Boys Will Be Boys

Boys Will Be BoysIf contemporary right-wing politics is evidently authoritarian-putting aside whether it merits the designation fascist-it is also proudly and stridently the opposite.The male fantasies driving the MAGA imagination traffic in the fear of disorder, represented by open borders, chaotic cities, and sexually promiscuous women, but they also celebrate an anarchic spirit of male entitlement.Even as MAGA-ists like Tucker Carlson hailed Donald Trump as a "daddy" coming home to dispense an overdue spanking (to an imaginary teenage daughter in Carlson's porn-inflected scenario), the defining libidinal energy of the movement and its non-Trump avatars isn't only the sadomasochism of order and discipline.It's also the explosive, expulsive eroticism of boyish misbehavior.They aren't angry daddies; they want to make mommy mad.A helpful theorist here, to complement and complicate Klaus Theweleit, might be Leslie A. Fiedler (1917A.Fiedler ( -2003)), a literary scholar and cultural polemicist who placed the male revolt against maturity at the center of the American tradition.In Love and Death in the American Novel he identified a "strategy of evasion"-of escape from civilizing, restraining social forces associated with women and marriage-"that makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly 'boyish'" (xxi).In Fiedler's account, oppressive authority is often construed as feminine: the mother, the household, the scolding wife, the oppressive domestic regime.The male urge isn't to conquer that but to break free of it.That's a thread that goes through Rip van Winkle, Huckleberry Finn, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, James Dean and Marlon Brando, early rock and roll, classic westerns, and the arrested-development film comedies of the 1990s and 2000s.Women in this world are scolding mothers, schoolmarms, bluestockings, makers of rules, enforcers of respectability, enemies of pleasure, withholders of sex.