The postmodern bifurcation of the masculine

The new second sex

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir famously developed the thesis whereby the feminine sex was a marked category, in contradistinction to the masculine which was the assumed default in unmarked contexts. This problematization of the feminine, it has been noted by many authors since Freud, results in a cultural bifurcation between those women who comply with socially endorsed gender norms - the Madonna - and those who do not - the Whore. Under this patriarchal configuration of biopower, female agency is undermined by the binary categories into which women are culturally assigned.

This analysis seems to me highly cogent as a framework through which to interpret the cultural production of gender norms under modernity. However, I believe it has not yet been noted that a major cultural shift is underway whereby this bifurcation is, in economically advanced culturally Western states, no longer imposed, by tacit cultural understanding, to women, but is now increasingly imposed to men.

The shift in LGBTQ identification on the part of individuals born since 1997 (so-called Generation Z) in the US has been widely noted. Since 2017 there has been a marked rise (of course, new individuals have also entered the cohort of those eligible to respond), whereby currently around 20% of this cohort so identify.

What has not been remarked, and I myself have not been able to locate the underlying data but this is what ChatGPT tells me, is that this increase is entirely down to shifts on the part of biological men. That is, the share of women in the population as a whole identifying as LGBTQ has remained flat since 2017 at 5.1%. Given that bisexuality is very differently understood by many female subjects and is far less culturally problematic, it is, moreover, likely that this figure includes many women whose primary romantic or relationship orientation is towards the opposite sex.

The temptation on the part of young males to sidestep problematic identification with legacy culturally dominant male gender roles, seen as frequently “toxic”, is understandable: this is a discursive strategy with obvious advantages in certain contemporary contexts. By disidentifying as heterosexual, these men choose a path akin to those feminists who have embraced labels such as “slut”, thereby rehabilitating the whore part of the old bifurcation of the feminine. For the vast majority of women who have chosen this self-presentation, however, their sexuality as such has not needed to be redefined. Indeed, the whore archetype corresponds to a hypersexualization which is definitionally heterosexual. In the case of men, an opposite logic prevails: many labels are available, but what they have in common is that they are anything but heterosexual. The male whore is queer.

This is perhaps obvious and one may say, who cares? But it is the rump population of males still identifying with the culturally unmarked (in a legacy sense at least) “madonna” leg of the bifurcation who face a problem of tremendous complexity to navigate. Whilst the madonna role delimited female agency in evident ways and to a considerable extent, within it there was always a space of self-expression which was unproblematic. In other words, it was not an imperative and prescriptive paradigm but simply a fencing-off. However, for males not willing or able to disidentify with legacy male roles, this space of freedom is shrinking as undesirable attributes increasingly become attached to traditional notions of masculinity and those inclined to self-represent in non-conforming ways increasingly place themselves entirely outside the category. It thus becomes, in order to safeguard ones space of self-expression, necessary to discard heterosexual identity and most if not all traditional attributes of masculinity entirely. Those who do not, manifest as reactionary and most of what have passed for cultural models of how to be, as a man, in the world - those models which have enabled what equivalently passes for “civilization”, particularly in an economic sense - are now tainted with suspicion.

Perhaps ultimately this tension may resolve itself in some way which does not necessitate the wholesale abandoning of civilizational norms and of those natural specializations between the sexes, analogous to sexual dimorphism, which have undeniably determined our cultural evolution as a species. I am as convinced as anyone that we should question these norms and values, but I fear that we lack the cultural tools to do so, and that the only possible outcome of this renegotiation is a civilizational collapse.