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e p i l o g u e Irony, Instinct, and War “Thinking,” as political theorist Harvey Mansfield has written, “is by itself a challenge to the superiority of manliness.”1 That masculinity is undone by mindfulness has been a first principle of this study. And yet thought and masculinity are hardly antithetical. As detailed in the preceding chapters, normative U.S. masculinity, with all of its brutish content, has been an elaborate intellectual enterprise , mediated by literature and language and ideas, and manifested in culturally constructed mental habits and disposition. De-evolutionary masculinity betrays a certain self-consciousness, I have argued, an intentionality that belies the complex’s assumptive naturalist psychology and tends to prove its collaboration in male power taking over women and other men. My intellectual history of modern American masculinity has worked from an epistemological formulation best summarized by William James: I, for, my part, cannot escape the consideration, forced upon me at every turn, that the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind . . . a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences.2 Committed as he was to a Darwinist psychology of instinct, James still insisted on a wedge of mindfulness inserting itself between any preexistent motivational force and the particularities of human thought and behavior. The mind—even the masculinist mind—“is in the game”: that idea has guided my research and analysis in the preceding chapters. Normative U.S. masculinity’s obsession with rugged individualism can be better explained by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and other historical and social scientific thought as well as by the elaborate culture of mimicking the autonomous figure of the Old West than by the biological dynamic of a person’s neurological response to vast, open, and unpopulated physical space. Affective states of aggressiveness—while hardly inconsistent with man’s primordial past—have been cultivated through a narrative formula of savagery and killing found in popular masculinist novels, short stories, and hunting stories. Masculinist emotion has been further structured over the past 130 years or so through modern sport, including college football, which has stylized player and fan alike as a bloodthirsty brute loyal to a larger corporate whole. Killing a fellow human being in martial combat also has deep roots in human history, although the drives to do so can be traced to such intervening causes as nationalism and deriving culturally privileged pleasure in taking another life. And, similarly, the so-called natural law of sexual selection and its attendant reflex of sexual jealousy and violent rage have immediate origins in both male homosocial relations and Anglo-American common law—a contingent legal tradition that has underwritten a man’s interest in protecting his marital property. My goal in every chapter has been to isolate the institutional arrangement of a de-evolutionary psychological turn back to man’s imagined animalistic past. This historical exercise has called for no small amount of irony. Locating and coming to terms with the masculinist mind’s decision making—its “vote”—requires simultaneous immersion in and distancing oneself from meaning-making formulations that are all too alive and well today, even as they have become subject to satire, caricature, historicizing, and increasing rejection. Irony, Sam Fussell’s Muscle, and Masculinity as a “Parodic Tableau Vivant” Just how far does presence of mind go in undermining hypermasculinity? Certainly irony has a corrosive effect on masculinity and its reliance on what it takes to be instinct. Irony can approximate James’s wedge of knowingness, a self-conscious breach between biologically or culturally inherited impulse and behavior. And in focusing on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it’s impossible to ignore the diffusion of irony into virtually every effort to maintain normative U.S. masculinity. From the parodic Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche...

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