Fascists turn men into weapons
Isolation, fear, and getting free
Every major event now comes with a layer of bullshit. Instead of coming together to address both the needs of people struck by tragedy and the deeper roots of the problem, we’re faced with a manufactured storm of bigotry and conspiracy layered on top of floods, fires, any sort of devastation. For these LA fires there are, as is too often the case now, too many streams of misinformation to identify them all. But one stands out because of its sheer stupidity, and because of what it shows about the people and ideology we’re up against: the targeting of firefighters.
In a way, this latest narrative is the same tired story we’ve heard again and again. A plane crashes or a neighborhood burns and the same people immediately start chanting “DEI, DEI!” But there is something different here. In the middle of a catastrophic fire they decided to level these chants against firefighters, of all people. They saw a queer woman leading the LA fire department and immediately found their target. Stochastic terrorist Chaya Reichik, who runs the account Libs of TikTok, posted, “Don’t you hate it when climate change appoints a DEI hire to run the fire dept.” I, who occasionally think myself incapable of being shocked by the torrent of hate and lies from every fascist mouthpiece, found myself surprised. They’re going after universally recognized heroes in the middle of fighting massive fires?
But then Elon Musk, with his usual tact, began to give the game away. As Rachel Leingang reported for The Guardian: “Elon Musk, the owner of X and a frequent spreader of misinformation, claimed: ‘They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.’” But then, in a response to Libs of TikTok, Musk wrote: “Wild theory: maybe, just maybe, the root cause wasn’t climate change?” At first he sticks with the DEI line, but then he ultimately can’t help himself. He has to reveal that the real priority is discounting the reality of climate change, even as seven months of drought and remarkably strong January winds cause multiple disastrous fires.
Does a man like Elon Musk genuinely hate women, people of color, and queer people? Most definitely. Does he also want to build fascist power in this country, and is he willing to scapegoat anyone and everyone to reach that goal? Certainly. Wealth and power are so important to him that he’s pivoted away from the accepted science on climate change, once central to his electric car business, and is now to the point of attacking women firefighters.
The bigger question than the motives of a greedy fascist loser like Elon Musk is why so many people, mostly men, are willing to join him. As an over-consumer of social media, I’m exposed to this particular genre of man more often than I’d like. We know that Musk shifted the culture of Twitter such that denigration and objectification of women is not only commonplace, but elevated for all to see. And Zuck is in the process of doing the same on his platforms. Every video made by a woman on Instagram is already littered with replies remarking on the OnlyFans she must have, which apparently negates everything she has to say. Young men flood the platform to look at beautiful women while simultaneously talking down to them. These boys and men have been told, both implicitly and increasingly explicitly, that this is what they must do to announce their masculinity — that their worth is premised on their denigration of women.
I doubt this will reach those guys, those young men in particular, but I’d like to be able to reach you. I hope one of you who feels the urge to put women in their place by leaving a comment on her Instagram sees this. I know you probably won’t, and I know that the first couple paragraphs might’ve turned you off if you did click. But I hope at least one of you saw Elon Musk blaming firefighters in the middle of these wildfires and thought, “Wait, what the fuck is he doing?”
I hope you’re reading this because it doesn’t have to be this way. Men don’t have to trade the false feeling of superiority you get from a social media comment, which lasts for about thirty seconds, for the future of the planet. Because that’s the deal being made right now, whether you know it or not. Zuck wants you typing at women who don’t know you exist while he consolidates power. Musk wants you to hate women saving lives in California while he teams up with politicians to take away your rights and your money.
This is how it’s always been. Fascists have always used sexism and misogyny to build their power, while they take yours, all of ours. As Ewa Majewska says, “I think that people don't know that historically fascists have always been anti-feminist. They were building their notion of masculinity based on virility, strength, power, heroism, self-sacrificing heroicism. Therefore femininity has always been not only the weak, but also that which refuses sacrifice because she has, for instance, others to take care of. This has historically always been very present in fascism.”
Nazi Germany provides one of the clearer examples of all this. Ruchira Gupta, writing about how feminism and women fared under Hitler, lays it out:
Gupta goes on to say much more, explaining that women were expected to birth children and then care for those children and her husband, and that was it. Today, that same strand still runs through fascism. In Argentina, the current fascist president Javier Milei ran in part on opposing abortion and shutting down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as Anna-Catherine Brigida reports.
And since taking power, in addition to attacking women, Milei has hurt everyone. He’s privatized government services, selling out the public to enrich a few multinational corporations and the super-rich. In a supposed bid to tackle inflation, which is really about a desire to take a chainsaw to the government and turn everything into for-profit businesses instead of public goods, Milei has slashed government spending, laid off government workers, and frozen all public works projects. Inflation is down since its record high earlier in his term, but poverty is up — the poverty rate now sits at 50%.
Fascists, then and now, claim to offer countries stability and security. But these days the far right is more interested in stripping governments for parts, creating the economic instability it claims to address. The erosion of civil liberties and worker rights are all aimed at making the rich richer, not building any sort of decent foundation for a middle class.
Similarly, fascists promise men a little power over women, but that dangerous promise increasingly appears false, a red flag waved to make the bulls charge. Then, when young men have rushed right in pursuit of superiority, the flag is whisked away, and nothing remains except a system where capitalists rule every aspect of our lives, none of us are free, women, queer folks, and countless others are suffering, and men are left sad, lonely, and ultimately still powerless.
Zoë Hu, writing about Andrew Tate, the larger phenomenon of the misogynistic influencer, and modern sexism, compares the modern manosphere message to older anti-feminist ideologies:
“Patriarchy used to position women as natural caretakers and dependents; women were fitted into a domestic sphere in which they played necessary if inferior roles, bartering obedience for security. Tate’s misogyny is much simpler and much lonelier. The fraught bliss of the shared home is missing from the aspirational fixings of Tate’s influencer image. Women and property are viewed simply as financial assets. There is no marriage or romance, however false and abusive, in Tate’s world—just girlfriends who are allowed to stay with him for ‘extended periods of time.’”
It’s perfectly stated, as is much of her essay. This current version of misogyny offers even less than the versions that came before. It offers a hollow and sad transaction, demanding that men submit both to other men and to the ugly logic of capitalism. And in exchange men can now expect to receive virtually nothing, because the truth is they’re being sold weird financial schemes emblematic of late capitalism rather than any real power, love, or family.
But Hu doesn’t end there, and I’m grateful to her for closing on a note of what can be done about the increasing isolation, alienation, and radicalization into the right of young men. Near the end she says, “If the left can offer men a plausible defense against the destabilizing, isolating forces of capitalism, then men will come closer to accepting positive programs for that system’s overturn. Such a culture must go beyond new podcasts or samplings of online content. Any worthwhile defense will be rooted in personal feeling and social concourse; it will find its affirmation daily—in institutions, in sustained relationships, in what Hall called a ‘hundred shared habits.’”
In short, we need each other. Under fascism, men are promised a degree of power over women, if they’re willing to make themselves subservient to other men. And instead they get almost nothing, maybe a fleeting feeling of power, but one followed by a lasting separation, from women, from men, from communities, and from humanity. What Hu’s solution offers is connection. What a union, what neighbors, what a better world that’s not run on profit and bitterness can offer is real connection, friendships, and relationships. We can and should build the organizations, the institutions, the places for us to gather and come together instead of being isolated and alone.
All of us want these things. We all want real friends, relationships, to care and be cared for. It can be scary to admit that, and even scarier to try for these things and fail, but the idea that the answer must be either dominance over others or subservience to them is both false and unappealing. It’s a dangerously oversimplified way out of a complicated issue. And at the bottom of this answer, down at the root of this approach, is fear.
The right teaches rage, anger, a flimsy version of masculinity. A lot of that serves to cover up fear, to cover up our fear of failure or isolation instead of addressing it in any helpful way. I hope one man or boy reading this comes to see that underneath anger is often fear, and that even though you’ve been told you’re not allowed to be afraid, there’s plenty to fear in this world. It’s fair to be afraid of homelessness or of a meaningless life or of dying alone. It’s even reasonable to be afraid of love. As bell hooks writes, “Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.”
In her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks said more than I can possibly convey here. I will just pass along one more quote, but I recommend the entire book to any man reading this. hooks says: “Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood. It is a wall that separates you from others…”
Men, what I ask you to consider is whether or not you’re being sold a wall. Are you being sold disconnection and agony and told it’s power? Are you being sold pain and told it’s freedom? Are you being told to deny your own humanity, just to make the fear go away for a minute? Are you cutting yourself off from love because you’ve been convinced that domination is what matters? And are you denying the truth, the truth that you want human connection just as much as anyone?
I’m here to tell you that you, me, and all of us deserve better than a life spent running from fear. We all deserve a life of happiness, connection, and love. I doubt this will reach the men who I most hope read it, but I really do hope it finds one of you. And I hope we build this world of a hundred shared habits, of a hundred places to gather and build and connect, of the relationships and closeness and comradery we all seek. That world will benefit each and every one of us, it’ll teach us love by allowing us to live it out, to practice the actions that make up love and constitute community. In that world, we all can thrive. In that world, being cut off from one another loses its appeal. In that world, we are not weapons aimed at each other, but neighbors living in solidarity day by day.
This post wasn’t divisive at all. I read it as hopeful.
ahhhh...having *just* finished bell hooks' A Will to Change, she instantly came to mind when I read the introductory words to this article...super nice to see your nod to her, and to see her words later in the article. It's clear for me to see how her work has helped shape your ideas for this piece and how antipatriarchal-feminist perspectives, like hers, offers us all, both men and women, a path toward wholeness and away from violence. Her work is such an inspiration! I hope your article offers men permission to choose a different path, outside of the toxic masculine archetype that this "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchial" system has sold us all. Solidarity <3