It seems to me that the main source of hierarchy starts in the smallest of spaces: in the nuclear family. It starts here because it is here that young individuals are started off as contrasted against their mother, and, as extension, all people in her category (female). In short, one becomes a boy by being nothing that a girl is.
Freud spoke about the Oedipus complex, how at a certain stage of development we’re supposed to rival our same-sex parent for the attentions of the opposite-sex parent. How exactly small children are to know existentially which parent is in such a category and why is not quite explained, so far as I can tell. In fact, to be honest, female children get the short shrift in Freud’s moral story. All children are seen in his view as competing for the attention of the primal mother; so for the daughter to suddenly go from seeking her mother’s attention to garnering steam in the other direction, for father, seems kind of tied on there. Like Freud didn’t really flesh that one out.
The son goes from wanting his mother’s doting, motherly attention to vying for her peer-driven attention, as his father’s rival—that’s a full arc of character development, tragic as it is. But daughters are not given the same inherent character growth. There’s no agony encoded in the developmental cycle of the lifespan for them, except as the thrown-bone contention of penis envy, a mirror formation of castration anxiety (a concept which has complete resonance for males).
Penis envy: an idea only a man could foist upon all women.
But I think Freud was driven to understand a fundamental difference between boys and girls because there seemed to be such a gulf between sons and daughters. (Never mind the fact that society differentially conditions each, so that it is impossible to set aside any one characteristic or constellation of traits as being due to sex differences as opposed to merely environmental/caused by childrearing practices.) And part of that gulf is this: boys are encouraged, are conditioned, to regard their positive growth as being deliberately contrasted against the alternative of being the opposite sex.
For Freud, this mean the son as a very young boy stops seeing himself as part of his mother (as it is acknowledged all children first do). He does this to cleanly identify with the father as an equal (rivals are those equally pitted). He is to mark all of the differences between mother and father in order to identify with those more of his equal. If mother and father share qualities, they can be drawn from the father image and left out of the mother image, in terms of this contrast. Thus, when the boy is later tasked with distancing himself from his mother, he has remaining this caricature of rejected and half-recognized traits that stands for not-boy: that stands for girl.
Hence it becomes a horror to be told one throws like girl. Or sounds like a girl. Or laughs like a girl. Or any umpteenth thing that could possibly separate one from another in terms of infirmity and the humiliation that naturally comes from being so infirm. That’s the connection made in the minds of young boys everywhere: to be a girl is to be lesser-than. Don’t call me a girl.
Socialized into this pecking order by those before them, and those by men before them, older boys initiate the younger ones into this society (between ages three and seven, though this continues through adolescence), through a practice of hazing, attitude-modeling, and teasing that can travel even into the sadistic. Humiliation is key. It is by this one axis of emotion—that of extraordinary social fear and the threat of isolation—that these habit formations take such profound effect, in terms of depth and longevity.
Such fear of abandonment strikes the heart of a person such that one can be motivated, especially at such a young age, to split off the disaffected parts of oneself in order to distance one’s self-image from those traits. The traits still exist, but now they are not recognized as part of self—they are compartmentalized away. Often, due to repression issues, the traits are projected or displaced onto others.
A split is a serious developmental crisis. We’re not necessarily talking about the classic split personality, but in terms of compartmentalized aspects of one’s self, that honestly ranks pretty high in terms of importance, in terms of needing intervention. When a split first happens is the best time to heal the breach, so the closer one is to the trauma the more possibility of correcting the split before it becomes established. But it calcifies with time and grows more antagonistic as more contrasts are drawn in the hazing/socializing rituals.
These are the rituals that encode for being masculine/being not-girl. This includes taking sharp strikes in various parts of the body, whether braced for them or sucker-punched; being suffocated or wrestled to the ground; dunked under water; tested with the flame of a lighter under the palm to see “how long he can take it”, etc. All of these boys-will-be-boys hazing rituals are thinly disguised sessions in sadism and humiliation in the form of games of pain toleration.
And back of all this, with these lumps of flesh, the boy is left to think, “I can take it because I’m a boy. Because I’m not a girl.” This is operant conditioning.
Once you have such a society of boys, the gating mechanism for enforcement of behavior is the continued contrast between compliance (affirmed as a boy) and difference (gender called into question). This is the kernel of misogyny. This joins the boys into a pact of behavior conformity as a form of gender alliance, and thus necessarily excludes females from the company of their consideration. This exclusivity is the basis, the pollinating germ, of the old boys’ club, and of the idea that all things feminine are inferior or beneath them.
It’s the establishment of a hierarchy in the guise of setting norms in a community of peers. The peers to each other are seen as equals; all outside of the group are seen as lesser-than. All guys on the mountaintop. That can be seen as the model.
Splitting, in terms of shunting off parts of one’s essential senses of self in order to conform to an ideal, creates a weakened ego. A good deal of energy is manifested in just the maintenance of that barrier (with all of its attendant repressions). That’s energy that doesn’t get invested in structures of ego development. Fixations may form; this is known as arrested development.
I would posit that a common split that happens in a culture where hyper-heterosexuality is affirmed (hyper meaning the frequency and the magnitude of contrast drawn between differences in physiological sex) would be that of splitting off “female traits” that are scared off of self due to allegations that it might signify homosexuality. Conversely, “homosexual traits” can be frightened into extinction due to allegations that those are “girly”. The tautology is devastatingly destructive.
In such a society of boys, homosexuality is a betrayal, because it brings in these elements that have already been encoded as being not-boy, as being lesser-than. In fact, by definition these traits have been so defined. So this exhibition of being boy-but-not-boy introduces too much confusion and intricacy in a system where distinctions are meant to be dichotomous.
Gender as an enforced dichotomy becomes a ruling axis of behavior. Thus, by maintaining the gate of boyness and masculinity, the male group ultimately enforces heterosexuality, by the exclusivity of the definitions of those conditions, what it means to be a boy.
This group hazing process ensures an understanding of hierarchy (the older boys initiate the younger), and it is this establishment of hierarchy that the boys take into various aspects of adult life. The value of hierarchy is inculcated at this communal level, by way of enacting these rituals and practices. That is to say, they learn by doing.
If they learn that they must hide away essential parts of the self in order to not even recognize traits that might be more feminine—or, heaven forbid, homosexual—in order to conform, then they are not only maintaining that gender boundary for themselves (though they must, in order to justify killing off essential parts of themselves) but now they maintain the boundary externally, too. It must be enforced universally, because it must reflect the rightness of the inner state of the split. Thus the homophobic can become one of the most onerous enforcers of gender conformity. They criticize others in order to patrol their own grounds.
Right now we are buffeted on all sides by a blitz against a broad swath of sexuality. Female sexuality is attacked, gay marriage rights are being threatened, trans identities are being legislated out of the lexicon and so out of existence; all of these are concomitant with the rise of fascism in our country. These are not separate movements; they are part and parcel.
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Jason Stanley: Fascist forms of authoritarianism are harshly anti-feminist. We can see the attack on abortion. You know, people are like, “Oh, well, the Nazis countenanced abortion.” But the Nazis viewed abortion as murder. They viewed abortion as murder. They were just fine with murdering non-Aryans. Abortion for Aryan mothers was strictly forbidden and enormous penalties faced doctors who provided them. So the view that abortion is murder, the view that women’s bodies are under government control, women’s bodies are for the delivery of babies, that is common to fascism.
It is by this extreme policing of gender conformity that males uphold and retain their gender-exclusive society-within-society. When certain men act like only they are people, this goes back to this all guys on the mountaintop model where men in the stratosphere talk and govern amongst themselves, in a council of peers, before considering opinions inferior to them coming from below. They act like this because they already do this.
Fascism thrives on this extreme gender dichotomy. It potentiates already established patriarchal patterns. Fascism exults this very idealized image of the classically virile man, the nucleus of the family. But necessarily this means that fascism is glorifying the male specimen. In order to so idolize the image as is culturally demanded, all traces of homosexuality must be banished from conscious acknowledgment. That means externally there can be no permitted instances of gay acceptance, no gay marriage, no gay courtship or even friendly behaviors. There can be no reminders to the very masculine men of this fascist culture that they worship the perfect male form.
Much energy goes into enforcing this boundary by those invested in the society, who derive their identity from it (perhaps because they let their identities be limited or determined by it). The foot soldiers of fascism are often the most brutal exactors of gender conformity. They gain power by persecuting others.
Maintaining a high threshold for virtue guarantees that there will be those left out of that population that one can villianize to great effect. Today we see that with pregnant people. We see that with trans people. These people have been found on the opposite side of gender virtue and thus must be made into examples.
But much of this still goes back to boy-but-not-boy, the position occupied by the gay person, the gender nonconformist. Those who defy gender conformity and break past the extreme silencing power of stigma, those who speak out and declare their gender identity as not conforming to the dichotomy, are those who have chosen their own egos over and opposed to melding with the group; thus the person has doubly shown themselves to be untrustworthy, as far as patriarchy is concerned. For patriarchy is a racket.