In Defense of Manly Man: Cultural Expressions of Masculinism in the Alt-Right

• In Event: Anti-democratic Metapolitics? Right-wing Appropriations of Cultural Productions

Abstract

« You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more ». This statement from the movie Matrix (1999) was embraced by a specific community, self-identified as the « red pillers », who are part of the manospere, who claim that women have it better than men and collectively discuss « sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men » (The Red pill, official subreddit of TRP. Red). This shows how popular culture is being reappropriated by conservative and far-right activists and theorists nowadays. This proposition aims to explore this idea by focusing on two figures associated with the so-called « alt-right », even though they distanced themselves from the label, the You Tube personality and theorist Paul Joseph Watson and the activist and theorist Jack Donovan. The comparison can be justified to the extent that both assert masculinism through cultural production, although in different ways.
First I propose to account for the ways in which popular culture is used in their writings and on-line videos in order to reaffirm masculinity by advocating readings which tend to shape what a real popular cultural object or character may be according to their own assumptions and the ambiguous nature of their forms of theorization such a promotion may highlight. I will here shed light on a particular dimension of Watson’s paradoxical relationship with culture – he channels a classic conservative cultural distaste while wanting to embrace a certain kind of popular culture and the form of his interventions is absolutely steeped in the culture of the ‘extremely online’ – by investigating the ways he may display masculinism in a synthesis between antifeminism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia and by strategically using class and sometimes even race in a particular kind of populist vein. For instance, I propose to show how his gratifying analysis of the movie Joker (2019) which lies upon a critical review of the critique of the left wing, and woke culture is expressed in terms of masculine revolt, rejection of allegations of racism, class, critique of the LGBT community and in a broader challenging of political correctness. I will examine how this critique allows him to mobilize other films which received critical acclaim or which were on the contrary strongly criticized, in a sharp contrast with popular success, respectively such as Hustlers (2019), which he presents as « some God awful feminist cringefest » or on the opposite Sticks and Stones (2019) by the Black humorist Dave Chappelle, and how he uses it in order to « subtlely » criticize the LGBT minorities which Chappelle was accused of. In the case of Donovan, I will question how the promotion of « guy movies » and figures such as Don Corleone (The Godfather) and Tyler Durden (Fight Club) help him exemplify what masculinity is as related to violence and outlaw and how it displays another kind of paradox compared with the form of manliness he more broadly promotes in his speeches : the legitimization of dubious moral characters while his intellectual manly behavioral statement draws on a nietzschean morality of the strongs.
Second, I wish to scrutinize how the specific use of the internet can be read in terms of performance of gender. In the case of Watson, I will study how his critique of left wing statements operates through the use of an effeminate tone of voice which contrasts with the masculinity he reclaims and that he is then supposed to embody. Although Donovan does not extensively use the internet in comparison with Paul Joseph Watson, he significantly devoted a section of his YouTube channel to poetry. I propose to scrutinize his reading of two poems, « Ozymandias » by Shelley (1818) and the non less famous « if » by Rudyard Kipling. I will account for the ways in which these readings allow two different performances of masculinity. I will show how in the first one Donovan positions with a strong emphasis on virility expressed through a warrior position while in the second one, he connects masculinity with sensitivity, in quite an astonishing though revealing performance considering his usual emphasis on violence. I thus propose to study through this communication differing ways of emphasizing masculinism by using varying cultural productions, how they connect with those men’s broader analytical framework and the limits such an appropriation may show.

Author

• Eve Gianoncelli, University of Oxford