Sophie Kemp in LA Review of Books:
My brother and I are both adults now. I am pushing 30; he is pushing 24. He is bright and kind. He is intense like me, but much more soft-spoken. He was a child when Trump first entered the public consciousness as a political threat. He was a college student when the pandemic hit. He has not and will never vote for Trump. He is perfect to me. I do not feel this way about other men his age. This is what I would like to talk about: American masculinity. I would like to talk to you about these men, who are in the cohort that is slightly younger than me, and what has become of them now that they are adults.
I think the best way to describe it is a kind of rot.
It’s so easy to backslide into if you are bored and hateful. Something about the ancient Greeks. Because of Mesopotamia. How thousands of thousands of years ago, civilization began to take shape around hierarchy. A father and his wife, his children, and their slaves. An eye for an eye—if you throw your enemy into the Euphrates and fill his pockets with rocks and he somehow survives, you will be tossed in too. There is a fantasy about all of this: a man sits in some sort of olive grove, looking out at the Aegean, and discovers a new fact about the triangle. A wife sits at the table brushing her daughter’s hair, perfect and subservient. Empedocles and how he jumped into Etna because he knew he would be reborn a god. “You’re not reborn as a god,” declares the fascist writer Bronze Age Pervert. “Maybe there’s a girl waiting. Her pussy is warm and inviting.”
Bronze Age Mindset (2018) is a fascinating document because it is very boring and stupid.
More here.
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