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Toxic masculinity and the genocide: the case of Ben Shapiro (and the beloved and much missed Rachel Corrie)

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We should be talking more about how big of a role toxic masculinity plays in this genocide, and how much it sets the scene for a clash between two very distinct types of masculinity.
For brief background: Rachel Corrie was an American peace and social activist, a sweet, lovely young woman in her 20s’ who developed a special interest in the plight of Palestinians. In March of 2003, as the IDF was demolishing homes in Rafah (the occupation is a never-ending loop of destruction and despair), Rachel Corrie was there, protesting. She was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. 
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Ben Shapiro, on the other hand, is your hyperverbal cousin reciting his Bar Mitzvah speech at 1.75x speed 5 hours straight without stopping once for air or to ask you if you’re still conscious on your way to a family vacation.
Unimportant and uninteresting, he still demonstrates what is expected of him as a speaker for the oh-so-tough-and-masculine American right. In 2011 he tweeted

That miserable tweet resurfaced some 10 days ago (early February 2024), and when he was asked if he regretted it, he said no. Rachel Corrie was still on his list of history’s greatest idiots. What a man, now, do you see? So cavalier. So careless. Dead activist! LOL.

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This is one of the most prominent marks of toxic masculinity: the delight it takes in the death and destruction of “others”, especially women and children, who are mocked and hated for their vulnerability.

So much of the right-wing response has been similar to this, and become totally mainstream. “This is the price of war”, or “this is war”, “those are not innocent women and children”, “they shouldn’t have done October 7th”, “collateral damage”, “Hamas can just surrender”all used to convey absolute indifference, or actually taking pride in knowing how much it hurts you, and other people.

Like a sociopath, but with an added penchant for gloating, toxic masculinity guides its believers to deal death, torture, and destruction without once letting a muscle move in your facial expression.

It is all clinical and devoid of feelings as part of the performance.

Contrast this kind of masculinity with what we’ve seen on the Palestinian side: men in flip-flops rescuing people from under the rubble; Motaz and Wael (and many others) reporting tearing and sobbing, soft as children.

Men weeping with their dead child in their hand, and other men doing the world’s most blood-curdling job: telling them to stop and give up their child so they can be buried.

Not one gym bro have you seen in all the pictures of captured Gazans. Not one macho man. No tattoos. Only men sitting on the ground, or standing, with complete disregard for perceived masculine performance.

Men whose masculinity is grounded in family and community. Vulnerable to a painful degree, but not once trying to mask it. They just stand or sit there. They just are.

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What we really need as a human society is a model of a soft and loving man, a gentle man, who loves and respects everything and everyone. A man who cries when exposed to someone else’s pain and humiliation. We don’t need that dubious, destructive wannabe-viking clown of the suburbs who treats life as a video game, the type that calls for more women and children to be killed with his two legs missing because of a former colonial war.

And if you just want to understand how vacant, nonsensical and fragile the toxic man is, try and tell him that his fresh dead soldiers just joined your list of history’s greatest idiots. Oh no, you can’t. In our backwards culture you can only come out with a mild reprimand after saying that about a young woman who died trying to protect vulnerable people. Oh the hilarity.

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Mayim Bialik shared her reaction to a stand up show. It didn’t go as well as planned

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Two things about this video, uploaded by the notoriously insensitive Mayin Bialik (listen to it for just a minute):

1. The comedian, a guy named Stan, makes a joke about “from the river to the sea” by saying it’s the new “to the window, to the wall” (from Lil John’s legendary “get low”). This could be funny, because it does make an unexpected connection between two separate realms of reality, but it is not really funny.

It is not just the nervous delivery, but something deeper. You see, far from being simply a creative and quirky juxtaposition, the content in the two parts of his joke is actually very much interrelated.

The black man’s lewd sexuality and the native’s wild political barbarism always went hand in hand in the colonialist mind. This is so well-known and substantiated I don’t even need to say anything about it. You know it. And so “form the river to the sea” and “to the window, to the wall” are not two totally different things in the white colonial mind, but rather two aspects of one reality. This is why, even if you don’t get it immediately, it doesn’t really make you laugh.

It doesn’t feel like it connects people (as really funny things always do, because they take down defenses and cancel imagined hierarchies). It feels like it separates them. Which it does, and is meant to achieve.

2. Notice how these two people, who are not particularly ugly, and certainly not physically repulsive, appear wholly robotic and without even a shred of grace. This is what holding on to unnatural, counterintuitive ideas does to you. This is why Israel could never in a million years have an effective communicator. Effective communicators are emotionally authentic and accessible. The unnatural stance they’d have to assume speaking for Israel would make anyone who tried it stiff and unpleasant, just like these two.