Toxic politics, misogyny as ideology, and tough guys that are really just insecure babymen. There is something very badly amiss with popular conceptions of what it means to be strong, especially for men, and it is having real consequences for all of us.

From Andrew Tate to Donald Trump, I am so over having the terminally insecure babyman being repackaged as some kind of tough guy ‘alpha’.

I usually prefer the word authentic to the word strong, but if we are talking about strength then let me say this. Strong men do not need to control and manipulate women, their family or society.  

The lie being sold by online manfluencers like Andrew Tate is that controlling your female partner is somehow ‘alpha’. That being a coercively controlling creep, paranoid of any man your partner ever talks to is somehow tough. 

These attitudes are not strong, they are not ‘alpha’. All of this controlling behaviour is upside-down thinking that repackages visceral insecurity as though it is strength.  For all of his kick boxing, human trafficking, fast cars and macho crap, Andrew Tate does not look tough to me, he looks like an insecure babyman, influencing an emerging army of similarly insecure babymen. Andrew Tate of course is only one prominent example of a cultural avalanche of inverted thinking appearing in the online manoshpere.

Another visceral whinge of the manosphere is that feminism has ruined men’s lives.

Personally, I have to say that I feel very grateful for the collective impact of feminism in my lifetime. To have been able to grow up with independent women with the ability to make their own choices in life has been wonderful. To have been able to participate in university, in social movements, in relationships and friendships, in politics and business alongside empowered women and men has been fantastic. I would not want to return to a world where young men and women were confined to some kind of panicked marriage lottery in their 20s then locked down into fixed roles for a lifetime. Yet the latter is exactly what much of the desperate incel movement is advocating for.

This disease of inverted insecurity stretches well beyond social media. In national and international politics, we have been subjected to an endless procession of developmentally retarded baby men (Trump, Boris Johnson, Scomo, to name a few) as national leaders, and without exception they are as selfish as they are sexist.

In Trump I do not see any kind of tough guy, I only see a massively privileged yet deeply insecure toddler in an adult’s body. The self-obsession, the pathological lying, the extreme narcissism, the inability to ever accept losing, and of course the deranged predatory sexuality. That 40 anything percent of any nation could possibly consider voting for such a pathology causes me to really worry about the wider culture. It is no mere coincidence that alongside the narcissism of Trump, is a handmaidens tale agenda to reassert control over women’s bodies, choices, fertility and lifestyles. Some kind of paradise for aggrieved incels.

Combine the ideology of manfluencers like Tate, the scourge of domestic violence and coercive control, the appalling phenomenon of Trumpian sexual politics and the result is clearly misogyny as ideology.

When I first read about the idea that gendered violence could be considered a form of terrorism, I was sceptical. I had always thought of misogyny as primarily a personal pathology, and I still think it starts there, in deep insecurity. But we are seeing misogyny as extremist ideology, and the deliberate radicalising of insecure young men. Tragic events like the Bondi stabbings, and the attacks on the girls’ dance class in London, incels doing mass shootings of young women or ongoing attacks on sex workers, all combine into a form of ideologically motivated terrorism.

At the heart of the phenomena of the insecure babyman tough guy is a complete inversion of what it means to be strong or secure.

Let’s be honest about insecurity first up, everyone has it, it’s a normal part of being human. If only we could just accept that incarnating into a physical body, beginning life as a helpless infant relying on the support of others is how we all start, and that it gives us all a good probiotic dose of knowing that we are all interdependent. Being aware of our innate vulnerability and interdependence, breeds compassion for both the self and other, and provides the most authentic basis for our ongoing self-development, through childhood, adulthood and into our old age.

The greatest insecurity of all is to hide from our own vulnerability and interdependence.

The insecure baby man, whether he is a national political figure, or the coercive controlling boyfriend of someone you know, a sex trafficking manfluencer, or some angry pale incel being radicalised to hate women is all a manifestation of the same basic problem.

There is nothing strong or alpha about denying our own and everyone’s vulnerability and interdependence. Fearing your own vulnerability so deeply that you feel compelled to act out all manner of violent, controlling hateful behaviours to keep it hidden is the epitome of insecurity.

In reality we are a culture that lives in fear of our shadow. To some extent we all hide our deepest self-doubts behind a carefully curated personality. So, we all share a part of the terror of being revealed. But every step we take to acknowledge and embrace our own inner vulnerability increases our compassion for self and for other simultaneously.

Men especially need to be careful not to drink the poison of invulnerability. In our personal lives it leads to isolation, insecurity and paranoia, but in the collective it produces toxic politics and mass violence.

Misogyny, racism and violence are a collective manifestation of a process inside each and every one of us. No-one has ever been born alone. Most will not die alone. Keeping our mutual interdependence cheerfully in mind throughout our lives breeds collective compassion.

Being an adult is just about knowing that you are in the most able-bodied middle part of your life and that therefore you are able to help others more. That’s how it is different to being an angry insecure baby man that thinks he is being tough by being cruel.

This was first published in the Nimbin Good Times, October 2024

 

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