posts-gia-to-main

Everything they write about capitalism and consumerist culture— the trend towards commodifying everything, consuming more than one needs, valuing material goods over intangible goods such as human relations, seeing everything as disposable—can easily be repurposed as a critique of men and the male psyche.

When your primary self is that of a consumer, you are always dependent on somebody else, outside of you, a producer. (Of course these are women, in various ways, from the material and emotional to the biological.) There is no security of self to be found when you depend on another organism. Women feel this insecurity with regards to their social self and status, their man-made dependency; men feel this insecurity with regards to their biological self and status, much more deeply and humiliatingly, which is exteriorised as hatred. Women’s lack of self-security and solidity is artificial, social, man-made, and we can feel it, hence why women fight in a positive way, trying to create social change. Men’s is biological, deep-rooted, immutable, and they can feel it, hence why they fight in a negative way, by destroying themselves, other men, women, the world.

Men of course wish they were the producers, godlike, generators of life, hence all of their transparently covetous myths and male deities. But paradoxically, their nature as consumers devalues anything that produces and isn’t a fellow parasite—this is shown in the contempt with which they call women fields to be ploughed, or their lack of concern for land and the Earth which are always coded as female (as Sherry Ortner said, “female is to male as nature is to culture”). Almost every story they produce proves that their masculine ideal is not actually the Creator, but the Raider (summum of manliness: viking, pirate, conquistador, military). Yet in a strange reverse euhemerism most of the male gods they create and worship are creators, not raiders. It makes little sense.

The only way I can begin to make sense of it is, they want to be both. I don’t think men actually long to create—they have shown no interest in creating and nurturing life for its own sake; they want sons for narcissistic reasons; trans males want wombs as identity validation; transhumanists want artificial wombs and technological creation powers to make a ‘better’ kind of life, “the post-human”, etc. They either want to use life (creation) for their own derisory purposes, or deform it; not create it. But they want to appropriate the surface symbolism of the creator, presumably for ego-stroking reasons, while of course remaining consumers, in control, able to bleed resources dry with none of the nagging awareness a creator has of how precious they are.

They want the pride and security of self of the creator, and the material benefits of the consumer who mindlessly uses, exploits, enslaves. Of course they will never have both, but I think they succeeded in creating a culture that makes it appear like they do, deluding themselves in the process.