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Published online: 17 June 2025
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025
Rudyard Kipling’s (1899/1929) intersectional poem on race and gender is notable for its psychosocial dream of white men finding unification in the cultivation of a cold imperial edge. A handful of decades later, Kipling’s phallocentric suggestion of potential omnipotent if not anal retention through power over others is found to be ever-present in mainstream cinema whereby a male gaze is considered perverse for trading in an alienated and voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey, 1975). In regard to masculinity per se, a phallocentric fantasy of being chronically cold and steady is all too often essentialized along lines that repudiate feminine identifications with relationality and intimacy (cf. Kupers, 1993). In the extreme, repudiation facilitates the counterdependent declarations of difference known as aggression and violence. To the extent that group identifications that naturalize domination lead particular identified males to affirm violence, the burden of obsessional and compulsive preoccupations with power are traumatically known by any targeted other. Of these idealized and enacted values, a contemporary Nietzschean will rightly complain of stale if not bad air. Attempts to open metaphorical windows are found in twenty-first century calls to shift the psychoanalytic subject from centering on a European, bourgeois, white male to a decentered and decolonial context that favors the Black female (Stephens, 2024). Movement towards such a utopian vision entails working to situate and potentially tame the narcissistic power relations that thwart intersubjective relationality (cf. Sherover-Marcuse, 1986). In the wake of persistent culturecide, genocide, and ecocide, it may simply be too late for a civilized maturational transformation of the default social representation known as the heterosexual white man to make a significant difference within global relations. Yet, a stubbo