Kulturkampf

[benji]

That article is great:

This did not come as a huge surprise to me or Gray. He teaches humanities at a local college, where I have taught too, and we’ve often talked about how tricky it can be to keep hetero boys involved in classroom debates. Many of these young men seem very anxious about saying the wrong thing, and will often refuse to participate, sometimes projecting a provocative kind of defensiveness that is its own argument. As much as I think cancel culture is a fake problem in media, it feels very real to young men when they’re sitting in a classroom. Whatever they are feeling, it feels real as hell. Insisting that they’re imagining their enemies doesn’t help.

After the study came out, there was a lot of speculation as to what might be causing this ideological schism. Is it capitalism? Men’s-rights influencers? Is it the dreaded woke mind virus?

There’s no mystery about why young women are becoming more progressive, but it’s harder to understand the factors behind the increasingly conservative young men. My friend Greg sent me a fascinating piece of analysis by Dr. Robin James, who argues that central to the move toward conservatism among young men is a sense that they’re an aggrieved party — that they are being robbed of entitlements. James explains this in financial terms: In today’s social world, which borrows much of its logic from the free-market economy, success isn’t figured in terms of just doing steady business year after year. It means going viral, experiencing a crazy run of success and earning a windfall. This is true in the realms of art (think superstars who started out making TikToks in their bedrooms), finance (crypto), and consumer culture (Stanley cups).

Applied to people, it maps to feminism and its mirror, misogyny. Feminism feels unfair to these young men because it’s based on the premise that women started from a position of inferiority (many young men find this hard to believe, because they were literally born yesterday) and now get to enjoy the glory of having beaten the odds. For young men to experience the same narrative of success, they feel they need to start from a position of disempowerment. Blaming women for their troubles is an easy route to that position — it’s way easier to explain and understand than, say, the neoliberal dismantling of the public sphere, and the alienating effect that can have on our everyday life.

James writes, “Femininity is figured as resilience, or the ability to flip sexist damage into spectacular success. Popular misogyny is the masculine complement to that: It takes perceived loss of status as an injury and then makes a spectacle out of overcoming that damage through things like podcasts, social media, and rap songs.”

Overcoming obstacles is the most hallowed narrative in our culture — it’s a place where capitalism’s growth imperative dovetails with the progressive appetite for stories about emancipation. So for young men, and straight white men in particular, to feel like valid participants in the storytelling of selfhood, they feel the need to start from a place of grievance, because otherwise there’s no way to bounce back and beat the odds. James cites the gender-studies scholar Michelle Murphy, who has argued that girls’ venerated place in our culture right now is the quintessential example of this mobilization of human capital: “Her rates of return are so high precisely because her value begins so low.” (This argument is the entire basis of the Barbie movie’s success.)

The appeal of a grievance-based identity makes it hard to convince straight white boys that they in fact have plenty going for them, and that they have no reason to feel aggrieved.

WHY ARE YOUNG MEN VEERING TO THE IDEOLOGICAL RIGHT? DON’T BLAME WOMEN OR FEMINISM; BLAME CAPITALISM

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I wrote a whole book about the implications of financialization and popular feminism on femininity: femininity is figured as resilience, or the ability to flip sexist damage into spectacular success. Popular misogyny is the masculine complement to that: it takes perceived loss of status as an injury and then makes a spectacle out of overcoming that damage through things like podcasts, social media, rap songs, etc.

This is neoliberal creative destruction (think: the gentrification of Manhattan after the 1970s crash, post-Katrina New Orleans, the way private equity guts companies and sells off their parts, the IMF’s approach to the Global South, etc.)  applied to personal identity. Everybody but cis straight nondisabled white men already starts from a position of relative damage, held back by sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, religious and ethnic bias, undocumented status, you name it. Chishetero nondisabled white men aren’t already disadvantaged by patriarchal racial capitalism, so to succeed in this political economy they have to invent and perform some type of damage. The perceived loss of prior entitlement–such as the entitlement to sexual property in women’s bodies (incels), or the entitlement to mansplain (“free speech”)–fits the bill exactly. Wounded entitlement is how cishetero white men in particular can position themselves as damaged and thus capable of resilient comeback.

I was listening to Pretty Hate Machine the other day when I realized that the first three songs each contain a refrain depicting the perceived loss of entitlement: “You can’t take that away from me,” “I used to be somebody,” etc. Reznor’s lyrics depict a narrator fearful and angry over potential and perceived loss of things he has previously been entitled to. From parents’ groups whipping up moral panics about school libraries and drag queens trespassing upon their parental rights over their children to Charlottesville alt-right bros chanting that they won’t be replaced by non-white people to mens’ rights activists and incel culture, Reznor’s wounded entitlement vibe is the foundation of today’s alt-right grievance. Alt right media makes a spectacle both of that grievance, and of its vindication. In gamergate, for example, the attacks on women were themselves social media spectacles, viral pile-ons that drove engagement on platforms like Twitter. Similarly, the one thing the 45th president of the US is actually good at is making a spectacle of wounded entitlement: it’s like literally the name of his fan army. When he was kicked off Twitter, he was effectively its main character, driving user engagement worldwide. Just as popular feminist influencers like “bimbo” Chrissy Chlapecka turn their performance of overcoming patriarchy’s damage into a way to go viral and monetize their social media accounts, the alt-right performance of wounded entitlement and its retribution as a tactic to succeed in a market where value is expected to grow at the exponential rate only possible when you flip a distressed asset.

Young men’s hard swerve to the right is not primarily the result of psychological or soft power/cultural factors. There is a deep structural reason why the performance of (white) masculinity as wounded entitlement is rewarded and valued: it’s how this identity can be monetized, how (white) cishetero men can create and exhibit the viral growth in both human capital and market value that a financialized, asset-based economy prizes.

Robin James is a writer, editor, and former associate professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte. Her fifth book, Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation, is under contract with Duke University Press. Her previous four books include: The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (UNC Press, 2023), The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, & biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism (Zero, 2015), and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music (Lexington Books, 2010). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Jezebel, The Guardian, LARB, Real Life, BELT Magazine, The New Inquiry, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere across the internet. She’s an expert in feminism/gender/race and popular music, pop music and politics, sound studies, electronic dance music studies, and contemporary continental philosophy (especially critical theories of neoliberalism and biopolitics). She is also working on a sixth book project about the alt-rock-to-alt-right pipeline.