Male Functionality in Contemporary Society
The function of the male in society transformed from wielding hammers and hauling steel, to becoming a scapegoat for society’s guilt at acquiescing to Capitalism.
Over the past week I happened to see three films that spurred some thinking on the role of males in contemporary America, the original True Grit, staring the American actor John Wayne, the epitome of mid-20th century traditional masculinity, Blade Runner, staring Harrison Ford, a late-20th century icon of masculinity, and Blade Runner 2049, staring Ryan Gosling, representing early-21st century modes of masculintiy.
All three actors play characters, and adapt personas, that solidify a “masculine” ideal, the mark of what masculinity ought to be: a brooding, blunt, self-sacrificing empty shell to be filled as fodder for ideological forces. A de-human.
This is on full view with Harrions Ford’s portrayal, Ford essentially playing the affectless John Wayne-type, of the character Rick Deckard. The is he or is he not a replicant question of the film (if you haven’t seen the film a replicant is essentially an android) is a too transparent way of signifying the de-humanized mandate of male-ness: to be male means to be non-human.
The two Blade Runner films do offer, internally, somewhat of a critique of traditional masculinity and the limits it presents in male’s development, with the films clearly acknowledging that males are socially coerced into turning themselves into non-humans, and teaching the expectation that society should view them as non-human.
But, the so-called critique, a critique of masculinity that is very popular at the moment, allows only one path of the male possibly conceiving of itself human enough to “pass.” To pass the male must be programed with a “functional masculinity” in the mode of Wayne, which is, paradoxically, an affectless non-human. The 21st-century of brand of masculinity may have a somewhat different surface color of “traditional masculinity,” but under the surface it’s the same mode: masculinity must be functional.
Blade Runner 2049 plays this paradox out very disturbingly, in part with its exploration of the function of memory and by extension revealing the function of History. History is a constructed memory, both a cultural memory and an individual memory, designed to stabilize affectless de-humanized masculinity as, and only as, a functional cog for ideology. Any ideology that can colonize male subjectivity.
The functionality of traditional masculinity was not abandoned in the New Masculinity, the contemporary social coding males are programed with, a gentler, less angry masculinity. No, the functionality component has merely changed its costume.
In the new Masculine Social Code, the male is no longer meant to exclusively be meat for neoliberal capitalistic endeavors, nowadays everyone has been suckered into doing that (we can all be agents of a police state now, no matter if your female, black, etc. etc., we’re all sucked into the machine at this point). Rather, the function of masculinity in today’s world is to act as a sort of scapegoat for the neoliberal de-humanzing of our entire culture (c.f. the death of the humanities).
The cultural trauma, the effect of every member of our culture being sucked into the machine of neoliberal capitalistic ideology, the culture trauma of loosing our humanity results in society constructing and mapping masculinity and the male body, not as a target for foreign bullets (an external threat), though it is still that, rather it maps masculinity as a cultural psychological guilt (an internal threat), resulting in a schizophrenia of sorts as half of our culture (the male half) is transformed into a blight that society then rationalizes to itself must and can purge (socially and ideologically and legislatively) so as to achieve a sort of purity.
The function of the male in society transformed from wielding hammers and hauling steel, to becoming a scapegoat for society’s guilt at acquiescing to Capitalism.
This cultural psychological trick is a convenient short-term solution to deal with neoliberal de-humanizing mechanisms, but it is not a healthy (human-wise) long-term solution for the very reason that this trick is an actual component of neoliberal de-humanizing mechanisms. This trick produces cultural alienation which merely opens up more space for more incursions from neoliberal forces taking away more and more of what we consider human.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The deterministic social coding that males are forced to download may have a nice new interface, but it’s the same old message: You are a male, you are not human.
And until we can ditch these sorts of social mandates laid upon males, males will contiue to suffer, and they’ll suffer silently, because no one wants to hear men complain, and besides isn’t that how they’re supposed to suffer?
Augustus Fossly is an autodidatic deinstitutionalist dwelling in an (a)liminal non-representational space of immanance. His writings have been featured in the journal No Where. He spends his time as a gadfly. Follow him on instagram @augustus.fossly
