Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card

Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America’s Favorite Card Game The Poker Mindset Andrew Manno Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America’s Favorite Card Game Andrew Manno Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America’s Favorite Card Game The Poker Mindset Andrew Manno Department of English Raritan Valley Community College Branchburg, NJ, USA ISBN 978-3-030-40259-4 ISBN 978-3-030-40260-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40260-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Image credit: LAMB/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface and Acknowledgements How is it that an English professor writes a book about masculinity and poker? As a bookish child, I struggled to create a masculine identity that combined academic inclinations with more-or-less unquestioned traditional ideas of masculinity. That bookishness led eventually to undergrad- uate and graduate degrees in literature. My doctoral dissertation in the mid-1990s, I can see now, while focusing on twentieth-century Irish literature, touched on issues of masculinity, albeit not in an overt way. Further, while working on my dissertation, I became a parent. During this time, I attempted to reconcile an academic identity with the expectation of being a middle-class “provider,” as these two seemed at odds considering the long years spent in graduate school living off stipends and teaching fellow- ships rather than making more lucrative career choices. These experiences prompted me to think about masculinity as an ideology: How is such an ideology constructed? How are the pressures to live up to the ideals of our traditional masculinity ideology harmful? How can they be resisted? As time went on, my analysis of masculinity became more explicit. As an English professor at Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg, New Jersey, I researched the growing field of Men’s Studies and thought about its important connections to Women and Gender Studies. One consequence of this research and analysis was that in 1999 I developed a course, Masculinity in Literature, that explores literature that questions, resists, or subverts traditional notions of masculinity. Further, I worked with colleagues at Raritan Valley to develop an Option in Women and v vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Gender Studies for the A.A. in Liberal Arts degree and to create an Introduction to Women and Gender Studies course as part of the Option. As I thought more about Gender Studies and taught the Introduction to Women and Gender Studies course, I became convinced that it was essential to include an examination of masculinities in that course, because it generally wasn’t reflected in the textbooks available at the time. As a result, I cowrote an article published in the journal Men and Masculinities in 2011, “Navigating the Gender Box: Locating Masculinity in the Intro- duction to Women and Gender Studies Course.” I’ve also presented my work on analyzing poker through the lens of masculinity at a number of conferences over the last ten years, including conferences for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, the American Men’s Studies Association, and the Working-Class Studies Association. This project is the result of a number of fortunate accidents. It was a fortunate accident in 2002 when two friendly neighbors invited me to a poker game at one of their homes. It was another fortunate accident that I did my doctoral work at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As I drove from New Jersey into the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania on Route 78 each morning during my time taking courses and working on my dissertation in the early 1990s, I saw the smoke billowing up from the Bethlehem Steel plant as I entered the town. The road I took to the Uni- versity passed massive Bethlehem Steel plant buildings. Eight years after the Bethlehem Steel Corporation filed for bankruptcy in 2001, the Sands Bethlehem Casino opened. I saw the transformation of the location from the site of an iconic industrial era company to a casino as a powerful sym- bol of the changing economy and the place of workers and citizens in it. I’m an experienced amateur poker player, having played recreationally for the past eighteen years. I’ve played in cash games and tournaments in poker rooms in nearby casinos, in cigar-smoke-filled garages and base- ments in my neighborhood and in nearby towns, and in free poker leagues across New Jersey. My personal journey helped me make sense of the in- tellectual journey that has resulted in the argument I make in this book. While I immediately saw the gender dynamics at work when I began play- ing poker, it took me many years to make sense of my own interest and involvement in poker and how it related to the poker boom. This book is not merely an academic exercise for me; it’s personal and the result of years of observation, research, and introspection. While I initially saw poker as a way to feel better about my masculine identity by conform- ing to aspects of traditionally accepted masculinity, I eventually came to PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii see poker as an activity that reinforces and perpetuates damaging masculine cultural values about wealth, consumption, toughness, risk-taking, and aggression, to name a few. If I’m being honest, I initially held myself above my fellow poker players, thinking that their enactment of traditional masculinity in the form of their displays of toughness, aggression, deception, and risk-taking was something to look down on. I saw my desire to play smart, disci- plined poker based on patience and sound decision-making as superior to their displays and apparent motivations. Eventually, I came to see the hubris of this thinking and realized that in my desire to play poker, I was not of course immune to the pressures of enacting traditional masculinity. In fact, I was enacting it every bit as much as my fellow players. The difference—something that took me quite a while to realize—was that I desired to enact different elements of traditional masculinity, those related to control and financial providership. The book that you are now reading is definitely not the same book on poker and masculinity that I envisioned almost twenty years ago. I initially took a very traditional literary approach and examined the way that representations of poker in fiction and film enacted traditional masculinity. However, that analysis didn’t explain poker’s popularity, so I shifted my analysis to argue that this popularity was due to it being a symbolic space where men can enact desired versions of masculinity that they had difficulty enacting in their daily lives. Such an analysis was an improve- ment from my original vision of the project, but it was still missing a larger reason for why the analysis was important. As I took a step back to consider the bigger picture of the economy, labor, and socio-economic class, I saw what I came to call the “Poker Mindset,” a set of values seen outside the poker table. This lens helped me connect ideas that were previously seen in isolation. One doesn’t need to be a poker player to subscribe to these values. They’re part of our cultural rhetoric and our current national ethos. Examining the “Poker Mindset” sheds light on three serious social problems—toxic masculinity, casino capitalism, and worker disenfranchisement—that are generally unexamined and certainly not adequately examined together. The Poker Mindset is a way to bring together an important analysis of these interconnected problems, explain how toxic masculinity fuels a damaging winner-take-all hyper-capitalism, and challenge accepted gender expectations as a way of bringing about both greater gender and economic equality. viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book will not teach you how to play poker. For that, there are abundant books, websites, and other instructional materials. This book will also not focus on advanced poker strategy, the lives of famous poker players, or the history of poker, as do many other books about poker. In fact, if you love poker you may not love this book

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