How our views of men’s bodies instantiate the patriarchy./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, bagotaj.
Text-based greetings, Alt-reading lovers!
It’s so good to see you in the library, among the mahogany walls and musty book smells. Let’s discuss today’s textual treatise, shall we?
Most people with brains–a category that excludes us on the right wing of the political spectrum and also readers of this here inane, pointless, but also fun and irresistible website called Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW)–know that all of life in 2018 is a men’s movement, a constant and extreme propping up, promoting, and coddling of men. Much as we non-Jewish whites flipped out when we were asked to pass the cultural pie, please, and elected Donald Trump, Jr. to be president, when women asked, “Can you stop touching us without consent, either explicit or implied, dudes went bonkers and launched The Men’s Movement. Of course, it’s a favorite of us conservatives, naturally, since we’re the Party of the Patriarchy. A seminal–pun intended–text in this fantabulous cultural force is The Masculine Physique by Bill Freespan. It’s the manly version of Betty Friedan’s feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique.
Related: Learn to cope with your Alt-ish fear of African-Americans in positions of power.
Men Are Hot
Western Civilization has, since ancient Grecco-Roman times, unofficially deified the male body as the apotheosis of all that it valorized and lauded: strength, resilience, solidity, toughness, clean lines, and geometrical perfection. Wouldn’t ya’ know, those very traits and attributes are among those that enable the soul-crushing, body-killing, women-and-minorities-excluding endeavor known as capitalism.
That men’s bodies are eye candy for so many of us cannot be denied. They have the ability to turn our knees to jelly, make our hearts flutter, and our jaws drop, let’s be honest. No one said it better than Jack McFarland in an episode of Will and Grace: “Men are hot.” The Masculine Physique addresses this concept, locating the abstract ideas that make possible rape-culture, industrialism, the nine-to-five workday, colonization of the planet, and subjugation of non-Western cultures in corporeal masculinity.
What’s In a Name?
A lot, apparently. Friedan wrote of a gnawing knowledge on the part of women in mid-century America that there was something more to life than prettying up their bodies, hunkering down in their homes, and opening up their wombs in support of men, never finding what they want and hope and dream and need. Freespan finds in various male body parts, detached from the whole and thereby dehumanized, ideals of the Western industrial-capitalist project.
Freespan, on the other hand, a hand much preferable to rightists, like us, writes of a simmering resentment among men in Western culture at their perception at being sidelined in favor of equity and inclusion.
“Ingrates, all of these women and minorities! It’s the skyscrapers, airplanes, syringes, lipstick tubes–um, hello….guns–we fathers and sons invented that gave them the society they’re demanding a role in these days,” Freespan rages so hunkily in his book.
Bi-Pectoral
“Look at our bodies. Look and leer and lust. We’re all the guy from the Dos Equis ad. And you love it, you whiny snowflakes,” Freespan posits.
And: Putting your money where your morality void is for Alt-non-profits.
One such place, if you will are the muscles known as the pectoralis, or more familiarly, “moobs,” short for “man boobs.” In this bifurcated loveliness we find the Western obsession with binaries, so astutely problematized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida: either/or, good/bad, up/down, hot/cold, rich/poor, Trump/good person. Even the male chest itself can be either doughy or rock hard. Without this belief that a thing either is or isn’t, the entire capitalist system, undergirded as it is by the patriarchy. a society in which men retain power and necessarily withhold it from women, might cease to exist. Then what?
Leg-islative Agenda
Freespan also trains his admiring gaze on the taut, tan calves of the cotemporary dudebro. Here, we find the power that allowed humans to walk erect thereby run, hunt, conquer, and kill–first their food, then fellow humans, then any chance for non-males to advance in their big, giant Old Boy Network.
“Were it not for the angular yet smooth cut of a pair of lean yet bulging calf muscles on a hunka-hunka-burnin’-love, all of this–this fantabulous Western culture full of war, famine, and pestilence–would cease to exist. We’re not asking for some respect, we’re grabbing for it. And you know where we’re coming to get it,” Freespan demurs in his book..
You need powerful legs to stand at an assembly line, to dominate a woman in bed, and even to be a construction worker, the ultimate male career choice–and not coincidentally, the one that makes so much of Western capitalism go ’round–along with banking.
Last But Certainly Not Least
While Friedan decried “the sexual solipsism of Sigmund Freud,” especially as his theories about human sexuality focused on the male phallus, Freespan rejoices in the wondrous possibilities that find their inception in the “twig and berries” of those with XY chromosomes.
Author Merlin Stone noted in her book When God Was a Woman that at the point in human civilization when people figured out animal husbandry, societies went from matriarchal and mother-goddess-worshipping to patriarchal and father-deity-worshipping. She theorized that once humans realized that women didn’t magically become pregnant with children, that men contributed to the act of procreation as well as women, all mother-goddess bets were off.
From that point on the penis and all it symbolizes–action, aggression, growth, expansion, penetration–took center stage. Freespan celebrates this, calling for an open exaltation in all things weenis.
“Enough with feminism,” Freespan writes. “It’s time to reestablish the cultural primacy of the dick, the shaft, the ‘thang,’ if you will,” he writes eloquently.
Also: An email to the director of a Ditchfield, Alabama Women’s Health Clinic/
Operators Are Standing By
Clearly, what you need to be doing right now, even as your eyes scan the digital screen you’re viewing this article on, is to be trotting your digits over to Amazon and sinking twenty bucks or so into this lovely, lexical lamentation of all things conservative man-hot. It’s a must-read for all those who wish to stick their legs out and trip-up women as those bitchy battle-axes, dowdy schoolmarms, and fat androgynes ask not to have their pussies grabbed (if you’re a bleached-blonde with big boobies and openly trying to infantilize yourself for the sexual gratification of heterosexual men then you’re cool–although they’ll never respect you). Imagine the nerve! Get your copy of this atrocious piece of idiocy today, SYRW readers.
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