Gender and Society as Zero-Sum

I was reading an argument on some masculist forums, trying to figure out what my problem is with the latest spate of “progressive” portrayals of male friendship. Some feminists are frankly hostile on the topic of homosociality; others are anxious about its exclusionary implications. For my part, I have long detected what seemed like a reactionary note in portrayals on TV.

Scrubs, for example, is a sympathetic look at an earnest, sensitive guy doing sensitive, human stuff: maintaining male friendships, cultivating sexual relationships, pining for the approval of a distant father figure. But Scrubs’ satire is nonetheless heavily derivative of “hegemonic masculinity.” We’re supposed to identify with Braff’s character for his “good heart,” but the show simultaneously solicits our agreement with Dr. Cox that he’s an obnoxious wuss. The female characters, in whom Scrubs’ authors invest so much humanizing care, nonetheless come across as pedestalized morality pets – the better to teach our hero a valuable lesson, perhaps.

What idea of masculinity resolves from this tension? Why, that liberal morality (for which the Braff’s character implicitly stands) and mature masculinity are irreconcilably opposed.

When the two are posed as innate enemies, the viewer can be expected to prefer the latter, which is why the trope is so codified. Nietzsche’s herrenmoral and sklavmoral – hero-worship of the winners posed against a loser suffering beautifully — are tempting because they’re so close to a truth about the morality of aristocracy, but they’re fundamentally encoded in the same morality, spun from the “tragic” cloth of nihilistic hierarchism. Where such “stoicism” leads is to the idealization of man as a shark.

This is a profitable ideal for some societies as a whole, but it’s a mischaracterization of human nature. For average men, chasing success in a stoical and unreflective way is a long-term psychic hazard. Those who try will inevitably make mistakes that must be justified, and end their lives as parodies of those justifications. This is a path fraught with suffering and indeed, for most men, the very homosocial relationships that Dworkin castigates are the bulwark against this outcome. People like Samantha Bee, who speak in terms of “sacking up” and beam contempt at innocuous instances of homosociality, are asking for the Spartan whether they know it or not.

But can Dworkin’s critique be right too? Does “patriarchal tolerance” come at an inherent cost to women? Athens, after all, relied on denying women the fruits of their economic participation. Is it conceivable that gender and society are a zero-sum game in which the power dynamics of sex forbid equal dignity to both?