In many societies, men are brought up to compete with each other and I believe ultimately they are competing for women. To have a strongly competitive outlook is to be subject to feelings of aggression and to practice lonely individualism and unkindness.
The fear driving competitive men is the fear of loneliness and rejection. Virility in many cultures is based on a ‘strong-minded’ refusal of emotions of vulnerability and tenderness.
Which leaves only the exultation of the victor over the conquered. Hence all the nonsense (so common in 20th Century novels) of ‘he conquered her’ ‘his many sexual conquests’ etc.
What men should be driven by is collaboration and the pleasure of shared achievement.
Of course, not all men are competitive and aggressive all the time but so much energy is wasted in this empty-hearted game when there is so much to do to patch up this broken world, to make ‘tikkun’ as Jewish tradition calls it.
‘Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward.’ from The Book of Joan Lidia Yuknavitch
There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.
“Men resist green behavior as unmanly” is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon.
Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the “rolling coal” trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money). Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian 31/12/2022
The author here reading about the cruelty of dictators like Putin, Stalin and Hitler (or Mao or Julius Caesar, it’s a long list) feels embarrassed and ashamed to be a man sometimes, he feels like a German in 1948 perhaps realising the destruction his nation had wrought on our beautiful continent of Europe.
