I’m starting to think about liberal masculinity, and especially about the relationship between liberal masculinity and entitlement. Basically, liberal masculinity appears to understand its entitlement as charity. In other words, it understands itself as “good” for making gestures that appear (from its perspective) to run counter to its own privilege, and so, as a result, it feels entitled to have its goodness and liberality validated, no matter what the consequences of its benevolent actions are. Its “goodness” is understood by itself as a favor– as something it doesn’t have to do– and so it’s self-congratulatory about having done something that its privilege reminds it that it doesn’t have to do.

(These are just obvious thoughts that many people have previously stated about philanthropy more generally, but one has to begin somewhere.)

Because of its acute awareness that its privilege means that it doesn’t have to exhibit this “goodness,” liberal masculinity becomes angry when its gestures are not validated with a response that confirms that the gesture was generous– this anger occurs even (especially?) when the gesture is actually harmful. That is, if the gesture actually harms the person at which it was directed, liberal masculinity understands itself to have been harmed, since the gesture it wasn’t obligated to perform hasn’t been received as helpful. Being harmed by its gestures is– from the liberal masculine perspective– nothing more than a form of criticism. One is harmed not because one is harmed, but in order to disparage its “good” intentions.

The beings at whom these helpful gestures are directed cannot, from this perspective, be understood as fully human. They can only be understood in terms of whether they reflect appropriately the liberal masculine subject’s image of himself. He says, “Confirm for me that I’m not obliged to perform this gesture, and that therefore the gesture is a positive one, since the only useful measure of the gesture is my generosity in performing it.” (“Confirm for me that telling you to ‘cheer up’ is helpful, even if it’s harmful, since my privilege reminds me that any gesture is more than you deserve from me.”) If a being is not helped by the gesture, then that is read as evidence that the harmed being is flawed, not that the gesture is flawed.

Here’s an analogy. The United States donates powdered milk to countries (or regions) which have food-related crises. Some decades ago, there was a flurry of offended righteousness, since it emerged that some groups of people were doing things with the milk other than drinking it: feeding it to their pigs, for example, or whitewashing their homes, or simply throwing it away. Although I have a dim memory of people talking about this, I’ve been unable (today, at least) to track down a record of this public indignation. But I did find an article that confirms the “punchline,” or, the motive for the “ungrateful” behavior:

“Several interesting examples have resulted from attempts to introduce the practice of milk-drinking to lactose-intolerant people. For instance, it is reported that many reservation Navajos throw away powdered milk distributed to them by the government (Nelson 1969). Janice Gully, a Peace Corps volunteer returning from two years with the Kanuri in West Africa, reported (personal communication, 1969) that following the arrival and distribution of a shipment of powdered milk supplied by CARE, a rumor soon spread through the village that the milk contained evil spirits, and the villagers refused to use it. One cannot be sure, of course, why the inhabitants attributed evil spirits to the milk. but it is reasonable to assume that the belief arose following digestive distress due to lactose intolerance. … Another Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia reported that large shipments of powdered milk were used to whitewash the homes of the village … (William Robinson, personal communication, 1969). There are reports of similar uses of milk in Guatemalan villages (Peter Snyder, personal communication, 1970).” [Robert D. McCracken. “Lactase Deficiency: An Example of Dietary Evolution.” Current Anthropology. 12.4/5 (1971): 479-517.]

Powdered milk is useless, of course, to someone who’s lactose intolerant. So, what I’m getting at, here, is the absence, on the part of the philanthropist, of an impulse to say, “Why would someone behave this way? What would be a rational motivation for this behavior that I don’t understand?” (Or, even better, an impulse to say, “What would actually be helpful in this situation?”) Instead the response tends to be something like, “Jeez– what a bunch of ingrates. I’ve learned not to squander my charitable impulses on the likes of you.” This is the impulse that seems also to motivate the individual liberal masculine subject. If one fails to be helped by a gesture that’s intended to be reflected back as evidence of the liberal masculine subject’s helpfulness, then one is crazy, or irrational, or committed to unhappiness, or otherwise infected with some pathology that inhibits one from accepting the helpful gesture as helpful– in other words, one is unable to be helped.

Even if it’s granted that there’s a real reason why another being has failed to be helped by the philanthropic gesture, that reason is connected to some irrationality on the part of the un-helped (or harmed) being. Here’s another article about US-donated milk: “Starving Africans throw away gifts of American powdered milk, complaining that it harbors evil spirits. Colombian Indians refuse to drink reconstituted milk and use it instead to paint their huts. On the Navajo reservation, many Indians discard Government-issue powdered milk rather than suffer diarrhea.” (“Of Man and Milk.” Time. 13 July 1970.) Although the article does go on to discuss lactose intolerance, this introduction implicitly associates not having much lactase enzyme in one’s small intestine with believing in “evil spirits” and living in “huts”– fairly loaded terms, to say the least. In other words, the failure to accept the powdered milk in the way the gesture was intended is still associated with being “primitive,” even when a reasonable explanation is being presented. An example of the domestic-sphere articulation of this impulse might be when the liberal masculine subject “acknowledges” the “value” of the “emotional” character of female behavior– the “legitimacy” of the “emotional” impulse that produces women’s failure to accept “practical” advice. The liberal masculine subject is sympathetic to the fact that women are rationality-intolerant & live in huts & believe in evil spirits.

One often hears men say, “Women don’t like advice; they just want someone to ‘listen’.” One never hears men say, “I wonder if the reason women don’t respond well to my advice is because I give crappy advice?”

What’s important to note is that this response in understood as benevolent. As such, it is understood as not being incompatible with saying that one values a woman’s intelligence (the valorized kind, in addition to the “emotional intelligence” kind– which, by the way, is a phrase that’s used to contain and diminish the threatening epistemological advantage of oppressed people; see Lucáks). Implicitly attributing the failure to appreciate powdered milk to one’s status as a hut-dweller is not incompatible with feeling a desire for the elimination of world hunger. In other words, all these impulses stem– simultaneously, perhaps– from an understanding of one’s own benevolence. The liberal masculine subject’s assertion that women can be as smart as men, and that world hunger should be eliminated, are felt by itself as articulations of its own benevolence. This is because it understands its impulse as a voluntary– charitable– relinquishment of its entitlement. In other words, it does not understand itself as not having that entitlement– it understands itself as having made a voluntary decision to relinquish some aspect of its entitlement, with the entitlement still feeling like an existing thing (which, structurally speaking, it is, of course). It is the act of “relinquishing” what it understands itself not to be obliged to relinquish that makes its gesture merit gratitude– not the consequence of the impulse itself. If that gesture is not reflected back in a way that mirrors its understanding of itself as still having entitlement, then the being that fails to mirror back the gesture appropriately is understood as defective– either malevolently (“she’s irrational”) or benevolently (“the irrationality of primitive people has an appealing merit of its own”). In this way, it is impossible to respond to a philanthropic gesture in a way that can’t be read as evidence of the entitlement of the philanthropist. Control disguised as a favor. Noxious stuff.

None of this is especially rigorous, yet. I’m just getting some starting thoughts down. I guess that’s the purpose of a blog, though– you can sketch out ideas.

The sense that there’s any distinction between the political and the domestic (or, romantic, or, personal, or, private)– the sense that it’s not legitimate to construct analogies between how your identity causes you to respond to world hunger and how your identity causes you to respond to the person across the dinner table– is what enables liberal masculinity to continue to nourish the sense of entitlement intrinsic to liberal identity, even when it self-identifies as left-not-liberal. There’s the same “disconnect” there that liberalism produces.

And its benevolence, of course, is always, on a certain level, a feeling of magnanimity in doling out some small portion of what its privilege robs from others– a feeling that it deserves to be understood as generous for meting out some small crumb that it associates with the larger structure of privilege to which it feels itself to be entitled. I’m running out of steam here, so I’ll only say that I’m thinking about this in terms that are not unlike Slavoj Zizek’s discussion, in the LRB, of Bill Gates’s philanthropy.

Liberal masculinity understands itself as the pinnacle of privilege, so it understands anyone else’s liberation in terms either of sharing its privilege, or– because it understands the world in terms of scarce resources– as benevolently sacrificing its own privilege. What it fails to understand is the nature of the question, “What debt do you owe because of your privilege?” What it fails to understand is that its own liberation is bound up in the answer to that question. It cannot see this because it cannot see in any terms other than those that makes its own privilege the definition of what liberation might mean– it cannot see this because it “creates a world after its own image.” But who wants to live in that world? Not me. That world sucks. If the liberal masculine subject weren’t at an epistemological disadvantage, it wouldn’t want to live there, either, I think.