Melissa McEwan of Shakesville says that vertently or inadvertently, the new VH1 reality show Tool Academy has an unexpected side benefit

But here’s the thing: Aside from the show being totally entertaining because of the finest collection of douchebags ever assembled on one reality show (which is really saying something), it’s also one of the most amazing exposés evah on how the patriarchy is just as bad for average straight men as it is for everyone else. (The Patriarchy: Bad for everyone who isn’t a patriarch!)

The first thing you discover is that, emotionally, every one of those guys is a hot mess. They don’t know what normal emotions are, repeatedly expressing shock that other people feel the same way they do—and they’re constantly confused because the behaviors and coping strategies that work among men, at least men like them, (competitiveness, braggadocio, aggression, dishonesty, emotional suppression) don’t work at all with women within the intimacy of a one-on-one relationship.

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It’s actually quite compelling to see the tools trying desperately to reconcile what they’re supposed to do around men with what they’re supposed to do around women. They have no idea how to navigate between the two disparate spheres—and it’s for the same reason they’re huge tools in the first place: They have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the hyper-masculine role of the Alpha Male as defined by the Patriarchy, where manhood and masculinity is defined almost exclusively in contradistinction to womanhood and femininity.

Anything stereotypically female is eschewed for what is stereotypically male, meaning that all the qualities necessary for a successful and mutually fulfilling relationship—kindness, gentleness, generosity, nurturing, empathy, communicativeness, self-sacrifice, compromise—were long ago rejected out of hand as being unmanly. Tenderness and decency are for girls and queers!

...For whom, of course, the tools have nothing but contempt. And how is it possible to truly love someone you disdain?

It isn’t.

The path to true (het) love leads straight through feminism. Which I always knew, but it’s nice to have it so conspicuously confirmed. Even by a bunch of tools.

Read the quote in context here.

The premise is their partners tell them they’ve nominated them for a “Mr. Awesome” award. And they really are nominated by their partners. But the idea, apparently, is to see which, if any of them can get clued in.

McEwan marvels that the guys on the show even had partners. And it sounds like something to marvel at. (When flustered one contestants says “you’re not gonna show me up! I’m gonna break something and I’m gonna pick this heavy [bleep]ing chair up and I’m gonna throw it. And you’re gonna like it, too!”)

But my experience, first, second, and third-hand is that a lot of guys don’t just not have a clue, they know they don’t have a clue. And in lieu of going out and finding one they effectively “bid” behaviors and proposition to one another to see not what’s actually manly but what the consensus on manly might be. With generally nasty, brutal, and… often tragically prolonged results.

Consider: McEwan emphasizes that things seem to be harshest when the men are in mixed company and wind up trying to reconcile their most likely more sincere one-on-one relationships with their partners to their less authentic one-to-many relationships with men.

And my guess is that, rightly or wrongly, the women who nominate their partners rather than leave them outright think there’s something worth keeping. Which may only show up when they’re alone together.

Yeah, I think that’s called the Wendy Dilemma when it doesn’t work… and maybe when it does. And a lot of the time it doesn’t. And even when it does it’s a triumph of the genteel patriarchal mandate that women exist exclusively to “tame” men. (As I’ve said elsewhere, and as McEwan hints in her “unless you’re a patriarch” post, the only thing post-industrial patriarchy hates worse than women is men.)

Anyway, while I’m not optimistic that Tool Academy is going to create many feminist men it really does sound like a classic illustration of the principle that the only way out of oppression is consciousness-raising. In this case male consciousness raising.

The difference… one that might make it even harder for men than we’ve made it for women over the last 40 years or so… is that we have to overthrow ourselves! Or, more accurately, or terrified little bidding wars for manly consensus. And since the bidding is effectively a race to the bottom, without at least a little introspection and maybe something like non-zero expectations, the man in a group who stands out gives the other already-anxious ones a chance to double down.

There’s a catch though.

It’s something one of my social-theory professors noted after showing us “Obedience,” the short movie about Stanley Milgram’s experiment in social cooperation and, um, torture of the innocent. You probably know the story — Milgram recruited volunteers to participate in a “simple” experiment to see what sort of electric shocks people were able to withstand. The volunteer was paired up with someone else, they flipped a coin, and the winner got to administer the shocks while the loser got the shocks. What the volunteer didn’t know was that everyone else, including the person they believed to be the other volunteer, were actors. And the volunteer didn’t know that the coin toss was rigged so that the real volunteer always won and, therefore, always administered the shocks. The real volunteer didn’t know, either, that the actors weren’t really shocked… even though over the course of the experiment they acted as though the shocks were increasingly, and eventually unbearably, painful. And finally, the real volunteers didn’t know the real purpose of the experiment was to measure just how far average people were willing to go when goaded to by an authority figure (in this case another actor posing as an insistent, experienced researcher.)

The way the movie plays it nearly every subject winds up shocking the “victim” into (feigned) unconsciousness. And in fact that usually was the outcome. More ominously, when there were other “volunteers” urging the real volunteer to keep going they often kept administering shocks even when the “victim” appeared to have had a heart attack!

What my professor said, though, was that in other variations with groups it almost always took dissent one other actor saying “I think he’s really hurt” or “I think we’d better stop and help this guy” to snap the real volunteer back into his or her senses and start resisting the urgings of the “researcher” to keep going.

My professor thought it would have been a much different movie if they’d explored that little angle — that obedience works, sure, until someone steps up. And I agree.

The thing about patriarchy — obviously, as evidently recounted in Tool Academy as well as too much of real life — is that it doesn’t work for the men in it. It makes men miserable, insecure, isolated, small, and generally pretty loveless. And I’m… pretty sure that even the “and I’ll throw this recliner” guy would head for the exits… if he just knew which way the exits were… and if his equally insecure cohorts didn’t bid him back in.

I dunno. I don’t know how to do it. We gotta figure out how to though. It’s hard to sympathize with men who make everyone else’s lives so fucking miserable. And I’m sure it’s great television to watch them dangle and thrash. But not only will we be better off when they have a direction to pull in, they will be too.