MUCH SOUND AND FURY Post uprising toxic masculinity

by Mithila Mahfuz

FOR the last two years, we have been witnessing the popular rise of a type of masculine identity which has rung alarm bells in feminist and women’s activist circles. This very rigid model of masculinity is seen proliferating in public spaces, including and especially social media. The faces of the ‘July boys’ have often promoted and embodied such masculinity. Right-wing groups are at one with it.

We all know this type of man online or offline. Most of us feminists have been slutshamed and slandered by men who identify themselves with this model of rigid masculinity. One well-known strategy employed by this type of man is the swift disposal of non-conforming people — leftists, women, gender-diverse people, and their allies — whose contributions to the July uprising had been evident. In the post-uprising period, the latter group were pushed aside through large-scale and intensely personal attacks. For these embodiers of toxic masculinity, the definition of gender is what they claim to be the only pure ‘natural’ meaning: one can only be either a cisgender heterosexual man or woman. The world according to them is ‘naturally’ divided and hierarchical. Women are ‘naturally’ inferior and subordinate and need more controlling. Those who do not fall into the cis hetero category are against this ‘nature’ that they refer to and defend.

These men are fed up with liberal culture because it has, according to them, bred what they understand as feminism and a left whom they call ‘cultural fascists’. They are fed up with women heads of state. They take the failure of women rulers, such as autocrats like the fallen prime minister Sheikh Hasina, as evidence to support their idea that it is their type of men, alpha males, who should rule. They feel cancelled by feminism. They feel cancelled by the global liberal democratic system.

These men are loud, rebellious, angry, self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascist’ (read anti-Hasina), self-righteous, vulgar, always in attack mode, and consider themselves protectors and saviours of tradition (and everything else). That’s why we see so many of such men in violent, destructive mobs. We see this masculinity propagated by bots and social media pages, religious groups, media outlets, and influencers. They believe they are entitled to attack and destroy anything that does not acknowledge them. Their arrogance and sense of acceptance have been further fortified by the normalisation of mob justice during the interim government’s tenure, compounded by the long-standing absence of justice and public accountability.

Not all such men are members of an organised group or fraternity; nor do they necessarily belong to Islamist militant outfits. They may be isolated individuals or members or sympathisers of various right-wing groups, but they share a fraternity grounded in a common ideology that places male supremacy at its centre. Another connection is that they are all nationalists. Misogyny, sexism, and homophobia, otherwise, are not new to us. They exist across the political spectrum — left, right, and centre — and cut across class and ethnicity. Bengal’s vibrant queer and trans cultures, and its diverse gender identities, have long threatened the capitalist nation-state. As a result, queer and trans communities have faced sustained repression, criminalisation, and exploitation.

These men, on the other hand, do not shy away from publicly declaring violence to make their point. They are unruly bullies whose social and political rhetoric constitutes toxic sexual imageries. This masculinity is so trendy because it shows no inhibition in using the vocabulary of rape to attack its enemies or to put women in their place. Remember how the slain leader of Inquilab Mancha, Osman Hadi’s threat against the Awami League went viral, ‘shauwa mauwa chhira falaite hobe’. It literally means, ‘Your [Awami Leaguers’] vagina needs to be torn apart.’ The recording of Hadi’s speech immediately went viral on social media. This framing of sexual violence as justice, which toxic men immediately identified with, shot Hadi’s fame to a new height. It is my belief that the toning down and inclusivity we saw in Hadi’s later rhetoric were due to him realising that the wrong camp was picking up on and appropriating his language, thereby tarnishing his politics, which were to fight against all forms of cultural hegemony. Or consider Pinaki Bhattacharya, a right-wing political commentator and influencer — indeed, one might say a conspirator in exile in France — who has become a major guru of this toxic masculine culture.

Gender roles are already deeply normative in Bangladeshi society to the extent that the liberals among these conservative men often resemble the very liberals they claim to oppose. They profess to support women’s empowerment, but only so long as women perform womanly roles with equal competence. They believe this is possible only if women do not ‘go astray’ — as they are supposedly ‘naturally’ inclined to do and are allowed to do within a liberal culture — but instead perform their nature- (read God-) ordained duties. Men are, by default, providers, while women can study and work outside the home only if they are doing so to meet the family’s survival needs. Liberal culture, according to these men, has lured humans toward a downfall — a decline in uptight morals. And society, the polity, must be rescued. And one of the first steps toward a peaceful future is cleaning up the liberal trash of feminism, socialism, and democracy. They want to supplant the existing order with an authoritarian, sanitised (read highly surveilled and policed) version of ‘popular’ culture for the greater good.

Despite proclaiming to be providers and protectors of culture, people, traditions, nations, and religion, these men feel immediately attacked by the existence of non-conforming people. They feel emasculated and disempowered by women wanting equal shares in property, compensation for housework, not wanting to take care of the husband’s family, wanting fair wages, wanting daycare and old homes, or anything to do with ending, or at least minimising, male dominance that comes via dependence. Apparently, it is not dominance — this is ‘natural’, and men struggle under the burden of providing for and risking it all for women and their children. So, men are victims while women are temperamental, needy, ungrateful opportunists. That is why Hasnat Abdullah, dubbed Bangladesh’s subaltern superman by his fans and followers, can, without qualms, say that he remains distant and detached from his child so as not to dilute his political mission with soft emotions. As per this type of manhood, a father is something like a supreme leader — distant, detached, but permanently and unquestionably correct, just, and powerful. If a woman is not happy with such a benevolent provider, she must be the victim of feminism. So, surveil and doxx her; threaten and intimidate her, even incite public outrage if she fights back.

With all the sound and fury aimed at restoring order, all these men seem to be preserving is a ‘natural’ order that has never existed anywhere in history. Their ahistorical demands are impractical, since they have yet to present any real plans for genuine economic or political change. They are waging a loud and shallow ‘cultural’ war (I use the term ‘war’ deliberately, as they are all also pro-war) against liberal values, using words and actions grounded in a very limited understanding of global and local history, politics, and economics. They reduce complex ideas to simplistic, jargonised versions: democracy is equated straightforwardly with westernism; feminism is equated with Indianness or westernism; and fascism is equated with Hasina and anyone favourable to India.

Recall Dhaka University Central Students’ Union leader Mosaddek Ali’s threat to blow India away with the yet-untapped uranium in Bangladesh. Add to that the threats to ‘remove all the bricks’ of the Indian visa centre in Dhaka. The arson attacks on Prothom Alo and The Daily Star headquarters were also outbursts of this anti-India rage. Apparently, these acts would cleanse Bangladeshi culture of its ‘Hindu’ elements, all of which the carriers of such masculinity claim are inorganic and hegemonised by ‘Awami fascists’. The rising violence against religious shrines, mazaars, and dargas is thus justified as a defence against such cultural pollution.

If we look closely at their anti-Indianness, we will see that these men display no awareness that India is a nation of diversity, irrespective of whatever its government or state seeks to portray. But these men, being lovers of monoculture, prefer to be blind to the history of colonialism and the complex, entangled social, political, and kinship histories of peoples of both Bangladesh and India. They keep referring to a historical victimhood resulting from the defeat and fragmentation of Islamic empires but fail to see that such victimhood is not unique to them; it is structurally reproduced by a colonialist, imperialist global economy everywhere. The poor, the indigenous, the gender-diverse, the private or informal sector workers and the low caste — history has victimised us all, irrespective of our religious beliefs. These men, however, assert that theirs is the singularly worst victimhood and that this loss must be vindicated by rebuilding a rival empire-like entity anew, eliminating those who disagree or do not fit in.

Their proclamation of ‘war’ on drugs, the homeless and poor, trans and queer people, sex workers and workers and indigenous people makes clear how their absence of faith in and trust in the government and the democratic state itself is being channelled as rage against the non-conforming, weak and minoritised. It is therefore not surprising that most of these men demand compulsory military training for all ‘males’ in Bangladesh, because that is what ‘real’ men do (and also because it offers them military-grade superiority over trans and queer men) — rescue and serve justice with guns and swords.

Are you surprised that this masculine profile trending in Bangladesh brings back memories of fascism or sounds like Nazi masculinity? Do Bangladeshi alpha men’s disgust for feminist women’s ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’, ‘unwashed’, ‘undesired’, and ‘wasted’ bodies remind us of Italian fascists who obsessively propagated similar disgust for women who resisted traditional wife-mother womanhood? Or of extreme Hindu ideologists who also garlanded and cheered the man who raped Bilkis Bano, just like a ‘towhidi’ group did after a fruitful attack on a police station to release the library assistant. Mostofa Asif Ornob, who was reportedly arrested for threatening a woman student with rape in 2025? Or the MAGA (Make America Great Again) men and Zionists who promote that gender diversity is ‘unnatural’ and so women should aspire to the tradwife role? All the above-mentioned men share a similar playbook of hate, fear and disgust. All of them are offended by diversity and democracy because such ideas and practices make moot their claim to supremacy. It is alarming that this type of masculine model is again attracting the youth in different parts of the world.

Having said this, if we take a look around, in reality, men are not sole material providers and protectors. The large majority of women are doing both and much more. Urban men in physically sedentary jobs and minoritised men, for example, are generally incapable of providing much physical protection. Research gives bad news about men’s reproductive health; living wages are low; working conditions are unhealthy; the quality of public education and public health is abysmal; unemployment is at record highs; job insecurity is widespread; the climate crisis adds unforeseen precarity; the free market is a farce; and global imperialist fascists are always at our throats, but these men proclaim to have the solution to all problems in a hypernationalist, hypermasculinist culture war.

What are their aggressive assertions if not a desire to replace a fascistic system — understood as a complex of Western and/or Indian liberal cultural hegemony — with another form of regimentation? They do not have a problem with corporate oligarchs running the world but believe their misery to be caused by liberal gender ideology and women, who, taking advantage of the system, apparently take away men’s jobs and dignity. Labour laws and wages are unjust, the private sector is a regulatory mess, and a small group of corporates and politicians are constantly fattened, but they call women greedy if they are not content with the absence of even the bare minimum. These men’s loss of self-worth and dignity, feelings of constant doom, and reverence of fear and hatred cannot be cured with another form of masculinist supremacy which merges corporate and right-wing politics.

Ultimately, they will not be breaking, changing or restoring anything but will be reproducing the status quo because this rebellious hue and cry is fuelled by self-righteous shortsightedness. Instead of examining how our economic and political system profits from the continuous production of inequality and the exploitation of people of all genders, they blame women, gender-diverse people, and cultural diversity for the loss of self-worth within such a system. They do not wish for an end to all forms of dominance — they offer vendetta, rivalry and destruction, but rebuilding after abandoning the hegemonic system is not in their plans. We are then bound to ask: who and what is this delusional, ‘shauwa-mauwa chhira’ masculinity really destroying and changing through so much sound and fury?

Highly susceptible and vulnerable to being used as servicemen of fascistic politics, they are not ‘saving’ anything or anybody, not even themselves.

Mithila Mahfuz is a teacher and writer.