BROTHERS IN ARMS 

by aurora linnea

_{Featured photo of Judy Chicago’s In the Shadow of the Handgun from PowerPlay}

On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron drove to a supermarket in a majority black neighborhood in Buffalo, NY, and began shooting at people in the parking lot. He shot the supermarket’s security guard and entered the store, where he continued to shoot. Gendron killed ten people and injured three others. Less than two weeks later, in Uvalde TX, Salvador Ramos would shoot his grandmother in the face, steal her truck, and drive to an elementary school. There, he would shoot and kill nineteen children and two teachers, wounding seventeen others before he himself was to be killed by police. 

Gendron and Ramos had a lot in common. Both came of age during a period of plummeting mental health among U.S. teenagers. Both have been described by peers as quiet, shy, disaffected, socially isolated and maladjusted. Both were outcasts. They spent many of their waking hours on the Internet. Both had a history of voicing violent threats: Gendron had “joked” in a school report that he planned to commit a murder-suicide when he retired; Ramos told multiple young women online that he would rape and kill them. Both tortured and killed nonhuman animals. Both were fascinated by guns, and were able to legally purchase the semi-automatic assault rifles they used to shoot their victims. Both were 18 years old and male. Boys, becoming men. 

As I write this, I have just learned of another shooting, this one in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Seven people were killed and at least two dozen more injured when someone began shooting into the crowd from the roof of a business during the town’s Fourth of July parade. A suspect is in custody, Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo III. 21 years old. Male. 

Manhood is the greatest predictive factor for mass shooting perpetration. More than mental illness, more than indoctrination into online extremism, more than childhood misery or being the victim of bullies, what mass shooters share is manhood. Of the 172 mass shooters inventoried in the Violence Project Database, 168 were men, and two of the four women included were acting alongside men. Of the 228 shooters documented in the Gun Violence Archive between January 1 and May 17 of this year, all 228 were men. A 2021 study found that 95% of school shootings committed since 2003 were the work of males. Beyond mass shootings, men own guns at triple the rate of women, and men are responsible for 80% of all gun violence in the United States. Beyond gun violence, men can take credit for 88% of all homicides and 81% of all violent crimes in the United States*. 

Overwhelmingly, every kind of violence is male violence. Women know this well. 

Reviewing the cases of 31 young male perpetrators of “adolescent rampage school shootings,” researcher Kathryn Farr found that all had experienced what she calls “failing masculinity performances.” Viewed by peers as less than appropriately masculine, these young men were subject to “emasculating bullying,” ranging from ostracization and teasing – the standard taunts: homo, fag, sissy, cry baby – to sexualized violence enacted by higher-status males. They described being hit in the face with other boys’ genitals, being urinated on, having their heads dunked into the toilet. The other major failure of masculinity, noted in over half of the 31 young men’s cases, was rejection by a girlfriend or female love interest. (We must not forget these truths: that the majority of mass shootings are related to domestic violence, that 36% of shooters boast criminal records for assaulting women, that the first person shot is often a female partner or relation.) Farr theorizes that the shooters perceived their classmates’ abuses and girls’ rejections as injustices denying them their “gendered entitlements.” In other words, they knew themselves to be men and felt they should be treated as such. Being men should have afforded them power and status, yet they were deprived of these. As men they were also owed sexual access to females, but this too they were denied—because they were not seen as Man Enough. Their manhood contested, they would have to prove it. Farr lists the shooters’ strategies for dispelling doubts and convincing their peers that they were men worthy of respect. Consciously cultivating hypermasculine personas, they embraced violent themes in their writings and recreations. They idolized violent anti-heroes. They proclaimed a passion for weapons, and specifically for firearms. Violence was, in the minds of these young men, manhood’s substance and its substantiation. 

After purchasing his first gun, Eric Harris, who committed 1999 Columbine High School shooting with his friend Dylan Klebold, reflected, “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.” Elliot Rodger, whose murderous rampage in 2014 targeted a sorority at the University of California, Santa Barbara, experienced a similar sense of exultation following his own handgun purchase: “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches.” 

The current trend in tepid mainstream media condemnation of male violence is to critique men’s compulsion to assert manhood through shooting or otherwise brutalizing people as “toxic masculinity.” Deemed toxic, this masculinity is swiftly sorted off to the right side of the political spectrum, as though it were a byproduct of right-wing movements, a syndrome particular to right-wing males. Trump, of course, is the reigning icon of toxic masculinity; the GOP and alt-right online “manosphere” its strongholds. It is true that men in these realms glory in violence, and yes, the Trumpian caricature of strongman machismo is a canker due for excision from U.S. culture. But the grim reality is that male glorification of force, men’s belief in the redemptive capacity of violence, are hardly derangements unique to the political right. The romance with violence is not some freak deviation nurtured in society’s seedier crevices. It is instead a corruption nested deep in manhood’s morbid heart, that rancid organ which has for millennia now pulsed war-lust as patriarchal civilization’s lifeblood. 

Violence is not peripheral to manhood but central to it—as a testament to power, a route to righteousness, a rite of ecstatic catharsis, a tool of domination, and the most efficient means of asserting manhood, synonymous with “selfhood” or “humanity” in the patriarchal lexicon. Patriarchy’s earliest myths tell of Man begetting himself and his world through generative acts of violence. Take as an example the Mesopotomian god-king Marduk, who slayed the sea monster his mother, Tiamat, to build his kingdom (the earth) from her dismembered corpse. Or there is the patriarchal canon of heroes, the most legendary of whom are revered for their talents in righteous violence. Heracles and Odysseus, Odin, the samurai, G.I. Joe, Superman. And while men’s celebration of violence may have grown less overt over the years – indiscriminate slaughter being somewhat less socially acceptable today than in past epochs of patriarchy – it has not abated. Men’s urge to assert themselves through violence resurfaces like a reflex, seductive as ever, when they sense their male power, status, and selfhood threatened. 

Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover: The Sexuality of Terrorism (1989) examines the male penchant for escalating every conflict into a war. Whether defending status-quo systems of power or revolting against them, whether serving as the shock troops of the state or renegade freedom fighters, men rush to claim combat as their strategy. The reason for this battle-readiness, Morgan explains, is that what she calls “manhood identity” depends on waging wars. Whatever their cause, men always find a reason to revert to violence, and a way to justify it. Violence is justified because the violence of the enemy necessitates their own violence. It’s self-defense, really. Or violence is justified by the intensity of the injustice they’re opposing. Most importantly, the men remind us fainthearted females inclined to pacificism, violence is the only genuine proof of stregnth. On this point Morgan quotes Nietzsche: “Only an excess of strength is proof of strength; strength is restored through wounding.” Violence is also the only serious answer to a serious threat. Strategies short of wounding are rejected as passive, i.e., womanly. Real men act, real action is violent. Therefore, determined to take real action against the imperialist war machine they despised, the real men of the anti-war Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, etc., having declared a “Wargasm” on America. Even war can be justified if the good guys are the ones to launch it. 

Morgan lends further support to her theory of manhood’s reliance on violence by singling out revolutionaries for whom anti-oppression struggle was explicitly a defense of their manhood. She quotes Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver: “We shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre elected to secure his own earth-leveling manhood vicariously, via hot-and-heavy enthusiasm for the Algerian National Liberation Front’s armed rebellion against French colonization. In his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the philosopher gushes, “by this mad fury…by [the colonized’s] ever-present desire to kill [the colonizer], by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men […] This irrepressible violence…is man recreating himself.” 

In August 2020, the right-wing “Western chauvinist” group the Proud Boys gathered in Portland, Oregon to demonstrate in support of Trump’s re-election. There they were met on the street by left-wing “antifa” (anti-fascist) counterprotestors. “[T]he two groups quickly began shouting at each other and engaging in tense, face to face confrontations,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. “Within an hour of meeting, protesters began to push each other and throw objects… Many people wore helmets and body armor as they punched, kicked, and tore at each other.” A journalist for The Guardian detailed the scene that followed: “…Proud Boys discharged rounds from airsoft guns, while antifascists threw firework munitions, and both sides exchanged clouds of choking Mace and countless blows in a chaotic running street battle that lasted the better part of an hour.” To be clear, the Proud Boys and antifa are not morally equivalent. Groups like the Proud Boys engage in violence to re-entrench an oppressive status-quo, while antifa’s brawling is, ostensibly, in the name of liberation. But I’ve seen footage from the Portland skirmish, and all the boys involved, to the right and to the left, looked awfully damn proud to me. 

As the most riot-ready segment of the contemporary left, antifa bears the torch for revolting manhood’s irrepressible violence. The classic antifa  is to swarm right-wing events activists have sniffed out as fascist in sentiment and then antagonize the attendees, deemed Nazis, by hurling smoke bombs, obscenities, and punches at them. Punching, in particular, is an antifa staple. “PUNCH A NAZI” has been the movement’s trademark meme since 2017, when a black-clad antifa crusader interrupted an interview with white-nationalist thought leader Richard Spencer to punch him in the head. The video clip of the punch was an instant internet sensation and was roundly rejoiced as an antifa victory. Natasha Leonard, praised the punch in an article for The Nation as a moment of “pure kinetic beauty.” For Leonard, some guy punching another guy represented “anti-fascist bloc tactics par excellence,” a triumphant example of refusing to dilly-dally with “polite protest” or “reasoned debate,” and skipping instead straight to the good stuff: “direct, aggressive confrontation.” 

From the “PUNCH A NAZI” episode and its widespread celebration, we begin to get a sense of the antifa ethos. Men’s voices echo down the ages: violence is the only proof of strength, the only serious response to a serious threat. 

Antifa sympathizers’ justifications for their violence are likewise inherited from their forefathers in struggle. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: An Antifascist Handbook (2017), characterizes violence as a “small but vital sliver of anti-fascist activity” and states that the truly sincere anti-fascist is unafraid to be proactive in its implementation, to “shut down” fascist threats. Fascist violence justifies anti-fascist violence. Antifa violence is justified, if not as self-defense, then as a defense of “marginalized communities,” the trending Innocents in need of rescue. A simplistic good vs. evil narrative emerges, with antifa positioned as plainly good, fascists as plainly evil. Could there be a more obvious evil to pit oneself against than Nazis? It’s a no-brainer: violence against Nazis is not only justified but righteous, because Nazis are evil. 

This is the legitimizing theory behind antifa’s “street war” approach to neutralizing the fascist threat, with its action scenes of young (male) renegades in Doc Martens posed defiantly atop burning cars while flipping the bird at cops and dudes with spooky Hitler Youth haircuts. A local newspaper described an antifa rumble in Vancouver, Washington as resembling a mosh pit; while a 2020 New Yorker article supplies the following case study in the groups brand of confrontational activism: 

A mob of at least fifty young people pursued [a “nazi” target and his female companion]. 

[The target] kept up a show of equanimity until his hat and glasses were snatched away. Soon, drinks were emptied on him, objects were hurled at him, eggs were smashed on him, and he was punched and pepper-sprayed. With the blond woman’s help, he stumbled forward while someone rang a cowbell in his ears and others strobed flashlights in his eyes. ‘Kill the Nazi!’ someone screamed…

Later, when a member of the right-wing group Patriot’s Pray was in fact killed, a young woman in the antifa camp addressed her fellow warriors against evil to share the news. “He was a fucking Nazi. Our community held its own and took out the trash. I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.” The crowd cheered. 

Although the antifa camp tends to eschew Eldridge-Cleaver-style declarations of manhood – the Proud Boys and their ilk make more ado about manliness, to be sure – there is in the fury of their insurrectionary spectacle a palpable yearning for self-assertion. These rebels with a cause, once again reenacting the war games of their forefathers, perceive violence as their means to achieving power, prestige, and enhanced self-esteem. Mark Bray, arguing against the suggestion that violent resistance rarely succeeds in its aims, draws on the example of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. “These moments gave an entire people pride in a context where they faced extermination. Those brave combatants reclaimed their humanity, if only for a brief window of time,” Bray writes, implying that, had they not attempted combat, their humanity would have been utterly lost. It is apparent that he believes the same goes for his antifa brethren. Another young man, when asked why he chose to get involved with antifa activism, told the Washington Post, “I wanted a purpose…I wanted an identity. That’s the reason why I became part of antifa. I wanted to fight for something.” The identification of “humanity” and “identity” with violence is a male identification. Without a fight, Man has no self. Manhood identity depends on waging war. 

And like with any addiction, there is pleasure for men in the war they are dependent on. Wargasm is a gratification in itself. Antifa boys do not deny that they relish their street battles. Black Bloc dress-up, bullets worn as earrings. The catharsis of throwing the first punch. How exhilarating to have an enemy, someone to destroy. As antifa news site It’s Going Down editor James Anderson said in an interview with Vice, “This shit is fun.” 

Further uniting men at all stops along the political spectrum, making brothers in arms of antifa and the Proud Boys and mass shooters, too, is the fetishization of weapons as symbols of manhood. As Robin Morgan writes, to be a man is to identify oneself as a weapon and thus actual weapons surface as the default symbols of masculine identity. Weapons are phallic symbols in the deepest sense, not just out of some superficial resemblance to the penis but because they represent the capacity for violence that is integral to male power. The man who accessorizes with artillery is making a public statement of manhood. For those whose manhood is in doubt, grabbing hold of the nearest lethal weapon offers supplemental masculinity. 

The truth in this is evident in the case of shooters like Eric Harris or Eliot Rodger, whose experiences of “God-like” and “alpha male” exultation through gun ownership we have already encountered. It is equally obvious in a 2010 advertisement for Bushmaster firearms, in which a semi-automatic rifle appears next to the tagline, “CONSIDER YOUR MAN CARD REISSUED.” These are the examples likely to be offered up in mainstream media think piece on the right-wing crises of “gun culture” and “toxic masculinity.” Less apt to be mentioned, in spite of also being an obvious case of weapon-as-manhood-fetish, is the iconic portrait of Black Panther Party “Minister of Defense” Huey P. Newton, “Huey Newton Seated in a Wicker Chair.” The photograph shows Newton looking regal in a throne-like rattan chair, a gun in his right hand and a spear in his left. Also left out of the discussion is the leftist gun club boom that arose in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. One such group is the Seattle-area John Brown Gun Club. In a Guardian article, club members are shown “protecting” a trans pride event while wearing patches with AR-15 semi-automatic rifle superimposed over trans and rainbow flags. A kindred group is the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club. Asked what motivated him to start the club, one of Trigger Warning’s founders replied, “It’s a way to assert our strength. Often, queer people are thought of as being weak, as being defenseless, and I think in many ways this pushes back against that.” 

The only proof of strength, of power, is violence. To prove oneself capable of violence is to defend not only oneself but one’s selfhood, by which men mean manhood. By arming themselves, those scorned as weak (unmanly, womanly) have found a means to Man Up. 

This Manning Up strategy is in fact all the rage among those who call themselves “queer” and/or “transgender,” though no one is supposed to see or speak of it. “Trans rights” activism is leftist arena in which manhood’s romance with violence is on constant, striking display, yet goes almost entirely overlooked—because it’s considered in bad taste to point out the maleness of the violent men. Observers are forbidden from accusing men who call themselves women of “toxic masculinity,” much less male violence. It would be terribly offensive, for example, to note that warmongering manhood identity shines crystal clear through these men’s violent behavior and the justifications they supply to sanction it, though what we have before us is a textbook case. Men sense their power, status, and self-defined selfhood under threat: they have declared themselves female, and yet some women dare to deny their declarations of femaleness. By refusing to accept these men’s claims of womanhood, women challenge men’s power to be and do absolutely whatever they want. Such disrespect cannot stand. Feminist women who do not endorse the charade of male womanhood, who do not revere the men as men feel entitled to being revered, are designated the Enemy. The men respond by asserting themselves – their self-proclaimed female selves – through violence. They are righteous in doing so, because the Enemy is evil. Their violence is justified because those who don’t believe in male womanhood are literally killing them: it’s self-defense. 

The men wage a war, as they always do, since their identity – their manhood identity as well as the identity they’ve invented as “transwomen” – depends on it. Bomb threats against women’s meetings. Effigies of dead women hanged from trees. At a 2020 International Women’s Day protest in Spain, women were physically harassed, while activists screamed “Kill the TERF!” and slashed their banners with razors. Men show up to disrupt women’s events wearing “KILL THE TERF” t-shirts. Men in dresses throw milkshakes at women’s heads. They throw water bottles at women; they throw eggs. On Twitter, a man warns that “Women’s day is the national day of beating TERFs, so you will see us attacking more than one [of them] today.” In Paris, a woman is bitten in the face. In Los Angeles, a woman is surrounded, shoved, threatened with a skateboard, chased into a busy street. On Etsy, champions of the war on women can purchase buttons, stickers, t-shirts, patches and pins broadcasting their support for chopping off women’s heads with guillotines, tazing and stomping women, stabbing and shooting women. 

Men march in parades with baseball bats painted the colors of the flags that symbolize their sacred identities, as a show of strength, to demonstrate “extreme confidence during a terrifying time.” The only proof of strength is violence. 

Over and over the men instruct women to suck their “girldicks,” their “biologically female cocks” or “giant trans dicks.” Whatever the men prefer to call their genitals, their recourse to weaponized penis threats should be a sufficiently unsubtle sign of a specifically male attachment to violence call into question these individuals’ assertions of womanhood. Alas, no. Because it would be a cruelty to charge these men with being the slightest bit male, they are free to partake of as much manhood-affirming violence as they please. 

Violence in defense of threatened manhood (or selfhood, or humanity), in retaliation against perceived slights, as proof of potency and strength is not distinct to any particular set of men. It is not right-wing, not left-wing, but, as Spike Lee might say, a “dick thing.” Men of every political persuasion, even those whose power play takes the form of forcing others to pretend they’re women, have their own special methods of violent manhood restoration. Some men perpetrate racist mass shootings at supermarkets. Some men punch Nazis. Some men threaten to choke women they dislike with their genitals. Many men beat their girlfriends, their wives, their daughters. But however they choose to wage their wars, the meaning does not change: through this violence I do make myself a man. Creating and recreating themselves as men, males of all creeds embark on one rampage after another: school shootings, suicide bombings, street brawls, gang rapes, military invasions, fucking this and fucking that through clash after righteous clash. Imagining themselves warriors and heroes, the men destroy whatever threatens to deprive them of their birthright, their ascent to male dominion’s throne, until the earth is leveled and there is no one, nothing left to fight. And in that gaping void, do you suppose that then, sisters, Man shall finally find his peace?