Rob Kardashian dominated social media on Wednesday, setting Instagram and Twitter ablaze by posting nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend Blac Chyna. The tumult of their relationship has played out publicly to the amusement of observers in recent months, as they’ve taken the unfinished drama of their television series directly to the internet for raw consumption. It’s sad to see, especially given how often their child is caught up in the drama.
Last November, Kardashian, the younger brother of Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe, welcomed a baby with Chyna, a model to whom he proposed earlier in the year after just months of dating. Their relationship was documented on the reality series “Rob & Chyna” that aired last fall on the E! network.
Kardashian is obviously not well. But rather than leaving it at that and hoping medical professionals are able to help out, one HuffPo writer analyzed his behavior as a symptom of “insecure masculinity.”
From the article, headlined, “The Insecure Masculinity Behind Rob Kardashian’s ‘Revenge’ Posts”:
When men share naked photos of ex-girlfriends without permission and detail the sexual exploits of those ex-girlfriends to millions of strangers online, what they’re really trying to do is “perform” masculinity. Demeaning is their method of domination, a way of saying, “Yeah, you may not want me anymore, you may have slept with other dudes, but I still own your body.”
This is a deeply personal assumption to make about a man the writer has likely never met. But that’s the problem with probing every action taken by a celebrity in an effort to craft some larger argument about how it’s somehow a powerful statement on our culture.
The modern concept of gender performativity is largely attributed to the work of Judith Butler, a feminist philosopher taught frequently in college-level gender studies courses. It’s not done justice in the HuffPo analysis of Kardashian, but for the most part, after you boil down the convoluted logic, it means exactly what it sounds like it means. We construct the boundaries of gender by acting it out, guided by cues passed down from generation to generation.
Thus, insecure about his manliness, Kardashian is “performing” an act of masculinity by “demeaning” his ex-girlfriend, or so the theory goes. That analysis is predicated on a negative concept of masculinity, one that contends masculinity contains an impulse to “own” women’s bodies and “dominate” by demeaning them.
This is a helpful glimpse into the contemporary feminist worldview, one that prevails in academia. The stereotypical boundaries of masculinity and femininity persist only because men and women reinforce them through their daily behavior; this, many would argue, keeps us tethered to restrictive and dangerous norms.
Yet the glaringly obvious conclusion of intent to be drawn from Rob Kardashian’s behavior is that he was attempting to expose an ex-girlfriend as a cheater. It was disgusting. To credit the behavior to his “insecure masculinity” is to take a conclusion more appropriately reached by a therapist and then hold it up as a representation of an entire gender.
It’s not fair or productive, but it’s standard operating procedure for too many progressive feminists.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
