Hello comrades, it’s time for a new discussion thread for The Will to Change, covering Chapters 8 (Popular Culture: Media Masculinity) and 9 (Healing Male Spirit). Thanks to everyone who participated the last few weeks, I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts again. And if you’re just joining the book club this week, welcome!
Putting the thread up early since I won’t be able to do so tomorrow. This’ll stay up a little longer than usual as well so everyone has the opportunity to share their thoughts during/after the busy holidays.
Chapter 8 briefly surveys popular media depictions of masculinity and how media either reinforces patriarchal roles in its male heroes, or forces them to reject those roles in favor of a healthier sense of self. Chapter 9 discusses healthy vs unhealthy conceptions of intimacy and how men are incapable of true intimacy until they allow themselves to be vulnerable and reject the dominator model of relationships.
If you haven’t read the book yet but would like to, its available free on the Internet Archive in text form, as well as an audiobook on Youtube with content warnings at the start of each chapter, courtesy of the Anarchist Audio Library, and as an audiobook on our very own TankieTube! (note: the YT version is missing the Preface but the Tankietube version has it)
As always let me know if you’d like to be added to the ping list!
Our FINAL discussion thread will be on Chapters 10 (Reclaiming Male Integrity), 11 (Loving Men), and the book as a whole, beginning around New Years Day
Lot of great stuff in Chapter 8. Not totally sold on all of her cultural analysis (Is The Matrix the movie we’d pick as an example of valorizing white male patriarchal violence?), but the stuff about how the most retrograde misogyny and violence is projected on to racialized others is spot on. I’m thinking in particular of the way that Israel’s genocidal violence has been justified with reference to the evil Islamist hatred of women and queers. The part about the Hillside Strangler is also very interesting. I’m currently working on a research project about sexual assault with my students (a topic they chose by vote), and one of the questions that came up is what the link between mental illness and sexual assault is. There’s a pretty common attitude that sexual assault is such abberrant behavior that someone who commits it is almost definitionally mentally ill, which as hooks points out erases the misogynistic/patriarchal character of the crime.
Yeah, that made me raise an eyebrow as well. Even leaving out the entire trans subtext, it’s still a bunch of multi-racial, strongly queer and kink coded outcasts of various genders who exclusively fight cops and feds that are all a carbon copy of the same white dude and are agents of an exploitative system the outcasts want to overthrow. Is it violent? Yeah, doing backflips while dual-wielding SMGs is definitely one form of violence, but it’s revolutionary violence against a system of patriarchal white supremacist imperialist capitalist dominance and it’s one of the incredibly rare cases in Hollywood where revolutionaries are unambiguously the good guys instead of being shown as irresponsible mass murderers.
OTOH the point of these movies somehow went over many peoples’ heads, just look at what they made of the red pill. We have an entire generation of misogynists who use 0,625mg Premarin pills as their metaphor for tying patriarchal masculinity to their ankle like a millstone. People get The Matrix wrong a lot.
I wonder if its inclusion was because it was the action movie of its day that advertising and other similar movies had to address, which is lazy but obviously not an uncommon viewpoint at the time (a decade earlier the example would have been Die Hard, a much more straight example).
I mean, i’m old enough to remember when the first movie came out, the impact it had on pop culture back then was huge. And that wasn’t about any of its many subtexts, it was about the aesthetics and the fight choreography. Matrix tought Hollywood a new way of larger than life violence. It redefined how action heroes and action heroines look, dress and move, and how they punch people. From a 2004 perspective, i absolutely get why she includes it in that list. It’s just funny how that has aged.
Bring back DVD “making of” extras
I think the time is a large part of why she may have included it. Can’t forget that it was one of the things being blamed by the MSM for the Colombine shooting. And at a surface level I can kinda see why she might have viewed it in the same way. Like for all the diversity and queerness that it had you still had a seemingly cis hetero white man as the savior figure (he’s The One). I don’t know if she ever watched before or after this book, but I would think she’d change her mind about it given what we know now.