Stephen Marche Quotes About Masculinity
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Men talk about masculinity through sports and clothes. They don't talk about gender, they talk about LeBron James and whether it's okay to wear lipstick and eyeliner. They're not getting to the question at hand, which is, "What does it mean to be a man when the traditional values of masculinity are eroding incredibly rapidly?'
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Men who define themselves as breadwinners are going to have to leave the traditional iconography of masculinity behind if they want to be breadwinners.
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You have two things happening: You have the cultural and economic reality of men falling apart and traditional masculinity falling apart.
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Men are losing power in their daily lives, but manliness is still iconic of power. This creates incredible turbulence around masculinity and incredible confusion around gender norms that's only going to accelerate.
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What we're seeing now is not just a backlash against feminism. When you look at guys like [Jesse] Helms in the '80s or even Reagan and Bush, there was a real political backlash against feminism. This is different. This is a parodic recreation of the destruction of traditional masculinity. Look at these hollow men. Look at Steve Bannon who wears sweat pants, who doesn't shave. Or Yiannopoulos who is just a clown. This is toxic masculinity. It's new. To see it as a return to the past is a mistake. It's the breakdown of traditional masculinity, rather than its retrenchment.
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Actually the family is still the core social unit. Culturally, traditional masculinity was a removed father. That was a false conception of masculinity and the proper relationship between a man and his children.
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One thing you can say about Trump is that he is not a traditional patriarch. He has a wife who's not even in the White House. And you could say the same of Duterte in the Philippines and of Putin. They're parodies of masculinity. They're hyper-masculine, but they're also totally unsure of their masculinity, and they parade it around.
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