Are we still talking about soy boys? This former commonplace of right-wing discourse seems to have quieted in recent years, but I suspect this is largely because the lines are now drawn. In 2016, when our reactionary cycle first reached life-or-death proportions, people were waking up to suddenly polarized relations. Intimate bonds split along political lines nearly overnight. Eight years later, the implicits remain with us, even if the discursive elements that were then present have now gone quiet. Right-wingers still discuss, if not soy boys per se, the Decline of Masculinity, it’s just that the implicit assumptions this thesis was based on don’t need to be restated anymore. You’re either for or against it, and you already know what “it” is.
But the soy boy is a fascinating cultural touchstone, both for whom it seizes upon, and for its specific contents. Unlike our frog overlords’ other boogeymen, the soy boy is a white (presumed) cis straight male. You could say he most directly represents the rightoid male’s imagined left-wing counterpart, the urban male obsessed with mainstream popular culture, deferential to his female partner, and willing to kowtow to the liberal agenda. What I find particularly interesting in this portrayal is the drive to see soy boys as excitable. Just look at them:1
Let’s leave aside (for now!) the meat-as-masculine thing; other than the beyond chicken, what is these people’s crime? Their face, their excited happy face, that big “OOOOH!” expression. That’s soy face. Here’s another, complete with MCU reference2:
For William Blake, the human spirit is capable of taking up two “contrary states,” which he terms innocence and experience. It’s not as simple as thinking that children have innocence and adults experience; rather, these two states are present at all times, in greater or lesser measure, in adults. At times we are very innocent, at times very experienced. Children, of course, are mainly innocent, but their interactions with the world of adults hint at an experience that is sometimes sublimated into such forces as the evil magic of fairy tales. These two states are rather what you might guess; you might say that innocence looks at the world as mostly benevolent, while experience understands the complex ambiguities of evil, and wonders what their ultimate metaphysical meaning might be. Take two complementary poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, “The Lamb,”3 and the very famous “The Tyger”:4
The Lamb
Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Tyger
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Notice how certainty in the first one is coupled with doubt in the second. Innocence has no problem seeing the lamb as God’s creation. Experience isn’t quite sure what to make of the tiger. I think this is a defining feature of Blake’s conception of innocence and experience. Innocence is capable of looking at the world directly, of turning first impressions into certain conclusions. It does this not by being prejudiced, but by being simple. Because it begins from a premise of benevolence, it expects to find good intentions everywhere, and is therefore never fully deceived. When good intentions are absent, innocence isn’t tricked, it simply doesn’t see. This is rather like the way in which you can plop a seven year-old child in front of an episode of the Simpsons (I suppose the reference dates me), and they’ll laugh at Bart’s antics while remaining oblivious to the show’s more risque jokes. Similarly, when you do something truly evil to a child, they don’t waste liters of ink on theodicy. They don’t interrogate the genealogy of moral sentiments, or wonder at how different people can have such different conceptions of the world. They call you cruel. Experience doesn’t have this luxury. Experience knows that people can act in horrible ways for complex reasons. It lives in a moral aporia, never quite sure of when its own sentiments will deceive it to disastrous effects.
This leads to two contrary ways of relating, not just to external creations, like the lamb or the tiger, but to our own emotion. Tales of innocence are romantic; simple emotions like joy or sadness take huge proportions, and people rarely interrogate why they feel as they do. This is the space occupied by sentimental novels like Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, or the poetry of Keats, or MCU films. I’ve not watched an example of the latter category in years, but I seem to remember that for all their superficial interest in complicated societal topics (“is Thanos a fascist?”) they rarely interrogate the minutia of characters’ emotional motivations (“does Tony Stark love Pepper Potts or does he just want to get his dick wet?”). Tales of experience, on the other hand, tend either toward an existential reckoning with the meaning of morality, like a Shakespeare tragedy, or toward ironized views of ourselves and our motivations, like DeLillo’s White Noise.
The patriarchy works by turning women into a class of permanent children. Most of us are meant to be passed on from the custody of fathers to that of husbands. As a result, our default cultural expression tends to favour innocence, whereas that of men tends to favour experience. Again, adult women being adults, this is nothing more than a sort of default, a starting point for what is most easily permitted. Men talk of Big Complex Things, whereas women uncritically descant on our feelings. Hence the eighteenth century reception of sentimental novels as intrinsically unserious, nothing like the high culture of poetry that men (and some women) participated in. Or consider the position of certain acquired tastes. Imagine a woman who drinks single-malt scotch and eats rare cuts of beef; now stereotype her sexuality. If you’re imagining someone who’s atypically dominant, likely to seduce her sexual partners as opposed to being seduced, likely to be experienced in bed, and perhaps likely to be homosexual, you’ve got the logic down pat. Such women transgress assigned modes of behaviour.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with innocence. Jane Austen, that great critic of the sentimental novel, still finds ample room in her works for innocent sincerity. I think she’s one of Western literature’s great experts when it comes to mixing innocence and experience into a cocktail that is at once realistic enough to be convincing, and romantic enough to be seductive. You could say that Pride and Prejudice is essentially the story of two cold and ironic people who, through their love for one another, come to rediscover sincerity and innocence. It’s interesting that Darcy falls in love quite early, and his emotions toward Elizabeth don’t exactly change from that point on. Rather, he comes to relate differently to himself; he understands that to accept the Bennets as his in-laws means learning to laugh at himself, setting aside the ironic detachment with which he separated himself from such lowly people.
Perhaps you’ve taken my meaning already: if women are assigned innocence, men are assigned experience. Given the XXIst century’s blanket skepticism of self-important existential cogitation, that means they have to deal with their emotions in an ironized fashion. This is the soy boy’s great sin. His excitement for things is too simplistic, he’s not adequately skeptical of his sincerity. I suspect he is the product of a generation of liberal parents deliberately attempting to raise boys and girls in the same way. This is perhaps one of the few true socially progressive acheivements of neoliberalism. Neoliberal doctrine maintains that material structures are fundamentally immutable, but social aims can be acheived by modulating one’s private behavior. Like so many other aspects of our current reactionary swing, the reaction here is more against a broad cultural trend with an ill-defined beginning than it is against particular political institutions. It’s worth considering what this foretells for the future of men. The danger isn’t just that, as is often stated, they’ll lose touch with their emotions, but that they’ll forego sincerity entirely, which is subtly different and far more dangerous. It’s the difference between creating a cohort of men that are too angry to interrogate their political behavior, and creating a cohort of men that consider political change inherently intractable, since, after all, “everything ends in pizza” anyway. The world can’t run on irony, nor is a permanent state of detachment actually conducive to a greater degree of self-understanding. If you don’t allow yourself to be excited by those soy nuggets, even at the cost of feeling a little silly later, how will you know how you really feel about chicken nuggets?
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1926230-two-soyjaks-pointing
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1895355-soy-boy-face-soyjak
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43670/the-lamb-56d222765a3e1
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger