Masculinity...Tableness... and the Girl from Palestine
"all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk" (Heroin, Nico and The Velvet Underground)
The footage of the little girl from Gaza?/Palestine came to my attention a few days ago. It is by no means the most horrific footage to emerge from the ongoing genocide in Gaza/Palestine…but it is particularly troubling/disconcerting to the Western lens for a number of reasons. Even more disturbing….I would suggest… to the male western lens.
Aside from just the raw human instinct of seeing a child in such circumstances/distress…. is the jarring exposure of complete impotence. The young girl…as incongruous as it may seem embodies the core virtues of masculinity….Courage, Duty, Strength, Loyalty, Heroism…in its most distilled perfect essence. She just happens to look like that weird kid in Mad Max 3.
Even in the way the young girl carries her younger sibling in the form of a fireman’s lift. We associate such professions with heroism and that association following the bravery of first responders/fireman to the events of 9/11 only further cemented that association within our shared cultures. The fireman emerging from a burning building having rescued a person in great danger…the selfless duty, courage involved is an archetype of these virtues/forms.
Modern Western man searches through the mediated abstractions served up through a consumer culture for echoes of those virtues…always remembering. Some may look to the daring do in the literature of Andy McNab/Bravo Two Zero etc etc which is an incredibly popular form of literature/entertainment amongst men…starved of heroic forms. It may be sought vicariously through the physical courage of those engaged in combat sports…hence the popularity of MMA/boxing etc etc. To a perhaps lesser degree the hero worship that takes place in football….whether it be the ruthless/uncompromising dedication of a Roy Keane or the SS Guard like defensiveness of a Jaap Stam. Sports…to varying degrees are rule encrusted formats in which some of these virtues may find expression. Some make attempts to realise these virtues/forms through their leisure pursuits...’Iron Man’ triathlons and expressions of physical endurance/prowess….or via the gym culture that has emerged over the last 20 or so years. The sheer poverty of their availability is not new…to my generation most eloquently and emphatically expressed in the film Fight Club…whose enduring popularity remains today, I would suggest, because the issues it identifies so well have only further deteriorated/accelerated.
I haven’t followed any of the Andrew Tate brouhaha…I suspect given his CIA father…that the whole ruse is a clever/sophisticated form of psychological/social/cultural manipulation… as the overwhelming majority of media is in one form or another. An Albert Pike hero for Gen Z, raised on the Fast and the Furious/computer games…would find an appeal in such a figure. I suspect much of what he says is true…but that is not the point. It is how his appeal is harnessed and applied for purposes of psychological and political/social/cultural control. The obvious cleavage being notions of ‘toxic masculinity’ as a dividing wedge between sexes. I am just uninterested in watching a bald man theatrically smoke cigars in a silk kimono/dressing gown/robe?….or supercar ownership…it doesn’t have the same appeal to millennials…even if…as I suspect…his analysis of/commentary upon many societal/political/cultural ills will be accurate/truthful. It necessarily has to be so…or he would not be so popular/useful….ditto Tucker Carlson…ditto…Elon Musk…ditto Jordan Peterson….ditto Russel Brand…yada yada.
The little girl from Gaza…dishevelled…barefoot….ragged…..embodies the form of a perfect table…the ideal of masculinity. The incongruity/dissonance experienced is how that perfect table/form is delivered/revealed/manifests.
The recent speech given by Dr. Ahmad Malik (link below) focused upon the many inversions that we exist amongst…that are transparently obvious/uncontroversial to many at this stage. In order to achieve such fundamental inversions within a society/culture it is necessary that the forms that underpin them must be distorted/perverted/bastardised/subverted/forgotten. The metaphorical tables overturned.
The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg shows how skilfully this was achieved…particularly in manipulating women…whose response to those artificially constructed forms was predictable.
The footage of the little girl from Gaza/Palestine is not the machinations of a sophisticated psychological operation/manipulation….and the consequences for men who understand what they are witnessing are profoundly disturbing when set against the fakery/abstractions/derivatives of masculinity they are force fed…
The stark reality of the little girl….exposes the truth of the sheer impotence/meaninglessness/fraudulence of our age….our collective perfect form is moral cowardice. A table that we are forced to sit at…from which we cannot leave/be excused…a banquet for the dead/impotent.