Model of masculinity under fascist Italy
[citation needed] In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded the Futurist Movement, which advocated values such as instinct, strength, courage, sport, war, youth, dynamism and speed as exemplified by modern machines.
[1] Mussolini, after having been elected to power in 1922, created a myth of himself, craftily adapting the image of the Übermensch of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to the Italian forma mentis, which was grounded in the following credo: absolutely hegemony over life and death and good and evil.
"[1] Accordingly, war was regarded as the training ground of virility: a place to cultivate, embrace, and exercise masculinity to its fullest extent in the name of serving for one's nation with others as a collective entity.
[3][full citation needed]The wartime climate provided an opportune environment for Mussolini to reinforce the values which he extolled as central to his purported hegemonic masculinity.
[2] As an ideology that prefers traditional ways, fascism emphasized a hierarchical relationship between male and female relations, one that was grounded in a patriarchal view of gender dynamics.
[2] Arguments were made by the fascist government that the involvement of female workers in traditionally all-male workplaces would disrupt the power hierarchy that supported society.
[2] As per issues involving masculinity, fascist rhetoric advocated for misogynistic, homophobic, and virilistic values in their campaign during the 1920s and made direct references as to the accepted and unaccepted gender codes, as explained in this passage: The deviant male was above all a bourgeois, egoistic and unpatriotic as well as scarcely virile (because he was unfit or reluctant to repeatedly impregnate the female); the deviant female was the too 'modern' woman, Americanized, independent and masculinized.
The social damages provoked by these two converging deviants were most serious: a widespread and 'excessive loosening of family hierarchical relations, a decline in the main of that robust virility that fascism, with much love and perseverance, pursues in other ways.
[2] Ardegno Soffici describes such hegemonic masculinity as apparent in rural Italy: ... with their sobriety, the strength of their bared arms, tanned by the sun, and their savage resistance to work and fatigue, represented ... a solemn lesson in virility.
The fields turn to desert; but when the abandoned and burned regions spread, the metropolis is caught by the throat: neither its business nor its industries nor its oceans of stone and reinforced concrete can re-establish the balance that by now is irreparably broken: it is a catastrophe.
Metaphorically, this means that they are cultivating less of their hegemonic masculinity that they should be embracing, and physically, they are contributing less to the state because those that move into the city usually have less children and marry less frequently, the regime argued.
[8] In this way, in the name of maintaining status quo, women were rendered into means of achieving and maintaining male supremacy: a representation of the 'new woman' in pathological terms was advanced in order to trace a line between orthodoxy and deviance, but the description of a monstrous figure devoid of feminity, rather than presenting a solution to the problem, often achieved the effect of amplifying the very sense of alarm that the problem itself provoked".
[9]The bourgeois was perceived as unmanly, effeminate, and infantile in the following quote: Middle class, middle man, incapable of great virtue or great vice: and there would be nothing wrong with that if only he would be willing to remain as such; but when his childlike or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes him to dream of grandeur, honors, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve honestly with his own 'second-rate' powers, then the average man compensates with cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics and becomes a bourgeois.
The bourgeois is the average man who does not accept to remain such and who, lacking the strength sufficient for the conquest of essential values – those of the spirit – opts for material ones, for appearances.
[12] Institutional measures were put in place to accelerate the process of acculturation of individuals into the political ideology purported by Mussolini: schools, physical education programs, and mandatory military service to the state.
[1] He believed that the virility of male bodies was essential to reconstruct in a modern context the ancient and warlike 'Italian descent' as the National, then European and finally International model.
[1] Students that did not pursue advanced studies were mandated to enlist in the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN), and from 1930, the Fasci Giovanili di Combattimento (FGC).
[1] It is evident that through these institutions, the Fascist regime insinuated itself into the Italian social fabric, endeavouring to fascisticize the world of school, work, and free time.
Mussolini illustrated his perception of masculinity, as well as its connection to sports, with the famous Stadio dei marmi statues, commissioned and supplied under his incentives by the sixty Italian provinces.
These include, for example, the paintings of homosexual artists such as Corrado Cagli, Filippo de Pisis and Guglielmo Janni, the poetry of Sandro Penna, and composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's 1936 setting of several of Walt Whitman's Calamus poems.
