Note (January 8, 2024 ): This is my talk at the Mid-South Sociological Association, Lafayette, Louisiana, held October 25-28, 2006. The title of the talk is “Twin Tyrannies: Authoritarian Politics and Oppressive Gender Relations.” The conference was timely titled Sociology in Ill-Starred Times: Crisis, Survival and Reconstruction. The talk was given in Jackie Eller’s session Gendered Terrorism: Re-thinking Tyranny and Oppression. A version of this paper would be published in Routledge’s International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities in 2007.
Tyranny in its standard meaning designates a situation of extreme social inequality and repressive rule. Tyranny takes different forms across time and place, but a dictatorship that rules via terrible means is popularly thought to be typical.
The paradigm of tyranny in the modern world epoch is Nazi Germany, led by charismatic dictator Adolf Hitler. However, because most societies fall short of the extreme form, yet present with hierarchy, inequity, and oppression, it may be useful to conceptualize social orders as lying along a continuum with democracy at one end and tyranny at the other.
In a second sense, tyranny is a metaphor for situations wherein certain ideas and practices trump other ideas and practices. In the field of gender studies, Connell theorizes that hegemonic masculinity defines women’s roles while at the same time suppresses subordinate masculinities. By creating a situation in which prevailing gender relations seem normal, and by checking challenges to the status quo, heterosexual males impose a tyranny of masculinity over women, homosexuals, and children. State and non-state actors using legal and extra-legal strategies and tactics (marriage, rape, etc.) reproduce hegemonic masculinity.
The major challenges to sociological explanations of male dominance emanate from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which hold that traditional masculinity and men’s dominance has a biological-evolutionary basis. This view is found to be an element of hegemonic masculinity itself and not an objective scientific position.
What is of particular relevance to the present essay is the relationship between dominant ideologies of masculinity and tyrannies of various stripes. It is here that both meanings of tyranny come together in the intersection of the gendered character of interpersonal relations and larger societal structures.
Values attendant to prescribed gender roles in the second sense predispose a population to acceptance of tyranny in the first sense. It is no accident, then, that tyrannies should possess and emphasize such “virtues” as aggression, competition, and violence.
These associations are evident in the coercive methods with which oppressors achieve tyranny, methods that fall broadly under the category of warfare, chiefly involving police and military machinery. Randall Collins theorizes the empirical link between warfare and men’s domination this way: men do not organize into military units; and approximate conditions of equality exist between men and women in societies in which military threats are few and the means of destruction are limited. In turn, military organization emphasizes aggression and violence, which are associated with the intensity of men’s domination.
More broadly, Raewyn Connell argues that men are the main agents of violence in the modern world epoch and, in most societies, violence is culturally masculinized.
Instances of the intersection of prescribed gender roles and political-military tyranny are readily found in the atavism often inhering in fascist dictatorships. For example, in what Burleigh and Wippermann call the “barbarous utopia,” subordination of women and glorification of masculine images and values reflect the centrality of patriarchal relations in Nazi constructions of the Volkish state.
In 1933, anti-fascist Wilhelm Reich theorized that authoritarian society is reproduced by the authoritarian family, a conclusion later confirmed by Nazi actions that removed women from the workplace and sharply limited their numbers entering college.
The regime established the Reich Mothers’ Service to promote a eugenical vision of a “New Germany,” criminalizing abortion for healthy “Aryan” women and sterilizing and euthanizing the “unfit.”
Fascism thus reached into the womb—the zenith of patriarchal-tyrannical rule.
In turn, warrior men became the subjects of adulation, especially the führer, propaganda depicting Hitler as the ideal type of male virility.
Klaus Theweleit concluded in his analysis of the Freikorps texts that fascist writings “revolve around the same central axes: the community of the male society [and escape] from a world that is rotten and sinking (from the morass of femaleness).”
The fascist vision of the “healthy” family also affected homosexuals. Hitler’s violent purge of leading associates in the Sturmabteilung was in part justified by alleging “sexual deviance” among its members, most notably Staff Chief Ernst Röhm, an openly gay Nazi. Gays were labeled “sexual subversives” and “sexual saboteurs,” and, after Röhm, all persons engaged in homosexual activities were registered (the so-called “pink lists”). The regime focused on high-profile homosexuals both to eliminate opposition and to draw attention to the Nazi campaign to portray hegemonic masculinity as central to the rebirth of the German nation as a pure biological and moral entity.
Oppressive gender relations situate in a matrix of domination that includes class and race. The tyranny of masculinity reinforces the practice of white supremacy in its more violent expressions, namely the extra-legal practice of lynching blacks and the “nigger hunt,” with their standard justification retribution for the alleged crime of interracial rape and their form the ritual emasculation of the accused. While the affirmation of whiteness is explicit in these crimes, less obvious is the affirmation of men’s dominance over women.
References
Bowker, L. H. (ed.) (1998) Masculinities and Violence.
Burleigh, M. and W. Wippermann (1991) The Racial State.
Collins, R. (1975) Conflict Sociology.
Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power.
Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities.
Connell, R. W. (1997) “Arms and the Man.” Expert Group Meeting on Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace. UNESCO Oslo, Norway, 24-28 September.
Griffin, R. (ed.) (1995) Fascism. Oxford University Press.
Reich, W. (1946) The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Orgone Institute Press.
Theweleit, K. (1987, 1989) Male Fantasies, 2 vols. Cambridge: Polity Press.
freedom and reason 