Graphic: John McCann/M&G
The left excoriates figures like Andrew Tate — unjustly, in my opinion — for the coarse type of masculinity they role model. It responds to them with moral outrage and thereby misses the opportunity of seeing them for what they are — unwitting subversive figures.
It goes without saying that Tate isn’t an authentic embodiment of masculine authority. His hypermasculine performances expose the hollowness of the foundation of traditional patriarchal power. Joan Riviere (British psychoanalyst, 1883-1962) argued that femininity is a masquerade. Tate teaches us the same regarding masculinity. It is a pretence. It is the pretence of having the final answer to every question, of having the thing (the phallus) that gives every woman a final, lasting satisfaction, making her whole. What is Tate, except a parodist of masculine identity?
His brand of masculinity operates through deliberate excess. He overidentifies with masculine tropes to the point of making masculinity look grotesque. His lurid displays of wealth, his reduction of women to transactional objects, his ridiculous claims of sexual conquest and dominance – these are obviously not the confident assertions of masculine authority but the desperate theatrics of someone who performs an identity that no longer carries any social weight.
This performative quality makes him simultaneously compelling and ridiculous. Masculinity becomes a pure spectacle. It is utterly divorced from the institutional and social structures that once gave it its authority and substance. Tate shows what masculinity has always been: a constellation of cultural signifiers instead of a coherent social position grounded in the possession of something (the phallus, power, etc.) conferring its possessor authority.
The appropriate response to figures like Tate shouldn’t be moral indignation. It should be laughter. Tate and his ilk show that traditional masculinity is so unstable today that it can only maintain itself through parody.
I suspect the anger of those on the left who respond with outrage does not stem from Tate’s transgression of progressive values but from his unwitting mockery of a patriarchal order they still secretly cling to and wish to restore.
Tate is a symptom of the current crisis of masculinity. This crisis reflects, I believe, a transformation of the structure of social authority. There is a correlation between the crisis of masculinity and the decline — or rather, the collapse — of patriarchy in contemporary democratic societies.
The patriarch was the emblem, role model, and point of identification for boys in their journey to manhood. He was the image of masculinity with which they identified in traditional coming-of-age rituals between the ages of 11 and 13. His position has become unviable in our society today.
A patriarchal society is built around the figure of the master — the patriarch is a master — whose authority is vertical: his word is law; his law is enshrined on tablets, inscribed on parchment, written in books, codified in the collective memory; and everyone in society submits to it. The patriarch lacks nothing, he is complete, while women and other subordinate members of society are desiring, incomplete subjects.
This authority structure has not vanished so much as it has been replaced by a horizontal structure. Authority emanates not from above — from a patriarch or master — but from a throng of equals, peers, or counterparts who are successful at portraying themselves on social media as happy, fulfilled, sexually satisfied, financially independent, socially liked, even loved — in a word, as complete and lacking nothing.
In Lacan’s words, symbolic relations with authority figures have been replaced by imaginary relations with counterparts.
Patriarchal authority operates through external commandments and prohibitions. The horizontal authority of peers on social media operates through internalized norms and rules.
The contemporary subject is not told what to do by someone who occupies the position of master. He is governed by the imperative to enjoy, that is, by the ideology of consumer capitalism with its promise to deliver happiness to everyone, complete satisfaction. It is an ideology that causes the subject to feel the failure to achieve satisfaction as a personal failure (rather than as a structural limitation or impossibility, inasmuch as lack is inherent to the human condition).
Is this liberation from patriarchal power a cause for celebration?
It is true that women are no longer systematically excluded from positions of power, that rigid gender roles have been challenged, and that alternative models of masculinity and femininity have gained social recognition. But this apparent liberation has generated its own psychological and social pathologies, particularly among young men.
The retreat into online communities that promise the restoration of traditional gender roles, the embrace of extreme fitness and lifestyle optimization techniques, the proliferation of self-help and motivational content promising to unlock real masculine power — these are desperate attempts by men to recover a clear sense of masculinity in a culture that sends them contradictory messages.
Young men are simultaneously told that masculine authority is problematic and that they must nonetheless achieve a form of successful masculine identity in order to be valued members of society. For example, the left tells young men to be more like women, while the right portrays coarse and cruel models of masculinity.
We should neither celebrate nor condemn the decline of traditional patriarchal authority, not least because our moment is a transitional one whose outcome is not yet in sight. Instead, we should begin a dialogue and ask why boys and young men are failing and falling behind.
Scott Galloway (whose forthcoming Notes on Being a Man should be on everyone’s reading list) says on his blog ‘No Mercy/No Malice’ that boys start school less prepared than girls, they’re less likely to graduate from high school than girls, one in seven men reports having no friends, while three of every four deaths of despair (suicide and drug overdoses) are men.
We must start by recognising the magnitude and severity of the problem: young men are facing an epidemic of loneliness, chronic unemployment, porn-, alcohol-, and drug-addiction, a lack of good male role models, in the home or at school, teaching them to clean up, take care of their body and mind, take care of others and protect the vulnerable, and so forth.
What is more dangerous to a society than rising ranks of lonely or broken men?
Alienated young men are more prone than women to turn to violence and extreme political ideologies. They are more easily seduced by conspiracy theories and manipulated by populist leaders.
It is time to break the silence about the current predicament faced by boys and young men.
Rafael Winkler is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.