Lifting Liberals, Nefarious Nazis and Huge Hands
Mark: Welcome back to our mediocre musings on masculinity.
Carrigan Miller: Two straight, white men writing about dude stuff. Really groundbreaking work here.
Mark: Last time, we mostly discussed lifting as a form of personal labor, as well as its role in economic class distinctions. Today, we’ll go into gender roles, societal pressures and politics — because everything is better when it’s topical.
Carrigan: I think this stuff is always topical, but that’s because I’m a dork who thinks about gender performativity constantly. Continue.
Mark: Since the election, countless articles have been written on why exactly America elected a leader whose motto amounts to “We are weak, but I will make us strong again”. Why did 47% of voters agree with that sentiment (and why were Trump’s voters geographically distinct enough to pull a non-popular win)?
In short, it’s his macho appeal. The brand of populist-nationalism that carried Trump to office is often criticized as hyper-masculine and misogynistic. The number of lascivious quotes and recordings alone makes it hard to argue against that claim, but the data shows that he polled extremely well among men.
It’s more than just conjecture; men preferred Trump by a 12-point margin. In the past 40 years male votes have typically skewed towards the Republican vote, but Trump polled on the extreme of that divide (beaten only by Nixon, Reagan and H.W. in ‘88). Donald campaigned on themes of strengthening our borders & expelling illegals, reviving failing industries and rooting the corruption out of D.C.; this isn’t necessarily gender-partisan policy, but the manner of his campaigning, debate and communication tactics all highlight the President’s love of macho stage dramatics. He cavorted about the country, insulted his competition with emasculating nicknames, attacked Clinton’s physical capability, and was thoroughly incensed by comments about his small hands (he still maintains that they are, indeed, huge). Carrigan, our president is in the goddamn WWE Hall of Fame.
Carrigan: And like any professional wrestler, he rose to the top by inciting the crowd with objectively stupid, but still effective tough-guy antics. I actually don’t mind this, because it means that the best resistance to Trump is being more like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.
Mark: But even with obnoxiously male politics in the White House, we can’t blame this on the GOP’s natural inclinations; it’s not quite as clear as “republicans are manlier than democrats”. Here’s an interesting study about bicep size and political ideology — a provocative topic to begin with. It made the news a few years back when “reputable publications” around the internet ran headlines like “Research Proves Conservative Men Stronger Than Liberal Men” or “Large Biceps Demonstrate Right-Wing Affilation”.
Carrigan: First of all, the study didn’t actually support that. It supported WEALTHY men with big biceps having right-leaning economic beliefs, specifically being against wealth redistribution policies. It also supported poorer men with big biceps having pro-redistribution beliefs, so don’t believe that swole people are politically homogenous. The big conclusion is that muscular people are more likely to feel strongly about things than weak people, which I can confirm, if only anecdotally (gym arguments are the best rests between sets because they keep your adrenaline levels high). The bicep data didn’t lean towards any side of the spectrum.
Mark: So you’re saying it was bipartisan?
Carrigan: That’s a really bad joke and you should be ashamed. Anyway, the study did have some parts that felt strange to me. It surveyed men from Argentina, Denmark and the US, so we can’t make any assumptions as to world standards or US-only correlations. Additionally, they were using arm size as a proxy for upper body strength, which they were in turn using as a proxy for fighting ability. I think that most people who lift a lot know that biceps are pretty much ornamental. They’re not very functional in compound lifts, let alone in a fight.
Mark: You could say biceps have a weak relationship with overall fitness and a strong link with ego.
Carrigan: Or a strong link with internalizing societal expectations for a male body. I think there’s a good point to be made here about this weird idea that lifting a lot of weight = fighting ability. In fact, there is a vast difference between someone who has a nice bench and someone who could win a fight. For example, I know for a fact that I bench press more than Connor McGregor, but that doesn’t mean I think I could knock him out.
Mark: Right. Society still thinks that muscles means fighting ability, but it turns out that the people who train to fight are way better at it than people who train to look big.
Carrigan: So we’ve established that muscles aren’t partisan and don’t always translate to fighting ability. But masculinity is still tied to violence in several ways — the Department of Justice records that men commit around 75% of all violent crimes in America while women commit ~20%. Crime statistics are always a little shaky (especially when they include self-reported data) but the findings support men committing over three times the amount of crime women do. So why all the violence?
Mark: I always took a biological point of view here — testosterone levels are higher in individuals with histories of violent behavior, and also increase during aggressive, semi-violent sports activities. Men get the majority dose of the hormone and are also expected to seek social dominance in general — it’s not a recipe for pacifism. That’s not to take any of the blame off of men in general, but when men commit a majority of crime, we should take a good look at the variable — gender and everything that comes with it — to help us understand why.
Carrigan: But it’s not just crime in general — men also commit the majority of hate crimes. Another DoJ report from 2005 notes that 79% of hate crimes were by men. And it’s political, because of course it is: the Southern Law Poverty Center reported 867 hate crimes in the first ten days after the election, over 300 of which referenced the President or his proposals.
So the masculine politics we discussed earlier just might be having an effect on “masculine” criminality. Which is bad. And even though violent bigotry exists across the spectrum, it’s been focused and mass-produced through Trump’s campaign to a point where the public perceives it as a partisan issue. Which it sort of is. But still.
Mark: But if society (and more importantly, the media) equates racist, misogynistic violence with the right — which is difficult to deny — how does the left react?
Carrigan: Stupidly, as it turns out. Check out the Swole Left talk about lifting like it’ll help them fight Nazis. First of all, I can’t take this Poncho Martinez seriously; he’s only been lifting for two years and his totals are not very impressive at all. I’m familiar with some right-wing lifters on Instagram and they do this guy’s PRs for warm-up sets. Hell, I do this guy’s PRs for warm-up sets. Him offering to train New York leftists is kind of worrying; someone with only two years of experience should be getting trained, not leading sessions.
Mark: I’m still convinced that muscles aren’t the best solution here, but I also don’t think he’s wrong in recognizing the value of a strong, intimidating male presence in confronting and deescalating other strong, intimidating male presences. That men have so much value in those situations is bad in itself, but these liberals have found a semi-practical option.
Carrigan: But that’s the thing — I think this guy is lifting for the wrong reasons, and a lot of his motivations are problematic from a leftist viewpoint. Martinez claims he wants to defy the “cuck” stereotype that the right has of the left, but trying to counter a gendered insult by conforming to a gender role (the powerful man) is not an effective type of activism. It’s actually a conservative view of gender roles; he’s submitting to archetypes of proper male behavior.
Mark: That’s a solid point — it’s almost like the alt-right baited him into validating traditional masculinity.
Carrigan: I don’t know if he was baited or just isn’t as divorced from it as he thinks he is. In particular, one quote in this piece stands out to me as being indicative of hegemonic masculine beliefs. Martinez’s friend Ben is quoted as saying that “I have a lot of friends who are women, trans, queer and just plain smaller than I am, and I felt I had an obligation to protect people I love and care about if they find themselves in danger at a protest.” This sounds noble. But talk of “protecting” women or trans people is so deeply linked to conservative views of a man’s place in the world and in a family. Recall that the justification for bathroom bills, such as the one in North Carolina, also uses the language of “protecting” women. With all their talk of fighting and protecting women, the #swoleleft come across as deeply indebted to the toxic masculinity that they seem to want to act as a foil to.
Mark: That’s where it gets tricky. You can’t really have a masculine response to toxic masculinity, or at least you can’t engage it on the same muscle-strength-intimidation level. I’m pretty sure the answer to actively hostile, physically intimidating people of any political leaning is police action — or open carry, but that might fall into the same trap.
Consider the much-reviled alt-right and their army of trolls. Spend twenty seconds reading Breitbart or listening to Yiannopoulos and you’ll see their favorite all-purpose insult is “cuck” — they use traditional monogamous (and heteronormative?) concepts to attack their enemies’ masculinity. They’ve also extended the definition to mean anyone weak-willed (who can’t make the obviously correct right-wing decisions).
Carrigan: The alt-right’s focus on masculinity almost seems like compensation for something. All of their heroes fall far short of the masculine bar. Trump, for example, is a draft dodger who eats his steak well done. Both sides end up looking goofy.
Mark: The danger is that they’re goofy, but still effective. The Swole Left claims they need muscles to defend against violent alt-right Nazis, and even though it betrays some of the left’s integral beliefs, I can see why the idea is attractive. You look at the news and see Richard Spencer talking about “the superiority of the white race” and calling for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”, and it’s the same shit that came out of Germany — 84 years ago. And it’s back to masculinity again — there was a large element of physical superiority in the Ubermensch; that’s why Jesse Owens winning the 1936 Track & Field gold in Berlin was especially powerful — purported Aryan superiority shattered by a black man from America.
Carrigan: That’s why sports and competition are so great. I don’t think they need to be tied into masculinity or men. Not all men love competition, and there are a lot of great competitors who identify as something other than male. But, man, stuff like Jesse Owens or the Miracle on Ice are so beautiful.
Sam: So altogether, if we equate the new conservative zeitgeist with violent bigotry, it follows that traditional masculinity is a part of that, muscles or not.
Carrigan: The two have been related in the past. Is it possible for the two to become untethered? Or, let me take this in a totally different direction, is masculinity salvageable or worth saving?
Mark: I think so. There are also good concepts we tie in with masculinity: bravery, perseverance, constructive competition. You’ll notice that none of those things are inherently male.
Carrigan: My conclusion is that masculinity needs a reformation, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there’s some stuff we can keep and a lot of stuff we need to throw out. We truly need to probe every part of modern masculinity and get rid of the bad stuff, and I think there are more toxic things than we think.
Mark: Reforms are definitely needed. I think our best hope is to disconnect the values behind “masculinity” (and preferably all gendered moulds) from men themselves — whether or not we use the same word, the collection of concepts behind it could be applied to anyone, to the benefit of everyone. But letting go of concepts we literally evolved with is an extremely hard task.
Carrigan: It’s hard work and it’s gonna get harder. But, after all, don’t men take pride in doing hard work?
