Everybody wants to be a manager: On masculinity, microfascism and the manosphere

Abstract

ABSTRACT The emergence of the manosphere with its online promotion of a blinkered view of masculinity associated with the alt-right, its hostility to feminism and explicit misogyny has been characterized as aberrant in relation to mainstream psychological and cultural values. Partly expanding on Guattari’s Everybody Wants to be a Fascist, this paper argues that there is instead a profound continuity between the two. They both share an ideology of resilience: a misleading notion dominating current representations of masculinity. They both share the ideology of dataism, i.e. the view that the world can be reduced to abstracted data and measurable logic. They both share practices of microfascism, i.e. a yearning for more management, order and control in relation to the intrinsic ambivalence of being human. In our post-civil-rights era of identity politics, white ‘injured’ masculinity masquerades as a ‘different’ and ‘marginalized’ identity in relation to which the bland slogans of woke capitalism and woke consumer-culture present no real opposition. At present, most cultural representations of masculinity are essentialist. Can psychotherapy theory and practice help construct new representations of masculinity as performative, fluid and as a turning point to a deeper form of inquiry?