#masc'd up and “masked up” sounding the same is on purpose in this case ^_^ masc as mask!

[cringearenachamp]

(about the VH1 Behind the Music documentary)

hmmmm....

The book I'm taking excerpts from is a Journey history and also an overview of whiteness and white rock musicians making Black music famous, but Journey is so full of gender stuff that Golland can't avoid it. there were sooooo many little dogwhistles in that documentary lol. you had Joel Selvin in there doing his apparent job in reminding everyone how tiny and puny and un-manly Steve was, the general "bridezilla" framing (as mentioned above), the whole "Steve didn't believe in Family Values" part.... (in 2002 "family values" was a VERY loaded phrase: "family values" were conservative/right-wing values. saying someone didn't "believe in family values" or was "anti-family values" was a way to "respectfully" accuse someone of being gay or even just an ally to causes like gay rights, abortion rights, etc)

But yeah, steve being a "diva", a "primadonna", "bridezilla"-- we call him a diva as a term of endearment, but straight guys don't call other guys divas to be nice, lol. guys accusing other guys of being womanly is a way to try and police the bounds of their in-group and bring the "accused" guy back in line. he doesn't necessarily even have to be all that feminine or feminine *at all*-- he could be the most normie cis-het dude ever in various respects-- he just has to go against the in-group's status quo enough in ways that trouble its social order. The femininity in this case is something other men brand him with because (in misogynist thinking and frameworks) feminine = inferior/submissive/weak.

Diva/primadonna/"bridezilla" aren't just feminine, though: eddie van halen basically called Steve a "sissy", and "sissy" especially evokes a weak/submissive feminine. Diva/primadonna/"bridezilla" evoke a powerful feminine, a dominant or "bossy" feminine, and in the case of "bridezilla" an out-of-control, monstrous feminine. They're terms men might use about women that didn't "know their place" (and for misogynistic men, any time a woman does anything assertive for herself is seen as a threat/not "knowing her place"). In this case, Steve is being gendered not only as a failed man, but a failed man that's also a failed woman! genderfailure squared!

If Steve stayed a prettyboy and kept his mouth shut, that might've been fine: hair metal got big by the mid-80s; a certain kind of femininity was okay for presumed-straight men to express again (but that femininity was paired with some REALLY nasty misogyny and homophobia-- because it was straight men, and they had to wink and nod to other straight men that they're "in on the joke", so to speak). If Steve still masc'd up Frontiers-style while maintaining the status quo, that probably would've been ideal for Herbie et al. But it seems as though Herbie and his allies saw Steve as someone trying to claim things that he didn't have a legitimate claim to: he was challenging the role of patriarch as someone who didn't want to necessarily become a patriarch himself (albeit still a leader figure). Part of why Steve's claim on the band was seen as less legitimate was because he wasn't seen as the "right" kind of man: he was a man that didn't respect the current patriarch and he didn't respect the ROLE of patriarch (A MAN? Not respecting the role of PATRIARCH?? Quelle horreur!). Or, he wasn't seen as the "right" kind of man simply BECAUSE he was staking a claim seen as illegitimate. Or a little of both, with each claim perpetuating and justifying the other (and of course women themselves are never seen as people who can be legitimate leaders: either way, it reveals the misogyny behind a lot of this, despite the target being another man).

Leo Bersani writes that straight people see gay leathermen, for example, as a PERVERSION of maleness (rather than a subversion of it or interpolation of it): a sort of claiming for themselves what doesn't belong to them and thus corrupting it. Gay men, even the most masculine, can never be "real" men according to homophobic patriarchal ideology: gayness in this equation is inherently "feminizing" (and very old-timey words for gay make use of this: "invert", for example, meaning a man with a woman's soul or vice-versa) and gay acts are "corrupting" what was once a "pure" masculinity.

Herbie would use language like that about Steve, too-- for example, saying he "corrupted" Jon (and he basically believed Steve taking on leadership roles was a "perversion" of leadership). Using language like "corruption" and words like diva/primadonna/bitch/etc about Steve seem to me like attempts to punish deviance, and to equate his professional "deviance" with a personal "deviance" and thus justify Herbie's treatment of him. Moreover, as I suggested earlier, Steve's attempts to gain control within the band were seen as personally insulting not just because he was "taking" what "belonged" to Herbie but because it was HIM that did it, and he was doing it "wrong" while being the "wrong" type of man (or, again, doing it "wrong" "proved" that he was the "wrong" kind of man).

(a little more: Herbie would use that kind of emasculating/feminizing language with Steve, but at the same time, when it suited him, he would simply dehumanize him instead (emasculation and feminization in themselves are seen by misogynist men as a sort of lite-dehumanization-- also part of why this type of man is very often if not always also transphobic): calling him "more primate than man", for example. Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ur Fascism", describes how authoritarians talk about their enemies as if they're both pathetically weak AND monstrously strong. You can see some of that with how Herbie talked about Steve.)