It’s quite easy to bring two of my recent lines of exploration together: crypto-masculinity and populist masculinity. For example, if you look at the Twitter feeds of populist masculinity celebrities Mike Cernovich, Roosh and Richard Spencer you will quickly find references to Bitcoin, and this interest spans out to various other lesser players in the […]
This time last year I started writing about populist masculinity in the Paste articles, Populist Masculinity: What It Is, and How To Beat It, Populist Masculinity and the Suspension of Order, and Are Populist Masculinity Celebrities Fake News? Not a lot has changed in the gender-political landscape of populism over the past year, but it […]
This week someone asked me what I thought about the article, Iceland Closes Gender Gap but Violence Against Women Remains. There are various complex things going on to explain such a paradox, but the first thing that came to mind is the idea that you can have gender representation or transformation, but not necessarily both. […]
I first started my work on masculinity over a decade ago as a doctoral student researching spirituality and masculinity. My 2009 book, Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy argued that pretty much every type of “masculine spirituality” is actually a thinly-veiled patriarchal spirituality. The exception I identified was gay spirituality, […]
My Masculinity Coin project highlights how normative masculinity is so prevalent in the cryptocurrency community. I’ve previously mentioned how celebrities such as Ghostface Killahand Floyd Mayweather have lent a heavy-weight masculine vibe to cryptos. More recently, I have noticed how John McAfee is contributing to this Stage 2 factor, with a string of tweets showing […]
Amber Tamblyn’s NYT article I’m Not Ready for the Redemption of Men is causing a stir at the moment and offers a useful extension to some of my thoughts from the past couple of weeks. For example, I noted recently that when Stage 3 critiques masculinity it is often perceived by Stage 2 as an […]
One of the characteristics of Stage 3 on The Five Stages of Masculinity is that it offers for the first time an analysis of systemic oppression. This is crucial in gender politics because it shows the oppression of women via patriarchy and atypical men via homophobia and hegemonic masculinity. As I have argued elsewhere, one […]
Commentary This month I have a new article on The Good Men Project website, We Need to Talk About Sustainable Masculinity. This article uses George Lakoff’s ideas about framing to critique the current obsession with describing everything as “toxic masculinity.” Lakoff states that “when you negate a frame, you activate the frame,” which suggests that […]
Earlier this year in my article What Does the Future Hold for Masculinity? I stated that “Whether it be virtual reality porn or sexbots, we are probably not that far off being able to achieve good-enough replications of sex for many men to disengage from meaningful relationships with ‘actual’ women. If we perceive there to […]
The “war on men” is a familiar lament from Stage 2: it is an impassioned response to what Stage 2 perceives to be a Stage 3—feminist—“attack” on men and masculinity, indeed an attempt to destroy men and masculinity. Typically, Stage 3 responds with something along the lines of “we are not attacking men, rather a […]