The Big Balls Man
Javier Bardem's criticisms of "toxic masculinity" disguise a more insidious truth about liberalism today
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If you’re sensing a pattern here, look: I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. My next opinion piece will not be about any part of the male appendage: meat, veg—no. Neither. I promise.
Today I watched a short video of actor Javier Bardem at the Cannes Film Festival. He was being Javier Bardem, by which of course I mean a typical Hollywood liberal.
Bardem is known for his grandstanding, and like many other actors, directors and film people, he never lets a good opportunity and a captive audience go to waste. And the Cannes Film Festival, where everything is about films and the people who make them, is exactly that.
Just occasionally, something strange and magical happens when a film person extemporizes at Cannes. The funniest time I think was when Lars Von Trier, that naughty Danish director of films like Nymphomaniac and Antichrist, started waxing lyrical about his admiration for the Third Reich, and Kirsten Dunst had to sit next to him like a huge anthropomorphic citrus fruit, without laughing or screaming or showing any visible emotion at all. Excruciating. It was probably her best piece of acting to date, which isn’t really saying much, I know.
But that was an amusing outlier. Ninety-nine times it’s just tedious right-on moralizing about the world’s problems from people who are probably least well equipped—even less than politicians—to diagnose, let alone, treat them.
And that’s exactly what Javier Bardem gave us: 66 seconds of tedious right-on moralizing about “toxic masculinity” and its relation to—well, I think you can guess. (Hint: it’s between your legs, chaps.)
Bardem’s new film, The Beloved—original Spanish title: El Ser Querido—“centers on a legendary director (played by Bardem) who reconnects with his estranged daughter (Victoria Luengo) by offering her a role in his new project. This brings them closer but reopens old wounds, exploring themes of family dynamics, power imbalances, absent or damaging fathers, male aggression, and patriarchal structures,” or so Grok says anyway.
Looking very grave, Bardem tells us “toxic masculinity” comes from “the bad education we have received for many years,” and it’s particularly bad in Spain—where the film is set and where Bardem comes from—because of its “machista” (misogynist) culture and “an average two women killed monthly by their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends.”
We must be “fucking nuts,” he says, to have “normalized” this.
And then, of course, he comes to President Trump—and the real “explanation” for “toxic masculinity.”
“And that problem also goes to Mr. Trump or Mr. Putin or Mr. Netanyahu, the big balls man. You know what I’m talking about: saying my cock is bigger than yours and I’m gonna bomb the shit out of you. It’s a fucking male toxic behavior that is creating thousands of dead people.”
Bardem is obviously a flaming retard, but the “small penis theory of history,” as I call it, is actually quite important. It’s symptomatic of our culture’s inability to understand men and their motivations, and of how men today are deprived of opportunities to give their masculine impulses a meaningful, satisfying outlet. The small penis theory of history is used to craft and market films like The Beloved, but the effects go much, much further than that.
It’s why we seem to be so obsessed with Hitler’s wiener, 80 years after he shot himself in the Führerbunker (or perhaps fled to Agartha). Just recently, we heard the news the Austrian Painter might have had a micropenis—genetic analysis suggests he had Kallman’s Syndrome—as if this somehow could explain why he invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and half the rest of Europe.
In fact, pretty much any prominent male figure from history is likely to be accused of having a small penis or some form of sexual dysfunction, especially if they’re famous for conquest and world-domination.
Look at Ridley Scott’s awful Napoleon film, for example, where the World Spirit on Horseback’s entire career, all that agony and ecstasy, is reduced to a cod psychosexual drama over his serially unfaithful first wife, Josephine Beauharnais. “The world, for Josephine,” the film’s posters read.
The small penis theory of history is part of a broader complex of jibes and insinuations that strike at the heart of traditional masculinity today. Most powerful of all, by far, is the claim that male association, even friendship itself, always contains a hidden core of gayness.
