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What's back of all of this gender backlash (or welcome to the conformity) [1]
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Date: 2022-07-28
It seems to me that the main source of hierarchy starts in the smallest of spaces: in the nuclear family. It starts here because it is here that young individuals are started off as contrasted against their mother, and, as extension, all people in her category (female). In short, one becomes a boy by being nothing that a girl is.
Freud spoke about the Oedipus complex, how at a certain stage of development we’re supposed to rival our same-sex parent for the attentions of the opposite-sex parent. How exactly small children are to know existentially which parent is in such a category and why is not quite explained, so far as I can tell. In fact, to be honest, female children get the short shrift in Freud’s moral story. All children are seen in his view as competing for the attention of the primal mother; so for the daughter to suddenly go from seeking her mother’s attention to garnering steam in the other direction, for father, seems kind of tied on there. Like Freud didn’t really flesh that one out.
The son goes from wanting his mother’s doting, motherly attention to vying for her peer-driven attention, as his father’s rival—that’s a full arc of character development, tragic as it is. But daughters are not given the same inherent character growth. There’s no agony encoded in the developmental cycle of the lifespan for them, except as the thrown-bone contention of penis envy, a mirror formation of castration anxiety (a concept which has complete resonance for males).
Penis envy: an idea only a man could foist upon all women.
But I think Freud was driven to understand a fundamental difference between boys and girls because there seemed to be such a gulf between sons and daughters. (Never mind the fact that society differentially conditions each, so that it is impossible to set aside any one characteristic or constellation of traits as being due to sex differences as opposed to merely environmental/caused by childrearing practices.) And part of that gulf is this: boys are encouraged, are conditioned, to regard their positive growth as being deliberately contrasted against the alternative of being the opposite sex.
For Freud, this mean the son as a very young boy stops seeing himself as part of his mother (as it is acknowledged all children first do). He does this to cleanly identify with the father as an equal (rivals are those equally pitted). He is to mark all of the differences between mother and father in order to identify with those more of his equal. If mother and father share qualities, they can be drawn from the father image and left out of the mother image, in terms of this contrast. Thus, when the boy is later tasked with distancing himself from his mother, he has remaining this caricature of rejected and half-recognized traits that stands for not-boy: that stands for girl.
Hence it becomes a horror to be told one throws like girl. Or sounds like a girl. Or laughs like a girl. Or any umpteenth thing that could possibly separate one from another in terms of infirmity and the humiliation that naturally comes from being so infirm. That’s the connection made in the minds of young boys everywhere: to be a girl is to be lesser-than. Don’t call me a girl.
Socialized into this pecking order by those before them, and those by men before them, older boys initiate the younger ones into this society (between ages three and seven, though this continues through adolescence), through a practice of hazing, attitude-modeling, and teasing that can travel even into the sadistic. Humiliation is key. It is by this one axis of emotion—that of extraordinary social fear and the threat of isolation—that these habit formations take such profound effect, in terms of depth and longevity.
Such fear of abandonment strikes the heart of a person such that one can be motivated, especially at such a young age, to split off the disaffected parts of oneself in order to distance one’s self-image from those traits. The traits still exist, but now they are not recognized as part of self—they are compartmentalized away. Often, due to repression issues, the traits are projected or displaced onto others.
A split is a serious developmental crisis. We’re not necessarily talking about the classic split personality, but in terms of compartmentalized aspects of one’s self, that honestly ranks pretty high in terms of importance, in terms of needing intervention. When a split first happens is the best time to heal the breach, so the closer one is to the trauma the more possibility of correcting the split before it becomes established. But it calcifies with time and grows more antagonistic as more contrasts are drawn in the hazing/socializing rituals.
These are the rituals that encode for being masculine/being not-girl. This includes taking sharp strikes in various parts of the body, whether braced for them or sucker-punched; being suffocated or wrestled to the ground; dunked under water; tested with the flame of a lighter under the palm to see “how long he can take it”, etc. All of these boys-will-be-boys hazing rituals are thinly disguised sessions in sadism and humiliation in the form of games of pain toleration.
And back of all this, with these lumps of flesh, the boy is left to think, “I can take it because I’m a boy. Because I’m not a girl.” This is operant conditioning.
Once you have such a society of boys, the gating mechanism for enforcement of behavior is the continued contrast between compliance (affirmed as a boy) and difference (gender called into question). This is the kernel of misogyny. This joins the boys into a pact of behavior conformity as a form of gender alliance, and thus necessarily excludes females from the company of their consideration. This exclusivity is the basis, the pollinating germ, of the old boys’ club, and of the idea that all things feminine are inferior or beneath them.
It’s the establishment of a hierarchy in the guise of setting norms in a community of peers. The peers to each other are seen as equals; all outside of the group are seen as lesser-than. All guys on the mountaintop. That can be seen as the model.
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