The Laius Complex and intergenerational masculinity conflicts

They aren't going away. They won't ever go away without changing masculinity itself.

Over the centuries countless diatribes about kids today aren’t even manly anymore have been written — not just spoken, but actually recorded for posterity. The Mesopotamians complained about it. The Greeks complained about it. The Romans complained for sure. The Byzantines also. The English complained about it over and over and over. I could provide all the links, but honestly they’re not necessary and you can fucking google that shit yourself.

For as long as we have had writing, masculinity has been associated with dominance and with strength, with both social power and physical power. But for even longer than we have had writing, physical power has been associated with youth. Certainly effortless athleticism isn’t universal among the young, but you won’t find it at all among the old.

Meanwhile, social power is in relationships and resources. These both take time to build. While you can find relative social power differences quite easily among the young, teenagers don’t rule countries, and they don’t control corporate conglomerates.

So while there is no perfect dichotomy, social power tends to concentrate in the hands of those who are above a certain age (the age depending on the nation and the era), while physical power is concentrated in the hands of those below a certain age.

With this in mind, let’s read together the quote that provoked this post, stolen from Robyn Pennacchia’s article reprising Julia Louis Dryfuss’ thoughts on comedy, drama, and art.

"Whither are the manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt ..." — A letter to the editor of Town and Country magazine in November of 1771.

The common reaction to someone seeing a ruff-necked, silk-hosed 18th century prig writing about how positively unmanly are the kids these days is to laugh and laugh. Ironic, right? Here they are, complaining about masculinity done wrong when they, themselves, are doing masculinity wrong.

But that’s not the case at all. The reason that we see such statements over and over again throughout the ages is that this is masculinity done right. Or, rather, it’s completely horrible but also completely predictable because this is exactly what masculinity demands. When a man is young, his physical power is nearly always closer to its peak (which may or may not be a very high peak, but still, a peak). When a man is older, if he is of high enough station that his words will be remembered 250 years later, he has almost certainly gained in social power while his physical power dwindles with age.

But masculinity, remember, demands dominance. The older men cannot as a class reliably physically dominate the younger men. Physical dominance is not their natural advantage. But the older men must dominate if they are to be men at all, and thus they assert their social superiority, including their superior performance of masculinity itself.

It must particularly rankle the socially dominant men to look at their own sons and think how easily they were both physically and socially dominant over them just a few years before as those young men were slightly built boys only just embarking on the journey of adolescence. For the conservatives most closely clinging to the powers and advantages of masculinity within a patriarchal society, they must justify their continued social dominance. The youths exhibit a more desirable, more ideal form of physical masculinity, and so lest they concede the patriarchal field to a new generation, they undercut the worthiness of the next generation to take patriarchy’s reins in the only way they can believably do so, by demeaning them socially, and specifically by emasculating them socially.

It is the nature of an aggressive masculinity that demands dominance to spark these intergenerational fights, with the young relying on their advantages and the older relying on theirs. We have seen the same emasculating rhetoric over thousands of years because patriarchy has changed so little over thousands of years. But it’s not funny, and it’s not a product of a failure of self-awareness. Freud might have called it the Laius Complex, the unhealthy counterpart in the father to the unhealthy Oedipus Complex in the son.

Whatever it might be named, we will continue to see older men attack the next generation of men as effeminate and unmanly unless and until we end toxic masculinity’s dominance imperative.