The masculine virtue of ‘toughness’ is, in truth, silence and complacency. From Spartans to Nazis to the US army, when you’re told “you need to be tough” what you’re told is “accept any order and any punishment without complaint.” What a great mocking irony that so many men associate “toughness” with independence and autonomy when it builds the lock-step following of orders.
sigh. when i talk about how leftish discourse doesn’t understand masculinity, fails to see it in anything but a negative light, and thus foolishly discards it, this is the sort of thing i’m talking about.
what toughness is, essentially, is tolerating your pain and discomfort without complaint. obviously this can go wrong in various ways, as has already been dissected ad nauseam by critics of toxic masculinity. obviously it’s paramount in the military, because it’s kind of essential in the military for individual pain and discomfort to be subsumed into the purposes of the group.
but even if we assume that no military ever did anything worthwhile, you still have athletes pushing through the pain to accomplish remarkable feats, scientists and explorers the dangers and discomforts of the wild, immigrants going to a new land with nothing to their name, and so on. not to mention the toughness that is necessary to resist overwhelming social pressure, if not outright physical attack, that comes with being nonconformist–which, by the way, includes soldiers who followed their conscience to disobey illegal or immoral orders.
Why is toughness a masculine quality?
Was I not tough when I endured (without complaint, although with a lot of anxiety) 72 hours of non-medicated labor with my firstborn child?
Was I not tough when I labored unmedicated for 14 hours to give birth to my second child, making no noise except for the sound of my breathing?
If women are routinely tough during the very experience that, some might argue, defines them as women, then I fail to see how toughness is a masculine quality alone.
That’s the problem with gendered “qualities” in a nutshell. I know far more whiny men than women. In fact, sometimes I think that policing men’s emotions from childhood became a thing because men are more emotional than women, not less. Yet women are the ones labeled “emotional” and “weak.”
All that said, yes–toughness is valuable. Enormously so. And like all personal qualities/attributes/goals, it must be tempered and balanced by other qualities.
honestly, you’ve read enough of what i’ve written on the topic to have gleaned that when i say “masculine” i don’t mean “exclusive to men.” i’ve said so explicitly a few times.
so why do i insist on gendering it? because masculinity and femininity still exist as conceptual clusters that underlie the way we think and talk about things. because there is a very strong current in leftish social justice that denigrates and dismisses masculinity as such, of which op is one small sample.
because when you say men are whinier and more emotional than women, you understand, on a gut level, that the insult is that much sharper because you’re calling men unmasculine.
The categories of “masculine” and “feminine” are inaccurate and unhelpful. They’re actively harmful, in fact, because so-called “masculine qualities” are over-valued and so-called “feminine qualities” are under-valued and yet _all_ of those qualities are valuable in some way, at some moment in time. All human capacity is valuable, if properly balanced and directed. And yet we punish men for being vulnerable and we punish women for being aggressive etc etc.
If “masculinity” is not exclusive to men, I think we need to liberate it from a term that relates exclusively to men.
you are overestimating our power to “liberate” these concepts. this shit runs deep. you can call it something else, you can try to degender your language, but you’re still going to run along the same well-worn grooves, and a lot more coherently than you realize.
and the people who you’d think would be the most “liberated”–the most “gender don’t real” people–are the ones who are reproducing it the hardest, and they’re pulling the center-left along for the ride. but imagining themselves above it, they fail to notice–or, when they do, fail to see that there’s something wrong and consciously embrace a rejection of masculinity.
anyway, i don’t suppose you’ll take my word for it, but i’m suggesting that you look out for it in popular media. for instance, this. it’s a bit of an outlier in doing so consciously, but notice how easily and naturally it dovetails with standard social-justicey talking points, because the latter are already coherently predicated on opposition to masculinity as such, in the sense that i’m talking about.
i’m not saying “let’s go back to the good old days when men were men and women were women.” i’m saying these concepts rule our lives today, now, even those who think themselves beyond them, and we ignore that at our peril.
I don’t think I agree with @anosognosic entirely about masculinity and femininity, but…
You want to know why certain traits are so gendered? Look at the words people have used to describe men who aren’t tough here in this very thread!
“Rather weak” “emotional” “whiny”. These are what immediately come to mind when you try to imagine a man who isn’t “tough”.
Notice how no one has yet said, “I know lots of women who are tough and lots of men who are emotionally open”. The opposite of “tough man” is still “weak man” to a lot of the people who say that they are trying to abolish gender.
What about the women who aren’t tough? Why would we need to talk about them? After all, toughness is a… What’s that word for things that are especially salient for men…
“Why is toughness a gendered trait when women are so much better at it than men and the men who are bad at it are failures?”
You just answered your own question.
I think a lot of it comes down to a critical error I see all over the place, this idea that something is “only a social construct.” Now, I think gender is a social construct, and I’m actually on board for getting rid of a lot of the modern understanding of gender; certainly at minimum taking away much of the de facto coercive power it exerts over people. My objection isn’t to the “social construct” part, it’s to the “only.” It’s to the idea that socialization is this silly vaporous little thing that we can just cast aside at a moment’s notice, that because we can’t touch or taste it, it has no real power or permanence. This is a load of crap. Socialization is incredibly powerful; in a variety of ways it pretty much rules our lives, and to uproot it, whether that means “pray the gay away”* or “decolonize your sexuality” is often incredibly difficult and painful. This is doubly the case when the socialization accords with the majority view within a society, meaning that most of one’s peers are going to be pushing back against one’s attempts to change one’s own mind and those of others.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t instances when it’s worth making that sort of change; as I’ve said, I think contemporary gender norms are in fact an example of such an instance. But realistically such change can often take generations; it’s not like you read one Judith Butler article and lo, you were blind and now you can see. Our internalization of gender norms happens over the course of decades; should we be surprised that changing the way we think about them on a fundamental level isn’t the work of an evening? Moreover, I think the pressure in a lot of left-wing spaces to present the appearance of total freedom from modern ideas of gender, while it comes from a well-intentioned place, is ultimately counterproductive. It doesn’t solve the problem, merely obfuscates it, and incentivizes people to make cases for why their thinking doesn’t really break down along gendered lines, so as to gain popularity and social capital, irrespective of whether it actually does.
*(For the record, the scientific evidence as I understand it indicates that sexuality is part genes/early biological developmental factors and part socialization; the point here is that even the social component isn’t just something that someone can get out of their head easily, no matter how sincerely they believe it’s sinful or otherwise wrong.)
One of the most useful sentences I have ever come up with is “Drought is a social construct, because there are no droughts in the desert.” Drought consists of not only a low quantity of rain, but also an expectation that there should be more rain. California spends half its years in drought, because we haven’t revised our baseline rain expectations for the state. The Sahara does not have droughts; it’s just always dry.
But equally, an unexpected shortage of water kills people, just as well as it would if it wasn’t tied to a social construct. You can’t explain away a drought and be free of dealing with it.
California is not experiencing drought, it’s experiencing desertification (the key difference being that droughts are expected to pass). Which is a word we indeed have, but which most people aren’t however experimentally familiar with and so they’re going to keep mistaking it for the nonsensical concept of “repeating drought”.
The moral for the gender discussion is that “toughness” is also not a monolith, even if some people will be worse than others at noticing the different contextual variants. E.g. one of them is called “resilience” (toughness against a major but natural obstacle), another “perseverance” (toughness against numerous small-to-medium obstacles), a third “resistance” (toughness against opposite human factions); of which the first two are much less masculine-coded than the last.
