Week 39, Entry 4

[goatgodschild]

There’s this thing in writing that I’ve started calling “creepy masculinity”, as distinct from “toxic masculinity”. 

To my mind, toxic masculinity is what you call it when trying to perform/extract a standard of masculinity from yourself and others becomes dangerous, and harms both you and the people around you. My go-to example of this is Marty Hart from True Detective: The Long Bright Dark, TD for short.

Marty, by the time we meet him, both in the present day and in flashbacks, is a mess. He’s violent to the people he doesn’t care about, whiny to the ones he does, damages every relationship he comes in contact with for not providing the proof (to him) that he’s a “real man”. He refuses to call his daughters by their names, only referring to them by pet names or insults, and has no pictures of them in his house (although there are his fishing trophies and several blown-up pictures of him in his college football outfit). He sleeps around because he thinks that it will prove to himself and to everyone else that he’s still young (he’s 32-ish at the time). Every man he meets, he first describes in terms of whether or not they could beat him up, or if he could beat them up.

By the end of TD, he’s learned to be a marginally better person, but it took being completely single and friendless for years, plus getting an axe to the chest. The narrative does not shy away from the fact that it was probably sheer laziness that kept Marty from being a serial killer, that Marty is bad and should feel bad.

Creepy masculinity is when the story shows that, objectively speaking, this man is terrible, but the story assures us that his actions are ultimately correct and “normal”. I’m not sure what a good TV/film example would be that a lot of people I know have seen, but Garth Ennis writes it in spades.