I smiled at the butchness in his story. “What happened?”
“I’ll never forget what Frank told me. He said, ‘You’re already a man, you don’t have to prove that. You just have to prove what kind of man you want to be.’” My eyes filled with tears,
Ben’s voice was as intimate as his smile. “What about you, Jesse? What made you the way you are? What’s your life been about?”
In a world with any justice I would have poured out my life story to him. I would have given him back in kind the trust he’d shown to me. But I was afraid and so I betrayed him. “There’s not much to tell ” I said.
He blinked in disbelief. I wanted him to let it go, but he wouldn’t. He was brave enough to bloody his head against my brick wall again. “Jesse ” he whispered, “tell me something about you.”
I was frozen with fear, unable to collect my thoughts enough to invent a story that even appeared to reveal something about me. “There’s nothing to tell,” I told him. 1 was closed and protected. He was left naked.
The warmth drained from his face and anger rose to replace it. He was too gentle a man to lash out at me. Like a butch, he kept it inside.
I stood up. “I’d better be going” I said. He nodded and stared at his beer bottle, I let my hand rest for a moment on his shoulder. He would not accept the comfort or look at me. I wanted to say, Ben. I’m so sorry I hurt you. I only did it because I was scared. I didn’t know men could hurt the way I do. Please let me back inside. But of course, I didn’t. Instead I said, “See you Monday."
(page 185)
I learned that strength, like height, is measured by who you’re standing next to. I was considered a scrawny guy in the gym. That opinion was written on the faces of men whose muscles were bigger than mine. And all the while the lifetime of cruel judgments about my body and my self throbbed like unhealed wounds.
Yet sometimes when I stood in front of my own minor at home, I saw a powerful me, I couldn’t hold onto the image, though. It slipped like a globule of mercury from under my index finger.
Maybe that was the lesson I tried to teach myself with each repetition—that power is something qualitatively more than strength. And that the world was wrong about me. I had a right to live.
Every day the men around me came to exercise their bodies; I came to exorcise my demons.
(page 210)
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. 1993.
was going to draw quotes from Verkerk’s Nietzsche and Friendship but it doesn’t seem right. Yet.
Verkerk, Willow. Nietzsche and Friendship. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
This is the point where some specious arguments may be raised against me. My opponents will try to cast discredit on the cellars of the combined order, because their kitchens will accumulate so many trophies. Listen to what they have to say: ‘We grant you’, they will tell me, ’that your phalanxes, your Series and your groups can provide such an abundance of exquisite produce that even the poor will share in it; but could you match that divine food everywhere in the globe with correspondingly fine wines, that would bear comparison with those of Médoc, Ay, Chambertin, Rüdesheim, Jerez, Tokay, etc.? Their vineyards, limited in size, will not be able to provide enough for the first-class tables in three million cantons, and so the good food of the common people will have to be washed down with poor-quality wine, which will make for gastronomic cacophony, as you cannot have a good meal without good wine. To accompany a meal whose plainest dishes utterly surpass those of a modern Apicius, everywhere would have to have wines superior to those from our famous vineyards which occupy tiny areas of land, and which no amount of work will ever be able to equal, as their characteristic flavours derive from the places where they are grown, not from the work that is put into them.’
This objection would seem to be an awkward one, and I am happy to pose it plainly, in order to demonstrate that the solution to the greatest problems is mere child’s play to anyone who accepts the theory of Social Movement. Yes, in the combined order a poor man will drink wines at his table equal to the most renowned wines of France, Spain and Hungary; and consequently the rich will have a choice of wines that are proportionately superior.
Nor is this all, for I shall show that where other drinks are concerned the tables of the poor will be better provided than those of kings are today. My examples are of three types, bitter, sweet and acidic; they are coffee, milky drinks and lemonade, all of which will be in every respect more exquisite than the best that kings can obtain. Their superiority will be due to the ways they are grown, transported and prepared, none of which can be duplicated in the present order and which kings could not provide at any price. Do you think coffee is grown as well as it could be in the fields of Mocha? Are there not major errors in the way it is collected and transported, perhaps even in its usual preparation? When you understand the care and discernment that the grouped Series will take over each detail you will realise that our most renowned products are infinitely far from perfection. If we add that future events will perfect the earth’s sap, and thereby refine the sap of the plants and animals which it nourishes, it will not be surprising that the drinks left to the poorest of men will often be superior to those of civilised potentates.
Fourier, Charles. The Theory of the Four Movements. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Whats the relation between generosity and scarity? or property?
Derrida - the gift, donation, hospitality
What does it mean to be generous as a man? To be generous with masculinity? Does this framing mean we have to consider gender (and its many intersectional permutations) as scare? Not in terms of ‘real men (tm) are scarce’ (if they ever existed) but, the material resources that enable possible men are scare? If a reaction to scarcity is hoarding, [something] producing miserly men?
I think there is a connection to Fourier here
When does generosity turn into a debt? A feeling of un-payability? Ask your neighbor to borrow a cup of masculinity?
Or does thinking along the lines of masculinity as scarcity just reinforce what we’re trying to unseat? Can you be generous with something you do not posess? (You must first posess to be generous) Who can posess (or is allowed to posess)? Does a disparity have to exist to be generous? What happens to someone who ties their self to an idea of generosity, when generosity is no longer needed?
or to think a (future) generosity that makes (contemporary) generosity miserly in comparison
To say only those who are already in possession of masculinity can be generous with masculinity would be to miss something important in Stone Butch Blues. The work of Jess’s femme lovers show as much.
Thieves, smugglers, [a third thing] show the way out? As Preciado does in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
Nietzsche draws a line between (heterosexual) love and property:
Sexual love betrays itself most clearly as a lust for possession: the lover desires unconditional and sole possession of the person for whom he longs; he desires equally unconditional power over the soul and over the body of the beloved; he alone wants to be loved and desires to live and rule in the other soul as supreme and supremely desirable. If one considers that this means nothing less than excluding the whole world from a precious good, from happiness and enjoyment; if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all competitors and would like to become the dragon guarding his golden hoard as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all “conquerors” and exploiters; if one considers, finally that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests—then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified so much in all ages-indeed, that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism while it actually may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science.
Could a similar line be drawn for a love of masculinity (as concept)?
Who (plural) will be the invisible biblo that defeats the dragon atop a pile of masculinity?
if the gamers could chill for one FUCKING second
All of this is maybe too much emphasis on masculinity as individual, or individual acts of generosity. (The letter from your local non-profit thanking you for your generous one time gift)
Consider Bogdanov’s martian utopia:
The blood transfusions presently performed by your medicine somehow smack of philanthropy: people who have a lot of blood give some of it to others who need it desperately due to, say, injuries. We, of course, do the same, but we do not stop there. Quite in keeping with the nature of our entire system, our regular comradely exchanges of life extend beyond the ideological dimension into the physiological one.
Bogdanov, Alexander. Red Star. Indiana University Press, 1984.
Why argue only for a reparative gift of masculinity (to fill a lack)? Why argue for a standard of masculinity? For some medical gate keeping? Why be fucking boring?
Put some skin in the game.
“our regular comradely exchanges of life” may also be a way out of the power dynamics present in Nietzche’s thoughts. Not something we can ignore at the present, but maybe for the future?
Maintenance, regular upkeep, a process.