male, right? Or the hyper-masculine, you know, African, you know, male. And, you know, there's all these, you know, kinds of cultural associations. And I think those bleed into the identification of soy because it's both something that's part of the kind of metrosexual, vegan, vegetarian diet. But it also is historically associated with Asians who, who are who are gendered in a certain way right Asian men but that seems like a very strange thing to seize upon because that's pretty recent maybe in the last decade and what how do they explain the fact that they've been crying wolf over this you know the sky is falling since like

the mid late 60s similarly with the COVID vaccines I mean if that's all we have to deal with for, you know, the problem of, you know, declining masculinity, well, you know, that's a pretty easy thing to fix. That's clearly much more of an important and broader shift. So anyway, those are just some initial kind of thoughts. Obviously, I think the conversation needs to go on the medical side to what are these structural, you know, pollutants and endocrine disruptors and so on. But maybe you have some further analysis about how they make this link and the turn, the culturalist turn, how it is that they are making this about the culture war specifically in their analysis. Yeah, great point, especially about the whole, you know, Western conception

of Asians and masculinity and how that ties into the soy thing. I think like when we're talking about right-wing conspiracies, there's a thing that makes them work so well is that they, thing can be sort of plugged into them and, you know, added onto nor any existing scaffolding of conspiratorial thinking. And I certainly think that with the rise of veganism and, you know, then there's this whole fear of like liberal globalist elites trying to make us eat bugs and take away our meat because of climate change. So then that can plug right in. The COVID vaccines, obviously reactionaries in particular were the ones that were most against it, most likely to emphasize the threats of the vaccine and under-emphasize the,

the threats of the actual disease and, of course, not understand how vaccines work in the first place. That was a, and a lot of that anti-COVID stuff came out of this, like you were saying, as you were saying, this health and wellness subcultures, which used to be dominated by like California liberal hippie-dipi types. Right. And increasingly now, I'm taken up by the right. QAnon, also, interestingly enough, sort of comes out of the similar areas and subcultures, particularly online. Your question about causation is. is really good. And I want to try to give an answer to it because certainly causal elements like soy or COVID vaccines, they'll both say these are these are contributing to them. They're causally

making these things happen. But the, you know, whether LGBTQ people are LGBTQ because of these things or are causing it, I think that's a little rougher. And I think they would, and it of course depends on the first of you're talking to. Everybody's going to have a different way of articulating this. But I think they see them as effects of like these. broader globalist, liberal elite trends, as well as causes, right? Because there's a, there's a lot of talk on the right about the social contagion of being LGBTQ. You know, on the left, we'd probably say the rise in LGBTQ people. I mean, I don't want to completely dismiss the social contingent phenomena, but largely as society becomes more accepting of different ways of expressing yourself,

people feel more confident, more able, they see it as a live option, and they're going to express themselves in these different ways. When society is deeply punishing, and disciplining these other forms of being, people are going to be less likely to even think about exploring that possibility. So, you know, I think that would be like a left-wing response and the right-wing response would be like, it's trendy to do. It's also, it's an effect of these other causes, but it also feeds in to the causes themselves and that there's a general social hostility to men. So that, you know, if you're a young man, it's more socially acceptable to say that you're non-binary or that you're trans or that you're gay than it is to say I'm a cis white man and I'm proud or whatever. Now that's not actually necessarily true, but that's certainly an ideology that is being sort of fronted by these people. So I think like the increase at LGBTQ people, they would see as both an effect and a cause. Like it has a causal impact. It's ultimately an effect of other things, but it's also making the problem worse. But you notice,

what their solutions are because that that's also very telling their solutions are never like let's have healthy organic produce in every grocery store let's end food deserts let's regulate corporations to make sure that these microplastics aren't infiltrating you know our bodies and you know all the corporate profiteering that comes from selling us empty calories and junk food we should use the government to put a stop to that because a lot of these people are going to be libertarian and going to have they're always going to be talking about the government as the main threat to their freedom, not corporate power. And of course, when you weaken and de-legitimize government in a vacuum, that's the mechanism powerful enough to hold corporations

accountable. So their whole worldview is not going to turn to those solutions. What are their solutions? Well, it's like a reinstantiation of traditional patriarchy, an end to liberal globalism and, you know, the conspiracy theories that revolve around them, punishing LGBTQ identities, de-emphasizing and incentivizing them through either old forms of traditional bigotry or through literal state authoritarian power. And, you know, some of them in the new right are talking about, in addition to those things, we should also maybe provide some social benefits to help families, right? Be reproductive and, you know, man and a woman come together and create a baby.

There is some economic issues here. We should help, you know, facilitate the formation of families through some forms of social welfare. but when the rubber hits the road nothing ever is going to come out of the Republican Party of like let's fund families let's give a UBI to all of people who have kids you know that's that's the corporate interest in the party is going to stop that so it's like a rhetoric for a certain section of the Republican Party to pay lip service to but never actually have to follow through with real material policy

which is interesting but you know I think it also cuts to the core of what is masculinity. We've heard this term come up over the last several years, toxic masculinity, which puts some people on their back foot. And then there's the questions on the left of, okay, if there's a toxic masculinity, is there a healthy masculinity? Could there be a non-toxic form of masculinity? And then we get into the harder questions of, okay, what is exactly masculinity and what is femininity? And how are those to be expressed? And I think certain masculinist ideas want to claim, exclusive right over some traits. So, for example, you ask one of these people, what is a real man, a provider, a protector, somebody that's strong, right? Somebody that can lead. Okay, but are we also saying that women or non-masculine people can't have those traits? They can't be dependable.

They can't protect their loved ones. They can't go out and provide. You know, they can't lead. Well, that seems weird. This, you know, it's almost as like there's universal human traits. they could manifest differently perhaps in a trans person, in a man, in a woman, whatever. Maybe these universal human traits are funneled through a certain sort of masculinity or femininity and they have a little different flavor because of, you know, the vehicle through which,

the prism through which they were sort of condensed. But I think there's a certain reactionary conception of masculinity which needs to claim exclusive control over certain human traits. You know, no, it really is just a man who can provide and protect and really displace strength and really lead. Women are biologically incapable of doing so. These are masculine traits. And anytime somebody that is not a cis man tries to express those traits, it's always going to be a farce, you know, something like that. And so, you know, I think of maybe a left response is kind of what I'm alluding to here.

There's universal human traits. We like humans who can give rise to. these traits. It's not exclusive to masculinity or femininity any one of these traits, although expressing them through that prism might come out with slightly different, like I said, flavors or variations of them. But ultimately, we shouldn't get into this binary thinking that some traits belong over here with this person. You know, she wears pink and she submits herself and she does the kitchen work and then I wear blue and I do this and I go to work. You know, that's very childish and it's trying to maintain a socially constructed binary, which is increasingly,

I think for good reason, being brought under pressures, whether that is external pressures because of the material conditions shifting or social pressures of the advancement of otherwise marginalized groups. It sort of puts masculinity on its back foot. And I would also say that there's something inherently insecure about reactionary masculinity. I think a masculinity that needs to patrol and police its borders is a fundamentally insecure masculinity. So when you have these obviously insecure men pretending to be, you know, these sions of masculinity and giving advice to younger men, it's actually counter-effective. It's not effective because what undergirds this display of machismo that these people mistake for healthy masculinity is a profound insecurity.

And so if there is a masculinity and there is to be a healthy masculinity, It has to be one that embraces the universality of traits that does not need to patrol and police its borders, that is comfortable in its own skin, and does not need to exclude anybody else or punish anybody else for crossing any lines or giving voice or expression to anything that doesn't fit inside this preconceived binary of masculinity and femininity. So again, this is a tough question. I think the left has some work to do on confront. confronting this stuff because I think it is potent for men. I think it is very potent for young men with very few opportunities in the world to start blaming women, you know, blaming the left, becoming down these reactionary rabbit holes. And there's a lot of insecurity that doesn't want to be faced. You don't want to, as a young man, especially when you're deeply insecure, look that insecurity in the face and try to deal with your own shit. What happens is you repress that part of yourself, that insecure part of you, overconfidence. compensate through machismo and then make that repression into projection, make everybody else's problem. Yeah, lashing out, yeah, at others, basically.

Yeah, and I mean, that's where this toxic masculinity has a new kind of vicious dimension to it. I mean, look at also the, like, rise of the incels. I mean, you know, this is basically a tragedy of masculinity is suffering under the burden of this particular, very narrow, exclusivist controlling vision of what it means to be a man to help understand and explain why you're, you know, having inadequacies, you know, in, you know, kind of the dynamic of, you know, relations with the opposite gender. And then, you know, projecting that it is really the problem of women, you know, sort of displacing that, you know, on to women and then giving real vent to, you know, misogyny.

And, like, that's the part that we see because it turns to this kind of violence, this hostile, aggressive, instability, and so on. The root of it, though, seems to be also, you know, the Chad. Okay? That's the key part of it, it seems to me. And that's not often talked about as much as also inadequacy, hatred, and hostility for basically what is in kind of masculinist gendered terms a kind of divide that is also a class divide, that is other things that are associated with it. But this kind of sense that, you know, I won't be

attractive to the other sex because I'm not wealthy. I'm not one of these people with like big degrees and social status. And, you know, basically it's this kind of complaint in a way of the insistence and our inability as a society and a culture to evolve and change our understandings of what it means to be a person, which is where I would really put this, because when you're talking about universal human traits and qualities, you know, why do we need to emphasize so much about what belongs where, what's masculine and what's feminine and more what is it in what is important to be a healthy individual a whole person in a society where you still have some kind of recognized role you know where you can

participate and be effective right i mean that's really what it's what it what it comes down to and so what this whole gendering analysis and i think you're absolutely right that the left should uh and i think many have you know people who are doing kind of work on you know gender gender theory and so on. But it hasn't become very popular, I would say, in even leftist movements, is that the critique is clearly that capitalism, you know, is incredibly destructive, and especially the current form of capitalism, and it's failures. It's failures really to be able to produce the kind of conditions of wealth and so on. in a distributed sort of way because it just gets concentrated further and further in the hands

of a few, the rest of whom are rendered essentially powerless in society, is that this is so disruptive of normal human social relations. And gender is just being scrambled along with it, like so many other things, like so many other ways of orienting yourself. So I do think that there is when you were saying about, you know, young men. I mean, I think young men are pretty vulnerable right now because they're probably very confused. They can't fulfill the vision, the narrow vision and the burdensome vision of like that vision of kind of outdated masculinity that divides, you know, the world in that patriarchal privileged way. We should point out that is, of course, the real purpose of insisting that certain of the most important political, you know,

decision-making and economic, you know, qualities reside with men is obviously to buttress, you know, patriarchy. But, you know, they can't really fulfill that burdensome, you know, a set of obligations, you know, it's kind of impossible to do that, really, except as a kind of cartoon character of ultramachismo that you already, you know, were analyzing. So what is the alternative? What's available to them? And I think in that context, they are vulnerable to two kind of quick visions of ways in which the self-help discourse of how you can be, you know, like Jordan Peterson offers, he's actually responding to a legitimate kind of crisis and problem among, you know, young men in, you know, Western kind of capitalist, late,

late capitalist society is that, you know, there isn't a really good pathway to feeling like an integrated person and like the Andrew Tate type phenomenon you know this kind of you know this kind of thing is so toxic and dangerous because it does try it does present some kind of so-called solution

or answer in a pathway for how you can you know still fulfill this ideal and And I think, you know, the real kind of question here is, well, what can we do on the left to make more, I mean, you know, we can analyze why it's impossible to fulfill those visions. But like our question is, what do you do to overcome some of these insecurities and toxicities and unrealistic apprehension of the world? so that, you know, I'm not going to say everybody is going to, you know, could be healthy. I mean, I think capitalism just damages us socially, culturally, psychologically. So nobody's going to be completely, you know, immune to its effects and consequences.

That's not the recipe. But is there some way to survive? What's the vision? What's the progressive alternative for how you can be a whole person, you know, and be engaged in genuine struggle? and change for a better world that isn't an attempt to roll back and reconstitute an impossible vision that didn't even really exist in the past on these gender terms. I feel like that's what that kind of Andrew Tate and what they're pushing is double down, you know, even though it's like actually impossible to fulfill these things, you know, you can kind of create.

this artificial culture of hyper-masculinity that has very vicious consequences and effects. And which the men promoting and receiving these ideas don't even often live up to themselves, which is interesting as well. Yeah, so I'll get to the possible goal, but a couple of things I wanted to say. There is this, like, DeAndre Thay obvious is the obvious example, but I think it's more subtle in other people like Jordan Peterson's anti-feminist men. Right. which is sort of like misogyny as masculinity and you know the feminism is bad these things are bad women are trying to overtake men that's bad and i think what that does is fundamentally undermine any real chance any of these young boys have in becoming the sort of men that can actually communicate with women because the moment you start seeing them as your political and cultural opponent as opposed to fucking human beings who are living through the same shit you're living through and try to get through you've already obliterated the the possibility

in most instances, by which you're going to ever be able to talk to and have a meaningful conversation and thus relationship with somebody. You don't start off being like, I hate this idea that women are equals. And, you know, it's because of you that I don't have any. And then also I'm going to be able to talk to women and appeal to them. And there are some really right-wing reactionary women that play into on the internet dangled this little carrot of hope. Oh, maybe women are waking up. And they want to also go back to these, you know, this pre time that doesn't exist and materially isn't possible anyway. So I think that's interesting how a lot of this advice undermines itself just inherently. The other thing, though, I think

you really pointed out, is this class divide and this class anxiety. What does somebody like Andrew Tate say? He reinvick, far from escaping the matrix, he reinforces it. He tells you if you want to be successful, you got to give money, status, wealth, and fame. Everything that capitalism already tells you you need. Now, of course, because we live in capitalism, that is not going to be possible for most people. It's like you're saying, you're actually making, I guess you're providing a possible solution, but it is impossible for 95% of the people there. And those men that know it's impossible for them, they're going to become the black-pilled in-cell types who are like, fuck it all, burn it all down. And that class anxiety is real. One of the things we can do as the left just generally

for human beings, and this is something I try to do in my own limited way, is promote this idea that we should reject this idea that success is about status, fame, wealth, a career. Success is about the sort of human being you are. How you treat other people. What you do with your limited time on this earth? And right there, just to start,

just reject this idea of success, having anything to do with these narrow capitalist rat races, buying a Lambeau and a Bugoy, and focus on being a human being, developing your potential outside of a career, a job, a wealth status, figuring out who you are, dealing with your own shit, instead of projecting it on to everybody else. You know, you will talk about a real man, bravery, and courage, sit down with yourself and work through your own issues instead of blaming it on everything and everybody else.

That's a good start. But, you know, this idea of separating success from what the capitalist tell us is success, the pointing to the real problem here, this unstable material base that capitalism incessantly, you know, advances further and further. I mean, Marx and Nangles talked about this in the communist manifesto. Everything melts in the air. Everything is torn asunder. The old social relationships and the roles that we used to play are completely thrown up in the air. And everybody is lost. This is a fundamentally political economy issue that we can get to.

And I think insofar as we can articulate this and communist and socialist and Marxist politics are becoming more clear. There are young men who are kind of waking up to that and saying, the solution here is not to double down on misogyny, not to return to a false nostalgic. past age. It is actually to see women as human beings, me as a human being, and we join together to create better underlying conditions. Then we join together as equal human beings and fight for a better world in which the material basis of society would allow for new, dynamic, exciting ways of being that would eradicate a lot of the pressures and the anxieties that we're dealing with and bring us all into community so we can actually engage. as human beings because we're fundamentally evolved as a social species. We're not meant to sit

at home behind a screen for 12 hours a day and think you're going to get anywhere in life or in personal development or even have a relationship with somebody. So those are parts of it. And then as well, I think by pushing back on this solid binary, there's a sense in which if we agree that these conventionally masculine and conventionally feminine traits are actually universal human traits that we can all embody, then we should strive to do that. Integrate the masculine and the feminine energy within yourself and stop trying to create a binary where you're on this side and they're over there on that side fundamentally separate from yourself. Whatever you think is feminine and masculine, the good things about those two

binaries, yeah, you could do inner work to try to give voice to and express the best of both world because that's really what being a well-rounded human being is. And I think the moment you start falling for this dichotomy, start biologically essentializing it, you're already on the wrong path that leads absolutely nowhere, but more anger, more hate, more confusion, more rage. And so, you know, I think those are the beginnings of the solution. But again, for a lot of people, the reactionary pitch is just more visceral, you know, it takes the anger, it, it It takes all onus off of you to do any work. It puts the thing on people you likely already hate because of your politics or whatever.

And it flatters the ego. You know, you are nothing wrong with you. You know, you are a victim of this feminism and these liberal elites and these globalists and these vaccinators. And so go out and attack them. Go out and kill them. Destroy them because they're destroying you. Okay. That is viscerally appealing, especially to young immature men who are frustrated.

But it ultimately leads nowhere except more social. disintegration and chaos, and it doesn't actually solve the problem. So we have, as always, as communists, this problem of we have better answers and better solutions, but the fascist and reactionary appeal is always going to be more guttural and more immediately appealing to some people. And that is like a general problem. And it also instantiates itself, I think, in this issue. Absolutely. I mean, I think I agree completely with those recommendations for how we can get outside of this binary way of imagining relations and gender. I mean, you know, if you can be a more caring and supportive individual, whether you're male or female, that's, you know, that's a good

thing. That isn't being a, you know, feminine. You know, I mean, we should, you know, strive for some kind of synthesis, you know, I mean, between these things. I think what you pointed, out was that so often this vision of masculinity is understood as a kind of zero sum of gender identity. Like, you know, you have to be hostile to the equality of women because being a man requires that subordination of others, of women. It requires that patriarchal power. Otherwise, you won't be a man. And this is, you know, incredibly dangerous. This is the kind of, you know, problem we're dealing with. And if we can get people to recognize and understand that it's actually a real great benefit to have a more cooperative interplay, you know, I mean, just as humans,

because those roles really do trap you and they're so limiting. And how can you have growth as a person, you know, if you feel like you have to just live up to some narrow set of ideals and qualities. So I think those definitely were great points and great recommendations. I mean, I dare say that there's clearly a need for some kind of emotional and spiritual education broadly in the society. The enemy of late consumer capitalism and of exploitation is clearly shows its manifestations on all aspects of society and culture, the isolation that people feel, the atomization, the confusion because, you know, these kind of truisms that we've inherited in our culture no longer have the kind of descriptive power and force that they once did because the gap between that

ideological construction of gender identity along with so many other ideological constructions is being torn apart by, you know, rampant exploitation and social change. The key is, though, that we do need some kind of training, some kind of, some kind of education that isn't just at the level of intellectual analysis of politics as much as valuable and necessary as that is also to even understand the purpose behind such kind of more emotional personality, spiritual, if you will, kind of formation to give people some sense of positive hope for a vision of a more just and equitable society where they actually get to be themselves.

That's the problem with these visions is that each, you know, we're just living up to some other, some constructed external vision. And what we're not doing is doing the work, as you were pointing out, of actually figuring out how to fulfill ourselves, like who we really are and not who we are trying to be in order to conform to a repressive and divisive, you know, gender division, you know. So at any rate, I don't know if you had any other sort of thoughts on where this is all headed. We didn't talk that much about the scientific. Maybe that's another aspect to go along.

You mentioned that it is disputed, but I do think that there is evidence of lower rates of fertility and other sorts of things. I mean, the fact is that we've been poisoning the planet for a really long. time, you know, none of these components of industrial chemical processes that make up modern life, and especially the processing of petroleum in plastics and the microplastics and so on, were ever really regulated or really developed with a full sense of how it would affect human beings, other biological kind of creatures in the animal. world or the environment as a whole. And this is just one subcomponent of the environmental crisis and catastrophe that we're that we're dealing with. I mean, it seems to me that the other direction for

this sort of politics is to actually do something about preserving the environment and developing processes for production to sustain a quality of life in ways that don't have. have these terrible adverse effects on us and on the rest of the planet. I mean, so an environmental ethic seems also crucial to a healthy, you know, healthy gender in some ways. Like, we're not going to have, you know, we're not going to have healthy societies if we can't heal the earth. And that seems to be completely ignored in this discourse as well. In fact, is actually hostile to that, even as there are eco-fascists who recognize that there's, you know, that there's, you know, one subgrouping on the far right. And are these eco-fascists who don't deny, you know, climate change and environmental devastation, but, you know, see a right-wing, you know, exclusionary politics needed to guard and preserve from the inevitable waves of immigration and consequences of the destruction of the planet.

So that's like, you know, one component of it, but the vast mainstream of these right-wing groups that are so obsessed with these cultural questions and cultural problems is never to look to material reality and to take seriously that, you know, 100, 150 years of industrial production, often unregulated, increasingly unregulated, is having disastrous consequences and effects for us. And that that should be, you know, targeted. I really appreciate your dialectical thinking when it comes to poisoning the planet is poisoning ourselves. Environmentalism is seen by reactionaries as effeminate. As, you know, Jordan Peterson himself, who centers himself as like the guy telling young men the healthy ways to be a man calls environmentalist guy the worshippers. You know, Bivik Ramoswami, the Republican candidate for president next. his whole thing too is like you know men are in crisis but these environmentalists um they don't have any meaning in their lives and so they try to build meaning by becoming environmentalist and lefty political people but they don't see this deep deep connection which you're 100% right the poisoning of the planet is poisoning ourselves because we're not fundamentally separate from one another or from the planet we are we bubble up out of the planet and this idea that nature is out there we can subordinated we can poison it we can poison it we can poison it in it, we can exhaust it, for our own needs, and that's never going to come back

and us, you know, structure the way we think, structure our own material realities, is an illusion that is creating more and more suffering. And you tying it back to gender expressions, it's like perfectly shows the superiority of dialectical thinking. Everything is in relation to everything else. And you can't just chop this off. Well, environmental is a bad. Well, let me tell you how to be a healthy man. Testostero levels are going down. Well, it had nothing to do with big corporations and ecocide. It has to do with feminism and, you know, this is what happens when you don't see the hole in its relations therein. So I think that's incredibly important. And the last thing I'll say, I loved your point

about following a template, you know, I'll put this in existentialist language. You're living in bad faith. You're turning away from your own authenticity, your own freedom by saying, this other guy who I perceive as the guy I want to be is handing me to this template, this old binary, wear blue and do this and wear a heart, ha, whatever, this is what it means to be a man. So instead of doing the own investigation, instead of looking within myself, integrating the masculine and feminine, giving voice and expression to my own unique being, I'm going to take on this template. I'm going to turn away from my own responsibilities and authenticity in the process. And I'm going to try to live up to something that's impossible to live up to. And even if I did live up to it, I would just be living up to somebody else's fantasy about what this is, you know? And so you never get to know yourself. You know, you never get to develop your actual capacities. And you're living in a shadow of somebody else's ideas.

You never really get coming face to face with yourself. So, you know, I think that's an incredibly important point. And yeah, so I just loved all those points. I don't really have too much more to say on this. I think there is certainly more work to do. this process of reaction is going to continue, as are the social movements for equality. And the ultimate solution is in coming together with your fellow human beings across our differences and fighting for a world that actually takes care of us all.

Because as you are alluding to, these tired, ossified, masculine ideas, they're dead in the water. They don't really produce anything of value, ultimately. and they're disconnected from these deeper struggles that would actually solve the problem. And so, yeah, I think for all those reasons of war, we have to start thinking in those terms. And that also is why we have to start thinking dialectically and understand how things feed into other things

and how, you know, joining together, seeing women not as an enemy, but as a partner, seeing the environment, not as something outside yourself, but something within yourself that is you and acting accordingly is the best, is the best way forward. and it allows you to live in good faith, find out who you are, be authentic to your own existence in ways that these other things could never ever do.

Yeah, well said. I mean, I think that's a great conclusion. The only thing I would add here is just also that the kind of concern and anxiety about like lower testosterone and infertility and so on are really also playing into these fears of demographic kind of ideas, demographic concern. particularly that there is proliferation of non-white people, you know, and so on. And it's really this discourse is not a universalizing discourse. This is one about Western men, men in Europe, i.e. white men, okay, are suffering this

kind of, I mean, I'm not saying that there aren't, you know, also likewise problems of, you know, kind of a crisis of masculinity with social changes and cultural changes taking place all over. But I think what we're talking about in terms of this right-wing kind of orientation definitely has purchase in these demographic fears about white patriarchy and not just, you know, global patriarchy, global men, you know. And so that's one component, it seems to me, of it as well, which is, I think, tied to also these debates on abortion. I mean, what they're mostly concerned with. And there is some evidence, actually, of, you know, certain U.S.-based foundations and right-wing organizations being interested in trying to promote in European right-wing politics, anti-abortion legislation, and so on. And I think that is also kind of tied to this idea of demographic fears that they have, right? So there's several contexts for this.

There's a gendered component. and there's a gendered way in which a certain kind of racial orientation is being expressed. And, of course, also as Marxists, we're always very keen to see the way in which a class politics and a class analysis also helps us understand the way this has come together in this particular way. So anyway, I hope listeners that you've enjoyed this kind of excurses on an interesting topic of the so-called crisis of mass. or at least the crisis of the explanation for it since they came up with some really, they've been coming up with some really bizarre ways of framing this that we should be able to confront and present an alternative perspective on. Brett, can you tell the listeners where to be in touch with you?

Yeah, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Great. And listeners, you can follow me. on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and also I encourage you to listen to my other podcast, the M-A-J-L-I-S, and for example, we just recently had an episode on Iraq 20 years after. By the time this comes out, it will have been a week or so since then, but hopefully you might still find it relevant. Until that time, well, and also you can follow the the podcast on Twitter, I believe it's at Gorilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-A- underscore pod. And, you know, subscribe, and you can also find our Patreon, not hard.

You can go to our Twitter and you can see the links there. We do appreciate your support. So until then, until next time, listeners, solidarity. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.