Trump and Noxious Notions of Masculinity
W.J. Astore
A friend recently sent me a passage from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) that resonated with me. It comes when the main character journeys deep into the future. He muses about what kind of human beings he will face:
What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness--a foul creature to be incontinently slain.
Writing in the late Victorian era, Wells put a heavy stress on manliness that is decidedly unfashionable today. Yet his description of manliness is interesting: he contrasts it to men who are “inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful.” For Wells, true manliness taps humane qualities; it values sympathy; it resists being consumed by a will to power.
And it struck me that in men like Trump, a portion of the dystopic future Wells envisions in The Time Machine is now. For Trump, being “manly” is about acquiring power, commanding obedience, forcing other men to submit while grabbing pussy whenever you can. It’s a noxious notion of masculinity, an unsympathetic, even an “inhuman” one.
Another interesting passage I came across this week appears in Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980). The main female character in that book, a Canadian economist by the name of Marie, muses about the men she’s encountered in government employ, at the highest and most secretive levels:
Oh, God, she loathed them all! Mindless, stupid men. Playing with the lives of other men, knowing so little, thinking they knew so much.
They had not listened! They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been—had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not. The corruption came from blindness, the lies from obstinacy and embarrassment. Do not embarrass the powerful; the napalm said it all.
And again it got me thinking of Trump and men like him. Trump is all about his “instincts.” He doesn’t bother to read or study, and he sure as hell is not a listener. And he lies and lies just to stay in shape.
But Trump is less cause than symptom. America produced him, and voters voted for him. Roughly one-third of Americans continue to say they support him, irrespective of his serial lying, serial infidelity, and his greedy and grasping policies that favor the richest few over the poorest many.
As Marie said in The Bourne Identity, America has too many “mindless, stupid men.” Men whose ideas about masculinity are defined in opposition to that of H.G. Wells’ concept. Men who are driven by power, who think being manly is about suppressing any sympathy for those less fortunate, men who are proud to be “tough” by being inhumane and nasty. “Empty souls,” as my wife succinctly said this morning.