What Love ultimately brings into focus is not love but a
twisted and entirely commonplace masculine subjectivity: what I am
calling the Male Sentimental. The Male Sentimental is an overarching
genre bracketing a variety of characters that have proliferated over
recent years: the fuckboy and the softboy; the manchild and Kay
Hymowitz’s video-game playing, basement-dwelling, extended adolescent;
2015’s explosive hashtag #masculinitysofragile; “the creative type”;
male feminists (see porn actor James Deen, who, when confronted by his
girlfriend Stoya regarding rape, called her tears “abusive”); Drake; the
manarchist and his variations; the New Man (a la Martin Amis); and what
Laura Kipnis calls “the victim.” It is a genre that describes a general
mode of patriarchy wherein feeling is used to secure domination.
The Male Sentimental operates through a version of sentimentality that
is definitionally manipulative, contrived, and simplistic. He wields
sensitivity to escape responsibility, disorients others by dissolving
their feelings into a smoky haze, and trades in guilt. Rather than
emotional, he exists in a constant state of emotional fugitivity. One
way of thinking about the Male Sentimental is as a kind of masculinity
one dips into or out of—not so much a fixed identity as a method or a
practice.
Taking a step further, the tactics utilized by the Male
Sentimental are nearly identical to those wielded by—in the lexicon of
pop psychology—emotional abusers, manipulators, and blackmailers. The
reason Murphy’s behavior at the party is so instructive is because in
this single scene, he engages in prototypical behaviors of emotional
manipulation from Susan Forward’s 1997 book Emotional Blackmail—from
feigned innocence (shrugging as he walks away, retorting “What are you
talking about” when Electra calls him out); gaslighting (making her
doubt her knowledge by acting confused); the spin (shifting focus from
his betrayal to hers and attacking her character and self-worth); and
what Forward calls “brandishing anger” (when the sheer intensity of
Murphy’s rage overwhelms Electra and the conflict at hand).
Ultimately
I am suggesting that a better way of thinking about patriarchy is as
emotional manipulation. Characterizing it as misogyny, or “hatred of
women,” increasingly misses the mark because it fails at descriptive
precision. Hatred seems vague, outlandish, or unrelatable and this
makes the accusation easy to dismiss. With the rise of feminism’s
influence, patriarchy has sought different techniques, echoing
Foucault’s belief that politics use a “sort of silent war to reinscribe
that relationship of force.” The Male Sentimental can ultimately be seen
as the result of a bargain with feminism: one can be a man with
feelings, pass the feminist test, and still keep power. Patriarchy
operates at the register of emotion where it can’t afford to operate
through violence or coercion. In this light it also becomes quickly
apparent that the appeal of the sensitive male subject is subtended by
his potential for violence. As Eve Sedgwick’s therapist once described
her father, “someone who could punish but doesn’t, or whom you can
relate to so that he won’t.”
Liz Kinnamon -- The Male Sentimental