On the Title of this Substack

Basketball, masculinity, and power from below

A quick note on how I’m thinking this will work

Hi all! Thanks for reading this, the second week of my Substack.

Here’s how I’m thinking this will work: each week I will dig up a couple of old notebook entries to publish, on whatever day of the year it happens to be (ex: on March 4th I may post something from March 4th 2015, or March 4th 2020, etc.). I will also try to post some new content – a reflection on current events, a poem, anything I wrote that week – each Friday. Not everything will go out via newsletter, so if you’re interested in browsing all the content in a given week or month, you may want to go directly here.

I’ll sometimes append a short note to a particular entry like this, if it feels relevant, but will otherwise try to let the rhythm of the years and months and seasons speak for themselves.

Thanks again for reading, and here is today’s entry.

-A

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On Boxing Out

I’ve always been a relatively undisciplined writer. It’s hard for me to stay on topic. I proceed instead, usually, if I’m in tune with my own way of going about this, via feeling and association – finding loose threads between disparate topics and seeing what unwinds.

That said, there are certain topics I keep coming back to, and that I want to keep coming back to in this format, that I feel are important during this time. And one of them, maybe the central one, is masculinity: specifically how, in the body, feelings take root that form the basis for authoritarianism (reactivity, resentment, rage, etc.); how, in the body, men can root down into something different.¹ How this battle takes place along definitions of what is masculine, what is strength, what is power.

From an essay I started writing in 2021:

For awhile [this essay] has had the holding title “UFC,” for Ultimate Fighting Championship, with which I have been, suddenly, obsessed for a period of nine months now. (Gestation period of a baby, or of repair between tough fights.) Every Saturday during the pandemic, I tune in to watch grown men (and women) beat the living piss out of each other – with elegance, skill, often beauty.

Or maybe the word is normalcy.

The fights, after all, have a pattern. There are grapplers, whose job is to get in close, to get lower than you and then on top of you, to control. There are strikers, staying, often, at a distance, using their fists or legs to damage the parts of you left out in the open, vulnerable, and avoiding being hit. There are fighters with mixed styles (MMA, after all, stands for “mixed martial arts”); fighters who are specialists; fighters who are generalists. The truly special ones are both: good at everything, great at one thing. Out of any two fighters’ strengths and weaknesses emerge a battle. Styles make fights.

Nora Samaran’s Nurturance Culture essay came out a number of years ago. I remember reading it while I was on retreat, at an embarrassingly expensive and new agey place with workshops like “Finding Your Power: The Way of the Tiger,” and, in the cafeteria, the most delicious, nourishing bread you could imagine. It was the kind of place to which I could only justify going because I was that broken and in need of a break; that is to say, so in need of a break that I was broken.

In the essay, Samaran makes a case, in the positive, for what culture might replace “rape culture” for men: a culture of mutuality and care, in the place of dominance. At the time, I so appreciated focusing on possibility: not only how we were wrong, what was wrong with us, as men, but what we could become. A care I already knew well and had inside me buzzing.

While fighters often enfold themselves in a kind of embrace, on the ground or standing,

and frequently show each other an immense respect when the fight has finished – arm around the shoulder, reciprocal bow, forehead to forehead embrace –

it would be too simple to argue that within the seed of this surface of violence and struggle is bursting the fronds of a deep, almost spiritual, mutuality and care.

Anyone who is looking closely can see that.

What I am probing for – leg kick, leg kick, close the distance – is actually a place, or way of being, where aggression and care are not in opposition.

I am looking, as an organizer, for a secret about power.

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I have found when and where I feel most powerful, most in tune and alive, and also know what it feels to be very far from that. And I think there is a way that this is at the root of most of our political problems, at least at their most personal. Who feels less alive, less powerful, most besieged, in their life (regardless of whether or not this corresponds with the reality of actual power relations). And what they turn to to try and salvage something. What for them is nearest.

Everyone who has written about fascism, about the appeal of the “Strong Man,” historically, proceeds from a version of this insight. I’m writing, I expect, in that tradition. There may not be much “new” here. But I hope I can present some weird helpful shape of it.

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“Boxing out” in basketball is an art. It is fundamentally protective: to push out your opponent to make space for you, or your teammate, to reclaim the ball. To regain possession. You must relish contact; you must get lower than your opponent; you must focus and stay disciplined. And you can put all of your heart and soul and guts into it. The great rebounders of any time are some of the most alive people you can imagine.

When I think about a winning masculinity, not just for the Left, but for all of us – men who in their distant dreams would not right now identify with a struggle to redistribute and balance power, in the way our movements envision it – I think about boxing out. I think about the power and beauty and struggle in all sport (basketball just my favorite language of them). I think about the positive senses of competition: how in any pickup basketball game the goal for me is always to balance teams as much as possible, so that we can each exert and challenge ourselves most fully. Find someone you match up well against. I think about swinging my hips into another mass of muscle and movement, and seeing what happens, who can gain the advantage. And then I think about erasing it all and starting again, moving on to the next moment. The goal is never to to lord it over someone, rubbing their face in the hardwood (although knocking someone aside, winning the exchange decisively, is for sure a distinct pleasure). It’s to win and keep going. To get the next one.

I play basketball every Saturday now – “my version of Church,” I joke, but am not kidding – so that I can find the most full expression of my power, in connection with others. The guys I play with are a variety of ages. It’s a great group. We build each other up, but it stays competitive. People occasionally get mad at each other, but without the threat of fists, or falling out. It’s incredibly healthy for me to have outlets for aggression like this. Contained aggression, or not contained but routed, in fullness and connection. Touch.

There is the art and beauty and elegance to the game too, of course, if we are playing it well: ball movement, player movement, passing. But the Right is not wrong that men need outlets specifically to find our power. We can belittle the J.D. Vances of the world as much as we want (and trust, they deserve belittling). But if we do not uncover positive visions of power for men, then we will continue losing them to the destructive and dominative versions currently on offer.

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When I first made a “boxing out” meme, it looked like the following²:

Where the goal, for men, it seemed to me — for myself — was to be softer, more pliable, more adaptable, more open. Vulnerable. And this is not in itself wrong: there would be enormous benefits to that, both personally and for the world, if men rebalanced ourselves to that kind of shape, alongside the hard, the rigid, the inflexible, the unmoved and unmoving. I have experienced so much benefit from that. It’s deeply necessary.

But it is not sufficient.

I am coming around to a different understanding, of what the terms in this meme might be. The words I would use, now, are something like: power via connection – or attuned power – versus power via domination. Power-from-below instead of power-over.³

We (men) need to give each other a vision of – need to help each other sense, in our guts – our fully attuned power.

The men who think they rule the world right now are weak and wounded. They float up out of their bodies. They do not govern themselves. Any man who has been convinced to believe in them trades a sense of his own truly derived power⁴, that is, the power and aliveness that originates within him, and through his contact and connection with others. Men trade away our lives, and souls, for a false idol: the ability to exert power over others.

Power-from-below, on the other hand, is power derived from consent: consent to be governed; consent to touch bodies. Power-over may feel like the most efficient option, when it seems like it is all that is available. (My three and a half year old son doesn’t go to his room to get dressed, and so, losing patience, I pick him up and carry him.) But it doesn’t originate from a position of true strength. It’s not durable or lasting. It creates a reaction. The Right resorts to it because they know they cannot beat us in a fair game. And yet they continue to consolidate and blow us out in this rigged one.

What would it look like: “real democracy,” deep and informed consent, in a public?

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One of my initial goals, in sharing my writing (in particular the old, more intimate journaling pieces), is to simply make public my own interior journey, as a white dude in social justice spaces, as a kind of roadmap for anyone who is interested in what challenges come up. It would help, probably, also, if more men saw their own struggles and challenges reflected, authentically and with less posturing — or maybe even useful to see ourselves, in the posturing? — and that that would help more of us stay in it, because more of us are clearly — it was always being said! — needed. Even if we were at times so difficult when we ended up there.

I believe fully, as a matter of temperament more than belief even — I know in my bones that this is what it feels like to win — in Hahrie Han’s push for an organizing that puts belonging before belief. This is just always who I am in a room: trying to figure who doesn’t feel welcome, and how I can help them feel more at ease and connected (sign me up as a greeter for any big group gathering!). I know none of this comes easy – how each of us are bringing our own traumas and conditioning and positionality into any situation – and that there are real obstacles we can’t just skip past to building communities, on the Left, in which men feel real belonging. But beyond as a matter of strategic necessity, I guess I just want to say – I think it might be worth it. To organize successfully, in this way, across difference. For men to help each other back from the right-wing brink. I think – I know – it’s possible. My whole life feels like an elaborate unfolding of this argument, and I will fight for it.

See you on the court.

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Read “Welcome to Box Out the Right” here.

1. I almost titled this newsletter “Accompanying Resentment: Diaries of a White Guy in Transformation” before my wife Vero, I think wisely, advised against it.

2. Shout out Leon Powe!

3. This is a playful riff on well-worn concepts of power that I first learned in community organizing workshops, and that are nicely defined here and here. (An earlier version of this essay used “power under” as the counterpoint to “power over,” but I like “power from below” even better, as it seems to gesture toward both individual and collective senses…)

4. At some point I will probably write a post about “cucks,” projection, and red-pilling…but not today…