by Lu Ann Pade
On the 23rd of May 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Roger killed six people in a shooting and stabbing rampage in Isla Vista, California, before ending his own life by directing his gun at himself and dying from a gunshot wound to the head. Roger, having lived his life as the son of an affluent filmmaker, foreshadowed his crime by distributing a 141-page document detailing his frustrations at his involuntary celibacy to the dozen people closest to him via email just hours before he embarked on his murder spree. He then uploaded a “retribution” video to YouTube in which he complained about never having been the object of female attention, never having even kissed a girl. Then the violence began. While working on this piece on masculinism, I was led to ask myself: how has masculinism metastasised into the dangerous, misogynistic and degrading ideology of people like Elliot Roger? How has this term come to embody these characteristics? This article does not aim to cover all of the implications of topics relating to incel culture and sexism. It seeks rather to take a look at some possible explanations for the emergence of masculinism as it exists in its current form.
Masculinism can be characterised as a reactionary and conservative counter-movement to feminism. It can be interpreted as a response to the “masculinity crisis” the followers of this doctrine consider society to be facing, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. At a time during which the two movements coincide, the claims of masculinists are multiple : feminism denies the masculinity of men (even worse, it tries to invert the pre-installed hierarchy and place women above men in the social hierarchy) and it is one of their missions to prevent this from happening. The masculinists want to promote “masculine” attributes, and they are in favour of a co-decision of abortion, as well as more favourable conditions in cases of divorce.
Identity, hierarchy, and recruits
Considering the roots of masculinism, we come to understand that even if the movement experienced an incredible growth during the past decade, it is not new and is thus the result of an ongoing identity crisis. Masculinists have decided, in the wake of their proclaimed crisis, to adopt a language based on the hierarchy between men and women so as to better cement the identity of each in today’s social media-dominated context. Red Pill , Blue Pill , Alpha , Sigma, are all terms that those familiar with the manosphere will know all too well. This language allows masculinists to differentiate between those who are part of the awoken and those who are not. The main adherents to this ideology thus end up being young men who seek to create a masculine identity among others with the same aims, in echo chambers dominated by self-reinforcing masculinist norms. In this way, masculinist circles have become less and less accessible to the general public, and as such less capable of being understood, questioned, and challenged.
Masculinity at risk
The rise of masculinism – as we have already discussed — is mainly due to the empowerment of women since the advent of the second wave of feminism. Masculinists’ reasoning is that, because feminism and feminists exist, there exists a need for a counter-movement, a response. Here lies the fragility inherent to this stream of thought: it exists only through the prism of feminism (the definition of masculinism in itself often refers to its anti-feminist oriented actions). However, paradoxically, because masculinism is neither independent nor the fruit of something fundamentally new or different (men were not deprived of their rights in favour of women, while feminists asked for rights to rule over their own bodies), it becomes increasingly difficult for masculinists to feel like they are a part of something new, revolutionary, important – elements which were crucial to the staying power of movements with a major importance in history.
Is femininity to feminism what masculinity is to masculinism?
The androcentric character of masculinism places the protection of masculinity, attributes, and behaviours biologically or socially constructed to characterise men, at the centre of their concerns. The strand of masculism that grew prominent in the 1970s and 80s posited that feminism (and, in general, all movements in favour of the emancipation of women) aimed to put masculinity at risk . It thus followed that, in order to protect men and their identity, the essential characteristics of masculinity needed to be protected and reinforced. This is why the primacy of masculinity in masculinism is not comparable to the placement of femininity in feminism. While feminism adopts a more individually-based construction of identity following the aims of the movement, masculinism’s aim is the construction of a new identity: the “better self” which is what a man supposedly becomes when he incorporates more masculine traits and behaviours, and adheres to the masculinist movement.
Masculinism, although widely contested since its initial waves, continues to spread and mutate with the help of multiple social media platforms where its spokespeople share “motivational for men” content aimed at empowering men to succeed in what they claim is a ”gynocentric world”. The elements developed in this article are not intended to depict feminism as the “right choice” (feminism has failed on many occasions to represent all its members, particularly in cases of intersectionality), but rather to explore and explain the most topical discourse around masculinism. These relatively varied reasons are increasingly being put forward and pointed to in order to raise awareness of the danger of certain movements and the behaviours associated with them.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 