We share a taste for domination, Putin and I. We like to be obeyed, feared and we want to be at the top of the power pyramid so that we can submit and have no master.
This is what we have in common.
I mean, that’s not the only thing we have in common, certainly.
I like horses. I resist American imperialism at my level and if I had to dine with a false humanist and real neolib like Macron, I would also choose a table as long as possible.
But this thirst for power and control is what I think we have mainly in common.
He may have results that show that he has managed to climb more steps than I have on the great staircase of power, but we practice the same discipline.
Doesn’t the Sunday climber have many challenges and constraints in common with the greatest of Sherpas? Don’t they share a taste for endurance, shortness of breath, crampons cracking on the ice and the sun burning the snow?
I think they do.
Well, Putin and I are the same.
We are both practitioners of the same discipline, he at international level, I privately, as an amateur.
We practice masculinity.
I started very early, I should say.
And immediately full time.
It was exciting.
I discovered it as a newborn, watching the doctors, the nurses, the midwife, as a child watching my parents, my uncles, my grandfathers and their friends. All the people I met and everything I saw from the moment I was born allowed me to practice masculinity every day, intensely.
Putin did the same at home.
He learned, as I did, to be strong, to compete, always, and be angry in case of loss, to enthusiastically despise all those who were not in a position to resist us, and to see all vulnerability as a mirage, a non-reality, something that doesn’t exist and therefore can’t be addressed with anyone.
We grew up this way.
I liked it. I was good at it.
The years passed and Putin and I managed to be respected. Which is, I must say, already an interesting level in our discipline.
As children, we took up space, made noise, were aggressive and refused authority. Each in our own way, as I think he went to schools where the teachers were less tolerant of indiscipline than mine. But we understood, it’s not necessarily about being bad at school or in all the instructions we received, it’s about pretending to distance oneself from it, to mock, grunt, whine and attack the authority figures whenever possible. The ones that aren’t too dangerous, right? we’re not oblivious either.
As teenagers, we achieved many feats. Sports, adventure, sex.
And the ones we didn’t succeed in, we invented. With our mates, we did it a lot. We spent long evenings talking about girls, sex, football and demonstrations of strength or courage.
Never any feelings, doubts, fears or distress.
It was not difficult to avoid this subject, since we had learned that it did not exist. A fantasy.
So we thought we were friends with the other boys.
Even if these friendships were mostly populated by conversations in which we had to give up talking about what we felt, preferring to talk about what we thought we had to have achieved.
I became a cop. Well done.
An officer in a homicide investigation unit.
At 22, I was carrying a gun, arresting people, protection people with force and courage, having adventures that were admired by my family. Admiration.
That drug.
I had a big motorbike, a big beard, a big wallet, big muscles and a big bank account. Happy. I played football. Manly.
On my scale, in my discipline, masculinity, I had reached an interesting level.
The criminal investigation department and football: two high-level occupations in our branch.
Putin was a secret agent.
Good.
That’s good, I’m not criticizing, I really am not.
But if he had been there, in a bar, between me and my mates, I would have challenged him anyway. Just to see.
What I thought of secret agents was that they were doing the same job as me but without the risks of working in public.
Secrecy helps when you have to take risks. At the end of the day, a Russian secret agent, I have to admit, would have dominated me. Already. But we never met.
As for me, I’ve made my way in our industry. I had fights, took all sorts of risks. I managed not to get emotionally involved with my parents and my family.
I abused my partners by ignoring my emotions, by pushing away my vulnerabilities. By not talking. By not listening.
I cheated for the sake of possessing and dominating.
I chased the external signs of power and control. I hurt. I have stepped on heads to get to enviable positions.
I sought recognition, credit, admiration, obsessively.
Later, I called my depression “stress” and blamed others. I ignored, despised and belittled my partner and systematically considered our difficulties to be hers.
Putin was doing the same kind of thing.
He made good progress and today he is world renowned for his expertise in our field.
He may even be a world champion.
But there is a lot of competition.
In the world of violent domination, obsession with power and conquest, disregard for vulnerabilities and egoism, I have to admit that he stands out.
I’ve done my homework, but he’s really out of this world.
Now, over the last ten years, thanks to Good Men Project and others, I have discovered that our discipline is a violent culture, that I had learned well, but that it was all wrong.
I have revised, I have changed, I have grown.
I try to be a good man rather than a “real man” and I have children to whom I pass on different values, empathy, respect, altruism, care for oneself and others. I am another man.
Not him.
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Carmen Rodriguez on Flickr Public Domain