Drawing on original case studies, Chalmers examines how marketing personnel in particular firms appeal to valued and Marketing Masculinities: Gender and Management Politics in Marketing Work Volume 57 of Great American Orators.
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Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik , who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. We will just shoot you in the vagina. Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today.
And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.
When did this crisis begin?
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And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present , I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.
There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna.
A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them.
During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles. The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength.
Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being. On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market.
The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists and their Hindu imitators: Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness.
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This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being — someone to be subdued and dominated — and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.
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Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human — a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist.
As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races.
Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing — and a craving for regenerative violence.
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It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism. One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: As a former drama teacher, Mr. Trudeau likely knows this well. Ronald Reagan's years in Hollywood unquestionably made him the tremendous communicator he was while in office.
Abe Lincoln's years as a storyteller made him a great orator as president. Connecting with your audience is everything. As the fictional Bill Clinton says in the novel Primary Colors , we need a candidate "who knows the emotional part of the game …" Justin Trudeau understands this well. And he's not afraid to show it. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way.
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The crisis in modern masculinity
Gary Mason National affairs columnist. Published November 30, Updated November 30, It's been an emotional few weeks for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Story continues below advertisement. Follow Gary Mason on Twitter garymasonglobe. Report an error Editorial code of conduct. Log in Subscribe to comment Why do I need to subscribe?
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Gender Displays and Men's Power: Gender displays and men's power: Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette and Michael A. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Research on Men and Masculinities Series. Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile above so that you can save clips, playlists, and searches. Please log in from an authenticated institution or log into your member profile to access the email feature.