Showing posts with label liz kinnamon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liz kinnamon. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 May 2016

what are you talking about?

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