Ethical Hostility: A Situated Response to Performativity, Authenticity, and Complicity

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

There are moments when I attack. Not because I lose control, not because I crave domination — but because I can no longer bear the dissonance between what is being shown and what is being done. My hostility is not random. It emerges from an ethics of lucidity. I do not strike the real. I do not hurt those who are present with themselves, even in their confusion or fragility. What I attack — and what I refuse to tolerate — is the staging of selfhood as a form of distraction, manipulation, or concealment.

And yet, it goes deeper than a mere opposition between real and fake. The most insidious moments occur when someone appears authentic — when they openly confess their their wounds, their contradictions — but still, in that so-called authenticity, betray the humanity of others. Especially women.

I have witnessed men speak of their pain, their process of reconstruction, their distance from dominance — and in the same breath, offer their support to other men who reproduce misogynistic narratives. This is not just hypocrisy. It is an ethics of allegiance that places male bonding above moral responsibility. Even when they seem honest, they remain structurally loyal to a system that disfigures and erases women.

The Ethics of Performativity

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed reminds us that emotions do not simply reside in the individual — they circulate, attach, and shape collective orientations. A man’s display of vulnerability is never neutral. It draws sympathy, diffuses responsibility, and can function as a shield against critique. His confession becomes currency. His authenticity becomes performance — not because it is false, but because it is detached from accountability.

This is why my body reacts. Not to the fragility itself, but to its instrumentalization. A man who admits he is healing, but still chooses to support those who harm, is not reconstructing — he is reinforcing. He may be telling the truth, but he remains aligned with structures that negate mine.

Hostility as Discernment

My hostility is not about dominance. It is about discernment. It is about refusing to accept the affective economy where men’s emotional displays overwrite structural complicity. bell hooks warned us of this in The Will to Change: men may speak of love, may even believe they are loving, while remaining fundamentally invested in patriarchal power. The contradiction is not personal — it is systemic.

This is why I do not tolerate selective authenticity. You cannot be “real” while endorsing what dehumanizes others. You cannot process your trauma while ignoring the trauma you perpetuate by remaining silent when another man speaks with hatred, condescension, or contempt. Ethical authenticity is not what you reveal. It is what you refuse to excuse.

Masculine Allegiance and Ethical Cowardice

Frantz Fanon spoke of the “zone of non-being” — the space where colonized or disqualified subjects exist, erased from the world of those who claim universality. Women often live in that zone when men, even so-called enlightened men, choose male allegiance over relational responsibility. They stay silent when they should intervene. They validate other men in private. They say, “He didn’t mean it like that,” or worse: “He’s hurting too.”

But hurt is not an alibi. Pain does not absolve power. Silvia Federici reminds us that the body is a terrain of struggle — not a metaphor, not a symbol, but a literal site of appropriation, exploitation, and violence. When men bond through shared wounds while neglecting the embodied costs inflicted on women, they participate in what I call ethical cowardice.

Why I Attack: Not Rage, but Fidelity

When I attack, it is not because I reject vulnerability. It is because I protect it. Vulnerability without responsibility is manipulation. It becomes a tool for moral exemption. But I know what it means to be exposed without defense, to be real without weaponizing it. And I demand the same from others.

The moment a man’s authenticity becomes an excuse — or worse, a path to solidarity with those who harm — I intervene. Not to dominate, but to interrupt the spell. My hostility is not anger. It is fidelity to truth.

The Ethical Cut: Beyond Representation

There is a threshold where affect becomes coercion, where empathy is demanded but not earned. I do not owe gentleness to those who perform humanity while refusing to defend it. If your authenticity makes space for misogyny — even quietly — then your authenticity is not ethical. It is another form of permission. You are not healing. You are bargaining.

I respond with what I call the ethical cut: a refusal to remain soft in the face of softness that shelters harm. This cut is not reactive. It is epistemological. It reclaims the power to name what is happening — not what is shown.

A Situated Ethics of Response

I do not operate from a fixed moral system. I respond from where I stand — as a subject with memory, with intuition, with a capacity to detect the smallest misalignments between speech and allegiance. This is not universal law. It is situated clarity. And I refuse to soften it to make others comfortable.

Because when the cost of comfort is the erasure of the feminine, of the wounded, of those made unseeable — then gentleness is betrayal. And I do not betray.

Authenticity is not sacred. It is a tool. And I reserve the right to dismantle it when it is used to protect harm. My hostility is not chaos. It is ethics sharpened into precision.