MASCULINITY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

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For most of my life, it has been easy to think of myself as an everyman — an everyperson, I guess, if I am being more careful about how I phrase that, but I’m usually not very careful with such things until someone points it out. I do not think I’m alone in this: for the entirety of Western history it has been fabulously easy for white men to think of their experience as the default human experience. For a very long time that was because, legally, socially and economically, it was.

The only people who got to define humanity were white guys: they were the only ones who could own things, who could hold political power, who could have their thoughts listened to. Even as more people fought for some kind of basic recognition — the right to not be treated as chattel, the right to vote, the right to not face statesponsored discrimination — the (straight) white male notion of ourselves didn’t really change. Even if legal definitions and theoretical rights changed, the narrative — still controlled by white men — effectively remained the same.

So, in the age of universal suffrage, for instance ( still not even 60 years old in Canada!) our society has treated the white male experience as comprehensive. Anything that represents white male experience, is assumed to be a default statement: when Birdman wins the Oscar, it is a grand statement about creative impulse, not how a white man deals with his place in the world; when 12 Years A Slave wins, it is about how America must reconcile with its past, not about the incredible ability of a person to survive. Any white man in a position of authority, from a political leader to a news anchor, is assumed to be able to represent everyone, where women and people of colour bring “different points of view.”

The result of this assumption is that the story of anyone from any other background or coming from a different perspective is assumed to be niche, whether subtly or explicitly. Simone de Beauvoir was getting at this when she wrote, in The Second Sex, of men and women as electrical poles: “Man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria.” It’s white men who are granted the freedom to have no particular point of view, because they have every point of view.

This assumption — not just that a white male voice is the only one that matters, but that a white male voice can speak for anyone — has long been floating just beneath the surface of our psyche. But we have increasingly seen it bubble up and made explicitly, and typically in the ugliest way possible: Men’s Rights Activists threaten any woman who dares to speak. Donald Trump appeals to a grand past of white supremacy, promising to expel or silence anyone who disagrees. Calls for diversity are met with dismissiveness and hostility. These issues of representation that we presume to have solved in the 1960s, when the issues were as black and white as the pictures, still linger.

This toxic bile would seem to indicate a worldview that is perilously sick. That it has hung around this long, though, may also suggest that we — and in this case, I mean white men — have not done enough to purge it and replace it with something healthier. In the same way that women, people of colour and queer communities have spent decades creating narratives and voices specifically to counter the default white male voice, it is time for white men to create a healthier conception of ourselves.

From academic treatises and courses, community meetings and on-the-street activism, marginalized groups have pushed their narratives into a space where even the most resistant of us cannot ignore them. The realities of rape culture have become something governments now try to address, as in Ontario’s recent Who Will You Help? campaign. The profiling and killing of black people has become a national conversation — or is loudly decried if it fails to — t hanks to Black Lives Matter. And the long erasure of Indigenous people is finally being acknowledged, even by official channels. The long campaign to wrest the narrative away from white men has inevitably run into the fact that the overwhelming force of narrative-building power still rests with white men. It has always been easy for us to pay lip service to change, or to subsume it in the most agreeable form for maintaining the status quo. As bell hooks put it, the consistent misunderstanding of feminism as anti- men “reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

It’s only recently that it has been possible for someone outside our dominant group to reach something like a mass audience in a sustained and, most importantly, unmediated way. Social media and other internet-enabled forms of communication are still not substitutes for the massive resources of mainstream media — cable networks, movie studios and publishers — to say nothing of actual political or economic power, but they do have the ability to disseminate alternative points of view, loudly and consistently.

We can see proof of this in the way white men react to perspectives they have routinely ignored until now. It is not often with grace, humility or even the full extent of understanding, but even in a dismissal there is at least recognition. What we have not done, at least not consistently enough, is form an identity that takes account of these voices.

You still see men who seem to think that we are beyond progress; who still assume that we have the default perspective, and that this is what we’ve been moving towards all this time. This may even be most of us, at least some of the time: I certainly cannot pretend there isn’t a gut-level reaction to, as an example, someone pointing to racism or sexism where I see something benign.

This is the attitude that cannot fathom why anyone might take issue with using “he” as a universal pronoun. It is uncomfortable with the notion of white privilege, since after all we have worked hard to get where we are. Toronto Mayor John Tory, as close to an embodiment of that term as exists, felt comfortable, even thoughtful, dismissing the notion on the campaign trail: “I think there are people left behind, and what I think they need is a hand up from people of all skin colours and religions and backgrounds,” he said, flattening these groups into some universal form.

It’s an attitude that haughtily appeals to the brotherhood of man, the universal human experience — all lives matter — and assumes that anyone who doesn’t feel that must be working from a deficient frame of reference. It’s maybe a beautiful idea, in the right light, but it is a hopelessly blinkered one: it still assumes that it doesn’t need to listen to others because it understands them well enough. But a lone voice does not become a chorus simply because no one else is singing.

Where t hat attitude does not recognize it has been on a pedestal, the one that more expressly rejects the multiplicity of humanity does: the people who feel it are mistaking being knocked off a perch with being thrown into a pit. And so it is the uglier responses that are the more perceptive. They at least recognize that something is changing, and that their outlook does not carry the weight it once did.

These are the people who see a different kind of Ghostbuster as an assault on their person, a different kind of president as a sign of oblivion. They see women assert agency, and feel the urge to bully, berate and threaten them, developing elaborate theories about how someone else speaking is only serving to drown them out. Aided by a conception of men that sees understanding, compromise and self-reflection as weak — the “toxic masculinity” that psychologists identified in the ’ 70s, which feeds our assumption of importance and universality — they push down other voices.

Then, they hear a politician tell them that he can make things great again, that he will silence all these other voices, that they are illegitimate anyway, and he and the people like him are the only ones who can really tell it like it is. In response, they come out in droves to support him, and see anyone who doesn’t as not just someone with a different mindset, but as an enemy.

Admittedly, not all of these people are specifically white or specifically men, but their underlying impetus is still the same: the default point of view. The only identity they’ve known, is being ripped away from them, and their only solution is to cling to it harder. They turn to people who offer them a return to the past, to an identity that doesn’t just prize the status quo, but denigrates and dismisses anyone who would challenge it.

It’s easy for those of us who imagine ourselves more enlightened to denigrate and dismiss this kind of white man. We can scapegoat them to feel better about ourselves, congratulate ourselves on being so progressive, and then ignore them, imagining they will go away, imagining our softer ignorance does nothing to feed their harder kind.

However, it’s not enough to just tear down a flawed identity. We need to create a different kind of white male perspective, articulate how we are supposed to be once we have accepted that there is no such thing as a universal voice. If we don’t find something to fill the void, the old voice or something even worse will do it for us.

What the new identity might look like, exactly, is not particularly easy to say. Certainly, we have a better handle on what it shouldn’t look like, because we see its examples online and in the news every day. It’s also a fair bet that the identity vacuum continues to exist because even those of us who want to accept a place in the multiplicity don’t have a solid handle on what that place should be. We have received clues, though, particularly from these previously marginalized voices, the women and people of colour and queer communities who have been trying to get us to listen to them all this time.

Listening is where it will have to begin: that’s by far the most consistent request from voices that have been ignored. In her book Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay had the rather salient observation that “We should be able to say, ‘ This is my truth,’ and have that truth stand without a hundred clamouring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist.” We have to hear all these other truths, and work them into ours.

But we also cannot only listen. We have to talk to each other. It is not the job of women and people of colour and queer communities to fix us. It has taken enough for them to get us to listen, and it is time we fixed ourselves.

More practically, and more uncomfortably, it is plainly obvious by now that some of us are incapable of listening to these other points of view. As people they at least theoretically might listen to, it’s incumbent upon white men to say something. As has been pointed out consistently, racism and sexism are not the problems of the people they are inflicted upon: white men have to sort themselves out.

The base starting point for that is accepting that there is no such thing as a default human, that humanity is not and has never been a monolith, however much we have imagined otherwise. We do not, and cannot, look through the same eyes, hear with the s a me ears, speak with the same voice. Listen carefully, t hough, a nd there is at least a chance of understanding.