Examining the Urge Among Insecure Men (and Some Women) to Inflict Pain on the Weak and Defenseless
In recent months, I have again become obsessed with (and depressed by) the phenomenon of self-styled manly men exulting in acts of cruelty. As the Trump immigration crackdowns spiraled out of control, one of the most notable aspects of right-wing propagandists' response was their vulgar desire to ridicule and dehumanize their victims, all the while delighting in the spectacle of the ugly meanness of it all.
Kristi Noem (aka "ICE Barbie") may be gone, but the image of Noem standing in front of caged prisoners in El Salvador -- prisoners who had received no due process, meaning that she (and we) could not possibly know whether they were guilty even of immigration violations (which are civil, not criminal, absent additional facts) -- is permanently etched into my mind as an example of how toxic masculinity can metastasize and be embraced even by non-men. Worse still, rather than claiming that what was happening in that photo was somehow not terrible, Noem's social media accounts luxuriated in the cruelty.
There is more than a passing visual resemblance between the Trump Administration's "Look at how we're kicking these weak people's butts!!" posturing and the photo of Trump's eldest son on a safari holding up the tail of an elephant he had killed. It turns out that someone at Forbes in 2012 wrote a piece defending Junior that crossed the line into hagiography ("And Donald Jr. certainly has the good looks Hollywood would cast as the careless son of an American magnate. However, his reputation is clean. He’s a hardworking family man."), which is high comedy in its own right, but this line stands out in the context of what I am discussing here: "Donald Jr. points out, the leopard they hunted in Zimbabwe was not endangered, and they didn’t hunt any of the animals in an unethical way." (Yes, leopard. The elephant was not the only animal he killed.)
To be clear, there is a spirited argument among vegans and animal rights philosophers about whether outrage against hunting is the best use of anyone's energy. After all, the sheer numbers of animals being tortured and killed in factory farms is many orders of magnitude greater than the numbers of animals killed by hunters on any given day. I begin with a "Why not oppose both?" attitude that I concede is not fully responsive, but that discussion is not relevant here. My point is that it is revolting that people think that killing animals in big-game hunts is an enjoyable sport. In that 2012 piece, Trump fils mouths platitudes about hunting as environmental stewardship and even says this:
[H]unting isn’t about killing. Nature actually humbles you. Hunting forces a person to endure, to master themselves, even to truly get to know the wild environment. Actually, along the way, hunting and fishing makes you fall in love with the natural world. This is why hunters so often give back by contributing to conservation. ...
[W]hen I was growing up and other people I knew were getting into trouble, I was somewhere in a deer stand or going to bed early so I could be up before dawn to hunt turkeys. My love of the outdoors kept me solid.
So that explains why Donald Trump, Jr. is such a solid citizen today? Because he got up early, killed turkeys (even though "hunting isn't about killing"), and loved the outdoors? Sure thing. And if one is worried (as Trump Jr. also claimed to be) about the destructive overpopulation of certain animals, the question is why we should respond to that problem by having a bunch of amateurs run off to prove how tough they are by using high-powered rifles to "best" terrified animals.
It is notable that the Wikipedia page for "canned hunts" -- the horrific practice of putting animals in constricted areas, often drugged so that they will put up minimal resistance to the "sportsmen" who pay to kill them -- begins with this: "A canned hunt is a trophy hunt which is not 'fair chase.'" So the non-canned hunters feel that they are morally superior because they only give fair chase, meaning that they can use modern technology to run animals into exhaustion and then kill them, if their expensive high-tech rifles cannot do the job first?
Why would an environmentalist who is merely helping local populations in Africa control their animal populations then stop to pose for photos? Why hunt for trophies, for chrissakes? Again, how different is what Noem was doing last March from all of that, as she smirked in front of her prey after a ridiculously unfair hunt? Or what of Pete Hegseth sneering about the killing of scores of people on the open sea, including people who were clinging to wreckage and were then murdered in cold blood?
"No quarter" is a war crime for obvious reasons, but Hegseth was not fired, admonished, or even challenged by Trump Sr. or anyone in his orbit after saying that "[w]e will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies." Like Noem, Hegseth flaunts his thirst for carnage rather than hiding it. As Democratic Senator Mark Kelly put it:
“No quarter” isn’t some wanna be tough guy line - it means something. An order to give no quarter would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead. That would violate the law of armed conflict. It would be an illegal order. It would also put American service members at greater risk.
Notably, Senator Kelly and some of his congressional colleagues drew Trump's ire after committing the horrible sin of reminding US military personnel that they should not violate the law: "This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. ... Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders." Of course, Trump and his team want to prosecute those military and intelligence veterans for "sedition." Of course.
But my main interest here is in the enjoyment and celebration of unfair fights by these overgrown bullies. As I reluctantly conceded in a column last week, I experienced in my (early) adult life a moment in which I willfully exploited a physical advantage over a child while playing pickup basketball. To be clear, I did not in any way harm the boy, but I did in that moment get a jolt from blocking the shot of someone who was at least a foot shorter than I was. So I have felt it -- whatever "it" is -- but I also felt shame and then went about the business of becoming a better, more fully mature adult.
At some point, "running up the score" says worse things about the victors than it does about their over-matched opponents. In last year's Wimbledon final match, Iga Świątek defeated Amanda Anisimova in a historic 6–0, 6–0 rout. It was an astonishing thing to watch, but as Anisimova crumbled, Świątek did not gloat or preen. She was gracious in victory, finishing the match as quickly as possible (against an opponent who was not obviously inferior prior to the beginning of play that day) while showing that she was not enjoying someone else's pain. Why do I find it difficult to imagine anyone in Trump's world even being able to conceive of such a thing?
Again, I do know that there is something visceral that might be sitting inside even people who are not Hegseth-like in their day-to-day lives. But when I wrote above that I "gratuitously" exercised my advantage in that basketball game, I could have added "and pointlessly." What exactly does one get, after all, out of proving what anyone with eyes would already know? A 6-foot-1 adult man can block a 5-foot boy's basketball shot. A man with an expensive enough rifle and the right kind of ammo can kill any animal. A team of ICE agents can rappel from helicopters and smash into an apartment building filled with unarmed innocents. People who look or sound Hispanic can be rounded up and put in a gulag. War machines can kill people in boats.
Also, men have the ability to physically abuse their wives and children. Rich and powerful men have the ability to go to the island of a sex trafficker and force children to do things that children should never be forced to do. Stronger people can physically dominate weaker people for their own (twisted) pleasure.
What does any of that prove -- or more pointedly, why does it seem to make the people who are doing it feel like manly men? It is no accident that they reserve especially cruel treatment for trans people, who are among the most powerless people in our society. That these bigots then piously claim that it is the trans people who are the true abusers of innocent children (which deliberately conflates being trans with being a sexual predator, which is a vicious lie) is especially rich in a world where the bigots do nothing about people who have in fact abused innocent children. They themselves are sometimes the ones who have inflicted the abuse.
In a column discussing toxic masculinity a few years ago, I referred to "(the needlessly gendered) [aphorism that] 'a man never stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child,'" adding: "The idea is that growing up and being good involve learning to be part of something larger and caring about -- or at least noticing and minimally respecting -- the humanity of others."
But as I noted in a column that I re-posted here two days ago, the cruelty brigade that is currently laughing about its ability to engage in wanton cruelty toward the weak now seems to reject the very notion that "being good" is a real thing. They mock non-cruel people and accuse us of being performative, that is, of "virtue signaling." It is not possible in their minds, it seems, to imagine that some people are not inhuman monsters. Trumpists take pleasure in harming innocents, so they insist that the people who are not sociopaths are faking it. Rather than trying to learn how to live in a civilized world, they insist that civilized attitudes are a lie.
They are wrong. No matter how much they might want to believe that they are not uniquely awful, they are. Other people are not saints, but at least we try to protect the weak from the predations of emotionally damaged barbarians.
- Neil H. Buchanan