She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

These lines from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being had a deep effect on me when I first read them years ago. There are many ideas buried in this poignant observation.

Killing of individuality. Lack of introspection. Lack of critical thought. Handing over of agency to a central power. Violence.

All these are results of giving in to the oceanic impulse to march, wavelike among the crowd, chanting monosyllables like so many gulls. They are also hallmarks of toxic masculinity, as I would later come to realize.

After reading these lines and considering their meaning, I made certain changes in my ideology that have had deep and fanlike consequences in the way that I think. In many ways, I’m still exploring these consequences.

What I didn’t know at the time of reading Unbearable Lightness, was that it had such a perfect grave-twin out there on the dusty bookshelves of used bookstores across the country (at least in Boise). I encountered this match years later, by coincidence, as all worthwhile things come.

The twin is a novella called Seventeen, by Japan’s second Nobel laureate, Kenzaburo Oe. It is the portrait of a young, penis-obsessed male student (a rose is a rose is a rose) who has managed to “wrap[] [his] weak, petty self inside strong armor, forever to be hidden from the eyes of others.” (p. 160)

Seventeen is almost the portrait of one of those marchers that Kundera described, who marched with upraised fist, shouting identical syllables in unison. But not quite. It is the portrait of someone much more dangerous.

Toxic masculinity embodied: insecurity and egotism

The young man from Seventeen is the intermediary between the eloquent orator who manipulates the masses and the true faceless man of the march who screams and shouts threats, only to peacefully (if fitfully) sleep in his own bed and drudgingly go about his own work.

This young man from Seventeen is the one who has just the right mixture of insecurity and egotism that seems to be the recipe of toxic masculinity. As Oe goes on to show, this is something truly dangerous and violent.

He has a kind of crumpled, mangled psyche (a fact which may or may not be his fault). When fed with just the right strokes to the ego, he becomes violent against people who his insecurity tells him are his superiors. These are usually the very same people that his egotism tells him are his inferiors.

He, as narrator and object of the tale, begins with a pitiful confession that many, or most, or all, of us can relate to in some way. “I’m a chronic masturbator who’ll always be naked to the eyes of others.”

He loses an argument with his sister, which causes him tears and rage and a violent outburst. He wets himself in class after fainting in terror as his teacher describes the immensity and eternal return of the universe. Another shame-and-WD-40 soaked log on the smoldering tinder of his insecurity qua egotism.

The narrator’s real dangerous change comes after discovering the false empowerment of a uniform. In his case it is the uniform of the right-wing Imperial Way. He restates his earlier confession.

The uniform of the Imperial Way is modeled on the Nazi SS uniform. It gives me strength when I walk the streets, and an intense, memorable joy. I feel like I’ve gone to heaven, and my body is covered with an unyielding armor, like the carapace of a beetle. The tender, weak, vulnerable, unshapely creature inside is invisible to others.

Toxic masculinity as violence against women

This truly pathetic image is heightened in his disturbing sexual encounter near the climax of the novella. The leader of his Right wing organization tells him to visit a young girl at a Turkish bath who will “give his manhood a rub.”

His egotism appears to reside in his penis (or manhood, as the fascist calls it), as the insecurity does in his thoughts.

He is stripped naked and brought to orgasm by the girl. As he approaches climax, he cries with pleasure: “His Majesty the Emperor! His Majesty the Emperor!” To his impaired and violent mentality, the feminine does not exist even in his sexual fantasy. It resides somewhere outside (or in his mind, below) his true realm of existence as a Man among Men.

His toxic masculinity is further demonstrated: “I don’t say a word to this female slave as I put on my Imperial Way uniform. That’s the correct attitude.”

Immediately after this sexual encounter, the young man achieves a kind of backward and absurd clarity about his supposed enlightenment.

The fog is swept away. His Majesty the Emperor has ordered me to cast away the fog of selfishness, and I have cast it away. The individual I is dead. Selfishness is dead.

What is dead is not selfishness, but self-awareness, consciousness, and introspection. He has traded them for simplicity and blind obedience.

I feel I can give a plain and simple interpretation of a real world that once was so complicated and incomprehensible. 

The true climax of the novella, occurring in the final paragraphs sees the young man back among the crowds of Kundera’s marches of 1968 Prague. The oppositional violence of his new existence is made plainly manifest as he interprets the code of ethics of his Youth Group: “Trample the Reds, knock them down, stab them to death, strangle them, burn them!”

He describes his following actions.

I fight like a hero. I wield my stick of malice at the students, I swing my nail-studded wooden sword of hostility into a group of women. I trample them, I pursue them….The rumor that a female student has died instantly returns the confused crowd to stillness…. I experience the orgasm of a rapist.

The psyche of the toxicly masculine as described by Oe draws the same constellations between the same stars as pointed out in the quote from Unbearable Lightness above.

Identification with a male leader figure. Killing of individuality. Lack of introspection. Lack of critical thought. Handing over of agency to a central power. Violence (often against innocent women).

Truth in Stories

Oe’s Seventeen is essentially based on a true story. In October of 1960, the chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party was stabbed to death by a seventeen year old right-wing extremist. The act was caught on tape, on live TV in fact.

Oe freely used details from the seventeen year old murderer’s life in his portrait of the narrator and villain in Seventeen. Oe published a sequel to Seventeen called A Political Youth Dies. In this follow-up novel, the young man achieves his apotheosis through assassination and suicide.

Kundera’s portrait of the marches in Prague in 1968 is similarly based on a historical reality called the Prague Spring. In January of 1968 a reformist, Alexander Dubcek, was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. During the Spring of 1968, he enacted political and economic reforms, including more robust freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech is ever the enemy of autocratic dictatorships, be they right or left of political center.  The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries sent in soldiers and tanks to quell the freedoms. And when there are soldiers and tanks, violence is bound to follow. Kundera wrote his lines in response to this Communist squashing of human rights.

These two pieces highlight the violence inherent to living without a sense of introspection. They show, from opposite ends of the political spectrum and opposite ends of the perspective spectrum, that the fast track to violence and terror is to give away one’s agency, to quash critical thought, and to follow the blindly chanting crowd.

Oe’s Seventeen goes one step further, highlighting the egotism and insecurity of toxic masculinity. It is somewhere between uncanny and terrifying how well the twin themes of mob violence and toxic masculinity compliment, even explain, each other.