this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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The properly revolutionary version of all ideology, religious or secular, is revolutionary to the extent that it promotes pro-social values and reactionary to the extent that it promotes anti-social values, relative to previous iterations. Socialist masculinity and socialist femininity (beyond the extent to which they correspond to sex/hormones/whatever) are only different from each other as an artifact of the backwards social values they are derived from and trend forward in the future in the direction of being identical. As strength in men is good, strength in women is good. As cowardice in men is bad, cowardice in women is bad, etc.
Socialist masculinity also shares a similar relationship with socialist Confucianism, socialist Cheondoism, socialist Christianity, socialist Dharma, etc. These are all systems of values created in old societies based on old relations and are, to some extent, backwards. The job of the socialist, who cannot simply declare the age of Christ over and the age of Marx its replacement (at least not in an enduring and effective way), must seek to elevate the aspects of (say) Christianity that are pro-social, reinterpret those that can be reconciled with being pro-social, and criticize those that are irreconcilable with being pro-social (making these determinations by appropriately exhaustive investigation). In this way, to borrow a certain reactionary's phrase, there should be a "revaluation of all values" towards sociality until the only distinction between them is a cultural affectation.
Again, I disagree with this, because “socialist masculinity” isn’t backwards in any sense separated from it’s material context of gender and oppression. Muscles and oily, large calves and large beards are not counterrevolutionary, and neither are those who get off to them or whatever, but our insistence on associating them with certain personality traits and behaviors is (and is arguably part of the engine of patriarchy as a whole). I believe allowing this patriarchal engine to simply claim these superficial aesthetics, even implicitly by only allowing their existence as a “transitory period”, would be a step in the wrong direction. Especially when this superficial signifiers would not be counterrevolutionary in any sense when removed from their content in a post-communist world.
Instead, we should try to throw a wrench into this engine, by explicitly disconnecting the aesthetic from its original context. Have big, sweaty, muscled people who wear exclusively aprons and jockstraps work in flower shops as much as possible, and treat people with kindness and care. Have thin, long-haired, body-hair-less wearing bowties in their hair work in car shops and gun ranges and treat people distantly and competitively. Do whatever we can to make people realize these signifiers have no direct material connection to reality, and are only enforced by a complex web of social systems that try to force people into specific genders and specific, tiny roles.
Attempting to interrupt and remove these aesthetics from existence is somewhat revolutionary, sure, but it’s ultimately kind of idealistic in a different way. People already associate positive experiences and joy with the presentation of aesthetics, they are happy looking at them and being around them, and this is likely part of how gender as a social structure entraps them. This cannot be fixed by telling them the aesthetics they like are bad and they should just change their taste through sheer will; It can only be fixed by attempting to sever the connections between those aesthetics and the continuation of oppression, to “free” them and allow them to then grow organically into their own forms of expression and entirely new aesthetics.
DISCLAIMER: I have never read society of the spectacle or anything like that, I just have an attachment to how certain aesthetics look and think that, without any other
Also I think I agree with you in the sense of behaviors and such