Zelensky vs. the Strong Men

Two very different versions of masculinity are on display. Some men risk everything for what's right. Others obsess over controlling the weak.

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Watching Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky lead his country against an unprovoked Russian invasion is a masterclass in statesmanship — and in a particular kind of masculinity. The characteristics Zelensky puts on display — courage, integrity, righteousness — are not the sole domain of men, and there are millions of Ukrainian women displaying the same as you read this. But they do reflect one compendium of traditionally masculine virtues. Feminists spend a lot of time talking about toxic masculinity. At a moment when the world’s self-styled strongmen are using their power to attack women and LGBT people, Zelensky offers a powerful rejoinder to the tough-guy bravado of so many pathetic little tyrants.

This is not an endorsement of everything Zelensky has ever done and everything he ever will do. Hero worship isn’t helpful; Zelensky isn’t a feminist icon or a perfect man; he may very well disappoint us. But in this situation he does, to borrow from Joan Didion, have integrity. He knows the price of things.

Men like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and the like do not. Theirs is a politics of humiliation and dominance borne of insecurity and fear. And it’s a politics we increasingly see in the Republican Party in the United States. Zelensky and so many brave Ukrainians are, improbably, still in the fight to defend their homeland. Zelensky is using whatever platform and power he has to demand the world look — really look — at atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. Every day, he risks his own life, risks never seeing his wife or children again, to fight for a country so many thought would fall in a few days, but which he decided was worth everything, and here he is, still standing, and here is Ukraine, still fighting back.

He knows the price of losing. He knows that price gets higher by the day.

The entire concepts of masculinity and femininity can get quickly absurd and reductive. So I don’t mean this as prescriptive so much as reflective. Historically, there have been a lot of ways to be a good man, a strong man, and a man worthy of respect. Some of those ways include behaviors and attributes that are generally positive and helpful: Reliability, hard work, loyalty, leadership, protection, provision. And some include behaviors and attributes that are at best unhelpful and at worst dangerous: Quickness to use force, dominance, control. It’s not that many of the attributes commonly associated with masculinity are bad. It’s that too many men have seemed to need some person or a group of people to serve as their inverse — the men who can only feel strong if women are weak; the men who can only feel proud of their provision if it’s financial, and only if women don’t contribute in the same way; the men who only feel like leaders if women follow.

When we think of great men who have earned great respect, some of them are weak in this particular way of needing to see their inverse reflected back at them in order to feel powerful. But when we think of terrible men who have come to power, all of them have been weak in this particular way, and all of them transformed that desire for an inverse reflection into the public scapegoating of entire groups they deemed both weak and nefarious. And they took that scapegoating beyond the interpersonal and into the public and the political.

In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, authoritarian conservatives the world over, from Vladimir Putin to Fox News talking heads to prominent Republicans, blamed woke-ism and feminism and “cancel culture” for… well who knows for exactly what in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but certainly for making the West weak and effeminate. While brave (Ukrainian? Russian? the details weren’t important) men were picking up arms and going to war for their principles, here in the US we have transgender soldiers and fights over pronouns.

Conservative authoritarians are right about one thing: This is a broader fight over ideology and to an extent even so-called “wokeness.” But it’s not about how wokeness has weakened and feminized the West. It’s about how a comic book version of masculinity, and its related demands that women be weak and that anyone who challenges the strong man / docile woman binary be excised. This strongman masculinity, which demands no real courage and no real sacrifice, is often used in the service of authoritarianism. And this strongman character needs a vulnerable woman and maybe children to protect and provide for, and he needs a claim to some threat against his homeland, and so he also needs a smattering of enemies. These enemies certainly include outsiders — immigrants, ethnic or religious minorities — but also tend to include the women who don’t want to be under a man’s thumb, and certainly the women who aren’t willing to offer limitless procreation for the motherland, and often also the people who simply won’t opt into the man in charge / woman submissive and procreating model, which is to say gay people and other sexual minorities. This is one way anti-democratic authoritarian movements inevitably justify their existence: with promises to return to the traditional, natural order of things — an order so “natural” it takes a phenomenal amount of effort to enforce.

The weak-willed and thin-skinned little authoritarians who seek to enforce traditional and patriarchal orders often have few true principles and fewer scruples. These are not men of courage or integrity; they are not men who show up when it’s hard; they are not men with the kind of moral core that allows them to face opposition and competition and questioning. The Trumps and Putins and Orbans of the world are, like the Hitlers and Francos and Mussolinis and Lenins and Gaddafis of the past, men who need fawning acquiescence, who seek to demonstrate strength through oppression, cruelty, and abuse because they fundamentally lack the confidence and courage to stand for something other than their own self-enrichment and their own stranglehold on power — to know the price, and to be willing to pay it.

These men are cheats. They don’t want to pay for anything.

This profound moral frailty is why they obsess over things like birth rates and why they work so hard to restrict gay rights and abortion and women’s freedoms. It’s why they are so censorious, why they have always seen books about various minority groups and books that challenge the status quo and books that question tradition as threatening and deviant and worthy of banning or burning. Here, they portray themselves as tough, as masculine protectors of women or the family or children or the motherland, standing against insidious forces. But you’ll notice that the same things they tag as dangerous they also portray as weak and effeminate: Women, gay people, intellectual inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge. Over and over, strong-man leaders claim to stand for a nation and its traditions while squelching the complicated truths of that same nation’s history. It doesn’t quite add up.

No one ever accused the strong man of intellectual consistency.

As Republicans in the United States claim that they are protecting children by banning the very mention of same-sex orientation in schools, they are taking a page out of the authoritarian playbook. Similar attacks on LGBT rights and LGBT public participation were put into place in Russia under Putin, which is one reason why so many LGBT Ukrainians see the current war as about national sovereignty yes, but also about human rights — the (imperfect) expansions of rights in Ukraine, the radical contractions of those rights in Russia. Nearly a decade ago, Russia implemented its “Gay Propaganda Law,” which forbade the provision of information about “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors. Hungary has already walked back the legal recognition of transgender and intersex people, banned gender studies in university, and is set to vote on a “child protection” bill that, like its Russian predecessor, would ban any discussion or portrayal of non-traditional gender identities and orientations in schools, on television, and in advertising. Banning any public recognition of gay people, the authoritarian leaders of these countries argue, solidifies the importance of the male-led family and protects children from predators — “groomers,” the American right is calling them.

Does this sound familiar?

“Putin ain’t woke — he is anti-woke,” Steve Bannon noted approvingly on his podcast as Russia invaded. Bannon’s guest on that episode was Erik Prince. Both men voiced their approval of Russian laws curtailing the rights of transgender people.

Many of the nations that treat women and sexual minorities the worst, and nations that harshly restrict the rights of their people more broadly, are largely mum on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China and the United Arab Emirates, for example, have refused to criticize Russian atrocities in Ukraine and refused to vote on a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression.

These attacks on people with relatively little power — LGBT people, women — and these attempts to constrain their basic rights so that they have even less power and less ability to freely chart the course of their own lives is what passes for strength among the world’s weakest men.

Donald Trump’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine stands out to me. “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” Trump said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.”

This is a man who sees taking as a sign of strength. This is a man who has no idea what it means to earn anything.

Conservatives often complain that feminists are anti-male. Our criticisms of toxic masculinity — a term I will admit is tired, not particularly meaningful, and that I avoid — are interpreted as attacks on men and masculinity writ large. But masculinity can have its merits. There is, of course, no singular definition of what “masculine” means. But in its best iteration, the component parts that make it up include much of what is on display by the leader of Ukraine right now, attributes that are found in men and women alike: courage, sacrifice, tenacity, humility. And they form a telling counterexample to the illiberal, disloyal, and crude behavior that characterizes the men who seem most concerned about demonstrating their masculine strength. One demonstrates strength by standing strong when he needs to. Another yells about how strong he is and bullies those he deems weaker.

Notice who the men in your life, and the men in your government, choose to emulate.

xx Jill

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