Addressing Toxic Masculinity and Patriarchal Culture Through Art
A recent newsletter essay by author and journalist Daniel Pinchbeck alerted me to the online Twitter duel between environmental activist Greta Thunberg and misogynist right wing media provocateur - and now alleged human trafficker and rapist - Andrew Tate. To my reading Pinchbeck attempts to address the toxic masculinity espoused by men such as Tate as a lightning rod obscuring rather than enlightening communication regarding the existential threat of climate emergency.
I’d like to speak about an urgent cultural issue that I believe Pinchbeck fails to address, one that I attempt to address and subvert through my visual art and writing. We know and acknowledge that dominant patriarchal culture oppresses women. I’m speaking specifically to that same dominant patriarchal culture’s oppression of young boys, a culture that from an early age engenders toxic masculinity. Boys grow up – in a manner of speaking – to be young men. We as a society need to address the larger cultural problem if we’re to correct what I call the blood curse of toxic masculinity and allow men to actually grow up instead of becoming the emotionally stunted individuals that Tate and incel* culture represent.
If you find following popular trends in the news as generally distasteful as I do, I’ll briefly bring you up to speed on what I learned only recently myself about this character. A former professional kickboxer, Tate has been banned from various media platforms including Twitter for his online screeds advocating male dominance and “putting women in their place” more or less explicitly by violence. What should be to no one’s surprise, on taking ownership of Twitter Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s account. Tate apparently is widely followed by the predominantly white and male right wing, and has also developed into a hero for the incel* crowd.
In a Twitter rant this past Wednesday December 28, 2022 that I can only categorize as batshit, Tate addressed environmental activist Greta Thunberg to brag about eating pizza from non-recycled pizza boxes and his ownership of thirty-three cars. With barely veiled lewdness he proposed that Thunberg give him her email address, so “I can send you a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions”.
Greta’s appropriate and devastating one-line Tweet: “Yes, please enlighten me. Email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com”.
Metaphorically shooting himself in the foot by posting an online image of himself with those pizza boxes apparently alerted police to Tate’s current whereabouts in Romania. The following day he and his brother were arrested under suspicion of involvement in an international human trafficking organization and alleged rape. As I stated in a recent blog post, I quit Twitter soon after Musk acquired it. I don’t anticipate ever going back and so haven’t followed on subsequent Twitter reactions, except that after Tate’s arrest Thunberg trolled him over those pizza boxes.
From my artist’s statement:
“Patriarchy at its core is the first inequality, a hierarchical structure that emphasizes male dominance, cutthroat competition and rejection of women’s equality. Fear of “the Other” is manipulated to impose further layers of inequality, demonizing ethnicities, religions, gender identifications and economic standing other than one’s own. Patriarchy ultimately oppresses all peoples, men and women. My images combined with written words intend to expose and subvert the cultures of inequality.”
On the days that I attended my recent solo art exhibition I observed viewer reactions to my acrylic painting The Boy In the Mirror. It’s not a rigorous scientific survey, but the reactions seemed evenly divided between those genuinely fascinated enough to gaze awhile or interested enough to speak with me about its’ “meaning” and those who quickly glanced and walked on by.
I contend that the violence implicit in toxic masculinity is embedded in current culture. A male child is unavoidably born into it. I subscribe to the sentiment expressed by former NFL athlete, pastor and educator Joe Ehrmann in the Representation Project’s film documentary The Mask You Live In that “the three scariest words you can say to a young boy is ‘Be a man’”. Ehrmann disavows what he learned from his father as a young boy, that dominance and control is what is means to ‘be a man’ and that real men “don’t feel, don’t want, don’t need”.
One male visitor visiting the gallery where I exhibited told me he believed my painting was about one young man who was insecure about his manhood; and that he (the viewer) had no such insecurity, making the painting not relevant to him. While one surely can view the representations in my painting The Boy In the Mirror from the standpoint of gender dysphoria, this is only one of a number of valid interpretations.
I’d emphasize that I’m not addressing a “gay” versus “straight” issue here, but a culturally embedded trauma that every boy faces in greater or lesser degrees. I like to characterize this as a cultural blood curse that’s passed down generationally until those men who have the good fortune to acquire some level of awareness derail its trajectory.
There are unavoidable rites of passage that every boy in this society must undergo. Whether these are introduced by unaware parents and primary caregivers, surely they’re introduced and reinforced on the nation’s playgrounds and schoolyards. Not every boy navigates these rites of passage with “success” – as success is measured in this society – and a boy fails these rites at his social and often physical peril. Unfortunately, “success” often results in a man’s inability to know and experience love, let alone express it to a woman - and surely not to other men.
I was unable to begin confronting the origins of rage and fear in my own life until well into the fifth decade of my life. Behaviors that enabled me to survive childhood and adolescent bullying no longer served me as an adult, resulting in two failed relationships, an inability to make and keep friends and the alienation of those around me. Only desperate loneliness impelled me to reach out for help. Reaching out for help is something men are taught from boyhood that they’re not to do. “Man up” and “cowboy up” are two of the watchwords for this. As Ehrmann says of his childhood experience, “Don’t feel. Don’t want. Don’t need.” Success - until that success leads to addictions, self-harm, social ruin and suicide.
Among other individuals and therapeutic modalities I can thank the programs of the Breakthrough Men’s Community, and not only for helping to shape new behaviors in me. Learning such new behaviors is crucial without a doubt in becoming a better spouse, lover, family member and friend to women. Concurrently I had to begin addressing the root unresolved traumas incurred in boyhood that made me hate myself. If a boy does not learn what is lovable about himself, his eventual hatred and self loathing will leave him incapable of truly loving others in the deepest and most satisfying ways – other women and other men. I would add for Daniel Pinchbeck’s benefit that also leaves a man incapable of loving the natural world of which he is part and leaves him open to becoming a climate crisis denier instead.
I believe that such programs as Breakthrough, initially crafted over years by Fred Jealous and drawing from the conceptual advances of feminism, should be models for the educational process of boys from an early age. It’s also the basis for a continuing community environment that reinforces and validates new behaviors.
Education and re-education of this kind that subverts the culture of patriarchy is also the basis of pulling men from the toxicity that grips the incels, Tates, Trumps and Musks of this world. This is a topic I’ll revisit often in my writing and visual art. I welcome your thoughts.
*For the uninitiated, the incel community is an online and offline subculture of men, predominantly young and self-identified as heterosexual who desire to attract women for sexual relations but are unable to do so. Because of their inability they express misogynistic hostility towards women, often in violent terms. Incel is an abbreviation for “involuntarily celibate”. The trend has existed since at least the 1990s, but has been more recently picked up as a cause by more generally aggrieved, entitled, radically conservative, and predominantly white men threatened by changing gender diversity and tolerance.
