Excellent post! So much damage has been done and continues to be done in the name of gender "roles". I encounter this regularly in my work and try with all I have in me to counteract this belief.
Ironically, the great weapon used so often by arch conservatives to defeat the liberal agenda is now the best weapon to use against Trump's fascist war on America. States Rights!
The 2nd Amendment gives to each State the right to keep an armed militia to protect people's security and freedom in its State. Today the "armed militia" is the National Guard. The undisputed threat to freedom in the States is Trump and his private army; ICE and CBP.
We should expect private protestors to stand up to fully armed, undisciplined agents of the Federal government alone. They have the constitutional right to protest against Trump's violations of the laws he pledged to uphold.
Governors must call out their Guard and put a stop to Trump's tyranny in their State and in America.
I agree. I am even saying States could become sole taxing entities and provide all of the services for their states that other countries do that are the same size. I have asked my own Blue State governor to keep us safe from federal agents marauding as military (ICE and CBP) by using our State National guard. If Trump sends more ICE agents back to Chicago I hope that we get some physical protection from them. They are murdering mercenary forces.
I can’t help thinking our homegrown flirtation with fascism is in a sense a payback for our meddling in South American governments and Nixon and Kissinger’s determination to support military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. What scares me are the Americans who think it’s ok to torture and murder other citizens over political differences, they dehumanize us by claiming we are stupid and Marxist (Marxism doesn’t have much traction in American politics as the wingnuts claim,) and are quite ok with seeing their fellow citizens being murdered, including using the same method the dictators used of throwing people alive from planes and helicopters into the ocean.
Big business drove our meddling via the CIA and set up governments that were suitable to corporate America. Nearly all were dictatorships, so it sends a signal that our business and power elites wanted something similar here. They just needed a propaganda artist to sell Americans on fascism. tRump was their man.... and here we are.
I remember asking my father, a decorated WW2 combat veteran who fought in Patton's army and ended up being shot and disabled in the siege action at San Malo, "how do I know when I have become a man?" "When you no longer need to prove that to yourself or anyone else" was his answer. Champions of militarized masculinity today have failed to understand that.
“Militarized masculinity” is an attractor for the cadres of violent thugs who threaten and frighten the general public and legal protestors, so I agree this is an arm of what is going on. But Trump and his circle are essentially different—they are liars and thieves without any principle, ethic or loyalty other than to posturing and self dealing. Expose them for this by means of the Epstein Files—the great financial crimes as well as the sex trafficking—and the massive grifts, bribery, extortion, shakedowns and scams at Americans’ expense, the undermining of the US dollar and our entire international standing. Protest ICE, yes, but go straight and hard to the center of fraud, the theft and the utter debasement of America.
The Epstein files are devastating to the Trump myth. Pedophiles have been developing the Trump political policy. Cowards to the core. There is nothing lower than a child rapist. Even in prisons they are the lowest. But in Trump’s world these scum are running our government.
Megalomaniacal masculinity is absolutely unacceptable. I think more people of all genders are tuning into what makes relationship work. Not obedience but mutuality and genuine concern, care, and nurture.
The MAGA Algorithm Shits Itself in the Minneapolis Cold
Psywar and attempted cult mind control meet reality, and Trump's bubble of delusion is again revealed. It has to pop, and ICE has to stop
Absolutely brilliant and unfortunately, too true. Prof Heather Cox Richardson has made a similar argument about mythologized masculinity via Westerns on TV and in the movies. And Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, about the rise of "disaster capitalism" goes along with the history of militarized government using disasters and cataclysms to compel an extreme form of capitalism through privatization by which the few get very rich and everyone else doesn't. Klein also points to Chile and other Latin countries. Everything is connected to everything, and it would appear that militarized masculinity is the essential element behind it all.
Thanks for sharing this. It's been disturbing to watch the rise of groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and to see the spread of Nazi-lite propaganda, especially following Jan 6th, and the pardon of those participating. I suspect that many have now been recruited for ICE, along with a generation of boys raised on first person shooter video games and toxic masculinity podcasts. Is it naive of me to still believe that the regular army will follow their training and their oaths to the Constitution, and refuse unlawful orders when they come? Mark Kelly is a much better role model than Pete Hegseth.
I believe that the more Epstein files are released and disseminated the more the real military will follow their oaths. Like the Ford factory worker - some things just don’t fly. Pedophiles are one of those. A lot of rich men will be exposed, as should happen. Perhaps the adoration of the billionaires will begin to subside as more and more of these men are associated with Epstein. Ordinary people will be repulsed.
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Whew, Augusto Pinochet is a living memory to me, when under Dick Nixon we toppled the Democratically-Elected Salvador Allende, to replace him with Pinochet, and the rule of terror with torture, murders, kidnapping, all with the enthusiastic support of Senator Jesse Helms.
A postwar German writer shares your insight and that of Professor Lisa DiGiovanni about toxic masculinity and Fascist rule.
Namely, Johanna Moosdorf (Leipzig, 1911-2001), whose Novel, Freundinnen ("Girlfriends") printed by the distinguished S. Fischer Verlag (one of the very best of the world's sources of literature along with the great Suhrkamp Verlag) --
In "Freundinnen" (Girlfriends), two women in love with each other had another girlfriend, who was going to publish histories of the 17th c. witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Blood Courts were modeled by Moosdorf after the perverted courts in the Third Reich.
A woman was simply accused; exquisitely tortured until she either confessed or persevered.
The longer the woman held out, the more accelerated and painful the torture.
If she did not confess, she was executed as obstinate.
If she did confess, she was executed to extract repentance for the good of her soul.
Three generations of women in one family were wiped out, as a symbol for the horror of the Shoah.
One of the woman friends, hearing the story, reflected in a dream-sequence that was quite real, how she would rescue her girlfriend from the pyre or would somehow substitute her own self as offering.
"Freundinnen" pictured a future Society that revived Mother Goddess and excluded from rule toxic testosterone values.
The heroine had a man she had also loved, and he had many feminine features.
The man was modeled after Paul Bernstein, who was the husband Johanna Moosdorf had loved with her whole heart, and who was murdered by the Third Reich, despite many heroic and dramatic efforts on her part that temporarily saved him. The State finally caught up with Paul Bernstein, despite Johanna Moosdorf*s heroism, in September 1944.
Johanna Moosdorf NEVER, NOT EVER recovered from the loss of her well-loved husband or of the loss of family of the husband's blood -- all his siblings, parents, blood-cousins were murdered by the Third Reich.
"Freundinnen" is one of the most poignant witnesses against the horrors of the Third Reich.
And Moosdorf had accurately perceived the toxic, false and martial "masculine" values of the Third Reich.
DISCLAIMER: Most men are good and loving and the values of a healthy boy or man is not what we are talking about. Hopefully that is self-evident.
Toxic masculinity in the Church flourished in post WW1 with the installation of many war heroes in positions of leadership in mostly mainline Protestant denominations. It was known as muscular Christianity. Unfortunately (?)these men did not live up to the expectations of the people and many were vulnerable to the effects on their bodies and souls from the war. Severe lung problems, psychiatric disorders ( shell shocked etc) plagued their performance. Within 10-15 yrs most ministers had resigned or been replaced by different men who sought to direct the church in a move peaceful and loving your neighbor approach. Today the remnants of toxic muscularity/masculinity lives on in non denominational churches and sm Christian communities in the clutches of men who want power. MAGA and other men - Evangelical/Pentecostals - have latched onto these influencer positions and are preaching a form of religion akin to warrior prophets of the Old Testament. Hard to find the teachings of Jesus in all their negative ramblings.
Lisa DiGiovanni's mission statement, "I specialize in the role of gender and masculinity within fascist and authoritarian movements," is revealing not because it lacks clarity, but because it collapses under its own logic. Masculinity is a concrete, historically observable phenomenon. Gender, as deployed here, is not. The attempt to yoke them together does not strengthen the analysis. It weakens it.
The problem is not that masculinity is insufficiently theorized. It is that masculinity is over theorized through an unnecessary postmodern abstraction that adds nothing to our understanding of authoritarian power.
1. Masculinity Is Doing All the Analytical Work
The essay itself is, in fact, a study of masculinity, and a fairly conventional one. It describes ideals of male toughness, stoicism, and aggression, the cultivation of obedience and emotional suppression in men, the soldier as a moral and political archetype, the strongman leader as a masculine figure of authority, and the use of violence as a proof of male legitimacy.
These are not gender phenomena in any meaningful sense. They are male role ideals, forged in military institutions and mobilized for political ends. This is exactly the terrain explored long before gender theory existed, in military history, political sociology, psychohistory, and studies of nationalism.
Nothing in this account requires gender as an explanatory category. Masculinity alone suffices, and does so more precisely.
2. What Gender Adds and Why It Harms the Analysis
When DiGiovanni describes militarized masculinity as a learned gender identity, the term gender does not clarify masculinity. It reframes in service of ideology.
Calling masculinity a gender identity does three things, none of them analytically helpful. First, it detaches masculinity from sexed male embodiment and male-only institutions such as conscription and combat. Second, it recasts masculine norms as infinitely malleable cultural scripts rather than constrained responses to violence, hierarchy, and power. Third, it smuggles in a moral program of deconstruction, reeducation, and transformation that substitutes for explanation.
Masculinity becomes something to be corrected rather than something to be understood.
3. The Chilean Military Does Not Need Gender to Be Understood
Pinochet's armed forces were not driven by abstract gender identities. They were driven by a professional officer class, Cold War doctrines of internal enemies, a male-only command structure, and a long standing association between manhood, order, and force.
These are masculine formations, not gendered ones. They arise from male bonding, male competition, male hierarchy, and male monopoly over organized violence. Calling this gender is not an advance. It is a retreat into vagueness.
Indeed, the essays concrete actors are never genders at all. They are men, boys, women, soldiers, officers, wives, and mothers, sexed individuals occupying sex differentiated roles. Masculinity is visible everywhere. Gender remains abstract and inert.
4. Masculinity Versus Gender Theory
There is an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the framing. Masculinity, as described in the essay, is durable, coercive, institutionally enforced, and resistant to reform. Gender theory, by contrast, depends on the premise that identities are fluid, constructed, and politically rewritable.
The essay wants both claims at once. They cannot coexist without tension. The more seriously one takes militarized masculinity as a historical force, the less plausible the gender theoretical premise becomes.
That is why the phrase gender and masculinity is not just redundant but revealing. It betrays an attempt to preserve an ideological framework even when the evidence no longer needs it.
5. Conclusion
Masculinity is central to understanding authoritarian movements, especially military regimes like Pinochet's Chile. It is not a metaphor, not an identity claim, and not a linguistic construction. It is a sex linked social reality, forged in institutions that monopolize violence and discipline men to wield it.
The essay succeeds where it implicitly abandons gender theory and focuses on masculinity as a political and institutional force. Where it invokes gender, it adds abstraction without insight.
The real lesson of the piece is not that we need better gender theory. It is that masculinity can be analyzed rigorously only once the postmodern category of gender is set aside.
Thank you for this chilling comparison.
Thanks for this Ruth. Have your read Kristin Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne? Many parallels here. Her substack is https://kristindumez.substack.com/
This book is excellent.
Excellent post! So much damage has been done and continues to be done in the name of gender "roles". I encounter this regularly in my work and try with all I have in me to counteract this belief.
Ironically, the great weapon used so often by arch conservatives to defeat the liberal agenda is now the best weapon to use against Trump's fascist war on America. States Rights!
The 2nd Amendment gives to each State the right to keep an armed militia to protect people's security and freedom in its State. Today the "armed militia" is the National Guard. The undisputed threat to freedom in the States is Trump and his private army; ICE and CBP.
We should expect private protestors to stand up to fully armed, undisciplined agents of the Federal government alone. They have the constitutional right to protest against Trump's violations of the laws he pledged to uphold.
Governors must call out their Guard and put a stop to Trump's tyranny in their State and in America.
Sorry - more guns will just mean more deaths. This is what Trump is waiting for.
Sadly, Trump is just a terrorist bluffer. If the Feds had to face the National Guard in each Blue stare we'd see the "best" of the TACO.
I agree. I am even saying States could become sole taxing entities and provide all of the services for their states that other countries do that are the same size. I have asked my own Blue State governor to keep us safe from federal agents marauding as military (ICE and CBP) by using our State National guard. If Trump sends more ICE agents back to Chicago I hope that we get some physical protection from them. They are murdering mercenary forces.
Great! I hope Gov. Pritzker is listening.
Thus the anti-woke campaigns...
I can’t help thinking our homegrown flirtation with fascism is in a sense a payback for our meddling in South American governments and Nixon and Kissinger’s determination to support military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. What scares me are the Americans who think it’s ok to torture and murder other citizens over political differences, they dehumanize us by claiming we are stupid and Marxist (Marxism doesn’t have much traction in American politics as the wingnuts claim,) and are quite ok with seeing their fellow citizens being murdered, including using the same method the dictators used of throwing people alive from planes and helicopters into the ocean.
Big business drove our meddling via the CIA and set up governments that were suitable to corporate America. Nearly all were dictatorships, so it sends a signal that our business and power elites wanted something similar here. They just needed a propaganda artist to sell Americans on fascism. tRump was their man.... and here we are.
American businesses were hacked with nationalization of Chile’s copper mining.
Indeed! Guatemala; United Fruit comapany. Ecuador; our oil companies. The Congo; minerals, etc etc.
I remember asking my father, a decorated WW2 combat veteran who fought in Patton's army and ended up being shot and disabled in the siege action at San Malo, "how do I know when I have become a man?" "When you no longer need to prove that to yourself or anyone else" was his answer. Champions of militarized masculinity today have failed to understand that.
Bravo, Kevin.
“Militarized masculinity” is an attractor for the cadres of violent thugs who threaten and frighten the general public and legal protestors, so I agree this is an arm of what is going on. But Trump and his circle are essentially different—they are liars and thieves without any principle, ethic or loyalty other than to posturing and self dealing. Expose them for this by means of the Epstein Files—the great financial crimes as well as the sex trafficking—and the massive grifts, bribery, extortion, shakedowns and scams at Americans’ expense, the undermining of the US dollar and our entire international standing. Protest ICE, yes, but go straight and hard to the center of fraud, the theft and the utter debasement of America.
The Epstein files are devastating to the Trump myth. Pedophiles have been developing the Trump political policy. Cowards to the core. There is nothing lower than a child rapist. Even in prisons they are the lowest. But in Trump’s world these scum are running our government.
Megalomaniacal masculinity is absolutely unacceptable. I think more people of all genders are tuning into what makes relationship work. Not obedience but mutuality and genuine concern, care, and nurture.
The MAGA Algorithm Shits Itself in the Minneapolis Cold
Psywar and attempted cult mind control meet reality, and Trump's bubble of delusion is again revealed. It has to pop, and ICE has to stop
https://sunmoonlight.substack.com/p/the-maga-algorithm-shits-itself-in
How Books (and Mental Health and Friendliness) Can Save Democracy
Michael Fischer's pocket book is an essential read!
https://sunmoonlight.substack.com/p/how-books-and-mental-health-and-friendliness
Feminism 101. See how far we've come since the 70's? Not.
Absolutely brilliant and unfortunately, too true. Prof Heather Cox Richardson has made a similar argument about mythologized masculinity via Westerns on TV and in the movies. And Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, about the rise of "disaster capitalism" goes along with the history of militarized government using disasters and cataclysms to compel an extreme form of capitalism through privatization by which the few get very rich and everyone else doesn't. Klein also points to Chile and other Latin countries. Everything is connected to everything, and it would appear that militarized masculinity is the essential element behind it all.
Thanks for sharing this. It's been disturbing to watch the rise of groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and to see the spread of Nazi-lite propaganda, especially following Jan 6th, and the pardon of those participating. I suspect that many have now been recruited for ICE, along with a generation of boys raised on first person shooter video games and toxic masculinity podcasts. Is it naive of me to still believe that the regular army will follow their training and their oaths to the Constitution, and refuse unlawful orders when they come? Mark Kelly is a much better role model than Pete Hegseth.
I believe that the more Epstein files are released and disseminated the more the real military will follow their oaths. Like the Ford factory worker - some things just don’t fly. Pedophiles are one of those. A lot of rich men will be exposed, as should happen. Perhaps the adoration of the billionaires will begin to subside as more and more of these men are associated with Epstein. Ordinary people will be repulsed.
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Whew, Augusto Pinochet is a living memory to me, when under Dick Nixon we toppled the Democratically-Elected Salvador Allende, to replace him with Pinochet, and the rule of terror with torture, murders, kidnapping, all with the enthusiastic support of Senator Jesse Helms.
A postwar German writer shares your insight and that of Professor Lisa DiGiovanni about toxic masculinity and Fascist rule.
Namely, Johanna Moosdorf (Leipzig, 1911-2001), whose Novel, Freundinnen ("Girlfriends") printed by the distinguished S. Fischer Verlag (one of the very best of the world's sources of literature along with the great Suhrkamp Verlag) --
In "Freundinnen" (Girlfriends), two women in love with each other had another girlfriend, who was going to publish histories of the 17th c. witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Blood Courts were modeled by Moosdorf after the perverted courts in the Third Reich.
A woman was simply accused; exquisitely tortured until she either confessed or persevered.
The longer the woman held out, the more accelerated and painful the torture.
If she did not confess, she was executed as obstinate.
If she did confess, she was executed to extract repentance for the good of her soul.
Three generations of women in one family were wiped out, as a symbol for the horror of the Shoah.
One of the woman friends, hearing the story, reflected in a dream-sequence that was quite real, how she would rescue her girlfriend from the pyre or would somehow substitute her own self as offering.
"Freundinnen" pictured a future Society that revived Mother Goddess and excluded from rule toxic testosterone values.
The heroine had a man she had also loved, and he had many feminine features.
The man was modeled after Paul Bernstein, who was the husband Johanna Moosdorf had loved with her whole heart, and who was murdered by the Third Reich, despite many heroic and dramatic efforts on her part that temporarily saved him. The State finally caught up with Paul Bernstein, despite Johanna Moosdorf*s heroism, in September 1944.
Johanna Moosdorf NEVER, NOT EVER recovered from the loss of her well-loved husband or of the loss of family of the husband's blood -- all his siblings, parents, blood-cousins were murdered by the Third Reich.
"Freundinnen" is one of the most poignant witnesses against the horrors of the Third Reich.
And Moosdorf had accurately perceived the toxic, false and martial "masculine" values of the Third Reich.
DISCLAIMER: Most men are good and loving and the values of a healthy boy or man is not what we are talking about. Hopefully that is self-evident.
Toxic masculinity in the Church flourished in post WW1 with the installation of many war heroes in positions of leadership in mostly mainline Protestant denominations. It was known as muscular Christianity. Unfortunately (?)these men did not live up to the expectations of the people and many were vulnerable to the effects on their bodies and souls from the war. Severe lung problems, psychiatric disorders ( shell shocked etc) plagued their performance. Within 10-15 yrs most ministers had resigned or been replaced by different men who sought to direct the church in a move peaceful and loving your neighbor approach. Today the remnants of toxic muscularity/masculinity lives on in non denominational churches and sm Christian communities in the clutches of men who want power. MAGA and other men - Evangelical/Pentecostals - have latched onto these influencer positions and are preaching a form of religion akin to warrior prophets of the Old Testament. Hard to find the teachings of Jesus in all their negative ramblings.
Jesus isn’t there.
Thabk you Ruth. Your
Substack is one of the
most important stacks
here, speaking truth to
power.
Lisa DiGiovanni's mission statement, "I specialize in the role of gender and masculinity within fascist and authoritarian movements," is revealing not because it lacks clarity, but because it collapses under its own logic. Masculinity is a concrete, historically observable phenomenon. Gender, as deployed here, is not. The attempt to yoke them together does not strengthen the analysis. It weakens it.
The problem is not that masculinity is insufficiently theorized. It is that masculinity is over theorized through an unnecessary postmodern abstraction that adds nothing to our understanding of authoritarian power.
1. Masculinity Is Doing All the Analytical Work
The essay itself is, in fact, a study of masculinity, and a fairly conventional one. It describes ideals of male toughness, stoicism, and aggression, the cultivation of obedience and emotional suppression in men, the soldier as a moral and political archetype, the strongman leader as a masculine figure of authority, and the use of violence as a proof of male legitimacy.
These are not gender phenomena in any meaningful sense. They are male role ideals, forged in military institutions and mobilized for political ends. This is exactly the terrain explored long before gender theory existed, in military history, political sociology, psychohistory, and studies of nationalism.
Nothing in this account requires gender as an explanatory category. Masculinity alone suffices, and does so more precisely.
2. What Gender Adds and Why It Harms the Analysis
When DiGiovanni describes militarized masculinity as a learned gender identity, the term gender does not clarify masculinity. It reframes in service of ideology.
Calling masculinity a gender identity does three things, none of them analytically helpful. First, it detaches masculinity from sexed male embodiment and male-only institutions such as conscription and combat. Second, it recasts masculine norms as infinitely malleable cultural scripts rather than constrained responses to violence, hierarchy, and power. Third, it smuggles in a moral program of deconstruction, reeducation, and transformation that substitutes for explanation.
Masculinity becomes something to be corrected rather than something to be understood.
3. The Chilean Military Does Not Need Gender to Be Understood
Pinochet's armed forces were not driven by abstract gender identities. They were driven by a professional officer class, Cold War doctrines of internal enemies, a male-only command structure, and a long standing association between manhood, order, and force.
These are masculine formations, not gendered ones. They arise from male bonding, male competition, male hierarchy, and male monopoly over organized violence. Calling this gender is not an advance. It is a retreat into vagueness.
Indeed, the essays concrete actors are never genders at all. They are men, boys, women, soldiers, officers, wives, and mothers, sexed individuals occupying sex differentiated roles. Masculinity is visible everywhere. Gender remains abstract and inert.
4. Masculinity Versus Gender Theory
There is an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the framing. Masculinity, as described in the essay, is durable, coercive, institutionally enforced, and resistant to reform. Gender theory, by contrast, depends on the premise that identities are fluid, constructed, and politically rewritable.
The essay wants both claims at once. They cannot coexist without tension. The more seriously one takes militarized masculinity as a historical force, the less plausible the gender theoretical premise becomes.
That is why the phrase gender and masculinity is not just redundant but revealing. It betrays an attempt to preserve an ideological framework even when the evidence no longer needs it.
5. Conclusion
Masculinity is central to understanding authoritarian movements, especially military regimes like Pinochet's Chile. It is not a metaphor, not an identity claim, and not a linguistic construction. It is a sex linked social reality, forged in institutions that monopolize violence and discipline men to wield it.
The essay succeeds where it implicitly abandons gender theory and focuses on masculinity as a political and institutional force. Where it invokes gender, it adds abstraction without insight.
The real lesson of the piece is not that we need better gender theory. It is that masculinity can be analyzed rigorously only once the postmodern category of gender is set aside.
Ollie very impressive! I need to read your post several more times to help me put theory into my practice. Thank you