Bang Bang, You're Alive

Thoughts on Violence, Boyhood and Eros.

My apologies that it’s been a while since I have written here. It’s been an incredibly hectic few months. In the midst of it all, my book, Boymom turned 1. This year has been a crazy experience as the book reached readers of all types. I’ve had an amazing response not just from fellow “boymoms” but people of all genders and political affilliations with and without kids. I have travelled all over the country doing speaking events and done more than150 interviews- for magazines and newspapers and radio and TV and podcasts all across the world. The book hit a political moment in which anxiety about masculinity has been the psychic undertow. I have been lucky enough to and had the chance to talk about boys and men and masculinity with people from across the political and cultural spectrum (I have also heard from a fair few murderous MAGA trolls telling me that they would rape me, if only I wasn’t so unattractive)

With a few obvious exceptions, I’ve mostly been profoundly grateful for the conversations that this book has opened up, and have been so heartened to see how open most people have been to getting away from reductive binaries and culture-war fallacies.

Anyway, it’s been a pretty intense year and I haven’t been writing here as regularly, but now I am back in force and sharing a new essay. This piece was originally commissioned by a philosophy magazine- a publication I enjoy, for an editor that I really like and respect, for a symposium they were running on the topic of What is Violence For? The question is a fascinating one, as a prompt to think about the ways in which violence hooks us in practical and psychological ways. For me, as the mother of three boys, who has written and thought pretty intensely about the crossovers between masculinity, boyhood and the cultural trappings of violence, it resonated particularly hard. Unfortunately some things broke down in both communication and approach along the way with a different editor at the publication and I ended up pulling out of the gig. (This is one of the joyous perks of being older and more jaded… You can do that kind of thing!) Anyway, I am now publishing the essay here. Because its original destination was a relatively obscure philosophy magazine, it’s a little different in pacing than my usual writing on Substack- quite a bit longer and more circuitous- more thinking around the question than trying to come up with a definitive answer. I hope you enjoy it. (Scroll down)

In other news am pausing our long running masculinity discussion group for a while, but I will be running July’s nonfiction ideas pitching clinic for paid subscribers next week on Thursday July 10th at 10am PT/ 1pm ET/ 6pm UK. Bring your idea for any nonfiction project- book proposal, memoir, article, personal essay, op-ed etc- however unformed, and I can help you figure out how to frame and pitch it in a supportive environment. I will send out the link to join to paid subscribers that morning.

Also- I will soon be running a longer (likely 6 week) writing class on “memoir plus” - memoir with a reported or other extra element that gives it a wider lens. we will be looking at how to think about our own stories, how to make them “bigger” and speak to a wider audience and how to braid these elements together as well as practical advice on pitching, writing proposals, and securing an agent and publisher. According to various agents and editors that I have spoken to about this, memoir plus is really the only kind of memoir that it is realistically possible to sell at the moment if you are not a celebrity or were not raised in a religious death cult. There will be a limited number of spots on this course. If you would like to get on the list, reply to this email (paid subscribers to I Blame Society will have priority.). Also let me know if you might be interested in a day long in-person version of this class in the Bay Area.

Anyway, here’s violence….

BANG BANG, YOU’RE ALIVE

“Karate is about non-violence,” says Master Tony, the hyper-muscled owner of the martial arts dojo where I am about to enroll my 7 year old son, who is hitting again. I recognize Master Tony from the website, his vibe skewing uncomfortably closer to bro-podcaster than Gandhi. “The goal is to avoid violence wherever possible,” the website says. “Master Tony leads his students in practicing kicks and punches,” reads the accompanying photo caption.

As the mildly defeated mother of three young warring boys, I would prefer that my non-violence came in a package that was a little less… violent, but it’s hard to tell if there is genuine wisdom in the mix. Whether this a profound acceptance of the inherent contradictions of human nature, or self-serving doublethink, a way for the Master Tonys of this world to luxuriate in the trappings of violent masculinity, while passing the whole fightfest off as some kind of UN peacekeeping mission.

It all has the vaguely prurient ring of a preacher dishing out his abstinence education while dwelling lasciviously on the exact contours of every forbidden sex act, with regular belt testing in fellatio, sodomy and sex toy mastery. Do my sons really need detailed weekly instruction in the most effective ways to kick and punch in order to refrain from doing it? Couldn’t they just learn the violin?

I have now been raising boys , and writing about raising boys in a time period that has included two Pussy Grabber administrations, the #Metoo movement, several hundred school shootings, the rise of the Angry Young Man as a serious political force, a violent mob storming the US Capitol and Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to two cage fights. In this political moment, male violence- even the junior kind- comes heavily freighted.

It was my therapist who suggested martial arts for the boys, after I had spent hundreds of therapy dollars aboard a careening, runaway train of thought that started in brothers hitting and ended in an incel mass shooting. My therapist is a shining example of “healthy masculinity” who surfs and runs marathons and has a tattoo of a wave on his bicep. His men’s group holds warrior training weekends, where the warrior-ing is offset with feelings talk (or perhaps it’s the other way around.) “Martial arts are great for boys,” he told me. ‘It's a human instinct to be violent. You just need to channel it.”

Nora’s mom has also signed her up for Karate. “Martial arts are great for girls,” she tells me. But Nora is not there to rein in her “human instinct to be violent” but to develop it in the first place. Nora’s mom isn’t concerned that her daughter might be a perpetrator of violence but a victim of it. When she talks about her child kicking and punching, it is in the language of empowerment, not of desperation.

Raising young, dysregulated boys, it’s easy to slide into a kind of Hobbesian view of human nature. That left to our own devices- without jiu jitsu or absolute monarchy- we would all just beat each other to death.

But clearly this so-called “human instinct” to be violent is not evenly distributed. Look closely and you might see a notable difference between those who are fighting to control this apparently universal human drive and those who are struggling to acquire it in the first place. Call it fetal testosterone, socially constructed gender norms, or the toy aisle at Walmart, but it’s hard to argue with the bloodshed math. Psychosis and self-defense aside, truly violent women are extremely rare. Violence and masculinity are inextricable. As is often the case, that which has historically been labeled as “human nature”often has as much to do with male culture.

****

“When you walked in here today, you look thicker. You look like a different guy You — you look like a jiu jitsu guy,” Joe Rogan tells Mark Zuckerberg, during Zuck’s lengthy interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, the official state broadcaster of the bro-ligarchy. “I saw your neck. I’m like, his neck is bigger. Your neck is bigger.”

“Good,” replies Zuck, with the gleeful smile of a nerd who just received a nod from a jock in the hallway.

“The strong neck is great for jiu jitsu,” Rogan continues, “Because it’s a weapon. Like in certain positions, like head and arm choke. You need a neck. It’s a weapon….”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Zuck.

“There's so much going on in training that applies to virtually any stressful thing that you'll ever experience in your life” Rogan continues. “And along with it, you get this skill where you can kill people. You shouldn't kill people. Let me be clear. I’m not saying it’s a good thing to kill people. I’m definitely not. But I’m saying it’s a good thing to — if someone’s trying to kill you and they absolutely can’t, because you could kill them easy. That’s way better. ”

Threatened masculinity is the psychic motor driving our current political moment and the idea that men must be in a state of constant peak readiness for violent combat is becoming increasingly mainstream. Rogan devotes hours of his podcasting airtime to the topic of mixed martial arts. In an advice video entitled How to be Masculine, NYU professor and thinking man’s bro-caster Scott Galloway advised the next generation of young men that they need to get strong enough to be able to “walk into any room and believe that you could kill and eat anyone there.” Presumably, mere killing is now for pussies. Elon Musk, who has now twice challenged Mark Zuckerberg to public cage fights, shared a post on X from an account called Autism Capital, with the somewhat chilling comment, “interesting observation.”

“People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask “is this true” but “will others be ok with me thinking this is true?” …. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

The idea that men must be physically primed to defend themselves against violent attackers tends to get pitched as a sensible precaution, like installing a smoke alarm, or keeping a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. In our sedentary, safety conscious, tech-saturated modern world this line of argument is becoming increasingly implausible, particularly for someone like Zuck who has his own Facebook-sponsored security detail at the cost of $23 million a year, or Galloway who appears to spend the bulk of his time in climate controlled podcasting studios. At one level the idea of a constantly lurking physical threat is just increasingly absurd justification for tough-guy cosplay. But it also cuts far deeper.

Violence- or the capacity for it- is the most obvious placeholder for masculinity, that infinitely fragile status. As a child, Musk was, according to his mother, the “youngest and smallest guy in the school” and relentlessly bullied. Boys followed him home and threw soda cans at his head. For this strain of masculinity trauma, violent capability is also the clearest proof of concept. Money and power are all very well, but they will never quite fill the hole. There is no number of billions that Elon or Zuck can amass that can outspend their own insecurities.

Because of course the actual threat to these men, the real reason they need to pump iron and turn their necks into weapons and convince themselves that they can kill and eat anyone in the room, is not some outside attacker. It’s the specter of their own internal feeble-necked nerds, the persistent inner cuck, or soyboy, or pussy cowering just below the surface of their psyches, ready to eat them alive.

Boyhood is a hostile environment, even for those who manage to avoid getting soda cans thrown at their heads. Our story of masculinity tells us not just that boys should be tough and aggressive, stoic and virile, with little room for feelings or weakness. Operating under these impossible expectations, boys are almost doomed to failure, always trying to outrun the stony dread of emasculation. We are culturally complicit in creating these psychological wounds. We hammer home to boys- both the overgrown ones and the ones still growing- in a million subtle and not so subtle ways, both that violence is the main measure of masculinity, and that masculinity is the main marker of value.

For privileged white boys like my sons, tucked up safely under their Star Wars duvets, most of this is communicated less through actual threat than via a gaudy cultural pageantry, violence that has become cartoonized and removed. The toy aisles dominated by miniaturized slaughter. The rows upon rows of tangerine and neon green assault rifles, like the weapons arsenal of a Disney separatist group. The swords and lightsabers and Lego weapons and Marvel movies and Fortnite missions and Pokemon battles. Kill the bad guy, defeat the enemy, slay the dragon, hero’s journey, stealth attack, sword fight, lightsaber battle, superhero showdown, save the city, toy soldiers, bang bang you’re dead, virtual reality, Percy Jackson, defeat the enemy, WACK! THWOK! KAPOW! The narrative frame of boyhood is violence, its moral imperative is to be the good guy with the gun to fight the bad guy with the gun.

What is violence for? For me- socialized as a girl and living as a woman- honestly not much. It’s peripheral at best, only apparent in the cursory measures I take to avoid becoming its victim. But in the cultural logic of boyhood, it’s everything. Status and identity. Joy and honor, moral reckoning, social sorting, invigoration, passion. It’s sport and art, a settler of scores, social capital, emotional processing, the good part of the movie. And all of them derivatives of the One Main Thing, the sine qua non of male worth. Masculinity.

It’s not a hard sell for most boys- mine included. Whether this is biological priming or social conditioning, they are for the most part, not resisting this violent onslaught, but relishing every last bullet. Freud may have located violence squarely as part of the human death drive- Thanatos- but for the joyful pack of 9 year old boys running around our backyard with their Nerf guns, it looks suspiciously like Eros.

In the midst of the joy, it’s hard to spot the con trick. The whole thing is as unwinnable as it is compelling. Just as my friends and I loved the beauty magazines that gave us eating disorders, boys can’t get enough of the trappings of their own Sisyphean gender quest. And just as there can never be a state of thinness or prettiness that constitutes enough for a fully successful performance of femininity, boyhood churns out its own unmeetable expectations, its own built in inadequacy.

This perhaps one of the built-in fault-lines of the entire project, the reason why masculinity can becomes such a self-defeating loop. The precariousness, the aching fragility- the constant need to prove and reprove is in itself so thin-skinned, so desperate, it is emasculating in and of itself.

Unfortunately, this point is so painfully rarified, so close to disappearing into vapors, that it is perhaps uniquely ill-suited to communicating to an 11 year old boy, who is dosed up on Eros, joyfully re-enacting a WWE smackdown on his brother.

*****

In The Feminist, the first story in Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 collection of linked short stories, collectively dubbed “the first incel novel,” Tulathimutte introduces us to Craig, a “narrow- shouldered” male feminist, who has read “Sanger and Friedan and MacKinnon and Dworkin and Firestone and Faludi and Winterson and Butler and Solanas and Schulman and hooks and Greer.” His dating profile begins: “He/him/his (or whatever pronouns you are most comfortable with.) Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.”

“What reasonable woman wouldn’t be attracted to a vocal ally?” Craig asks. All of them, it turns out. “He’s too honest and available, the guys at work tell him, the ones who get all the girls. Those guys who don’t care about consent. They don’t ask first. “Don’t be a fucking pussy is all!” They tell him. Despite his feminist credentials or more likely, because of them, Craig is relentlessly unfuckable.

Craig is in many ways the strawman of the MAGA right’s imagination. The young man that has been sent the message that he must, in Vice President JD Vance’s words “suppress every masculine urge… suppress what makes you a young man in the first place” and become an “androgynous idiot.”

In the grievance-mongering of the culture wars, the right manages to pull off an impressive sleight of hand, claiming simultaneously both that feminism is a powerful and highly threatening force, that is destroying men’s lives and the social order and also at the same time that it is toothless and inconsequential, not worthy of the serious consideration of men.

As a feminist mother of boys the latter of these positions is the more chilling, speaking to a deeper fear. The Feminist is both brilliant and excruciating to read, because I see myself in Craig, bleating impotently from the sidelines. In Craig’s overtheorized talking points, I see my own irrelevance, my own lameness reflected back at me, while my boys get on with their ancient and noble apprenticeship in manhood. They are mini-men, the ultimate arbiters of relevance and worth. What I have to offer feels joyless and cringeworthy, as though I have turned up to a gun fight with a copy of All About Love. I am today’s Democratic party in the face of an ebullient and ascendant right. Neutered and cringey, shuttling between spouting abstractions about gender identity in Appalachia and making dumb ads about cowboys.

Throughout his bleak narrative journey, Craig endures rejection after rejection, disappearing into skin-clawing loneliness. In the final story of the book, he reappears, redpilled and rage-filled, having finally ditched his feminist principles, now no longer a “vocal ally” but a violent incel. He returns to his favorite restaurant, the site of at least one failed romantic encounter, dons a ski mask, and reclaims his decimated masculinity- we are led to assume- by shooting the place up.

The murderous incel is in many ways, the totemic violent actor of our nihilistic political moment, at the same time both deadly and pathetic. But as a literary character, Craig is confounding, in that he is both painfully accurately observed and also completely false, a political composite that does not exist in reality. Instead, Tulathimutte created Craig as a hybrid of two unrelated and even opposing culture war tropes.

“The idea of the sort of disingenuous, try-hard male feminist was floating around ambiently, as was the bugbear of the incel mass shooter” he told The London Magazine in an interview. “And I figured that coordinating the two archetypes as a sort of Breaking Bad style development for the story would provide a sense of movement.”

Rejection is obviously not a manifesto for the JD Vance school of reactionary gender politics. “To be clear in advance,” Tulathimutte tweeted shortly before publication, “Feminism is good, this character is not good.” Nor is the collection any kind of heavy-handed allegory about the origins of incel violence. Tulathimutte is too smart for that. As Dwight Garner put it in the New York Times, “Tulathimutte’s writing about these matters is sophisticated, circumspect, impossible to pin down. He’s an elusive anatomist of culture-war provocations.”

I have spent many hours interviewing incels and hanging out on their forums. There is no real- world feminist-ally-to-mass-shooter pipeline. The emotional truth of Tulathimutte’s creation is pitch-perfect but his politics are reversed. Actual incel mass shooters are not former feminists but generally the opposite- vocal anti-feminists and violent misogynists.

Violent incels are borne out of a different, and in many ways opposing set of pressures.

Their problems do not stem from an overbearing feminist politics that is leaving them neutered and unmasculine but from the crushing weight of those very masculine expectations in the first place.

Boyhood is a set-up and the incel is its most extreme victim. He has been fed an impossible and cartoonized vision of violent masculinity from toddlerhood. Bang bang you’re dead, is after all still murder. Bombarded with a narrative about the comic book superhero, the savior, the hypermuscled ubermensch with the weaponized neck who can kill and eat anyone in the room, who saves the day not through talking it out, or becoming emotionally healthier or loving connection, but through violent combat. And if you can’t be the good guy with the gun, it’s better to be the bad guy with the gun, than no guy at all.

Ultimately it is not masculinity itself that makes men violent, generally but the shame that they are falling short, that they are not masculine enough. A mass shooting, a one off splashy act of terror and vengeance is an easy shortcut to rebrand feelings of loserdom and rejection into a glorious avenging hero narrative. “You have rejected me as an inferior man,” said Eliot Rodger, patron saint of the incels, in the video he shared online shortly before shooting up a UCSB sorority house. “You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male.”

It's certainly not perfect, but feminism is really the only social movement that is attempting to loosen the stranglehold of this paradigm on boys and men.. As philosopher Amia Srinivasan put it in her 2018 essay The Right to Sex, that touched on the incel phenomenon, "Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy, may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel – as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy – inadequate."

Mass shooters are not suffering from a surfeit of feminist principles, but from their absence. The boy schooled in alternative ways to express his aggression and emotions- to talk about his feelings instead of punch someone, to reach out for help, or read some bell hooks and understand the roots of his own pain- is less likely to turn into a violent incel, and more likely to grow up emotionally healthy.

*****

When I was my sons’ age, back in the eighties, my mom was a dogmatic second wave feminist, a women’s libber and Barbie forbidder, who taught my sister and me to say, with barely a hint of irony that “pink is the color of our oppression.” At the time feminism seemed joyless and irrelevant, populated by scolds in ugly overalls, no match for the heady delights of gendered consumerism.

Women’s libbers were dumb and embarrassing forever. Until suddenly they weren’t. Their lameness and joylessness and bleating from the sidelines managed somehow to crowbar the Overton window out of the men’s locker room and reinstall it in the gender studies department. Now you can buy a Smash the Patriarchy t-shirt at Target and Barbie herself is quoting my mom’s 1970’s consciousness raising group. The work isn’t done but- for women at least- the premise is mostly accepted, the default thinking that fringe radicals push back against. Who knows if my sons will be cagefighting their own sons or taking them to the Hasbro-Nerf- Male Vulnerability Movie. But culture change is real and possible. We keep bleating. We keep fighting.