Thread by @mloxton

Paul the #Mansplainer pushed a lot of text out there recently

It begs analysis and deconstruction of the archetype, perhaps from a Surrealist Ethnographic perspective.

So here’s a little Max Ernst meets Max Weber thread

Paul deviates from the #mansplainer archetype in one way – most mansplainers do “well, actually” from colloquial to technical, Paul does the reverse.

Paul goes the other direction.

Other than that, let’s deconstruct My Dude the archetype

My dude inhabits a weltanschauung that places him, through his eyes, as peaceful, fair, egalitarian

Calm

Serene

Beatific, even

But with an energetic side – masterful, potent, virile

But My Dude is not at peace with the world
He is often dis-turbed

Un-settled

His calm is penetrated

There is dis-cord, dis-unity, and disturbance

My Dude treasures harmony, balance, and serenity

But more than that, he craves the occidental industrial parameters and boundaries to remain intact, in force, action.

He hankers for propriety and observance of role and tradition

He needs order and symmetry
Predictability

He yearns for a highly structured social order with “his kind” firmly in the upper middle or middle upper layers

My Dude treasures a world in which social interaction, roles, offices, and actions are clearly delineated.

Fully specified

Controlled

But paradoxically, also strongly individualistic (but only along his tastes)

My Dude demands no shades of grey

No defeasibility in logic

No subtexts

No contradiction

But clouds of uncertainty and perturbation gather in the reality of the world

He sees danger, risk, issues, flux

There are worries

Fears

Dark hints

Instability

The world grows turgid

The masses are riotous and recalcitrant
Heaving and teeming

They are not obedient to the social norms My Dude holds dear

They rend the orderly social structure.

Their individuality is inconsistent with that he seeks

And The Female greatly bothers My Dude

The Female in the world is not the archetype guardian of sanctity, the chaste vestal, the paragon of Victorian virtue that My Dude reveres.

They are not the soft warmth of the motherhood of which he dreams

There is an undercurrent of sturm und drang that he finds frightening, but which draws him, taunts him, haunts him

In the midst of a panel of virtue and grace, My Dude perceives danger.
In his mind, tiny dark demons orbit even the most wholesome image of social order.

Even in the garden of Eden, was there not a snake, My Dude asks himself

My Dude observes.
He scrutinizes, with a high index of suspicion.

He searches the world for signs of encroaching entropy, darkness, or fracture that may threaten the use of language, the traditions of practice, the structure of social relationships

My Dude watches

Language though, is very tricky.

It is fraught with complexity, strange loops, evolution of terms

There is continual blurring of boundaries, shifts in meaning, and sudden paradigmatic collapse to watch for

My Dude burns the midnight oils, soaks the elbow grease, and build the lactic acid of the mental muscle.

He has to remain on guard for sneakery, tomfoolery, buffoonery, and every manner of degradation and corruption of language and norms.

My Dude is often exhausted by his toils

The blackness of infiltration, pollution, contamination orbits My Dude’s world.

It probes for gaps, searches for cracks, tests fissures in which it can gain purchase.

It seeks upheaval and corruption of My Dudes serenity and order

So My Dude stations himself as a gatekeeper of the social order, of language, or norms

He is the guardian

The watcher

He protects us all from metaphor and metastases

But despite My Dude’s toils and labour, the fickle public invites the trickster raven through open window, evermore.

The masses and intellectuals intoxicated by their collectivisms, beckon to entropy, bid it enter

Callous intellectuals, My Dude thinks, obfuscate the critical boundaries, they multiply inconsistencies, and they twist relationships and blend strata, until nothing remains of My Dude's preferred social structure

My Dude feels scattered and nauseated by the bending of his reality.

He sees every category being overlapped, merged, blurred

Turned

Rotated

Flipped

Re-arranged in alien configurations

My Dude see physicians that undermine his Normality.

They medicalize and normalize abnormality

They legitimize the illegitimate

They elevate the subclasses, demanding equitability for all

My Dude is distressed

He pounds and throbs and lurches

He frets

My Dude sees The Masses perpetrate unspeakable acts of insubordination to My Dude’s norms

Of regression and revolution

Of lusts and acts

Of resistance

My Dude is de-pressed, op-pressed

He pines for rectitude of the occidental industrial social structure

The house of My Dude burns under the midnight crescent moon while the Dark observes

It gloats at the dis-repair, de-construction, and dis-ruption of My Dude’s world

My Dude freaks out

All the way out

Beyond

But it is too late

The parameters exceed operational safety

My Dude’s occidental industrial world lurches

Hell erupts, and spews forth beasts, and torment, and tumult

The duck-footed harpy skeletor assassin of liberality flies unfettered

Craven desires

Wanton dress

Free healthcare

Entropy escapes My Dude’s grasp, and flies free

It is all just too much for My Dude

He screams into the Void

The Void screams back

My Dude is lost

Cast out

A Wanderer in a Strange Land

A land in which Women Speak

Have Minds

And Yell “Time Is Up”

The Female has changed

No longer under his domain

Not obedient

Not compliant

Not pliable to his desire

But strong

Energized

Resurgent

And They Say NO to My Dude

My Dude summons an Angel

But

She too

Says

NO

~fin~

@threadreaderapp unroll deconstruction

It is all just too much for My Dude

He screams into the Void

The Void screams back .. [and breaks his gaze]