We Invent Masculinity Anew With Each Generation: An Interview with Wojciech Śmieja

wojciech_smieja_arch_autora.jpg, default, Wojciech Śmieja, photo: private archive

How did models of masculinity change in Poland over the course of the 20th century? Wojciech Śmieja, author of the book 'Po Męstwie' (After Manliness), talks about the ‘strong patriarchy of weak men’, the institution of ‘a mate from the army’ and lumbersexual types in Poland under socialism.

Patryk Zakrzewski: In recent years, the term ‘crisis of masculinity’ has become a media strawman, to which people ascribe different meanings depending on their political views: it might refer either to the alleged increasing ‘effeminacy’ of men or to their stubborn adherence to patriarchal patterns, out of touch with the contemporary reality. Meanwhile, according to your book, the history of masculinity in Poland appears to be one of recurring crises…

Wojciech Śmieja: It’s true that in my book I relativise the term ‘crisis of masculinity’ and try to demonstrate that it’s used to discipline us. After all, if there’s said to be a crisis, then it follows that there were times when things were better, when this imagined masculinity was on full display, and that it’s this imaginary notion of masculinity at full throttle that we should treat as our reference point.

However, if we trace these discussions around masculinity back to their 19th-century roots, it turns out that this crisis has always been present. In my book, I cite Bronisław Trentowski, who wrote in the Romantic period that there were no real men in Poland, only elderly ones and ill-advised youths. Examples from the interwar period include, for instance, the famous survey in the women’s weekly magazine Bluszcz (Ivy), in which Maria Kuncewiczowa opined that there were no real men in those days because ‘one [kind of man] is no more, and the other hasn’t yet appeared’. We can also mention Danuta Rinn, singing Gdzie ci mężczyźni (Where are those men?) in the 1970s. And so on.

In the book I put forward the thesis that masculinity is anything but a historically stable category and that its meanings are perpetually subject to negotiation. It’s due to the resulting sense of uncertainty that we like to return to the narrative of a ‘crisis of masculinity’. In these moments of crisis, our notion of a strict gender binary disintegrates. And this, in effect, gives rise to rebellion, both on an individual level – because maleness, or masculinity, has always been tied to certain privileges – and on a political one, as expressed in the widespread inclination towards conservative, anti-science thinking.

PZ: Regarding the first crisis you mention, in the 19th century, the sense of Polish men’s masculinity was shattered by the partitions. And so after World War I, our newly regained independence held the promise of recovering said masculinity, although differently construed by different ideological and political camps.

WŚ: On the communal level, that’s probably true. I would nevertheless like to go back to the 19th century because the very notion of masculinity is an invention of those times. That’s why I titled my book Po Męstwie, because I make a rather sharp distinction between the Old Polish ‘mąż’ [which in modern Polish means ‘husband’, trans.] and the modern ‘man’. Not every man could be a ‘mąż’ [in the Old Polish meaning, trans.] because this required resources related to noble birth and wealth, as well as an ethical justification tied to virtue or valour, so precisely to ‘męstwo’, i.e. manliness.

Wojciech Śmieja, "Po męstwie", fot. Wydawnictwo Czarne — Wojciech Śmieja, ‘After Manliness’, photo: Czarne Publishing House

On the threshold of the 19th century, a significant semantic shift took place. The word ‘mąż’ (still retained in such collocations as or ‘mąż zaufania’ [scrutineer] and ‘mąż stanu’ [statesman]), was replaced by the word ‘mężczyzna’ (man). At that point, it was neither an ethical nor a class-based category – a man was defined by life sciences, especially medical ones. In reading the works of political thinkers of the period, one can notice that they attempted to invent a community of men in different ways and to tie it to the nation, a concept which, in its contemporary sense, also emerged in the 19th century. In the patriarchal social structure, male identity is supposed to be a bonding agent that forms communal ties. It’s this bonding agent that I call a dominant fiction in the book. As a researcher in literary studies, I’m attached to the category of fiction as something that’s actually deeply factual – an example would be the myths we believe in and that shape our reality.

My book attempts to point to various discourses, to dig drillholes in the discipline, to map large-scale processes, which required me to paint the phenomena I describe with quite a broad brush. I list three dominant fictions: that of honour (interwar period: the Second Polish Republic), that of upward mobility (the socialist period: Polish People’s Republic) and that of success (the 1990s and beyond: the Third Polish Republic). And please note that each of these fictions is undermined at a moment marked by an economic crisis.

PZ: Let’s pause at the first one. It resulted from the takeover of power by the Piłsudski faction and the resultant model of military masculinity. However, the postulated adherence to the rule of honour, which you refer to as ‘histeria virilis’, already seemed anachronistic at the time.

WŚ: Yes, that’s why this fiction never took over all of society and was vigorously contested from different angles, both by the liberal left, including Antoni Słonimski, who wrote opinion pieces against duels and codes of honour, and by the Catholic Church, for instance by cardinal Hlond, who would say that this ecstasy of honour was incompatible with the spirit of Christian humility. But the fiction of honour served a social function – it was meant to reinforce a certain group’s dominant position in the social hierarchy.

PZ: Józef Chałasiński, whom you quote, wrote about this. ‘The path to the highest social status and political offices leads here not through economic entrepreneurship, as is the case in the United States or Denmark, but through relations, a military career and education’.

WŚ: Exactly, and since certain groups of men held a hegemonic position, other kinds of masculinity were subordinated and marginalised. Such a socio-political arrangement is bound to be shaky.

I’m glad you mention Chałasiński, because he wrote in the context of the young peasant movement, and peasants were one of the groups excluded from the dominant fiction of masculinity. Nowadays we often fail to realise how progressive organisations such as Związek Młodzieży Wiejskiej ‘Wici’ (Wici Rural Youth Association) [the term ‘wici’ literally means ‘bundle of twigs or straw’ but historically refers to an ancient system for signalling a call to arms, ed.] were and how forcefully they voiced emancipatory demands within this community. I’ll take the liberty of jumping forward to the present day: in his excellent book Chamstwo (Churls), Kacper Pobłocki construes the figure of a peasant woman on whose labour the entire serf system rests. And if we consult Wici documents from almost a century ago, we’ll find the same observation, that the peasant woman was the most marginalised figure in the economic system of rural Poland and that this had to be changed!

When we think of the interwar reform of social mores, Boy-Żeleński immediately comes to mind, together with Krzywicka and generally the voice of this intelligentsia, but we’re much less familiar with the peasant voice. We have a particular idea of peasants as an anachronistic group averse to change, whereas the interwar peasant movement was very vibrant. However, this tradition was brutally cut short by the outbreak of the war and has never been reborn in the same form.

PZ: Speaking of serfdom, in the texts you cite, there’s a recurring metaphor of a dominatrix that subordinates and stifles men. First it was serfdom, then communism. A similar idea seems to recur occasionally today in the right-wing discourse regarding the European Union. From years ago, I remember a rhyme by a Radio Maryja [religious, politically conservative Polish radio station, ed.] listener, about ‘The Brussels union, the Jezebel of Europe’ [Unia brukselska, nierządnica europejska, trans.].

WŚ: The EU is an excellent example. I haven’t thought about it before, but that would make sense. The figure of serfdom as a woman already appears in the foundational text of the peasant movement, Jakub Bojko’s Dwie Dusze (Two Souls). Then ‘communism, the harlot’ and the EU, which you mention, as three figures grammatically gendered as female [in Polish] as well as three oppressors. Or when we hear politicians say that Polish entrepreneurs are stifled by bureaucracy [biurokracja in Polish, trans.] – that’s another grammatically feminine figure, here imagined as passive and indolent. It’s an entanglement of various traditional notions of vampiric female traits that feed on men’s energy.

An interesting idea, I think, would be to write a history of Polish misogynist imaginings. Misogyny is a sort of men’s disease, since strong masculine figures establish themselves through it. Its Polish iteration is all the more interesting, however, since historically it had a strong basis in the moment, inceptive for Poles as a community, of entry into modernity, since it was then that Ferdinand II imputed that Poland was ruled by women. Then the alleged ‘effeminacy’ of Polish men – their lack of manly virtues – became a frequent charge on the part of the neighbouring empires, one that we ourselves also internalised to a certain extent. These imputations were picked up, for example, by Russian authorities, whose representatives would claim that ‘Polish men are, like women, false and treacherous’. The discourse of the female element in Polish men was strongly emphasised, for instance, by Roman Dmowski in Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Reflections of a Modern Pole) but also by a representative of a different ideological fraction, Stanisław Brzozowski, who wrote that Poles are infantilized, their nature effeminate.

Polish Catholicism, with its devotion to Mary, was also perceived as a factor that softened Polish men. The echoes of this thinking still resonate in current times. In the 1990s, there was a lot of discussion (albeit now forgotten) about whether Polish society, with its alleged Marian meekness, can be integrated into a capitalist reality, Protestant in spirit. One repercussion of these charges or convictions – that Polish men aren’t manly enough, competitive enough, ambitious enough and are subordinated to women – was the reinforcement of misogyny, the construing of figures whom men had to fight in order to demonstrate their manliness. I have the impression that these figures still function in our political imagery.

PZ: And that’s the driving impulse behind what you term, after Agnieszka Graff, the ‘strong patriarchy of weak men’ prevailing in Poland?

WŚ: We’ve created very powerful notions of ideal masculinity. And our strong patriarchy of weak men emerges from the tension between the idea of what masculinity should be and the sense that we fail to live up to this idea, since these standards are so prohibitive we could never live up to them. So it’s my impression that, paradoxically, this form of patriarchy oppresses men, too, to a certain degree.

I think that this weakness also results from intergenerational matters and from the fragmented history of Poland – not just history writ large but individual history, with all these class and geographic displacements. Think of the characters of young and old Birkut in Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), or fatherland and sonland, as in Gombrowicz – a constant tension caused by history’s questioning the experiences of the older generation.

We’re dealing, then, with a patriarchal society in which patriarchy is a myth, since sons were primarily raised by mothers, grandmothers and women teachers. It’s very much an intuitive rather than a scholarly claim, but it seems to me that boys raised in opposition to the experiences of their fathers are very much fixated on their masculinity. This masculinity is weak because it lacks the foundation of intergenerational transmission, a historically fixed form. As a result, we invent masculinity anew with each generation and hold onto it tightly.

PZ: Since you’ve mentioned Birkut, let’s discuss masculinity in the Polish People’s Republic. During this period, what laid the basis for normative masculinity was the fulfilment of the obligation to work. ‘Work, not heroics,’ as they used to say. In the fragment about those who questioned this norm, you list many diverse groups in one breath: ‘gangsters from the underground, shirkers, bikini boys [Polish equivalent of beatniks, trans.], banana youth [the offspring of people with a higher social position due to party affiliation and therefore believed to be out-of-touch with the experience of average workers, trans.], brawlers and hippies.’

WŚ: There was an intention behind listing them all in one sequence, admittedly quite a heterogeneous one. All these figures share one feature: they don’t work. My grandfather, who was from the first generation living in the Polish People’s Republic and demanded to be buried in a Polish People’s Army uniform, would always refer to the Solidarity opposition as ‘brawlers, shirkers.’ And so while writing the fragment you mention, I saw all this embodied in the figure of my grandfather, who considered the work ethic to be an indicator of a person’s worthiness for the generation to whom socialism made civilisational advancement attainable.

PZ: To continue the subject of ‘people of good labour’, a fragment I found interesting was the one about Henryk Słabek’s research from the 1970s, which you cite. Fathers for whom work at a smelter plant denoted upward mobility believed it would be a mark of parental failure if their sons continued on the same career path. It’s a pattern not unlike the one visible in immigrant families, in which the first generation performs physical labour but also saves up money so that their children can go to university, which they are encouraged to do. Except here we’re dealing with internal migration.

WŚ: Your comparison is on point. Whether in Poland or in the USA, the dynamic of modernisation processes was similar, even if we didn’t deal with cross-border but rather internal migration, from an agrarian to an industrial civilisation. Additionally, I think it also had to do with acquired experience. While these fathers did advance socially, they felt acutely the burden of everything that upward mobility cost them, and they wanted to shield their sons from a similar plight.

All the talk about the 1960s as the time of ‘minor stabilisation’ is one of the most serious misunderstandings in Polish history. After all, that was a time of the most dynamic social changes. Magda Szcześniak tackles the subject in her brilliant book Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce (Moved: Social Mobility and Emotions in Socialist Poland), in which she deconstructs this myth. That was a time of extraordinary destabilisation, reported live by Marcin Czerwiński, a sociologist endowed with superb literary skills whom I quote in abundance, as well as by another exceedingly intelligent observer of social life, Stefan Kisielewski, in his Dzienniki (Diaries). The latter points out that young working-class men, for instance, have started to dress ‘like the intelligentsia’ and that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between a labourer and an intellectual. And clothing, after all, indicates certain aspirations which the sluggish socialist economy couldn’t fulfil to the degree that society expected.

PZ: Regarding Marcin Czerwiński, I noted down a quote of his that appears in your book: ‘Many young men behave as if they wanted to delay as much as possible the moment of achieving social maturity’. He wrote this in the 1970s, but the sentence sounds like something that could appear in an article about the millennials from a few years ago.

WŚ: An interesting question is that of socialist masculinity being described as mature and responsible, as opposed to capitalist countries – to use the terminology employed at the time – in which men were, in a sense, degenerate. Now’s the time to share my favourite quote from Aleksander Bocheński; please listen:

Swedes and Americans have at their disposal on average over 7,000 kilowatt hours of energy per person per year. We have 1,845, so deliberations on the problem of whether sex is or isn’t the best possible way to fill one’s life don’t interest us at all. That’s because all that time must be spent working. As Aristodemus already discovered centuries ago, blowing off all of one’s steam in debauchery precludes the possibility of properly blowing off steam at work.

These missing kilowatts immediately followed by labour – that’s the horizon of possibility marked by the socialist homeland. Americans and Swedes have been so corrupted by their prosperity that they immerse themselves in pornography, but we are real, responsible men because we have a work ethic. Almost like something out of Max Weber [laughs].

PZ: You also evoke four models of masculinity in the Polish People’s Republic that were unauthorised by the state: private entrepreneurs (wheeler-dealers or profiteers), homosexual men, plebeian Sarmatians and ironic intellectuals. I was wondering about yet another alternative kind of masculinity, which you don’t mention and which I would tentatively call ‘drop everything and go to the Bieszczady’. It’s a little like the Polish equivalent of a beatnik, a very resilient myth too, from Stachura with his ‘Siekierezada’ (Axiliad) to Stasiuk.

WŚ: Of course, and I’d add Marek Hłasko and Baza ludzi umarłych (Depot of the Dead). Even Karol Wojtyła would fit here to a certain extent, with his mountain hikes and canoeing.

PZ: Or Herbert, who canoed during the Stalinist era around the Suwałki region together with Zdzisław Najder.

WŚ: You’ve just given me an idea for a book: Men – Nature – Socialism. Or Nature as a Space of Resistance. Someone could write a PhD dissertation on that. Maybe the achievements of our Himalayan climbers could also be linked to these strategies of resistance against the state…

But it’s true. When you think about it, a figure emerges not unlike in Henry David Thoreau, a kind of socialist Walden. As in the already mentioned Siekierezada: pioneer men, lumbersexual men, as we would call them today. I would describe them not so much as anti-establishment as apolitical. They’re driven neither by rebellion nor by the wish to start a political revolution. They’re marginalised, or even self-marginalised men, ones who have questioned the pathways of advancement the state offers. And at the same time, they didn’t get involved in any political movements or religious communities.

And since we’re discussing the book’s omissions, it’s certainly the case that I didn’t devote enough attention to Catholicism. I focused on the state as the main actor, but after all, the Church also offered a certain sort of escape route. This intensified after the election of the Polish pope, but even prior to that, the career of a priest was a young boy’s dream life path. Mothers would often imagine their sons as priests…

PZ: My grandmother said that about each of her grandsons, that he would become a priest. If one failed to fulfil the expectation she had of him, she would point to the next one.

WŚ: Maybe this applies to all Polish men in a certain age bracket: the peculiar art of failing to become a priest [laughs].

PZ: Another such experience that’s universal up to a certain point: mandatory military service. As a popular saying went, ‘what kind of man is he if he wasn’t in the army’.

WŚ: Yes, military service was a male rite de passage at the time. Of course, the case of the intelligentsia was different, since they had a strong opinion on the matter, a fairly negative one. Literature provides us with jocose descriptions of military units written in a Švejk-like style. But if it’s social processes that interest us, then it’s important to mention that mandatory military service was meant to be a continuation of civic education. Its purpose was to mould a socialist man with a scientific worldview and to tie a man more strongly to the state apparatus. It was also meant to equip them with certain skills, and for many men, especially those who were not from large urban centres, the fact that they would learn the trade of a driver or an electrician by the time they were demobbed was very important. The service also built social ties – that whole institution of a ‘mate from the service’, whom we might not see for years but once we do meet, there’s an immediate sense of brotherhood. I don’t have a mate from the service, and you probably don’t either…

PZ: I don’t, but I’ve just remembered the TV series ‘Święta wojna’ [Holy War], in which an otherwise complicated relationship between a Silesian and a Varsovian was based precisely on their having known each other in the service.

WŚ: I’m from Silesia, so I’m touched by what you’ve just said. That’s exactly it, and all the things that the service gave men were of great importance socially. The scale of militarisation of socialist Poland’s culture is unimaginable from the present-day perspective. It was difficult to reconcile the militarism of the military discourse with putative internationalism, with the narrative of peace and of building People’s Poland. And so they’d come up with economic justifications for projects. For instance, the military was harnessed to help in the construction of the expressway between Warsaw and Katowice.

In the feudal social structure, which persisted in Poland pretty much until the interwar period, there was a clear division into those who labour, those who pray and those who fight – laboratores, oratores and bellatores. As we know, under socialism, oratores were sidelined, and laboratores and bellatores were supposed to merge. This meshing of labour and combat was sharply visible in the state propaganda of the communist regime.

PZ: The military model of masculinity lost social legitimacy during martial law, and the economic crisis of the 1980s rendered work unable to ensure material stability and upward mobility. Once again, masculinity had to be invented anew, a project in which the political opposition got actively involved.

WŚ: It was in the late stage of the Polish People’s Republic that two spheres of constructing an appealing fiction of masculinity were born, ones that would dominate the 1990s. The first one was the Catholic figure, which we’ve talked about a little already. In 1979, the famous exhibition Polaków portret własny [Poles’ Self-Portrait] took place in Kraków – the vast majority of these portraits were, of course, of male figures. The painting that closed the exhibition – Polak 1979 (A Pole 1979) by Leszek Sobocki – depicts a troubled Wojtyła, who at the same time presented himself as a strong, mighty man. Under his folded hands, between his muscular arms, there’s a piece of the sky, as if he’s holding the entire world in his palms. So it was both a closing and an opening figure. The history of Poland and of the world finds its capstone in the person of the pope.

Another thing is that the types hitherto perceived negatively – wheeler dealers, profiteers, etc. – suddenly became positive ones. In my book, I refer to Mieczysław Wilczek, who is just such an emblematic figure of a moderniser and proto-capitalist.

In the 1990s, attempts would be made to reconcile these two tendencies. A model man was to have been a man of success, an embodiment of energy, domination and competition on the one hand. On the other hand, the ballast of religious tradition was needed to keep him from being carried away by the forces of globalisation. These two were difficult to reconcile, weren’t they? After all, Catholicism, as we remember, praises poverty, the virtue of humility.

I would point to two people who, in my view, baptised Polish capitalism. First and foremost, John Paul II, in whose encyclicals we can find approval for the transition to a free-market economy. At the local level, there was Rev. Józef Tischner. To be clear, I’m not trying to deny his contributions. But we have to face the fact that in his statements, he forcefully presented the figure of homo sovieticus as a negative, ominous one, and at the same time he was a major apologist of entrepreneurship while making no attempt to understand the perspective of those for whom the economic transformation brought no benefit, often leading to a social and material downgrade. In 1995, the book Między panem a plebanem (Between the Master and the Priest) was published, in which Jacek Żakowski talks to Tischner and Adam Michnik, two patrons of the imagination of Polish elites after 1989. In these dialogues, it’s Tischner who’s the hawk and Michnik who’s the dove. The latter explains himself, saying that he still has some residual communist mentality. He’s dealing with overemployment at Agora, but he doesn’t have the heart to fire his employees, which is something Józek [Tischner] would do without hesitation.

PZ: What I also found interesting was the timeframe you demarcate for the economic transformation. You write about the first years of the Third Republic of Poland as ‘a festival of freedom, experiments with identity and newly excited hopes for equality’. But the window of freedom shuts quickly, and here you point to two symbolic dates: the first issue of the Polish edition of ‘Playboy’ in December 1992, and the passing of the anti-abortion law one month later. And you point to UEFA Euro 2012 as the second caesura of transformation. Why this event in particular?

WŚ: I was searching for a significant moment that would allow us to mark the point within the contemporary period by which the economic transformation had concluded. I think I wasn’t the only one who noticed that we should search for it in the 5-year period between the Smoleńsk air disaster and the victory of PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice) in the parliamentary elections. As the moment of closure, I pointed to UEFA Euro 2012, which marked Poland’s ludic and pop-cultural incorporation into the Western world. Poland and Ukraine, too, let’s remember. After all, the stadium in Donetsk, opened in 2012, became an arena of bloody struggle two years later. It’s also symptomatic of the fact that the transformation ended in that year in a geographic sense. Those were times of local tensions, exemplified by the Independence March, which grew larger and larger each year, as well as of a breakthrough moment in the global context, directly following the great economic crisis.

UEFA Euro was meant to strip, speaking somewhat bombastically, demotic football-fan expression from the public space. It was tied to the modernisation of stadiums as secure arenas but also to the hiking up of ticket prices leading to football’s becoming a middle-class form of entertainment. These and similar developments, such as the acquisition of Legia by the ITI Group, sparked an outcry – we remember the slogan ‘Donald [Tusk], you moron, crazed sports fans will topple your government’ [Donald matole, twój rząd obalą kibole]. The sporting event was a success of sorts, but it also provoked a reaction that questioned the neoliberal order in Poland. And that’s when, according to my theory, a new era began. Someone will probably describe it someday.

PZ: Regarding that new era: at the end of your book, you claim that ‘there’s probably no return to privileged masculinity, now or ever’. However, in the past few months, one could get the impression that we’re dealing with a rapid return to the macho model of manliness.

WŚ: In the last paragraph, I write that one can get very far when fuelled by unprocessed grief after the loss of privileged masculinity, so I nevertheless left the door open for such a possibility. I think we’re faced with two options now. One of them is a utopian thinking about the future – in the positive, progressive sense – and we have a shortage of that right now.

Mind you, however, that behind the return of strong macho attitudes there’s no other worldview than a denialist one. I call it, after Zygmunt Bauman, a retrotopia, that is, an idealised vision of the past to which we could supposedly return. But the implementation of such a retrotopia through concrete political decisions doesn’t seem to be at all concordant with what societies want. Right now, that’s clearly visible in the United States, where, for instance, pictures of women serving in the military are being erased from official US Army websites. The scale of violence is extraordinary, but I believe it’ll be met with resistance. We’ll certainly witness major tensions in Western societies. I’m not an optimist, but I have the impression that an order implemented by force is always a weak one and therefore won’t remain stable.

Wojciech Śmieja (b. 1977) is a professor of Polish literary studies at the University of Silesia, working primarily in the field of 20th- and 21st-century Polish literature and culture. His main research interests include representation and expression of gender and sexuality (gender and queer studies, critical men’s and masculinity studies). He has published four monographs, a volume of journalism, several dozen articles, sketches and essays in academic journals and edited collections. He was nominated for the Marcin Król Award for his book Po męstwie (2024).

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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