Would love to write a book called “Great Idiots of History.” Rachel Corrie would make the list. @KurtSchlichter
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 3, 2011
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.
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.