Masculinity and Revolution

[Ven0m]

This is a topic that has played on my mind heavily of late. I'm always suspicious of traditionally “masculine” behavior, the John Wayne archetype of what a man should be bla bla bla, and I ridicule it everywhere around me. But I wonder if in destroying this idol we are neutering our revolutionary potential? I mean let's face it, a masculine heterosexual male is pretty rare amongst our ranks these days. But can you really see us queers, transgenders and women storming the Winter Palace? Being myself a feminine male with cross dressing-tendencies I hope I can say this without causing any offense. I strongly advise what we need to think about is fostering masculinity within revolutionary communism so when a revolutionary moment avails itself we have some teeth to bite with. We need to mobilize and identify the stong, disciplined militants amongst who know how to handle guns and do savage violence to our eenemies. What does everybody else think on the subject?

[Hrafn]

Masculine heterosexual males are rare? In the milieu I'm from, they are the by far vast majority. And I think that's a tragic fact in almost all left-wing movements.

You're making a serious mistake in conflating masculinity and militancy, toughness, bravery, etc.

[Naroc]

I'd too say they aren't rare at all. Almost all of my friends vom the leftist scene here are hetero males. Homosexuals are the one's who're quite rare around here.

[Jemdet Nasr]

You know, I have slogan just for this situation:
Anarchismo, not machismo!

On a more serious note, there is no reason why people can't cross-dress and be proficient with guns or combat.

Also, for the non-anarchists: Marxismo, not machismo.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

*sigh* Hi, graffic.

But can you really see us queers, transgenders and women storming the Winter Palace?

Yes.

Being myself a feminine male with cross dressing-tendencies I hope I can say this without causing any offense.

No.

I strongly advise what we need to think about is fostering masculinity within revolutionary communism so when a revolutionary moment avails itself we have some teeth to bite with.

Fuck no.

What does everybody else think on the subject?

Smash masculinity.

[RedAnarchist]

There's been countless women, queer and trans* revolutionaries.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Ven0m, you're confusing masculinity with militancy or the ability to fight. Plenty of LGBT people and women have been revolutionaries. Plenty have served in the militaries of bourgeois states, too.

[Scheveningen]

I'm confused.
What makes you think women couldn't take part in a revolution, exactly? Or, why wouldn't they be able to handle guns?

[Gawd]

How many bodybuilders you seen in Africa?

Masculinity is a form of marketing culture. Huge ass dudes with muscles and perfectly tight abs don't exist. If you got a gun, your as masculine as most people get.

stong, disciplined militants

This isn't something to theorize about, if your serious about something you should organize instead of insisting a violent and upbringing revolution like everyone else does on the Internet. Or else really, it wont ever happen and will continue to be insisted until it does happen. Then some far right forum will pop up and say the same damn thing about revolting with violence.

[RA89]

If you consider being into combat sports, contact sports, weightlifting etc as being masculine there are many other guys like that on the left including myself. Tbh I'd guess that many left people would assume I'm a macho douchebag before talking to me lol.

Anyway imo in modern times physical attributes matter slightly less as anyone can use a gun etc which renders biological differences between sexes partially void. Plus anyone can be trained, females from what I know are used effectively in the Israeli Defence League too.


I guess the issue here is how you define masculinity, if you're saying toughness etc is exclusive to being masculine then I think many will find that sexist.

[BIXX]

OP, shut your mouth.

Masculinity (which is primarily characterize by dominance, at least how It is socially defined) is not desirable for me (and, I assume, the other folks here). This is because we don't wish to dominate the bourgeoisie, but assert ourselves against them (which doesn't require domination).

[RA89]

OP, shut your mouth.

Masculinity (which is primarily characterize by dominance, at least how It is socially defined) is not desirable for me (and, I assume, the other folks here). This is because we don't wish to dominate the bourgeoisie, but assert ourselves against them (which doesn't require domination).

Isn't that just semantics though?

Either way it will be forceful.

Surely a better argument would be that dominance is not exclusive to males/masculinity?

[Loony Le Fist]

This is a topic that has played on my mind heavily of late. I'm always suspicious of traditionally “masculine” behavior, the John Wayne archetype of what a man should be bla bla bla, and I ridicule it everywhere around me. But I wonder if in destroying this idol we are neutering our revolutionary potential? I mean let's face it, a masculine heterosexual male is pretty rare amongst our ranks these days. But can you really see us queers, transgenders and women storming the Winter Palace?

If the John Wayne Archetype is so problematic for you, then why do you seem to be buying it here? There is absolutely nothing inherent about "queers, transgenders and women" that keeps them "[from] storming the Winter Palace".

Being myself a feminine male with cross dressing-tendencies I hope I can say this without causing any offense. I strongly advise what we need to think about is fostering masculinity within revolutionary communism so when a revolutionary moment avails itself we have some teeth to bite with.

What does fostering masculinity even mean? I say we should foster strength. Both physical and mental. There is nothing inherently masculine about strength, assertiveness, and toughness. We should all strive to be as strong and tough as possible. If for nothing else, to make life a little easier.

We need to mobilize and identify the stong, disciplined militants amongst who know how to handle guns and do savage violence to our eenemies. What does everybody else think on the subject?

What would make a woman/queer/transgender less capable of being strong, inflicting savage violence and handling guns? While those born female gendered might be physiologically limited in their built-in raw physical strength, this isn't a big deal. Firstly, there are plenty of ways to augment this (guns, powered suits, machines, etc). How much raw physical strength does a sniper need? Secondly, skill is very important when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. I'd put my money on a skilled fighter over a stronger, but unskilled one.

[BIXX]

Isn't that just semantics though?



Either way it will be forceful.



Surely a better argument would be that dominance is not exclusive to males/masculinity?

No, it's not just semantics. And no, doninance isn't exclusive to males, but as it Is socially defined (which is an appropriate usage IMO) masculinity is defined by dominance.

1. Abolish masculinity
2. We don't want dominance I would assume in a post-capitalist society
3. Yes women can be dominant (and so they are often considered masculine) and men can be submissive (which is what society refers to as feminine). My answer to this is that we should moved beyond the logic of masculinity vs femininity (which means leaving gender behind) if we want a truly anarchist world.
3. Forceful self-assertion is not dominance. But yes no matter what in the end if there is to be a revolution (which I honestly don't believe is going to happen) it will be forceful.

Jesus I should learn to count.

[Redistribute the Rep]

There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen's wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.

.

[human strike]

I couldn't disagree any more strongly than I do. We may need violence (of a sort), but we do not need masculinity or militancy - far from it.

[BIXX]

I couldn't disagree any more strongly than I do. We may need violence (of a sort), but we do not need masculinity or militancy - far from it.

Honestly militancy is used so vaguely by many folks that I have no idea what it really means. I would assume they mean "willing to be violent", which I think is good, or "wanting to formalize the struggle with the same hierarchical structures of the military", which is shit.

What does "militancy" actually mean?

[human strike]

Honestly militancy is used so vaguely by many folks that I have no idea what it really means. I would assume they mean "willing to be violent", which I think is good, or "wanting to formalize the struggle with the same hierarchical structures of the military", which is shit.

What does "militancy" actually mean?

I guess it's used in two ways; one being readiness to use violence (which is fine by me), but it also refers to the 'militant', someone who dedicates themselves to a political cause (not so fine by me). I suppose in the context here we're probably talking about the first kind of militancy so I probably shouldn't have said we've no need for militancy. Meh, whatever.

[Noa Rodman]

I think it's more in general to do with hipsters.

Morris Hillquit (who served as general counsel for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union from 1913 to 1933 and was leader of the Socialist Party from 1901 until his death in 1933), has a great characterization of the American left, in which I think there is an undertone of this association of courage and conviction with masculinity (I highlight the passage, but I could be reading too much into it). He was slightly built and frail himself so it has nothing to do with being macho.

http://www.unz.org/Pub/TheSurvey-1926feb01-00562

The American pre-war radical was a peculiar species, very unlike his European namesake.

The "radicals" of all lands outside the United States are persons of tolerably well defined and homogeneous views and purpose. They are opponents of the prevailing economic order and proponents of a new order rooted in industrial democracy. They may vary in their conceptions of the "cooperative commonwealth" or disagree about the manner of its attainment, but they are in general in accord on the need of a radical economic reconstruction. Broadly speaking, they are Socialists of one stripe or another.

The American "radical" is any person who does not conform to the accepted standards in any sphere of thought or conduct, and before the war there was an endless variety of him. Anti-graft crusaders in politics and settlement workers in social endeavor; "muck-rakers" in journalism and anit-fundamentalists in religion; devotees of free love and teachers of birth control; modernist in literature and art; pacifists, feminists and anti-vaccinationists; opponents of lynching and prison reformers; Irish sympathizers and politicians who had fallen out with the boss; men with flowing ties and pioneers of the female bob; iconoclasts, malcontents, sentimentalists and faddists of all imaginable and unimaginable hues, were equally listed as "radicals" by our discriminating press and enlightened officialdom on a par with the Socialists, the I.W.W. and the conservative union leader during a strike.

This motley "radicalism" had neither coherence nor substance, neither program nor material foundation. When it was put to the test in the soul-trying period of war, hysteria and terror it proved without conviction and courage. Few of our "radicals" survived. The great majority dissolved into the thin and unsubstantial atmosphere to which they owned their ephemeral existences. Requiescant in pace.

"Who succeeds them and where?" Fred Howe, who has put us all under obligation by the delightful account of his tragi-comical odyssey as a pre-war radical, has also indicated the answer. After twenty-five years of honest experimental search of the elusive "social truth," he reached the conclusion that our radicals failed because "they wanted to cure corruption without getting rid of the cause of corruption." He discovered in Paris what was perfectly patent in New York, "that the world was ruled by an exploiting class that ruled in the interests of the things it owned" and that there was but one class of people who could change that order, "the workers - those who produce wealth by hand and brain." The radical world beyond seas has made that discovery more than a generation ago and the experiences of the way have by no means detracted from its validity.

Future American radicalism, if it is to be anything more than the vague and impotent thing it has been in the past, must find a home in the labor movement, a borad and intelligent labor movement, organized politically as well as economically and inviting the active cooperation of radicals of other classes as does the Labour Party of Great Britain. Such as movement may be slow in coming here, but come it must eventually, and in the meantime the serious-minded radicals will find ample employment for their energies and talents in helping to pave the way for it.

In Proudhon's notorious work La pornocratie, he took issue with emasculation which he also, and perhaps mainly, associated with a promiscuity in the field of ideas; relativism, eclecticism (basically postmodernism/gender theory).

I think the key association of masculinity is with the past industrial organized working class, in opposition to the present post-industrial, 'consumerist' disorganized working class. There is tons of material on this (I'll be glad to give references), but a popular movie on this was The Full Monty.

[Црвена]

"Masculinity," is a stereotypical construct of society. Fine, there are traits that scientifically should occur more in males than females, but genes can be overridden, and lower average physical strength won't be that much of a setback. I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage stereotypically masculine people to join our cause - we should welcome everyone - but if we want equality and justice, we shouldn't be paying any attention to "masculinity," and other social constructs invented for discrimination.