The last acceptable prejudice? Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.


January 28, 2025   7 mins

Lou Reed was right. It’s hard being a man. In my mid-Twenties I spent three months living with my family in the mountains of Kabylia. As an analytical tool, that period was incredibly useful. Algeria, by comparison to the West, is a de-sexualised zone. Interactions between men and women are severely curtailed. There are no billboards featuring giant, unobtainable breasts to gaze at on your way to work. After three months devoid of stimuli, I found I no longer even masturbated. Back in London I’d been yanking the thing off round the clock. Out and out obsession with sex wasn’t a default setting, I realised. You needed to be obsessed with it so people in corporations could sell you things. It was all part of the capitalist fun. To have your basest impulses exploited endlessly and without restraint, that’s what was meant by the word: freedom.   

I’d rather not live in a Muslim country. My cousin Abdul lives in Algeria and flunked out of school early; now jobless, he’s finding it impossible to marry, which means screwing is indefinitely off the cards. At least his world is ontologically consistent though, at least he knows where he stands. Sat on the tube the other day I noticed one of these new TFL posters that condemns leering. “Unwanted staring is harassment,” the legend ran. Fair enough. One mustn’t stare. Right next to this TFL warning was an advertisement for perfume — I forget the brand. This ad consisted of a young blonde lady, her bikini-clad chest all but bursting out of the frame, her stare set to a merciless come hither. The screaming contradiction might well sum up the predicament of many a Western male today: stare, but whatever the hell you do, do not stare. Be this, but whatever you do, don’t.

The paradox I found myself bound up in on the train brought to mind an online spat from a few years back — a subject I’d given a lecture on in New York last summer. At the tail-end of 2022, climate activist Greta Thunberg was set upon by viral misogynist Andrew Tate. Unprovoked, Tate sent a picture of himself with one of his gas guzzlers, offering to email Thunberg a list of his cars with details as to their respective “massive” emissions. Her response set the internet on fire: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at [email protected].

 

Hailed by the commentariat, the phrase soon found unlikely mainstream currency. Imagine for me if you will, the feminised parallel of “small dick energy”. Now, take whatever three-word expression of gendered body shaming you’ve come up with, and imagine it not only finding its way into print at a high-profile newspaper in the year 2022, but being crowned “one of the greatest Tweets in history” by the country’s foremost progressive media outlet. In attempting to equate machismo with climate change denial, the author most famous for introducing the term “mansplaining” into the discourse — Rebecca Solnit — here finds it fit to lean into a chauvinism all her own. The uselessness of attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, as feminist hero Audre Lorde might have it, is casually thrown aside in a moment of point-scoring ideological bloodlust. A sadly familiar tale this last five or 10 years. No, I did not take an especially dim view of Greta’s comeback to Tate — Solnit’s opinion piece on the other hand I found genuinely disturbing. I still do. Given her stature, and given the fact her 2015 Lit Hub essay, 80 Books No Woman Should Read, castigated Hemingway on account of his smearing Scott Fitzgerald in exactly like fashion. She might have been more aware of the harm she was wreaking.

About Tate I know little. Unless I’m trying to sell something or ogling members of the opposite sex from a safe distance, I avoid being online. I try to keep myself out of touch, try to expose myself to as few of these click-ravenous public spats as possible. I’m often tempted to leap into the fray, but the jungle is laden with ideological tripwires — one’s actual opinions seem barely worth the hassle anymore. A cursory glance at Tate’s Wikipedia page suggests the lowest form of human life. A deeper dive leaves me thinking that I probably wouldn’t piss on the guy if he was on fire. By what contemporary progressive metric, I couldn’t help but wonder, does one feel entitled to equate everyone born with a small penis to this uber-pillock?

In an epoch defined by its obsession with the sweeping away of generalisations pertaining to that with which you were born, how does abuse like this end up on the top shelf? For sheer hit count, it’s still the fourth greatest Tweet of all time. If you wanted to turn confused young men wandering hopeless through the spiritual apocalypse of the internet, young men searching desperately for a way to rationalise or displace their ever-swelling superfluity into fully-fledged woman haters, then there are few more optimal ways you could go about doing so than by employing this kind of reactionary double standard. The history of Western civilisation was one bad joke, women were the butt of that joke, therefore, let’s all laugh at the little members.

More meat equals more man. More meat equals dignity, respect, honour and self-assurance. It all has, well, a bit of a Trumpian air about it, wouldn’t you say? The Solnit school of thought here appears as attracted to the source of its resentment as it is repulsed. The old heinousness is to be given a certain amount of free play. Hatred at a healthy dose in a bid to expel it from the community: the way of the scapegoat. A viable target must be selected, ideally someone harmless. In this instance, the small dick community — a community only now, for the first time in history, finding the courage to step out of the shadows and speak its truth — is being utilised as a kind of sponge with which to mop up society’s moral impurities.

The all too natural obsession with penis size proves an obvious fault-line in recent ideological trends. It is to “progressive” idealism what Epstein’s “suicide” was to the concept that our ruling elite are not child-molesting lizard people: a fissure, a glitch in the official narrative. Through this crack, that of guilt free, publicly proud, “sing it from the rooftops one more time Miss Solnit” small penis resentment, we momentarily glimpse the true nature of the beast, the faintly scrutable shadow play of bad faith, reactionary hysteria masquerading as social justice. Identity fetishism run ragged, basically, the very thing which has led us into our current political quagmire. Through its progressive arm, the neoliberal regime finds fullest validation and authority by posturing as the voice of equality and freedom. Questions of race and gender are of course important, but inflamed to the point where they drown out discourse centred around class, they wind up producing a kind of narcissistic counter-solidarity. Everyone reaching for their own personalised crusade, everyone obsessed with immutable characteristics — but only when it suits them.

“Everyone reaching for their own personalised crusade, everyone obsessed with immutable characteristics — but only when it suits them.”

Unsurprisingly, Miss Solnit got back on her soapbox to denounce the election of America’s irreverent strong man. She had lost none of her gift for aggravating cognitive dissonance. In her article she wrote of the “extraordinary balance of idealism and pragmatism, the joy, the generosity” of Kamala Harris’s coalition building. As a Muslim, I don’t quite see it that way. I see a party posturing as the representatives of moral hygiene while aiding and abetting an excruciatingly visible genocide. That was always going to be a tough sell: we’re the party of fairness, of diversity and inclusion… unless the people in question are a strategic inconvenience, in which case, bombs away. Maybe, some credit is due actually, after all they did achieve the impossible: they managed to make the touchy-feely convicted felon look like the one in possession of a shade of integrity. She then described the failed candidate as “supremely qualified”. The one hoop of qualification Kamala had to jump through — a primary — she hadn’t. She’d been anointed despite a track record of 0% electability, utterly devoid of democratic process, then attempted to sell herself as a bulwark against a lack of democratic process. Stare, but whatever you do, don’t stare…

Then of course we have the usual victim blaming where the “crisis in masculinity” is concerned. Apropos nothing, she reminds us that Silicon Valley — to whom she allocates a third of the blame for Trump’s success — was created by “white men”. The guy who comes to empty my wheelie bin once a week is also white. By whacking him and Elon with the same stick, all you’re doing is pushing them closer together, providing them with common ground. That even now, after an era defining drubbing, the self-defeating uselessness of this mode of attack still remains elusive to certain people is astounding.

It is the “crisis in masculinity” that leads us to the Donald, apparently. The “crisis in masculinity”, not the Democratic Party’s sponsored and curated usurpation of class politics with a self-glorifying, divisive fixation on identity. No, the now undeniably very real Bernie-to-Trump pipeline simply gave birth to itself. Instead of acknowledging the writing on the wall — that Western liberalism, in a kind of decadent, echo-chamber induced trance this past 10 years, has allowed itself to become dangerously unmoored from reality — commentators such as Solnit persist with more of the same alienating drivel, unaware or in total denial of their part in the symbiotic expansion of intolerance and scorn on both sides of the political spectrum this last 10 years.

Men have always been in control. They’ve always been largely superfluous as well where reproduction is concerned — there’s always been a superabundance of male chaff. Hence sending them off to die in their droves fighting this war or that. What else are we supposed to do with all of these blokes? Maybe that feeling has never been so acute as it is in the here and now? War is generally less of a thing. The provider, the protector, the patriarch; all notions fast becoming the stuff of nostalgia.

A long and bitter confrontation with our disposability is on the cards. Hence the explosion in male suicide. Hence Trumpism. The Don isn’t busy rubbing salt into the wounds of male redundancy. When I take a look around me, the lads generally seem to be falling apart: jobless, almost universally depressed, semi-homeless, furiously alone, minds ravaged by incessant pornography and drug abuse. Meanwhile liberal media outlets — which erroneously seem to believe that they speak for the man in the street — have been busy churning out articles for the last 10 years about the toxic masculinity of sky scrapers and the like.

And what have we got to show for it on the Left? The reduction of culture to a never-ending round of trauma Top-Trumps; a guy who goes on telly claiming illegal aliens eat cats and dogs is in charge of the Empire; and these little signs on the tube that remind you “staring is bad”, signs that jostle for attention with images of breasts begging you to stare at them — that’s like offering someone with a brain tumour a band-aid. The Democratic Party of America deserves all the loathing in the land. By gaming identity, by placing undue emphasis on it in a bid to retain power without having to betray their corporate sponsors, they have opened up questions of identity to undue enmity amongst the population at large. By forcing this fraud on people, they have inflamed the very issues they purported to solve. The one silver lining of the election result might be that it finally brings the curtain down on identitarian orthodoxy, that we finally get a Left that sticks up for the proles, instead of one that insists on trying to patronise them into submission. A Left more concerned with the size and shape of a man’s wallet than what he keeps stuffed down the front of his jeans. I doubt it, but god knows more of the same is no longer an option.


Lias Saoudi is the frontman of Fat White Family and the Moonlandingz, and the co-author of Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

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