On Masculinity: The manliness of freedom
Kevin Arnold
Through the fog of my hangover this past Fourth of July weekend, I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is to define a concept as large and complex as freedom. The difficulty corresponds with the challenge to define another grandly abstract concept I think a lot about, masculinity. Interestingly, these two complexities share a lot in common. When we pare the question of freedom down to our everyday, cultural understanding of what it means to us or what it “looks like,” we associate freedom with qualities like independence, autonomy, and self-determination, qualities that, in turn, are indelibly associated with masculinity.
The modern governmental and philosophical concept of freedom comes in large part from ancient Greek civilization, where being a man and being free were literally synonyms. One could not be free if one was not a man, and one could not even be a man, properly speaking, if one was not free. Of course women and children were not free, since owning property and participating in government were privileges reserved only for men. But more radically, adult male slaves were not even considered to be men at all in this society, since their lack of freedom defined them only as property.
If a citizen of the state no longer needs to own property (or a penis) in order to be free, the association between freedom and masculinity persists in our cultural imagination. For example, if a woman “exercises her freedom” to sleep with whomever she chooses, she is susceptible to being considered unfaithful and a slave to her passions for this decision. On the other hand, men can exercise this same freedom not only without reprisal, but also with authority and legitimacy. Sleeping with multiple women is encouraged for men as a practice of their independence and autonomy, their right to self-determination.
Freedom, then, is a saturated, slippery concept. The multiplicity of definitions of the word in the dictionary can be categorized by the grammatical prepositions that are affixed to it. “Freedom” as such really means very little, but when you start talking about the “freedom from” or the “freedom “of,” the word starts to take on real value in practice. These kinds of plural freedoms are the kind generally guaranteed by governments and other institutions: freedom from oppression and tyranny, freedom of speech and religion, Frank Roosevelt’s famous declaration of freedom from want and from fear, etc.
In terms of the law, this makes freedom easier to define negatively. We know what we don’t want (domination, censorship, etc.) but what is it that we do want? This is where to question of the “freedom to” comes in, which is much more difficult to define and understand. Simply, what are we to do with freedom once we have it?
There is a kind of tension between the “freedom from” and the “freedom to” that makes people start to worry about the prospect of too much freedom. Man’s “freedom from” domination might enable his “freedom to” dominate others, which we can see, for example, in the dynamics of team sports. The team provides a necessary “freedom from” all of the responsibilities on the field or on the court, which affords an individual player the “freedom to” perform at his best. The player’s performance is based on the freedom a team offers him, but at a certain level, his “freedom to” can start to become selfishness.
What Nietzsche described as man’s natural and inevitable “will to power” (over his environment, over others, etc.) is both the condition of his freedom as well as the principle of its own undoing. The foundation of freedom is therefore not in any guarantee of governance, civil liberties, or human rights, but in a primary, radical “freedom to” that is also characteristic of masculinity as the will to dominate. Unfortunately, the “freedom to” is then always defined by what limits it, as it must constantly seek out new horizons to transgress in an endless struggle for supremacy.
The common response to this problem is to place a reasonable check on man’s freedom, but it seems to me that this desire for domination ends, not with the destruction of the world and everyone in it, but with the destruction of the self. When there are no limits left to transgress, the will to mastery reveals itself to be the will to annihilate oneself, so that freedom is primarily a masochistic freedom. The only real limit to man’s freedom is the limit of himself.
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