Male emotional vulnerability enables rather than opposes ego-armour posturing

Evidence

Nothing Was the Same is characterised by the same ambivalence — a longing to be a new person who can love and trust (with a woman, naturally, charged as the agent of this transformation) together with a recognition that he will never change, that he’ll always be drinking, smoking, fucking, that he’s far from perfect, but neither is anyone else, right? He never really took off the gangsta-minstrel drag for good; instead, he keeps casting it aside, inspecting it, distancing himself from it, before wearing it again. He can’t help himself (or so he keeps telling us). But this oscillation is valuable for what it tells us about rap’s embattled masculinity in general. Drake confirms that the street-strutting bad boy “just looking for head in a comfortable bed” is the other face of the desperately alone little boy lost crying to his mommy substitute. The boasting brute is always on the run from the helpless infant inside, but, for that very reason, the emotionally broken-down male isn’t an alternative to all the ego-armour posturing, so much as it is its enabling condition. Women are to be publicly disdained, treated as currency in a homosocial bragging economy; in private they are asked to make these wounded men whole again. Is there a track that has exposed the real nature of the male-to-female love song better than Take Care’s “Marvin’s Room”? The conceit — a drunk Drake leaving a phone message to a long lost love he treated badly but now thinks he wants back — leaves us in no doubt that he was speaking to himself via a fantasised female Other. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1323

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Female biological instability produces an emotional vulnerability men lack; Victimization-related ego defenses can protect rather than harm mental health — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 928; Violence defends male subjectivity against being objectified by others — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 836 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Violence defends male subjectivity against being objectified by others #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 836
• Female biological instability produces an emotional vulnerability men lack #contradicts (0.75)
• Victimization-related ego defenses can protect rather than harm mental health #expands (0.75) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 928
• Male violence against women partly stems from resentment of their own bodily arousal #expands (0.75) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 609
• Dobson’s gendered psychology framed male fragility as requiring female submission #complicates (0.75) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 192