THE BOYS CLUB ***sold***

Martine Delvaux
(Éditions du remue-ménage, 234 pages, 2019)

***Winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal 2020 ***

They look at each other, seated in a circle, each growing in size as each takes the other in. It is enough to see themselves in the eyes of their fellow men. I think to myself that, really, men do not need a common interest to form a community: they themselves are the common interest; what unites them is the very figure of Man erected at the center. All for one and one for all, to always uphold the group they form, the assembly more commonly known as the boys club.

—Martine Delvaux

The Boys Club is a critical study of fraternity that shows no deference to its long-standing sanctity, exposing instead its troubled psychology and the repercussions of men in groups. Considering first the history of gentlemen’s clubs in London, Paris, and New York, Delvaux makes the case that their contemporary permutations are just as exclusory as ever, and just as intent on maintaining a misogyny that designates woman as “[sexual] object” and Man as “subject.” “And not only that” Delvaux writes, “the boys club is a mechanism by which privilege is constructed, erected and maintained, defended, protected.” Delvaux analyzes the gentlemen’s clubs of London, New York, and Paris—their histories as well as how gentleman club culture is portrayed in film—before turning to their less circumscribed and yet more pervasive presence in Hollywood, politics, tech, architecture, religion, law enforcement, and the military.

Where “[t]he repetition of a figure, of an image, exposes a system,” Delvaux looks at how men in groups are portrayed in film and television (largely by male directors): The Wolf of Wall Street, The Riot Club, American Psycho, Munich, The Fountainhead, Jessica Jones, Patrick Melrose, and House of Cards, to name several. Delvaux makes a strong case for the correspondence between film and reality. The stereotype of the architect as a Renaissance man-genius, for example, as seen in movies such as The Fountainhead or The Architect, is grounded in the foundational philosophies of the trade that place men in the position of architect and women in the position of designer. Like Iris Brey (The Female Gaze) emphasizes throughout her work, Delvaux argues that the film industry needs more women directors, and the tendency to treat women as accessories to the central (male) characters needs to be challenged. 

The result of this gender disparity in visual media is that boys consider that what is female and feminine is to be dominated and consumed. One of most disturbing examples Delvaux cites is iPhone footage of group rape and violence done to women uploaded to social media. The contempt cultivated for women in boys club culture rationalizes mistreatment and violence against women in advance—violence that will continue to percolate as long as boys clubs are allowed to remain invisible and inevitable.

The Boys Club is profoundly informed by the work of feminist scholars and writers, film critics, historians, and journalists—the bibliography alone spans eleven pages—but Delvaux goes further: it is not enough to defend the aptitude of women, to insist upon their participation in the world, and to decry the patriarchal systems still standing. Men-in-groups should also be subject to the very psychoanalytic critique that men have historically assumed to write about women; also, the mechanisms of the order should be exposed, and the boys pulled out from out behind the curtain.

 Martine Delvaux is a writer and militant feminist. She is a professor of literature and women’s studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal.