On Masculinity: Male violence and aggression
Kevin Arnold
Let’s start with a quote from Andrea Dworkin. “Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity… In male culture, police are heroic and so are outlaws; males who enforce standards are heroic and so are those who violate them.”
I’m not going to delve too deeply into Ms. Dworkin’s work, the least reason being that she is certainly no friend to men. In fact, she happens to be batshit crazy. However, if this quote is a way for her to discredit masculinity (as contradictory, nonsensical, and ultimately a farce), I think that she actually has her finger on something here. The description itself is completely accurate.
Of course it goes without saying that masculinity and violence are inextricably related in our cultural imagination. If you surveyed one hundred people and asked them the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word, “violence,” I’d bet my last cent that women would not figure in even a single one of the responses. From video games to MMA, from action movies to war, men and violence go hand-in-hand.
Where does this connection come from? For Dworkin, as for many feminists, it comes from a pathology that is intrinsic to masculinity itself. At best, this violence is something that must be excised to create a sort of “kinder, gentler” masculinity; at worst, it means we need to abolish masculinity wholesale.
Too often, we think of violence as only a means to an end. A man wants “X” (a woman, money, power, etc.) and in lieu of more subtle tactics, because it is not usually very easy to get what one really wants, men exercise violence in order to obtain it. Certainly, we might think, there are better ways of going about things. Violence and aggression, understood in this way, are nothing more (and nothing less) than a misguided perception of the world, almost happenstance, something that might be remedied simply through altruism, by being more understanding, or by compromise.
The question of violence and aggression for men, however, is about where this “want” for X comes from in the first place. For men, violence pertains to the experience of desire itself.
What the quote from Dworkin brilliantly demonstrates, then, is that the objective that is attained through violence makes no difference whatsoever. This is how one can justify the murder of thousands, even millions, in the name of peace. For men, violence is not an objective so much as it is a condition. Violence is not a goal; it’s a state of being.
It might not seem that this idea applies to the modern man, who has the luxury of taking a trip to the local farmer’s market instead of hunting for his food. But violence is a notoriously tricky word to define. In addition to the standard definition of violence as “the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury,” the Oxford English Dictionary also defines violence as “injurious or severe treatment,” a “great force, severity, or vehemence,” or as generally as “passion; fury.” Understood in the most general way, violence is something that is with men as much today as it was during prehistoric times.
So what is it about violence that is so enduring, so fundamental, and so intrinsic to masculinity?
Most modern philosophy is based on the idea that man is essentially alienated: from others, from the world, and even from himself. For Freud, man is alienated in his unconscious, through his separation from the mother during childhood; for Marx, man is alienated by capitalist economies of production and consumption. You don’t have to believe in psychoanalysis or Freud to understand this, because whatever the source or the cause, the fact is that modern man is somehow alienated down to his core. Even Descartes had to “think” in order to be sure he could say, “I am.”
One way of understanding gender, the difference between men and women, is through the type of response that is generated by this alienation. Women, for example, respond to their alienation by trying to encompass or embody it, by trying to occupy or to “be” this alienation itself. That’s a different article.
Men, on the other hand, respond to alienation (which is an uncertainty, a doubt, or an ambiguity about what the world means, about what others want from me and what I want from them) by trying to, in a phrase, “close the gap.” Man’s quasi-solution to ambiguity or to alienation is to resolve it, which accounts for both Western rationality and logic, as well as men’s take-charge, “can do” attitude.
But often, because this alienation cannot ever really be resolved so simply, men will forcibly close this gap between themselves and the world. When logic and reason fail to account for this alienation, they will attempt to eradicate it, eliminate it, or even to annihilate it. Alienation can be excruciating for people, period, but in men’s case, it leads to a desire for obliteration, which, of course, is also a desire to efface the self.
Connecting violence to male desire explains the way that men can actually enjoy and delight in violence, in what would otherwise be understood only as an unpleasurable experience. It also explains the way that the most modern, enlightened of men can quickly find himself ready (and able) to fight to the death. Dworkin is right that violence cannot be excised from masculinity, which is something that feminists and modern men’s movements should understand. Rather, the solution can only lie in a different understanding of the nature of this violence, and in directing it towards more productive outlets.
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