The crisis of male loneliness is very much in the news right now, for good reason; masculinity is certainly, to say the least, In Crisis. This is worthy of serious attention, but not from me. I’m going to focus instead on something that I think is kind of overlooked right now – what’s going on, exactly, with normie women? Women are a core demographic of the MAHA woo-woo right, many of them having abandoned long careers as Democratic voters to become fruit snack crusaders, vaccine skeptics, and general social menaces. There was a piece last month that a lot of people sent me, knowing where my interests in this stuff lie: “How New Age Women Turned Right,” by Sarah Jones. I was expecting some kind of explanation of how New Age women “turned” right, but with all due respect, the piece didn’t really deliver on that or much of anything else. It’s not exactly a book review, but most of the content summarizes one book about one very infamous New Age lady: Burning Eye Sees All, by Leah Sottile, about the late (excuse me, ascended) Amy Carlson a.k.a. Mother God and her cult, Love Has Won. Most of the insights in the piece are sourced from Sottile’s book; the one that was particularly interesting to me was Sottile’s contention that mysticism has historically been an avenue for women to transcend (heh) their restricted social status. (Including the 1970s-1980s New Age movement – Sottile points out that during these decades, women were still blocked from more mainstream spiritual authority.) Jones writes of Carlson: “she wanted authority, and a version of motherhood on her own terms, and it consumed her.” I think this is mostly right, and while the piece doesn’t explore this satisfactorily, I am going to excavate it like a commercial crystal mine for further insights.
Last month, around when the piece came out, I was also reading through most of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. His ignominious later career notwithstanding, I was really impressed by it (it came out in 1933, for Christ’s sake!), and felt like it illuminates something crucial about the MAHA moment that other analyses continue to miss (our well of collective intellectual resource getting shallower, I fear, amid the contentization and podcastification of thinking). Reich carefully synthesizes social-economic and political data about Weimar and post-Weimar Germany to make inferences about the “average personality structure” of German people at the time, the average personality structure that, he contends, made them ready and even eager to receive the contradictory rhetoric, false promises, violent fantasies, and emotional appeals of fascism. Though Reich was a psychologist, the book is not principally “idealist.” A great deal of work is devoted to demonstrating how the average personality structure is contingent on what leftists like to call “material reality,” economic conditions of work and life, social conditions at the particular historical moment, distribution of life chances, prospects for fulfillment of basic and spiritual needs, and so on. Reich focuses on sex and sexuality (feels Freudian to me, idk), contending that the industrial organization of life creates sexual frustration, in fact exploits and diverts sexual energy to make people to things like work in factories for most of their waking hours and live in nuclear families. I think this can easily be generalized to what we might call life energy, creativity, spirit, or whatever, without losing Reich’s drift. Fascism, in Reich’s analysis, is an outgrowth of this diversion and exploitation; fascism as “organized mysticism,” as he calls it (mysticism of, for example, the family, the mother within the family) offers people a sort of substitute emotional release for all their pent up and frustrated aspirations and vital energy.
In this way, the average personality structure acts like a lurking variable that serves to explain political outcomes that are otherwise contradictory at, for example, the level of balance-sheet material determination that we’re so comfortable talking in. Why do people vote against their own interests – poor people for rich people’s interests? Why do people “fall for” deceptive rhetoric and false promises? Because, according to Reich, the organized mysticism of fascist ideology offers a way to process the unbearable contradictions of social and sexual life that occur and are felt at the level of the individual psyche. German fascism affirmed, on an emotional and mystical level, the very “authoritarian family structure” (Reich’s term) that had been shredded by Weimar economic crisis. The particulars are, of course, different for us today, but I think the psychological aspect is similar. Social repression and exploitation and mystification/exaltation of the mother within an authoritarian family structure… where have I heard this before?
The family structure in the US is under tremendous strain from economic conditions, social conditions, the commodification and brutalization of sexuality and emotional life, the bite of neoliberal social and welfare policy coming into millenial maturity, even women’s putative “liberation” with the freeing of markets – now you’re free to work a shift for your boss and then a shift, unpaid, for your husband and kids! Now you’re free to subjugate yourself to the market to survive! Is this not what Reich would call “sexual misery,” the frustration and wastage of women’s life force and ambitions on a population scale? But just you try to point this out, as Chappell Roan recently did when she mentioned on a podcast episode that the moms she knows are miserable. Those miserable moms will be the first to lash out at you; in addition to the bulk of unpaid social and private labor, women also, through social media, take on the work of mystifying themselves and their lives. (I just saw a TikTok video of a woman asking her husband to take their kids to a birthday party because she was tired, they both laughed as the husband hedged and said he didn’t know if he “had it in him.” Fucking embarrassing.)
