Guardian | Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such
repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also
began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually
harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an
aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar
workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the
end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and
physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and
boxers.
It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and
Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope
that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in
the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports,
which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century,
became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of
mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative
empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the
playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.'
But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more
intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque
economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many
fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into
hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the
calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as
individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be
honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of
physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with
strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of
gender difference reached non-western societies.
European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their
virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and
patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the
west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls
“internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded
guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to
man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
