Dismantling Men
On patriarchy, masculinity and the fear of losing power
We were born and raised in a Western world shaped by a patriarchal society in which everything revolves around the male figure. Even today, our culture is steeped in references that portray women as crushed, submissive, as though the only way to preserve the status quo were to demean the female gender.
This line of reasoning fits almost every aspect of European society in recent years: woman as danger, as enemy, as antagonist.
“All feminists are ugly and horrible,” said Maximilian Krah, Bundestagsabgeordneter for the AfD.
Fear of difference is that set of negative and unfavourable emotions triggered when we encounter people whose characteristics differ from our own, such as skin colour, religious beliefs or sexual orientation [see: Michael A. Hogg, Graham M. Vaughan, Social Psychology: Theories and Applications, Pearson, 2012]. Paradoxically, we are light years away from the Enlightenment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his myth of the noble savage. There is no longer any interest in exploring differences; instead, the shortcut adopted by today’s politics is to move in the opposite direction: to exacerbate conflicts.
The radical solution is easy.
It is a precise strategy that screams at the top of its voice, channelling the frustrations of an inadequate social class into indiscriminate — yet discriminatory — hatred.
It is not a justification, but an acknowledgement.
Today’s man is weak, insecure, and afraid to admit it. To avoid doing so, he turns to the authoritarian model, repeating the historical games already witnessed at the beginning of the last century, when Romanticism gave way to the Nietzschean myth of the Übermensch.
The man who is going under is the man who is becoming the Übermensch. To go under means to pass from one condition to another. When man comes to an end, new possibilities open up. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch” [Prologue to Zarathustra, 4].
And going under is precisely a key concept for understanding modern patriarchy.
The strong man went into decline at the beginning of the 1990s, with the fall of Soviet communism and the Berlin Wall, with gunslinger George Bush and the First Gulf War, with the judicial scandals and major Mafia attacks that shook Italian politics, and, a decade later, with the rise of large-scale terrorism inspired by political Islam.
The decline of the strong man is also explored in an intriguing novel, Männer töten, by Austrian writer Eva Reisinger [Leykam, 2023]. The novel imagines an escape from the fleeting values of a superficial society (Berlin, precarious work, alcohol, wild parties) and a return to apotropaic myths and a kind of Amazonian society in which women — modern praying mantises — mate in order to reproduce and, once they have achieved their purpose, kill the male, rendering him useless for the future. Threat neutralized.
Although the novel does not entirely work, partly because its structure lacks subtlety, the idea that the women’s movement is infused with a rage so pure and profound that it becomes revolutionary is nonetheless thought-provoking.
The step from Sad Girl to Rage Girl is a short one [see also: “Rage Girl Literature”: Bücher über wütende Frauen als Trend on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 2026].
Feeling misunderstood by society, women writers — and consequently their protagonists — seek redemption on the pages of fiction; together, they discover a new self-awareness that brings together a nihilistic attitude, collective and collectivist intelligence, and a punk spirit already familiar from the days of riot grrrl music.
Take, for example, Bikini Kill’s Feels Blind:
How does it feel? It feels blind
How does it feel? Well, it feels fuckin’ blind
What have you taught me? Nothing
Look at what you have taught me, your world has taught me nothing
We men have underestimated the spark of a female revolution that is beginning to erupt through art in all its forms. Just think of Marina Abramović’s thematic experiments.
According to a recent survey, one man in three would rape women if he were certain he could get away with it. That says a great deal about his impending decline.
The male gender is lost.
And perhaps that’s for the best.