#masculity

[phanseyelash123-blog]

If yall wanna be free! Be free! Do make up! Drink wine! Bitch with your girlfriends! Cry! Be insecure! You’re amazing! We love you! Go men!

[heatdeathnews]

Vince McMahon is one of the architects — perhaps the architect — of modern professional wrestling. The longtime owner and chief creative authority of World Wrestling Entertainment, he began his career as a commentator for his father's company — then known as World Wide Wrestling Foundation — in the late 60s before purchasing it in the early 1980s. From there, he turned the business into a virtual monopoly, becoming a billionaire.

To the uninitiated, McMahon might seem like a niche figure. But under his tenure, the WWE survived the revelation that matches were scripted — not legitimate sporting competitions, but "sports entertainment" — and became a cultural juggernaut in the 1990s and early 2000s, glorying in racial and sexual stereotypes and aggressive hypermasculinity. Not content to manage his empire from behind the scenes, McMahon placed himself front and center in televised shows, generally playing a villainous caricature of himself — his rubber face contorting into pop-eyed stares, imperious sneers, and savage snarls.

As journalist Abraham Josephine Riesman argues in her upcoming book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, McMahon is a quintessentially American hustler — one whose machinations have contributed to the injection of a particular flavor of carnival unreality into American life, sped along by the election of his longtime friend, Donald Trump. McMahon, Riesman argues, found in the rough and tumble hypocrisy of professional wrestling a kind of pop-culture gnosis that has expanded to take over the discourse. In doing so, he opened the portal to our modern post-truth age — the doorway that has sucked in people of all political stripes and savviness.

Riesman is a journalist and the author of True Believer, a biography of Stan Lee, and several years' worth of articles on comics and pop culture for New York Magazine. This week on Heat Death, we caught up with Riesman for a wide-ranging conversation about the corrosive effects of knowing unreality, camp masculinity, wrestling slang, the fascist embrace of "kayfabe," and more.

You can read the whole interview right here:

The Ringmasters: An Interview with Abraham Josephine Riesman

On wrestling, the post-truth carnival, and the latent fascism of Vince McMahon

[slightlyuncomfortableravoli]

Does having testicles actually influence if you say romantic comedies over RomCom?

[alexguy90-blog]

“Dude You’re a Fag”: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse

I found the quote from the reading very interesting "I argue that the "fag" position is an "abject" position and, as such, is a "threatening specter" constituting contemporary American adolescent masculinity." This quote I think explains all these words that are created such as fag and gay this is because male think it is a masculine thing to do to call other men gay. But mean while a fag can be anyone even if they are straight. Similar to what we discussed about in class today where the person who calls the name is usaully the one who is a fag. Also what we spoke about in class about when a gay man marries a women and have kids to show to the media and public that they are masculine. But what we don't see in the background is that they are discreetly having an affair with another man. The quote basically means that society is making a man think that they are only masculine if they are heterosexual and if they are homosexual then they are less masculine. This causes those who are homosexual obligated to be with a women even though they are homosexual just to appear to society as a strong man.

[alexenglish]

This gender-bending approach to fashion has begun to achieve critical mass in pop culture and on the catwalk, with Alessandro Michele dressing his Gucci girls in dandyish suits and his Gucci boys in floral and brocade, actress Evan Rachel Wood wearing Altuzarra tuxedos on the red carpet, Pharrell Williams gallivanting down the Chanel runway in a tweed blazer and long strings of pearls, and rapper Young Thug posing on the cover of his mixtape in a long ruffled dress. More broadly, designers such as Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Calvin Klein are knitting their men’s and women’s collections together, showing them on the same catwalk and twinning certain looks—identical fabrics, identical embellishments, nearly identical silhouettes.

Maya Singer, Vogue, August 2017   

[misswizzle]

It is other men who pressure us to perform "manhood" through feats of bravery, loyalty, and recklessness. The title "man" is something they can bestow—and just as quickly take away. We learn early what we can do to make us "men" in the eyes of our peers, and most of us learn early to avoid performing those things that will earn us ridicule. (It's telling that the most hurtful way to put down a guy is, invariably, to imply that he is somehow feminized.)