<p>Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re likely to have noticed the discourse has been set abuzz with talk of a <strong>crisis of masculinity</strong>. While the debate is out on whether the <em>real</em> culprit is<strong> feminism, toxic masculinity, the Nanny State, or automation</strong>, men are indeed struggling to find themselves. The rates of loneliness, drug abuse, and suicide among men have reached record highs.</p><p>In response, <strong>a proliferation of “manosphere” influencers</strong> 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. <strong>Yet their vision of recovering </strong><em><strong>real </strong></em><strong>gender norms feels painfully superficial, even LARP-y.</strong></p><p>What is masculinity, at its core? And how can we—men <em>and </em>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 <strong>Pier Paolo Pasolini—a queer, Marxist, lapsed-Catholic writer and filmmaker</strong>—for answers. But cracking through conventional thinking is kinda what we do best at cracks in pomo.</p><p>Eve Tushnet joins Cracks in Pomo for a live discussion at KGB.</p>