The illegitimacy of the male

Institutional misandry is getting internalized, to the detriment of men and women both

I published the following essay a few years ago, but it didn’t get much traction at the time. I offer it again to the readers of Archedelia (with some changes) on the hunch that the problem I describe might be recognizable to more people now. The sexual paranoia promoted by the campus sex bureaucracy educates the sexual imagination of young men and women, in ways that make intimacy much harder. The effects include a rigorous practice of self-suspicion that is incumbent on men, and dissatisfaction on the part of women with the morally worm-eaten mates that they have been taught to approve of. To be gay is the only way to be above reproach. Failing that, one can performatively disaffiliate from heterosexuality by adopting gay-sounding speech patterns. Doing so might keep the sex narcs off your back.

-Matt Crawford

The male stain

The male, we are told, is fundamentally flawed. Not in that “original sin” sense, which might counsel resignation or charity. No, he is more like a Superfund site: something that urgently needs remediation, lest the whole community be poisoned. For that, you will need a sexual equivalent of the EPA.

The good news, from this perspective, is that the male, like the female, is entirely a “social construct.” When sex is understood as an arbitrary product of human willing, it invites the willfulness of people who are irritated by the way men and women actually live, and feel. Sexual difference is understood not as a given, and certainly not as a gift to delight in, but as a problem to fix.

Such fixing must begin by clearing away folk mythologies. In the recent book Are Men Animals? Matthew Gutmann patiently spells a few things out for readers who may need to be brought up to speed on why they shouldn’t trust their own experience. We now know, for instance, that “there is no predictable correlation between women’s menstrual cycles and their moods.” (I ran this past a lesbian friend and she snorted beer all over herself. But she said it was worth it, because she hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time.)

Who knows, maybe there is a study that claims as much (Gutmann provides no reference). There are many such proclamations throughout the book. Using a science-y voice to dismiss “gender essentialism” poses certain rhetorical challenges, and one can only feel sympathy for this author. His basic predicament is that of the contemporary left altogether, when it comes to sex: Science is good, but the concept of Nature is bad. Nature serves as the refuge of scoundrels who want to let men off the hook for their behavior. “Men behave the way they do because culture permits it, not because biology demands it.” Gutmann means to revoke that permission.

What is this male behavior that culture permits, but ought not to? Is Gutmann referring to such stereotypically male behavior as coal mining and sanitation work? Does the professor have in mind the lineman who scales a pole during an ice storm to restore power to the professor’s house? Perhaps he means those who man the fishing fleets in the Bering Sea (and, in doing so, die at a higher rate than in some combat posts) to bring sushi-grade tuna to the foodies in his university town. No, presumably these jobs would remain staffed as they currently are (with an appalling lack of gender equity), even after the ideological reform has been accomplished. But, crucially, these ruffians would no longer indulge their male privilege by, for example, making dick jokes among themselves as they warm their frost-stiffened fingers over a barrel fire. The sun-scorched roofers laying molten tar on the flat roof of a shopping mall in Louisiana, in July, would no longer abuse their high position to glance down the blouses of shoppers walking across the parking lot on their way into the cool air of Nordstrom. The roofers would be made to understand: that’s violence.

Today, to be male is to live under a moral stain. In particular, it has been decided that male sexuality is illegitimate. Of course, it has always posed a problem for society, as something that needs to be domesticated – made generative rather than destructive – because it presents hazards and indispensable energies. It provides both obstacles to the civilizing project of moral formation, and the basic material for that project.[1] Currently we view it through the simplifying lens of the criminal code, with concepts such as sexual assault and sexual harassment. These are made to stand for male sexuality altogether.

The rise of the sex narcs

In an eye-opening law review article titled “The Sex Bureaucracy,” two Harvard law professors with impeccable feminist credentials report in great detail what they call “the bureaucratic leveraging of sexual violence and harassment policy to regulate ordinary sex.” The story told by Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk is focused mainly on universities.[2]