"}Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were \u201cdecadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive\u201d.
Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see \u201cbestial brute\u201d but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can\u2019t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they\u2019re about how your woman left you, or doesn\u2019t stay true to you, or won\u2019t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn\u2019t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn\u2019t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.
A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes \u201cmasculinity\u201d in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.
(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading \u201cI Am A Man\u201d and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming \u201crapist\u201d. And, I mean, it worked. When\u2019s the last time you associated \u201cblack man\u201d and \u201charmless cuck\u201d? [When\u2019s the last time you did \u201cwhite man\u201d?])
In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up \u201cAmerica was legitimate even before the \u201860s\u201d, he\u2019d take advantage of this and redo Reagan\u2019s trick of defining himself against the \u201cwelfare queen\u201d, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.
(The flip side of that is the \u201cwoke bro\u201d, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness\u2026 was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)
Of course even within whiteness this stuff\u2019s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you\u2019ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.