I saw a masculinist influencer on TikTok explaining how he had worn, for a year, a kind of dental device intended to spread his palate bones, which I had not known until then were welded to much like those of the skull, in order to reopen an old scar to offer his face, which he found too thin, a little more bone material. In fact, he vaguely resembled Ben Affleck, and more generally all those American actors raised between their bucket of protein powder and the chlorophyll green of the studios. I had already seen videos showing how, by chewing on rubber balls, you can make yourself a square Batman-like jaw. As if cosmetic surgery wasn’t manly enough anymore for my influencers who want to sculpt themselves first and foremost.
We keep discovering the freak show American style of toxic masculinity and its singular excesses. It does, however, have a well-documented history that begins it – it’s 9/11 – on December 6, 1989, with a mass feminicide at the Ecole polytechnique in Montreal.
How is it possible that five years later, a whole generation, mine, lined up so easily behind the opinion expressed by the narrator of Houellebecq’s first novel (“Extension of the domain of struggle”, 1994), according to which feminists are mad castrators, and men their more or less consenting victims, starting with Tisserand, the lamentable sacrificial virgin of the book? Seems crazy to me, in retrospect. The novel, which found its rhythm so singular in its unprecedented way of oscillating between moral conservatism and Marxist rhetoric, had been read with interest by a whole generation who had been amused to see theory, the famous protagonist of the intellectual scene fallen into disgrace with the fall of the Wall, thus reappearing in the literary field.
Houellebecq was no doubt then only relaying the still confidential theories of a Christopher Lasch, a sort of right-wing Marxist, or even more confidential, before Soral rediscovered him, of a Michel Clouscard, left-wing despiser of the libertarian excesses of May -68. But it was necessary that this almost picturesque current lead, about ten years later, to this impasse of French intellectual life that would have been “Micheism”, with its fantastical reinvention of a people attached above all to the defense of its vernacular culture, and at war with the devastating cultures of the individual which have only given rise to ideologies as out of the ordinary as gender theory.
It was therefore necessary for Houellebecq to become the favorite author of that reactionary left, and, even worse, the favorite author of the French New Right, so that we could finally reread his first novel for what it was ultimately: a manifesto incelthe invention, even, of this character called to ravage the new century, and whose, from TikTok videos to feminicides, we observe the terrifying appearance for a quarter of a century, the construction of this political figure of the celibate by constraint, of the virgin expiatory, scapegoat of a modernity that would have successively friendzoned him, humiliated him and finally, as I saw on TikTok, scarred in his very flesh and forced to reopen his skull in a terminal initiatory ritual that would always leave him also alone, but with an enormous jaw, a kind of new Neanderthal come back to life to die a second time on the tired shelves of museums.
Source : Nouvelobs
I work as a news website author and mostly cover the opinion section. I have been writing since I was a teenager, and have always enjoyed telling stories. I studied journalism at university and loved every minute of it. After graduating, I decided to move to London and take up a position with a Global Happenings. It has been an incredible experience, learning about all sorts of different cultures and meeting some amazing people. My goal is to continue learning and growing in my career so that I can provide readers with the best possible content.
