No Man’s Land
MAY 2ND, 2016 — POST 119
“The dying middle class of blank”. These kinds of headlines are now common thinkpiece fodder. From music to movies, apps to YouTube creators, there’s an increasingly widening gap between the highly produced, heavily marketed and the cheap, almost disposable. For movies, budgets for summer blockbusters endlessly climb, as much for production as for marketing, and “indie darlings” are in a race to the bottom, actors working for well below what they’re able to attract for a belief in a project and the exercise of getting stuck into character over the exercise of squeezing into spandex. As well-documented as the polarising of movie production is, another kind of polarisation is well-observed and debated in regards to politics. With the current presidential race already throwing up unprecedented levels of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum, as embodied by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, there’s now an expectation that an individual who identifies as either liberal or conservative too are being pushed further and further toward the poles.
Polarity is the language of a media crippled by shorthand. Speed is the most supreme of virtues for the modern media organisation and an extreme position is quicker to explain. It’s easier to talk in black and white than to ruminate upon a specific shade of grey. At the same time, the world is seeing a civil, social, and cultural evolution that is defined by these greys. Discourse on gender and race is at a point now that its best moments, the grey is explained as quickly as black or white. Specifically as it pertains to gender, an entire appendix has been added to our vernacular to capture a nuance that the pace of the media cycle has threatened to annihilate. However, two words have seemingly resisted redefition; two words that are one of the definitive binary pairs: “femininity” and “masculinity”.
There are many things that I feel deprived of as an Australian but the presence of stupid people is not one of them. In this case, the stupid people are whoever conceived of, approved, and participated in a segment from breakfast television that is making the viral rounds here. For a discussion on the question of “Are men second class citizens?” the Weekend Sunrise crew brought in former opposition leader Mark Latham (google him if you want a laugh), journalist Miranda Devine, columnist Van Badham, and a columnist from Brisbane Rory Gibson.
The “discussion” rapidly broke down into a competition between Latham and one of the hosts Andrew O’Keefe as to who could yell the loudest. Talking about a recent anti-domestic violence ad campaign and talk of dedicated female-only carriages for late-night train commuters, the seams of the conversation began to burst around the very notion of “masculinity”. The Miranda Devine, who was emphatically against the tone of the ads and the implications of a female-only carriage, expressed that she was fearful that these measures demonise the “type of masculinity that has protected humankind for time immemorial”. O’Keefe wanted to shout her down, implicitly insisting masculinity generally prizes violence, and Latham came to her defense. Consistently it struck me that the frustration was born out of not having the words.
For whatever reason, we’ve taken “masculinity” as a constant, a group of traits that have been agreed upon as that for which men should strive. The word “masculinity” is the most toxic force enacted upon masculinity, its definition steeped in tradition. Despite a desire to want to talk about gender in terms of grey, the very language we use can’t help but force a binary way of thinking. As Van Badham points out, masculinity has been responsible for the physical harm of countless women and countless men. It’s undeniable that a lot of women have been hurt by a man they know, but every man, whether by their fathers or a schoolyard bully, has been hurt by a man. A very strong case could be made for the argument that masculinity is fundamentally corrosive of “maleness”. The implicit polarity one must prescribe to in using “masculinity” precludes the possibility of a proper reevaluation of “maleness”. The same can be said for feminity. These words, as much as they’re mobilised in this discourse, are actually the most significant barriers to progress.
All of this makes the middle a very lonely place to be.
