What Do Men Want?
Nina Power and I discuss "Masculinity and its Discontents"
Note: this month in The Portal we have been exploring the Sacred in collaboration with The Center for Process Studies. This week in Thought Lab we will be hosting Dr. Ruth E. Kastner, author of Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality, to think through “Science and Spirit” in light of quantum mechanics. All Portal members get discounted access to a conference hosted by The Center for Process Studies titled “Metaphysics and the Matter with Things” focused on the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist. To find out more, or to get involved, see: The Portal.
Last month I hosted philosopher
to discuss her latest book What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents. Throughout our discussion we use the clear Freudian references in the title/subtitle of the book, not so much to psychoanalyse this generation of masculinity, but to frame the issue of sexual difference, inspired by psychoanalysis, in a social and civilisational context. This brought us to tension and fault lines in the eternal battle between the sexes, the sexual non-relation between chaos and order, sex positivity and sex negativity, Blue, Red, Black and Christ-pills, and much more.Nina Power is writer and philosopher, author of both One-Dimensional Woman, and her most recent book, What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents, one of the Editors of the online magazine Compact, and teaches courses on Illich, Bataille, angels and evil.
Throughout this video we discuss:
The difficulty writing a popular philosophy book with an audience of everyone and no one, without sacrificing depth.
The book as centring the question of sexual difference and gender, with references to both psychoanalytic and deconstructive epistemologies
Sexual difference functions as a neutral starting ground to analyse the existence of men and women (but we must recognise the difference)
Contemporary ideology framing men as ontologically evil, but there are real possibilities for men and women to reconcile
Throughout the 21st century, we have birthed a more interesting world, but chaos reigns, and we need courageous intellectuals to reinterpret it again
World is more interesting in part because women are more educated, and we cannot “put that back in the bottle”, i.e. woman as rational political agent
Reactionary feminism (e.g. Mary Harrington) deconstruct the link between feminist waves and progress, complicating progressivist narratives
Major challenge: declining birth rates and potential global collapse of birth rates, cultural and demographic shifts throughout the world
Question of desire for woman if the child is no longer in the picture, i.e. how to think about a generation of women choosing not to reproduce?
Post-sexual revolution: sex positivity framed as opportunity to explore female sex desire; sex negativity as confronting desire as lack, confusing and painful
Post-Christian age: we face the problem of forgiveness, especially between the sexes; forgiveness (especially between sexes) has been abandoned
Male sexuality online: modern movements like MGTOW and NoFap, father figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate
Blue/Red Pill to Black/Christ Pill: deconstructing progressive for evolutionary narrative, falls into doomer vs. religious fundamentalist narratives
Future work focused on teaching about evil and hatred, which stems out of an experience of being hated/perceived as evil
To find out more about Nina Power’s work, check the links below: