tensorgami

There is a peculiar tension in contemporary Western culture. On one hand, the historical mistreatment of women is undeniable. On the other hand, many men now find themselves living under a moral atmosphere that treats them as defendants by default, as if they personally stand trial for the entire history of patriarchy. What began as a necessary correction has, in some quarters, hardened into a system of suspicion and ritualized guilt. The result is not a society of equal adults but a theater in which men are cast as either villains or penitents.

A central figure in this theater is what might be called the performative male. He is not simply a man who supports women or believes in equality. He is a man whose support is inseparable from a craving for absolution. His feminism is less a considered ethic and more a stage on which he reenacts an internal drama. Outwardly he is conspicuously safe, conspicuously allied, conspicuously indignant at the sins of other men. Inwardly he is negotiating with an archaic authority, a composite of mother, culture, and moral law. When he denounces other men as toxic, he is often exiling his own unresolved aggression. When he calls for linguistic purity and ideological conformity, he is trying to secure his place as the good son.

Psychoanalysis, particularly in its Jungian and Freudian forms, offers a useful language for this pattern. The Oedipus myth describes a son who inherits a fate and a guilt that precede his conscious choices. In modern ideological life, many men occupy a similar position. They are addressed not as individuals with specific histories but as carriers of a generic male guilt. Women as a class are identified with the wounded or disappointed mother, men as a class with the dangerous or negligent father. The performative male responds by overidentifying with the mother position and by staging his break from the bad father through public denunciation of other men. His allegiance to a certain style of feminism is, psychologically, an attempt to prove to the internal mother that he is not like the others.

This dynamic has two obvious variations. One is the guilty son. He is uncomfortable with his own desire, suspicious of his own impulses, and eager to submit to external codes. He is the one who apologizes for existing, who speaks of male sexuality mainly as a risk to be managed, and who treats every interaction with women as a possible offense. The other variation is the rebellious son. He rejects the guilt framework entirely and swings toward contempt and domination. Where the guilty son tries to appease the internal parents, the rebellious son tries to become the frightening father so that no one can shame him again. In outward politics these two types appear as the hyper apologetic ally on one side and the aggressive anti feminist on the other. Inwardly they are two solutions to the same unresolved Oedipal tension.

When men remain trapped in these son positions, their relationships with women become symbolic rather than personal. Women become mother figures, judges, prizes, enemies, or screens for projection. A man may seek in his partner the approval he never received, or he may punish her for slights that belong to someone else. Desire and resentment fuse. In milder forms this produces neediness, passive aggression, or chronic miscommunication. In more serious forms it feeds coercion, boundary violations, and, in the extreme, sexual violence. The guilty son may insist that he would never harm anyone, but because he cannot own his own aggression, it leaks out in ambiguous situations where he preserves his self image by redefining what happened. The defiant son may boast openly about conquest and treat women as trophies. Both are equally immature. Neither is present as an adult who says, without drama, that he is responsible for what he does with his desire.

The political sphere amplifies these private distortions. Ideologies offer ready made stories that can absorb personal guilt and rage. Instead of asking how I, in particular, have failed the people close to me, I can denounce entire categories of sinners. Instead of examining how I treat the women in my life, I can join a crusade against abstract patriarchy and imagine that my tweets or my denunciations compensate for my own unfinished work. This is what might be called moral laundering. Personal unease is washed through public virtue. The more unresolved the inner conflict, the more fervent the outer performance.

This mechanism is not new. The twentieth century provides stark examples of decent people doing ugly things under the banner of moral necessity. In interwar Germany, economic collapse, national humiliation, and rapid social change created a mass of anxious, resentful citizens. The National Socialist story offered them a simple map: you are not the problem, you are the betrayed; the true enemies are communists, Jews, decadent elites. Most participants were not born sadists. They were ordinary people whose need for belonging and moral clarity overwhelmed their capacity for independent judgment. Once the script had assigned certain groups the role of pollutant, cruelty toward them felt not only permissible but virtuous.

Contemporary ideological fervor in liberal societies is obviously different in scale and consequence, yet the psychological machinery has a family resemblance. In the wake of real injustices, such as sexual violence or police brutality, a wave of outrage arises that is, at its core, justified. Around that core, however, accrete rituals of suspicion, denunciation, and purity tests that are less about solving problems than about managing anxiety and guilt. Certain victims become sacred icons whose names must be invoked with proper reverence. Certain groups become permanent suspects. Empathy becomes radically selective. The suffering of an in group victim evokes near religious intensity, while the suffering of a designated out group figure is mocked or celebrated. The body in pain is the same, but the narrative has already decided which blood is tragedy and which blood is content.

Economic conditions intensify these tendencies. When people feel materially secure, they can tolerate complexity and ambiguity. When they feel their job, savings, or future collapsing, the nervous system demands simplicity. Who is to blame. Who will protect me. Which side am I on. Under such pressure, ideological movements gain power by offering clear enemies and clear rituals. They say, in effect, that your distress is not the result of structural complexity, personal choices, or bad luck, but of a malevolent them. Align with us, speak as we speak, and you will be on the right side of history. For the performative male, this is irresistible. It folds his private longing for approval into a grand narrative. He is no longer just a confused individual; he is a soldier in a moral war.

These dynamics take different surface forms in different cultures. In the United States, older models of masculinity emphasized stoicism, individual self reliance, and emotional restraint. Many fathers of the so called greatest generation or the early postwar years were themselves shaped by war, poverty, or harsh parenting. They passed on a model of manhood that allowed little room for softness or articulated feeling. Boys learned to treat vulnerability as shameful and to express distress through work, withdrawal, or anger. The result was a large cohort of men who never developed a stable inner life and who thus were poorly equipped for equal, emotionally transparent relationships with women. The more recent performative ally script plugs neatly into this inheritance. It allows men to admit guilt and softness, but only inside a rigid ideological template that still avoids genuine encounter.

In parts of South America the configuration is different but recognizably related. The tradition of machismo emphasizes overt male pride, sexual assertiveness, jealousy, and public toughness. At the same time many cultures in the region sustain more visible physical affection among men and stronger ties to extended family. Mother son bonds can be extremely intense, while fathers are often distant, authoritarian, or absent. This combination can magnify the Oedipal pattern. The young man grows up both dependent on and resentful of the mother figure, and either intimidated by or contemptuous of the father figure. His later relationships with women swing between idealization and control, devotion and betrayal. Here too women are likely to be treated as symbols rather than as independent subjects.

Across these variations the same structural problem remains. Men who have not resolved their relation to the parental archetypes, and who have not integrated their own aggression and desire, will approach women either as judges to appease or as opponents to dominate. Feminist language can serve as decoration for the appeasement strategy. Anti feminist rhetoric can serve as decoration for the domination strategy. The deeper logic is apolitical. It belongs to childhood.

One of the reasons this pattern persists is that the most intelligent men often reach for the wrong tools. They respond to emotional confusion with analytic escalation. They try to think their way through what can only be metabolized through feeling and relationship. The language of equations, proofs, systems, and optimization has enormous power in its own domain, but it is almost perfectly suited to avoid the vulnerability that psychological change requires. The more brilliant a man is in technical terms, the easier it is for him to live in abstraction and to treat his own interior life as an object to be modeled. But the pattern we are describing is not a bug in a machine. It is a knot in a person.

When activism becomes a place to hide from this knot, it can do real damage. Men who are unwilling to confront their own history with women can instead build moral identities that depend on constant external conflict. They invent or adopt causes that allow them to conscript other minds into their private struggle with the archetypal mother and father. Those who resist the script are treated not merely as mistaken, but as bad. The harshness of the reaction is often inversely proportional to the maturity of the reactor. The more childish the inner structure, the more absolute the judgment must be to keep it from collapsing.

To step out of this machinery requires something deceptively simple. A man has to stop playing the son and start standing as an adult. That means dropping the fantasy that some abstract mother, whether embodied in women as a class, in ideological movements, or in social media audiences, will finally grant him the stamp of goodness. It means acknowledging his own capacity for harm without drowning in inherited guilt. It means accepting that no amount of public performance will redeem him from the work of treating the actual women in his life with honesty, respect, and clarity.

It also requires resisting the temptation to resolve deep emotional complexity through totalizing political narratives. There are real injustices that require structural responses. None of those responses are improved when individuals use them as substitutes for private self examination. The more a movement becomes a vessel for unprocessed guilt and resentment, the more it drifts away from justice and toward scapegoating. That is as true for gender politics as it was for the national or racial politics of the last century, even if the scale and stakes are different.

A healthier culture would not demand that men deny the realities of history or their own capacity for wrongdoing. It would also not require them to live under permanent suspicion or to purchase moral safety through ritual denunciation. It would ask something harder. Grow up. Own your desire. Own your aggression. Speak plainly. Treat women neither as goddesses nor as enemies but as people whose interior lives are as dense and real as your own. Refuse both the guilty son posture and the defiant son posture. Stand on your own feet.

Until enough individuals do that, the machinery of guilt and performance will continue to run, replacing leaders and slogans as needed. The performative male will keep appearing in new costumes, in new movements, on new platforms. The only real exit is not a new ideology but a different psychological center of gravity. That is a quiet move. It does not trend. It does not confer instant righteousness. But it is the one move that actually weakens the machine.