Pasolini: Real Men are Pierced

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re likely to have noticed the discourse has been set abuzz with talk of a crisis of masculinity. While the debate is out on whether the real culprit is feminism, toxic masculinity, the Nanny State, or automation, men are indeed struggling to find themselves. The rates of loneliness, drug abuse, and suicide among men have reached record highs.

In response, a proliferation of “manosphere” influencers has cropped up, selling a variety of remedies: Nietzschean vitalism, a return to the Bronze Age with a stoic regimen of powerlifting and renouncing seed oils, going to Latin Mass and finding yourself a tradwife. Gender norms, they tell us, have been muddied by the waters of relativism and so-called theories of performativity. Yet their vision of recovering real gender norms feels painfully superficial, even LARP-y.

What is masculinity, at its core? And how can we—men and women—begin to recover what it means to embrace our embodiment, in all of its glory and fragility? Few would think to look to the example of Pier Paolo Pasolini—a queer, Marxist, lapsed-Catholic writer and filmmaker—for answers. But cracking through conventional thinking is kinda what we do best at cracks in pomo.

Join Stephen and Eve Tushnet for a discussion on the degradation & redemption of Masculinity through the lens of the life and artistic legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

KGB Bar Private Curtain (1st floor); Doors 7, Start 7:30

Buy tix beforehand. Annual/monthly subscribers get 50% off. Founding members get in FREE.

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