Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
Macho men who define themselves by their ability to control women don’t realize how vulnerable they make themselves. Literature is filled with examples, starting with every work that mentions cuckolding. These include Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”; Mallory’s Morte D’arthur; Shakespeare’s Othello, Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, and Winter’s Tale; John Donne’s “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”; and William Wycherley’s Country Wife. “A horned man’s a monster and a beast,” asserts Othello, expressing his fears that he wears the imaginary horns of a cuckold, even though Desdemona is in fact faithful.
All a woman must do is sleep with a lover—or say that she has done so—to bring such fearful men to their knees. This is Mrs. Yonge’s final attack in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poem “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.” Montagu penned the angry poem after watching Mrs. Yonge’s philandering husband sue his wife for her own extramarital affair, winning both a divorce and her dowery money. Montagu imagines things Mrs. Yonge could have said in return, concluding with one final prediction.
This prediction is that, even though Mr. Yonge is groveling before some older woman in an effort to secure one of her young cousins as his next wife, he will never be sure that this second wife will be faithful. Rather, he is likely to detect in his progeny the features of General Churchill and Anthony Lowther, two notorious rakes. After all, if one wife has cheated on him, how does he know his next one won’t as well?
Your high ambition may be gratified,
Some cousin of her own be made your bride,
And you the father of a glorious race
Endowed with Ch——l’s strength and Low—r’s face.
Back when I was teaching a course on “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century,” we explored how male sexual anxiety has been a major driver of comedy. Laughter is one way we use to inoculate ourselves against our anxieties as it both releases the nervous tension and assures us that someone else is the butt of the ridicule. Wycherley’s play The Country Wife’s takes the anxiety to the extreme. But before dipping into it, let’s take a look at a couple of instances of our own insecure men waving their you-know-whats around in a show of bravado.
First there was White House advisor Stephen Miller channeling his inner Goebbels in a speech to Memphis police:
The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless, they have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough, they have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore, we are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us. What do they have? They have nothing behind them. So we are gonna win, they’re gonna lose.
Then there was the Defense Secretary—or Secretary of War, as Pete Hegseth prefers to see himself—ordering the country’s military leadership to assemble so that he could strut before them. Here’s some of what he said:
Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the War Department. In other words, to our enemies, FAFO. If necessary, our troops can translate that for you.
It’s clear from his talk, as its clear from his previous statements, that women have no place in the military. He holds back his sexism only a little:
But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender-neutral. If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result. So be it.
Responding to charges of “toxic masculinity,” Hegseth tried to turn the adjective to his advantage:
On the topic of standards, allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. Upholding and demanding high standards is not toxic. Enforcing high standards, not toxic leadership. Leading warfighters toward the goals of high, gender-neutral, and uncompromising standards in order to forge a cohesive, formidable and lethal Department of War is not toxic. It is our duty, consistent with our constitutional oath.
Indeed, he couldn’t get enough of the word:
Real toxic leadership is endangering subordinates with low standards. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas, instead of based on merit. Real toxic leadership is promoting destructive ideologies that are an anathema to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we’re correcting that. That’s why today, at my direction, we’re undertaking a full review of the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying, and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.
Hegseth may have been thinking of the 2017 sexual assault charges directed against him in that last sentence. He paid the woman $50,000 to settle out of court. But back to Wycherley’s play.
The main character is Horner, who lives to put cuckold horns on husbands. (Side note: In 1977 I saw Albert Finney play Horner at London’s National Theater in a performance I will never forget.) Because all the husbands are worried about him, however, he has to come up with a new tactic to penetrate their defenses. He does so by getting a crooked doctor named Quack to swear that he has been rendered impotent by venereal disease.
When Quack wonders how the plan will work, given that the wives won’t have an interest in an impotent man, Horner observes, “If I can but abuse the husbands, I’ll soon disabuse the wives.” And so it plays out as the husbands welcome him into their homes, partly so they can gloat over him and partly so that he can chaperone their wives. In the end, the wives are sexually fulfilled and the men are all wearing cuckold horns. It’s a cynical but very witty play.
For his part, Hegseth appeared as insecure as Sir Jasper Fidget. It took a great deal of self-control for the generals—many of whom (unlike Hegseth) have experienced live fire—not to laugh at him. They certainly didn’t applaud, as both he and Trump noticed.
Putting comedy aside, however, I want to end with an Adrienne Rich poem that reveals the inner misery of men who are obsessed with the image of themselves as heroic knights. The first stanza captures how they want to be seen, the second shows how they feel inside, and the third wonders what it will take to free them of the metal/mental trap in which they have caged themselves:
The Knight
A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
A knight rides into the noon,
and his only eye is living,
a lump of bitter jelly
set in a metal mask,
betraying rags and tatters
that cling to the flesh beneath
and wear his nerves to ribbons
under the radiant casque.
Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently,
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?
The second stanza captures the Millers and Hegseths of the world, who wear their nerves to ribbons over the fear that they are not genuine he-men. It reveals that hypermasculinity is toxic not only to women but to men as well.
Our so-called woke military, by contrast, is doing a pretty good job of understanding that real strength lies in character, intelligence, and resolve rather than bombastic posturing. Those qualities, they know, are distributed fairly evenly between the genders and are far more effective at keeping our country safe. The transition hasn’t been easy but, to apply Rich’s word, it has been comparatively gentle. The various measures designed to counter sexual harassment and assault forced the wounds out into the open, where they could be treated.
