The events of September 11 have sent scholars and pundits alike scrambling to make sense of those seemingly senseless acts. While most analyses have focused on the political economy of globalization or the perversion of Islamic teachings by Al Qaeda, several commentators have raised gender issues.
Some have reminded us that in our haste to lionize the heroes of the World Trade Center collapse, we ignored the many women firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers who also risked their lives. We’ve been asked to remember the Taliban’s vicious policies toward women; indeed, even Laura Bush seems to be championing women’s emancipation.
A few have asked us to consider the other side of the gender coin: men. Some have rehearsed the rather tired old formulae about masculine blood-lust or the drive for domination and conquest, with no reference to the magnificent humanity displayed by so many on September 11. In an article in Slate, the Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger trotted out his old male-bonding thesis but offered no understanding of why Al Qaeda might appeal to some men and not others. Only the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that there may be a link between the misogyny of the Taliban and the masculinity of the terrorists.
As for myself, I’ve been thinking lately about a letter to the editor of a small, upstate-New York newspaper, written in 1992 by an American GI after his return from service in the gulf war. He complained that the legacy of the American middle class had been stolen by an indifferent government. The American dream, he wrote, has all but disappeared; instead, most people are struggling just to buy next week’s groceries.
That letter writer was Timothy McVeigh from Lockport, N.Y. Two years later, he blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in what is now the second-worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.
What’s startling to me are the ways that McVeigh’s complaints were echoed in some of the fragmentary evidence that we have seen about the terrorists of September 11, and especially in the portrait of Mohammed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the operation and the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.
Looking at these two men through the lens of gender may shed some light on both the method and the madness of the tragedies they wrought.
McVeigh was representative of the small legion of white supremacists -- from older organizations like the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party, to newer neo-Nazi, racist-skinhead, white-power groups like Posse Comitatus and the White Aryan Resistance, to radical militias.
These white supremacists are mostly younger (in their early 20s), lower-middle-class men, educated at least through high school and often beyond. They are the sons of skilled workers in industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’ legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small shops squeezed out by Wal-Marts and malls. These young men face a spiral of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight and at worst complicit in their demise.
As one issue of The Truth at Last, a white-supremacist magazine, put it:
“Immigrants are flooding into our nation willing to work for the minimum wage (or less). Super-rich corporate executives are flying all over the world in search of cheaper and cheaper labor so that they can lay off their American employees. ... Many young White families have no future! They are not going to receive any appreciable wage increases due to job competition from immigrants.”
What they want, says one member, is to “take back what is rightfully ours.”
Their anger often fixes on “others” -- women, members of minority groups, immigrants, gay men, and lesbians -- in part because those are the people with whom they compete for entry-level, minimum-wage jobs. Above them all, enjoying the view, hovers the international Jewish conspiracy.
What holds together these “paranoid politics” -- antigovernment, anti-global capital but pro-small capitalist, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic -- is a rhetoric of masculinity. These men feel emasculated by big money and big government -- they call the government “the Nanny State” -- and they claim that “others” have been handed the birthright of native-born white men.
In the eyes of such downwardly mobile white men, most white American males collude in their own emasculation. They’ve grown soft, feminized, weak. White supremacists’ Web sites abound with complaints about the “whimpering collapse of the blond male”; the “legions of sissies and weaklings, of flabby, limp-wristed, nonaggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed, fearful males who, while still heterosexual in theory and practice, have not even a vestige of the old macho spirit.”
American white supremacists thus offer American men the restoration of their masculinity -- a manhood in which individual white men control the fruits of their own labor and are not subject to emasculation by Jewish-owned finance capital or a blackand feminist-controlled welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo, a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any government agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and the economy emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue America from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous melting pot.
Sound familiar? For the most part, the terrorists of September 11 come from the same class, and recite the same complaints, as American white supremacists.
Virtually all were under 25, educated, lower middle class or middle class, downwardly mobile. The journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed families of Middle Eastern suicide bombers (as well as some failed bombers themselves) and found that none of them had the standard motivations ascribed to people who commit suicide, such as depression.
Although several of the leaders of Al Qaeda are wealthy -- Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the 50-year-old doctor thought to be bin Laden’s closest adviser, is from a fashionable suburb of Cairo -- many of the hijackers were engineering students for whom job opportunities had been dwindling dramatically. (Judging from the minimal information I have found, about one-fourth of the hijackers had studied engineering.) Zacarias Moussaoui, who did not hijack one of the planes but is the first man to be formally charged in the United States for crimes related to September 11, earned a degree at London’s South Bank University. Marwan al-Shehhi, the chubby, bespectacled 23-year-old from the United Arab Emirates who flew the second plane into the World Trade Center, was an engineering student, while Ziad Jarrah, the 26-year-old Lebanese who flew the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, had studied aircraft design.
Politically, these terrorists opposed globalization and the spread of Western values; they opposed what they perceived as corrupt regimes in several Arab states (notably Saudi Arabia and Egypt), which they claimed were merely puppets of American domination. “The resulting anger is naturally directed first against their rulers,” writes the historian Bernard Lewis, “and then against those whom they see as keeping those rulers in power for selfish reasons.”
Central to their political ideology is the recovery of manhood from the emasculating politics of globalization. The Taliban saw the Soviet invasion and westernization of Afghanistan as humiliations. Bin Laden’s October 7 videotape describes the “humiliation and disgrace” that Islam has suffered “for more than 80 years.” And over and over, Nasra Hassan writes, she heard the refrain: “The Israelis humiliate us. They occupy our land, and deny our history.”
Terrorism is fueled by a fatal brew of antiglobalization politics, convoluted Islamic theology, and virulent misogyny. According to Ehrenreich, while these formerly employed or self-employed males “have lost their traditional status as farmers and breadwinners, women have been entering the market economy and gaining the marginal independence conferred by even a paltry wage.” As a result, “the man who can no longer make a living, who has to depend on his wife’s earning’s, can watch Hollywood sexpots on pirated videos and begin to think the world has been turned upside down.”
The Taliban’s policies thus had two purposes: to remasculinize men and to refeminize women. Another journalist, Peter Marsden, has observed that those policies “could be seen as a desperate attempt to keep out that other world, and to protect Afghan women from influences that could weaken the society from within.” The Taliban prohibited women from appearing in public unescorted by men, from revealing any part of their body, and from going to school or holding a job. Men were required to grow their beards, in accordance with religious images of Muhammad, yes; but also, perhaps, because wearing beards has always been associated with men’s response to women’s increased equality in the public sphere, since beards symbolically re-affirm biological differences between men and women, while gender equality tends to blur those differences.
The Taliban’s policies removed women as competitors and also shored up masculinity, since they enabled men to triumph over the humiliations of globalization and their own savage, predatory, and violently sexual urges that might be unleashed in the presence of uncovered women.
All of these issues converged in the life of Mohammed Atta, the terrorist about whom the most has been written and conjectured. Currently, for example, there is much speculation about Atta’s sexuality. Was he gay? Was he a repressed homosexual, too ashamed of his sexuality to come out? Such innuendoes are based on no more than a few circumstantial tidbits about his life. He was slim, sweet-faced, neat, meticulous, a snazzy dresser. The youngest child of an ambitious lawyer father and a pampering mother, Atta grew up shy and polite, a mama’s boy. “He was so gentle,” his father said. “I used to tell him, ‘Toughen up, boy!’”
When such revelations are offered, storytellers seem to expect a reaction like “Aha! So that explains it!” (Indeed, in a new biography of Adolf Hitler, The Hidden Hitler, Lothar Machtan offers exactly that sort of explanation. He argues that many of Hitler’s policies -- such as the killing of longtime colleague and avowed homosexual Ernst Rohm, or even the systematic persecution and execution of gay men in concentration camps -- were, in fact, prompted by a desire to conceal his own homosexuality.)
But what do such accusations actually explain? Do revelations about Hitler’s or Atta’s possible gay propensities raise troubling connections between homosexuality and mass murder? If so, then one would also have to conclude that the discovery of Shakespeare’s “gay” sonnet explains the Bard’s genius at explicating Hamlet’s existential anguish, or that Michelangelo’s sexuality is the decisive factor in his painting of God’s touch in the Sistine Chapel.
Such revelations tell us little about the Holocaust or September 11. They do, however, address the consequences of homophobia -- both official and informal -- on young men who are exploring their sexual identities. What’s relevant is not the possible fact of Hitler’s or Atta’s gayness, but the shame and fear that surround homosexuality in societies that refuse to acknowledge sexual diversity.
Even more troubling is what such speculation leaves out. What unites Atta, McVeigh, and Hitler is not their repressed sexual orientation but gender -- their masculinity, their sense of masculine entitlement, and their thwarted ambitions. They accepted cultural definitions of masculinity, and needed someone to blame when they felt that they failed to measure up. (After all, being called a mama’s boy, a sissy, and told to toughen up are demands for gender conformity, not matters of sexual desire.) Gender is the issue, not sexuality.
All three failed at their chosen professions. Hitler was a failed artist -- indeed, he failed at just about every job he ever tried except dictator. McVeigh, a business-college dropout, found his calling in the military during the gulf war, where his exemplary service earned him commendations; but he washed out of Green Beret training -- his dream job -- after only two days. And Atta was the odd man out in his family. His two sisters both became doctors -- one a physician and one a university professor. His father constantly reminded him that he wanted “to hear the word ‘doctor’ in front of his name. We told him, your sisters are doctors and their husbands are doctors and you are the man of the family.”
Atta decided to become an engineer, but his degree meant little in a country where thousands of college graduates were unable to find good jobs. After he failed to find employment in Egypt, he went to Hamburg, Germany, to study architecture. He was “meticulous, disciplined, and highly intelligent, an ordinary student, a quiet, friendly guy who was totally focused on his studies,” according to another student in Hamburg.
But his ambitions were constantly undone. His only hope for a good job in Egypt was to be hired by an international firm. He applied and was continually rejected. He found work as a draftsman -- highly humiliating for someone with engineering and architectural credentials and an imperious and demanding father -- for a German firm involved with razing low-income Cairo neighborhoods to provide more scenic vistas for luxury tourist hotels.
Defeated, humiliated, emasculated, a disappointment to his father and a failed rival to his sisters, Atta retreated into increasingly militant Islamic theology. By the time he assumed the controls of American Airlines Flight 11, he evinced a hysteria about women. In the message he left in his abandoned rental car, he made clear what mattered to him in the end. “I don’t want pregnant women or a person who is not clean to come and say good-bye to me,” he wrote. “I don’t want women to go to my funeral or later to my grave.” Of course, Atta’s body was instantly incinerated, and no burial would be likely.
The terrors of emasculation experienced by lower-middle-class men all over the world will no doubt continue, as they struggle to make a place for themselves in shrinking economies and inevitably shifting cultures. They may continue to feel a seething resentment against women, whom they perceive as stealing their rightful place at the head of the table, and against the governments that displace them. Globalization feels to them like a game of musical chairs, in which, when the music stops, all the seats are handed to others by nursemaid governments.
The events of September 11, as well as of April 19, 1995 (the Oklahoma City bombing), resulted from an increasingly common combination of factors -- the massive male displacement that accompanies globalization, the spread of American consumerism, and the perceived corruption of local political elites -- fused with a masculine sense of entitlement. Someone else -- some “other” -- had to be held responsible for the terrorists’ downward mobility and failures, and the failure of their fathers to deliver their promised inheritance. The terrorists didn’t just get mad. They got even.
Such themes were not lost on the disparate bands of young, white supremacists. American Aryans admired the terrorists’ courage and chastised their own compatriots. “It’s a disgrace that in a population of at least 150 million White/Aryan Americans, we provide so few that are willing to do the same [as the terrorists],” bemoaned Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party. “A bunch of towel head/sand niggers put our great White Movement to shame.”
It is from such gendered shame that mass murderers are made.
Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of The Gendered Society (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Free Press, 1996).
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