The Inglorious Blandness of the Insecurities of Masculinity

The older I get, the more I appreciate Kurt Vonnegut. The absurdity of this life, maybe particularly American aburdity, has become an inescapable presence, towering over everything. Twain was the first satirist to be celebrated for it, and Vonnegut replaces Twain’s bucolic America with one where TV, film, and used car salesman (figuratively and literally) run the nation. The absurdity he so precisely chronicled was often related to the egos and insecurities of small men chasing big dreams, small men running from big dreams or small men who'd achieved those big dreams and were making an absurd mess of things in their success.

Vonnegut, though his insight and wit could be biting, always seemed to pity us all for being trapped in the cycle of madness that was modern life in his lifetime. What bleeds through his work is a conflict that has only deepened and become more salient with age and (I hope) maturity. There is a disgust with the smallness of spirit of so many men, mixed with a sympathy for all us in being trapped in state where that smallness is encouraged, in some ways nurtured. The very same conditions which make those men so small in spirit, then allows them access to many forms of power, often because of it. Vonnegut and Twain were both aware that smallness of spirit wasn’t exclusive to men, but they were also clear on who is let into power, either through collective incompetence or the force of the blunt, bovine celebration of it. 

What of Vonnegut’s work I’ve read was back in my teens. The sense of Vonnegut’s work has been coming back to me, the thing he captured that made his work genuinely beautiful, why it made such an impression on me and so many others. It’s the feeling of wry bemusement, which is really only a mask for the rebellion against the continuous shocks to the system that is the state of living with awareness of the vile actions of small men, then expanded to by their accompanying excuses. I think it’s Vonnegut coming back because it was around the same time I started to encounter feminism as more than the fight for the vote, equal pay and against sexual violence, and as something which could speak to whole other parts of our culture. Those early nineties years when alternative music was full of women speaking to their experiences and perspectives, as well as fashioning their public personas in opposition to sexism and patriarchy. The two aren’t just intertwined due to their proximity in entering my relationship to the world I lived in, but because Vonnegut’s bemused, tender pity felt like it was possibly the only option I had if I wanted to remain sane and not be dragged into a mire of hopelessness.

With all this, the memory that as a teen, in developing an awareness of theories of feminism, I couldn’t escape feeling the entire concept of gender wasn’t more than a con. I’m reminded again of how much it felt like the entirety of our ideas about both masculinity and femininity seemed to exist to do nothing but inspire and nurture anxiety, insecurity out of consistent fear of social reprisal and isolation. It was part of the introduction to feminist ideas to become aware how much of our storytelling has been centered on men, their happiness and well being. The paucity of women in the canon of great literature suddenly became clear, for instance, but also the narrow presentation of female characters, and lack of women in positions of power behind the scenes in every industry related to media. It’s a justified, and it seems to me, a factually accurate assessment. 

It occurs to me now, part of the reason the ideas resonated with me, was having been ensconced in things like the canon of great literature, great film and music. A good deal of that canon, The Great American Arts, this history of storytelling focused on men, functions as something else too. It is, if looked at correctly, a guide to the insecurities of masculinity in American masculinity. These were the things I identified with in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby wasn’t, to me, an aspirational novel. It was a cautionary tale. It’s beauty was that it’s lead characters are all pathetic, in no small part because of the way their insecurities rule them, ruining their ability to experience intimate relationships, and therefore, fulfillment. Hemingway’s work was drunk on those insecurities. What is Lolita, if not reportage of a particular kind of masculine insecurity no shortage of men think can be solved by the existence of a young woman in their lives? Catch-22, Heller’s great satire of the military and the concept of war itself, is shot through with it. Vonnegut’s work was sardonically smirking at it. Moby-Dick? How much of Shakespeare’s work is sitting at the crossroads of male insecurity and power? For a number of years now, I’ve thought Martin Scorsese’s success is due to more than his unquestionable skill as a director. He is also, arguably, the greatest cinematic chronicler of the corrosive nature of masculine insecurity, the havoc it creates in men’s emotional lives and, as a result, in the lives of everyone around us. Noir as a sub genre is obsessed with masculine insecurities, to the point it’s the genre which solidified the “femme fatale” as an archetype in American fiction. The femme fatale may be the ultimate guilty conscience in literary and pop culture history. The character is the embodiment of masculine fears that a woman could recognize the hypocrisy of patriarchal norms, and exploiting it.

There is a lot of great art in there, and so much of it is inextricable from male insecurities. In many ways, the canon of Great American Arts is the chronicle of masculine insecurity, from the perspective of the time the individual artifacts were created. I don’t say this in opposition to the correct assessment of feminism that it is far too male centric. I do think though there is benefit to all of us (including the cause of feminism), in assessing the canon from a perspective of being a lineage of confession about those insecurities. It occurs to me, there’s a very real possibility that the negative connotation no small portion of masculinity in the US attaches to the stereotype of “sensitive artist” is due to the degree the arts lay those insecurities bare. When taking the lives of many of these artists into consideration, the sensitivity seems extremely limited, but it’s hard to find even one who wasn’t sensitive to these insecurities. 

This is the game with insecurities though, isn't it? They are always the hidden engine, aren’t they? They create elaborate justifications, when really, all they are is small fears using illusions, throwing a veil over the damage they cause to give the impression they are something else, even at times going so far as to convince ourselves the acts we commit in their favor are altruistic. About two years ago, I finished a novella. It wasn’t very good. It was part of my figuring out how I write a novel though. There are some solid bones there, but the execution was terrible, and even more, I was horrified to find how much of myself, and those insecurities, was written into every word. It seems part of the process of creating is, intentionally or unintentionally, wrestling with them. 

I’m thinking about all of this because I read a piece in Vulture about the accusations against Neil Gaiman (I would warn anyone who is sensitive to descriptions of sexual violence to tread carefully).It’s not just that though. I posted a piece recently about the year in horror that was 2024, noting how much of the year was dominated by different representations of or expositions on feminine rage, and the connections to the year in headlines and new stories, most specifically in entertainment and the arts. In some ways, I also can’t help but see it’s connection to a personal obsession I’ve been trying to make into the project of this Patreon, which is starting to look at horror specifically, and the arts more generally, as a window into the collective fears manipulated by power, both conscious and unconscious. 

It’s all brought back that sense of gender being a con. I also can’t escape the sense that these days, the con is king. 

The story of Gaiman’s sexual assault of one young woman, as outlined in Vulture, feels like another variety of excavation of masculine insecurity driving a man do horrific emotional and psychological damage to human beings around him, because they were women. We’re familiar with so much of the story. A man uses what status and wealth he has to victimize a woman, then uses that wealth and status as a fulcrum to create leverage to insure she keeps quiet about it. It’s a story both old as Western literature and as modern as #MeToo. Echoes of Joss Whedon are impossible to ignore. As far as I know (and I could certainly have missed some aspect of the allegations against Whedon), he was never accused of sexual assault and/or rape, but the comparison is almost identical in terms of the cult followings dedicate to their genre work, having experienced a public profile that played to a feminist persona, followed by their downfall over revelations of deeply misogynist behavior, a public reckoning with those works and the degree those persona’s served to enable their abuse. 

Feminism has been successful in revealing, examining and communicating the patterns of insecurity, anxiety, what amounts to a constant assault on a woman’s sense of self and worth, inherent in the labyrinthian, contradicting expectations and requirements of gender norms pertaining to women. The bodies of research and literature make a case, when taken together, that is airtight as far as any standard of evidence is concerned. There’s been a question floating around the ether of our public consciousness and the discourse it generates, asking what an alternative to traditional masculinity would be. There’s an almost frantic air to it. It feels like those most dedicated to it are running around grabbing the names of men who have some degree of public cache, and trying desperately to sell them as the answer. The more I think about all of this, the more I find the failure directly in the design. 

Feminism didn’t uplift a specific design for femininity or womanhood. It did start wrecking the boundaries around what a girl or woman had to be, and it did so in no small part by speaking to women about the insecurities of gender roles and norms they were living with daily, and pointing to how misery making they were. There’s a reason there are so many different veins and perspectives on what feminism is, and it’s because when you get down to it, none of them can agree on the right way to be a woman, and I can’t help but think that’s just how it should be. There’s likely to be recrimination in some circles, saying it’s centering men, but I think there’s a degree of shared goal in beginning to speak to masculinity with a message that these insecurities blossom into neuroses, destroying men’s live and harming the lives of everyone in their orbit. I think, this is a project which can and should exist in partnership with feminism, not competition, considering how deeply intertwined gender norms are. Women have a stake in masculinity being freed from the boundaries which require it to enforce femininity, its desire to control the definition of womanhood, as well as to control woman as individuals on the micro level. Consider how much of feminism also spoke to women who became cognizant of the insecurities they were passing onto their daughters, grand daughters and what expectations of womanhood they passed onto their sons and grand sons. Men have sons, daughters, grand sons and grand daughters too, and part of the requirement of masculinity is to protect the family.

I don’t think this is the only reason Vonnegut has come back to both haunt and comfort me. The insecurities of small, venal, vicious men are have overturned the stability of the country. They look to be ready to undermine the stability of the geopolitical order as well. In neither case is this disruption looking to be for the better. Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, De Santis, Abbott in Texas… the list is astonishingly long. It's practically a mob of rampaging insecurities of masculinity using great wealth and power to tear apart whatever they feel threatens the dominance of traditional masculinity, and by extension, the perception of their public personas. The absurdity that my fellow citizens would continue to find so many small minded, bankrupt in spirit, blatantly rapacious voids of neurotic insecurities acceptable for positions of power, as leadership and figureheads is at times overwhelming. Something I think I’m coming to understand too, is that there is no avenue of action available to the majority of us who are colloquially known as “average people” that can extinguish or expend the well of anger in response to it. Instead, we’re forced this anger as a steam engine did it’s coal fires. Tend it enough that it continues to produce motivation, but keep a watchful eye to insure it doesn’t burn so hot it creates enough pressure to destroy it’s carrier in a fiery explosion. 

It’s impossible to be human without being a little bit broken. Human beings are messy. Even the best of us, through no ill intent, hurt each other in our brokenness. The scars develop edges of their own, and it’s in this messy process of humanity, living amongst and needing each other, we cut each other with those edges. I can’t help but think the gender norms related to masculinity are often a process of sharpening those edges, as opposing to dulling them. Those of us who become aware of the damage those edges can do attempt to find our way to dulling them. It is to challenge the structure of masculinity to recognize we have these sharp edges, grown from the scars of the sharp edges others failed to dull. It isn't masculine to recognize these insecurities not only exist, but play a major role in defining our behavior and our outlook. It is to acknowledge one may not be in possession of variety of composure, force of will, self discipline masculinity requires. It is to recognize no human being exists as pure will, free from all emotional realities that exist outside of a state of bottomless confidence and self assured certainty.

It doesn’t escape me that we are basically inundated with examples small men whose insecurities promise them respite and safety in power and wealth, and in their quest to achieve it have accrued every resource under the sun to shield themselves from the simple, plain fact that they’re blatantly, pathetically insecure. They could instead face the reality that they are just men, and our brokenness is the true measure and stamp of being human. To do so is to face the exhausting, lifelong process of attempting something in the realm of accurate self appraisal, itself a discipline, but one this fearful masculinity devoutly denounces. It's always seem to me masculinity demands we sharpen those edges instead of dulling them, in response to fears we're not supposed to name and in preparation for a protection we're expected to provide, from a world made unsafe by the continued, demanded practice of sharpening of those edges.

For women, patriarchal gender norms require they never recognize being rendered them less than human. It requires of men we never recognize we are plainly, inescapably human. All of this makes for complexes of insecurities and rationalizations which psychology, so long a men's game, hasn't even begun to excavate, and which make us all very susceptible to manipulation by people with the power, wealth and reach.

I come again to the realization that gender is a con. The most vile of men, no matter their status, wealth or power are by all measures nothing grand, but are ingloriously, blandly pathetic. With these again comes the sense of wry bemusement diffused through Vonnegut’s work.