Sometimes You Gotta Fight When You're a Man

Anxious masculinity and preening congressmen

"Fight!" by Aislinn Ritchie is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This piece was prompted by events that occurred a couple of weeks ago, which in much of the news media is considered a no-no. In fact, in my work as a political columnist I’m often bound by an unstated 48-hour rule: If the news “hook” of the column I’m proposing occurred more than 48 hours before when the finished column will appear, editors will usually nix the idea and request that I come up with something more current. Fortunately, here at The Cross Section I’m bound by no such rule. So come along for a consideration of performative displays of manhood as expressed in politics and culture, including a consideration of an old but fascinating country music hit. 

America is facing a crisis of manhood, or so one conservative after another has insisted. And to watch Republican politicians these days, it’s absolutely true. Unsure how to be a man in the world, they feel the need to enact histrionic performances of masculinity, so voters will be assured they are brimming with strength and virility. The result is an ongoing gender farce playing out on the campaign trail, in the media, and in Congress, one often rooted in the fantasy of righteous violence. It’s a drag show without the irony and self-awareness.

To really bore into this disturbing state of affairs we have to look at what happens in the explicitly political realm and consider the cultural undercurrents that feed it. Let’s begin with the former.

The quest to assert manhood, and its intersection with violence, has been unusually visible of late. A Tennessee congressman who voted to boot Kevin McCarthy from the speakership claims McCarthy elbowed him in the kidney, and runs off to confront him. “If I would hit somebody, they would know I hit them,” McCarthy says later, lest anyone question his fighting skills.

In a Senate hearing, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma challenges Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien to a fight; O’Brien accepts, and it gets to the point of Mullin rising from his chair before Sen. Bernie Sanders scolds him: “Sit down. You’re a United States senator.” 

Mullin then goes on a tour of right wing media outlets to talk about his love of fighting (he was once a professional MMA fighter) and desire to bring more of it to Congress. In one appearance on Fox Business, he talks about the history of fistfights and “canings” in Washington in the 19th century, an apparent reference to the incident in 1856 when Rep. Preston Brooks, a slavery advocate from South Carolina, used his cane to beat Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, nearly to death on the Senate floor. For Mullin, this is not a cautionary tale but an example to be emulated. “Maybe we should bring some of that back and it’ll keep people from thinking they’re so tough,” he says. Sean Hannity laments to Mullin that we’ve lost the glorious bloodletting of his youth, when every day’s pickup game of football or basketball included an exchange of blows. “When all of a sudden did we become that woke?” Hannity asks.

The culture of honor, and what you have to do when it’s threatened

One of the responses Markwayne Mullin made to the criticism he got over his childish outburst was to say that “In Oklahoma, if you run your mouth, you get called out. Period.” Mullin is saying (with pride) that he comes from a place saturated in violence, where objectionable utterances must produce either a threat or a fight. 

It’s a stance that would be familiar to scholars who have studied the “culture of honor” that is particularly prevalent in the South, which says that even minor slights must be met with swift retribution, often in violent form, in order to protect a man’s social standing. In one seminal study, researchers had someone bump into unwitting test subjects in the hall and call them an “asshole,”  then tested their physical reactions and answers to questions. The subjects raised in the South “were (a) more likely to think their masculine reputation was threatened, (b) more upset (as shown by a rise in cortisol levels), (c) more physiologically primed for aggression (as shown by a rise in testosterone levels), (d) more cognitively primed for aggression, and (e) more likely to engage in aggressive and dominant behavior.”

The culture of honor is not confined to the South, of course; in the right circumstances not only do we associate with almost anyplace, but those on the political right are sure to celebrate it. When Greg Gianforte, then a congressional candidate in Montana, grabbed and body-slammed a reporter for asking him whether he supported a particular health-care proposal in Congress, then lied to police about it, he was treated as a hero among conservatives. The reporter “got a little bit of Montana justice,” said a Fox News host. Rush Limbaugh called Gianforte “manly and studly.” “Any guy that can do a body slam, he's my guy,” Donald Trump said later. Gianforte not only won that race, he is now governor. 

Of course, there is no more prominent advocate of interpersonal violence than Trump, who would often claim his eagerness to get bloody to his feral, whooping crowds. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” he’d say of a protester, and encourage his supporters to do the same. Despite never having shown a moment of physical courage in his life, Trump imagined himself an action hero. “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” he said after the Parkland high school shooting, an idea so laughably preposterous no one even knew how to respond.

Just like Markwayne Mullin or Kevin McCarthy, Trump is only playacting, as was Joe Biden when he said of Trump, “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” But we’ve been fed the fantasy of delivering a well-deserved knuckle sandwich to those who are threatening or just obnoxious so many times that almost everyone feels the urge at one time or another, even if most of us won’t ever act on it. 

If you’re an actual adult, you can master those deep-seated impulses so we can all live in a civilized society together. That’s what Bernie Sanders meant when he told Mullin to sit down: Show some dignity. Have some control over yourself. Act like a man, not like a boy who’s worried people won’t think he’s manly enough. 

But that’s the problem: Culture and politics constantly reinforce the belief that manhood is eternally fragile, something you can lose at a moment’s notice should you not perform it in the proper way. And a man who is unwilling to fight other men over matters important or trivial must not really be a man. 

Defining manhood, in song and on film

Manhood is thus not something a man defines for himself, but something the community around him defines - the community grants it, and can take it away. To see how this idea is expressed and reinforced, let’s take a dive into one fascinating artifact, Kenny Rogers’ 1979 hit single “Coward of the County.” It’s the story of a man named Tommy who had been told by his father, who died in prison, not to repeat his mistakes. Tommy’s reluctance to participate in physical violence is so remarkable within his community that everyone knows about it; the song’s first line is “Everyone considered him the coward of the county.” This is a place so violent that should a single man not engage in regular brawling, he will be identified and scorned by the entire community as a contemptible wuss. 

The chorus goes like this:

Promise me, son,

Not to do the things I've done

Walk away from trouble if you can

It won't mean you're weak

If you turn the other cheek

I hope you're old enough to understand

Son, you don't have to fight to be a man

A noble message perhaps, but one that will turn out to have tragic consequences. Tommy obeys his father, at the cost of becoming a social pariah. Nevertheless, he manages to find love with a young woman named Becky. But just a few lines after we meet her, Becky is gang-raped by the three Gatlin brothers. After contemplating his father’s words one last time, Tommy goes to the local bar and finds the Gatlins:

Twenty years of crawling

Was bottled up inside him

He wasn't holding nothing back

He let 'em have it all

When Tommy left the bar room

Not a Gatlin boy was standing

He said, "This one's for Becky"

As he watched the last one fall

A common argument among today’s dime-store philosophers of manhood is that one of a man’s key purposes is to protect the weak, with violence if necessary. You hear this in the “sheepdog” analogy repeated often on the right, which says there are three kinds of people in the world: wolves (the predators), sheep (the prey), and sheepdogs, who use violence to protect the second from the first. But in “Coward of the County,” Tommy doesn’t protect Becky; indeed, within the world of the song it’s reasonable to conclude that it was his unwillingness to fight that led the Gatlins to think they could rape her without consequence. She had no sheepdog protecting her. 

Though Tommy turns out to be capable of violence as he finally casts off his pathetic history of “crawling,” that violence is used only for vengeance. “This one’s for Becky,” he says, but he can’t undo what happened to her; beating up the Gatlins is something Tommy does for himself, restoring his social standing by proving his manhood. In the TV movie made from the song, the bar fight is presented as fun and triumphant, complete with upbeat music and a crowd of onlookers who cheer when Tommy finally shows himself willing and able to give as good as he gets. Even Tommy’s preacher uncle (played by Kenny Rogers himself) joins in the fun, grinning happily as he gives the Gatlin boys’ father a whupping. When the fight is over Tommy and his uncle embrace in joy, huge smiles on their faces:

By the end of the song Tommy has learned his lesson; he tells his father, “Papa, I sure hope you understand/Sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man.” 

Films like this one that end with the villain getting a righteous pummeling from the hero (or a bullet in the head) are too numerous to count. Anyone who partakes of popular culture has seen that narrative play out thousands of times. In men, fighting ability is usually a proxy for virtue; sooner or later the hero shows he knows what to do with his fists, and we even have stories in which supposedly advanced societies (e.g. Wakanda) decide leadership by having two guys fight to the death.  

That men have no choice but to meet offense with blows is even written into our laws. The Supreme Court specified a “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment, which says that some statements, “those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace,” are not protected speech. The idea is that if you say something bad enough to a man — and it’s almost always a man — violence is inevitable. He can’t be expected to restrain himself. And over half the states have passed “Stand Your Ground” laws, the manly name given to measures that allow you to kill someone if you believe they’re threatening you. To paraphrase Tommy, sometimes you have to kill when you’re a man.

This is the tradition the avatars of anxious masculinity like Markwayne Mullin and Kevin McCarthy are tapping into, one that every day in America produces assaults and murders as men decide that violence must be the response to some offense if their manhood is to be sustained. It’s been a while since anyone has exchanged blows in Congress, but if it happened next week, none of us would be surprised.