My male peers are becoming more concerned with discipline — with their own discipline, and with the discipline with others. They are referring to a kind of rigour they deem necessary for mental and/or physical excellence, a volitional tautness that goes into being a healthy adult. But I have had my suspicions that their concern with discipline is not a positive thing at all for anyone involved. I am starting to suspect that discipline is nothing other than the spiritual economy of shame and critique that turns boys into men.
Despite the face of it, I do not suspect they are interested in a kind of general virtue or ability. This is because where their discipline is exercised and strengthened is in experiences of denial, in particular corporeal denial. More and more of my male friends are quitting masturbation, going vegan, meditating, trying to drink less and sleep more. They want to eat plain food and drink water. As one good recently recounted, he was lying on a stone floor in harsh weather camping in a rural bit of Scotland, drenched and cold. He told me that he thought whilst enduring, ‘This is exactly where I need to be.’ My first thought was to imagine a younger version of him, a seven year old, in the same place: at what point did extreme denial become an appropriate experience for this young man?
My friends are on the surface being reasonable. It is very hard to argue with them because they always have good reasons to justify the ascetic practice of the week. Why quit masturbation? ‘I am concerned with the ethics of pornography.’ Why go vegan? ‘The planet!’ Meditation? ‘It is good for my temper’ Drinking less, sleeping more? ‘I want to grow up.’ And yet each new and shiny rationalisation aside, each practice is the site of discipline battled for and won. I think the ironic logic of their denial is lost on them, however: it is through one lens a hunger strike, another lens a binge. Their bodies are denied or put through hell, but their egos are fed. Their discipline (or lack thereof) makes them special, makes them excellent — makes them men.
I have not yet read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault so I am nothing of an expert, but I have read about his conception of ‘discipline’. It seems that it is no accident to Foucault that the word ‘discipline’ can mean both a kind of punishment and a kind of effective control over the will. Here is Stephen M. Young explaining Foucault’s key ideas:
To explain disciplinary power, Foucault famously employs Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon – the architectural layout of a prison where the guards reside within a central tower and maintain surveillance over all inmates – which does far more than structure the building. For Foucault, ‘the major effect of the Panopticon [was] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’. This permanent visibility was constant but also unverifiable, in the sense that one would never know whether, in fact, anyone was watching. Foucault saw Bentham’s Panopticon figuratively, as a technological ‘ideal form’ of power that already existed elsewhere, albeit not in such a concentrated and elegantly articulated blueprint.
Young points out that unlike ‘absolutist, monarchical or sovereign form of power’, where some individual is believed to be the wielder of power, the panopticism of disciplinary power means that power is automatised and disindividualised. He goes into more detail about the psychic character of disciplinary power:
This form of power is neither a public spectacle nor an interrogation by one who controls power over a subject. When one knows that they are subject to a constant but unverifiable gaze, as does a prisoner in the Panopticon, the prisoner knows they could be watched and inscribes that gaze within themselves, on their souls to become useful, productive, and effective. As represented by the Panopticon, disciplinary power involves surveillance and control that works on the body and into the souls of the inmates. They become self-disciplined.
There is unsurprisingly something panoptical about masculinity, about the ways my male peers all go to the gym together, make group chats about it, share diets. When considering the way in which patriarchal power ultimately hurts men as well, it can help to see that men are both guards and prisoners: at once empathising with and obscuring their own perspectives as men, at once falsifying the truth in portraying it. Men look at themselves through the way they look at each other, and they look at women only to concern themselves again with themselves i.e with how women see them. This developmental ethic of discipline is narcissistic. In ‘The New Narcissism,’ Lara Prendergast writes
Writing for the Times recently, Anna Murphy described how she preferred the bodies of men who do yoga. It makes men look ‘stronger, leaner and a lot sexier’, she said. Stronger, leaner, sexier. What man wouldn’t want to seem like that to a woman? And what man would now dare to say such a thing about women’s bodies?
And Prendergast goes on to touch on the ambiguity of ‘discipline’, its face as punishment:
There is a dark side to the modern male fixation on intensive self-improvement and ethical dieting. In July last year, the NHS reported a 70 per cent rise in adult men being admitted to hospital with an eating disorder. Around the same time, it was revealed that steroid use had quadrupled. Up to a million people in the UK now take anabolic steroids in order to make themselves look more muscular — and one in ten men who go to a gym are thought to have ‘muscle dysmorphia’: the neurotic belief that their bodies are insufficiently toned.
Like the prisoners under the Panopticon, men have developed a kind of mechanism of masochism — they take pleasure in their own suffering. They do not find themselves worthy, though they do not find themselves unworthy exactly either — because they believe with the right action they can become worthy and the right action involves a kind of affliction. That is, they can become strong, lean and sexier and their reward — their freedom — is in sex (how women see them) and status (how other men see them). But I think there is another reason why men are clinging to their discipline, and it is because the panoptical gaze knows that chasing women and status is not good practice.
But Prendergast is right: it is a new narcissism. It has a different tone and pace. Many modern men have been given enough leeway to come out as lovers of a Downward Dog and readers of Eat, Pray, Love, as oat milk drinkers and open to pagan spirituality. They are enjoying a smidge of self-expression, a smidge of moral consciousness, but this itself does not account for the tonal difference. Call me a pessimist, but even as die-hard vegans it feels as if the disciplined are simply trying to kill two birds with one stone: to inhabit the space of a changing masculinity at the same time as negotiating to keep its privileges. It can feel as if they are trying to say, ‘Hey, look at me! Masculinity isn’t that bad, it can be good!’ The disciplined-undisciplined young man, with his poorly nourished soul yet plump ego, enacts an unconscious fantasy every time he looks at his lean, green body in the mirror: He enacts a fantasy where he takes himself to find a version of patriarchy, a kind of oppression, that women will be happy with.
Men can drink as much Huel as they want; be celibate; go to a solstice; read Fanon; build wells — it won’t matter. It won’t change the fact that the only form of masculinity that feminism should be interested in is that form which continues to critically take itself apart, that form which disarms itself. I love my friends, but I sincerely hope they don’t become ‘men’, that they don’t become what exactly they have in mind when they use the word. I hope that if they have a continued relationship with themselves scripted in terms of ‘discipline’ that they can have the imagination to use the term better. In a language they might understand: It takes discipline to read all of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; it takes discipline to learn Icelandic; it takes discipline to knit a scarf or master the principles of soup-making. You could even say it takes discipline to dismantle the patriarchy too. I love my friends; I hope they can love themselves as well.
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