Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

As I blogged about a week ago, a woman named Jenny Racicot reported that Gerald Platner, Democratic candidate in the Maine Senate race, raped her. Happily lots of Democrats yanked their support and called on him to drop out (not all). He has now done so; he has also formally submitted the paperwork that will allow Dems to remove him from the ballot. He is not, however, at all apologetic, presenting himself as a man unfairly persecuted. He wasn’t; as Scott Lemieux says, lots of left-wing candidates are running this cycle. The others didn’t get accused of rape.

Obviously he’s considerably worse than I realized. As I said in the post, I didn’t see much need to think about him deeply: I’m not in Maine, he was the candidate, and beyond the Nazi tattoo I didn’t pay too much attention. Other people did and they were clearly right to warn against him. As Courtney Milan says, “I just saw someone say that hindsight is 20/20 on Graham Platner, and let me just say that if you did not see this coming, your vision for such things needs to be checked.” Unfortunately some people aren’t 20/20 on Platner even in hindsight. (There’s also this WaPo podcast which explains how what happened with Platner is exactly like what happened to Biden in 2024).

Platner showed piss-poor judgment getting into a major race with so much baggage (I’m not implying rape results from bad judgment. It’s not bad decision-making, it’s plain evil). As Michelle Goldberg says, people “went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.” It didn’t help that Dan Moraff, his top strategist, didn’t want to spend money on an in-depth background check (one journalist says he previously asked her to delete candidates’ quotes from an article). Paul Campos lists other bad judgment calls.

Democratic operatives Moraff, Leanne Fan and Morris Katz all pushed Platner to run; the New York Times notes his campaign was a disorganized mess. I agree with Hilzoy: Katz, Fan and Moraff should be redflagged for future political work. I doubt they will be. To be fair, lots of other Democrats backed Platner as a white knight: “Many justified their endorsements with Platner’s so-called progressive values and the idea that the party must oust Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to have a better chance at winning a majority in the November midterms.” I’m sure Cheryl Rofer is right that Platner represents masculine stereotypes many people still find appealing.

I’ve read arguments over whether there are other, equally viable candidates with the right politics; like I said, I’m not following the Maine race closely enough to say. Regardless, I agree with Mother Jones at the last link that we cannot excuse rape in the name of the greater good: “This perspective considers only the good abusive men like Platner can contribute and dismisses the people they abuse. It treats survivors with disdain, devaluing what they add to their communities. It slams shut any pathway to speak out and denies survivors personhood by condemning them for even daring to exercise the right to speak.”

Stephen King makes an alternative argument: everybody’s doing it! We already have a Congress full of rapists! That’s not entirely true — I’m confident Ocasia-Cortez and Susan Collins haven’t raped anyone — but it’s entirely possible I’ve voted for rapists without knowing it. However that is not an argument for voting a known, or at least credibly accused rapist, into office. Adding another rapist doesn’t balance the scales. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Rape is a profound human rights violation, an act of dehumanization, and an act that says the rapist’s rights and desires are boundless and the victim’s rights and desires are nothing. It is incompatible with democracy.”

Besides, the everybody’s doing it argument, AKA “we are all sinners,” is fundamentally flawed.

It’s true, some compromises are necessary in politics; arrogance, ego, adultery all turn up in candidates. All can be forgivable, maybe Rape is not something to compromise on. As Steve Philips puts it, “If we are willing to look away from credible allegations of sexual violence whenever the political stakes are high enough, then we are not, in fact, the movement we claim to be.” Even though Republicans have no qualms about supporting rapists and accused rapists, “we’ll accept a rapist if they have better politics” is not an acceptable solution. Let’s go with “no rapists.” Rachel Cohen: “A version of this argument plays out now, as shocking numbers of people log on to defend Graham Platner’s candidacy, rapist or not, by pointing out that the President is a rapist with worse politics. They seem to have forgotten that we want to be different than the President.”

Over in a Lawyers, Guns and Money comment thread, my friend Karen points out another sexist aspect of this. Platner supporters hailed him because he was authentic, a working-class guy who’d served in the military and yet had progressive attitudes; by contrast Hilary Clinton in 2016 was often attacked as inauthentic. Karen replies Clinton was perfectly authentic: “She never pretended to be anything other than the hard-working honor student with the perfect resume.” And politically ambitious. And that’s kind of authenticity many liberal pundits despise: Clinton would be an example of what Ken Klippenstein labels “the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly.” See Cheryl Rofer’s link above about Platner’s appeal to a certain kind of man.

Of course Platner’s ambitious too. Nobody who starts out in politics running for the Senate can be anything else. But it’s more acceptable in a man. And if Clinton had his kind of authenticity — i.e., bad behavior — they’d be dumping on her for that. A woman can’t get away with inappropriate behavior the way a guy can (Echidne of the Snakes has an example).

Gender bias shows in other ways. Cohen points out that some people who initially insisted we have to support Platner as an the alternative is Republicans holding the Senate would probably have been outraged if someone made a similar case for Harris (e.g., however flawed her policies, Republicans will do worse). Solnit points out (at the link above) that “according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat.” It’s hard to imagine the people defending Platner’s acts as resulting from PTSD would be similarly kind to a rape victim.

As Fred Clark says, rape is a national emergency. It happens a lot, it happens every day. Like sexual harassment it derails the lives and careers of countless women, choking off their contributions to society. “How many? Too many. How often? Too often. That’s all the quantification we really need here.”

Last month I ran a post about Maine Senatorial candidate Gerald Platner and the men who defended his Nazi tattoo and his adultery — don’t Democrats realize that real people are flawed and messy? Rejecting him is just “HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. Another pundit, Ken Klippenstein, suggested it’s better to have someone flesh and blood and manly rather than “real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

Turns out Stoller and Klippenstein should have listened to the HR ladies: a woman who used to date him says he raped her. The woman, Jenny Racicot, provided evidence too: “emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner.” Some discussion here. Apparently the Maine Dems can swap out another candidate if Platner steps down from the race quickly enough. Sounds like he might do it. If he’s genuinely committed to opposing the Toddler and fascism, he should, whether or not we can win with Candidate B.

I’d like to say something deep about this. I got nothing. It’s frustrating to think control of the Senate, and thereby appointments to SCOTUS, might hinge on this mess. However dumping a rapist is absolutely the right and necessary choice.

Racicot says she waited because she supports his politics, just not him. As journalist Marisa Kabas says, “this dynamic described by jenny racicot is, as i understand it, very common among progressive women in maine. they’ve been put in an impossible position and feel like they’re tanking platner’s campaign when in reality he did that on his own by being a violent and reckless person.” As Elizabeth Wrigley-Field puts it “One of my hardest-won political lessons is that it’s never, ever worth it to treat ppl as ~indispensable no matter what they do~ —bc we see the contributions & potential of the abusive men & we don’t get to see that in the women they drive out. We never actually get to know what we’ve squandered”

You may remember a quote from a few months back in which a business owner talked about how good it feels that in the Toddler Era he feels free to say the f-word for homosexuals and the r-word for the mentally disabled — it’s liberating!

I’m quite sure if I said he was an a-hole and a homophobic bigot — both of which appear to be true — he would be pissed off rather than celebrating my freedom not to be courteous. It’s Wilhoit’s law — they want their side free of restraint and protected from consequence but nobody outside their own camp gets the same treatment. That translates in speech to the freedom to toss off racial slurs or insult people but anyone calling them on it is shutting down free speech. Case in point, I have seen right-wing arguments over the years that because of liberal politically correct, woke, thought-policing, they can’t say the n-word! It’s the biggest example of cancel culture ever! Of course, they can say it and they do, but they’ll be criticized for it — and they think they should be able to punch down without anyone ever punching back up.

That’s part of what fuels the endless cries of voter fraud: this is their country, rightfully belonging to property-owning white Protestant men like it was when the Founders approved the Constitution; when Thomas Jefferson said all men are created equal, he didn’t mean anyone else! Their votes should count, nobody else’s.

They want us back to the 1950s (for the enlightened ones) or the 1800s (the reactionary ones) when WASP men were in charge of everything and nobody noticed or brought up bias — it was accepted that was the way it was. It was not in fact accepted and people did bring it up but the voices weren’t so loud (I made the same point back in May). In Paul Campos’ words, “For Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett, and for hundreds of like-minded federal judges, America is a white supremacist country, and the Constitution is therefore a white supremacist document, and must at all times be interpreted to the extent possible — which is very considerable! — in the light of this fundamental underlying interpretive principle, which naturally includes all the other varieties of extreme cultural reaction (misogyny, money worship etc) that are integral to protecting white supremacy. Anything else is simply a theft of sovereignty from the [white] People.”

That supremacy includes the freedom to treat the “lesser” genders or races like shit.

As Paul Krugman says, the 19th century robber barons were horrible people but they felt obligated to pose as respectable members of society, keeping their bad behavior under wraps (though a lot of what we’d consider bad behavior, such as racism or abusing workers, was acceptable at the time). Now the gloves and the restraint are off. Consideration for lesser mortals? Screw ’em. Let them eat cake.

Similarly bigots and misogynists see no need to hide how much they hate people who are not them. A number of conservative Muslims showed up at the Texas GOP Convention this month. While conservatives are normally willing to ally with anyone on the right — fascists, Nazis, theocrats — it turns out they drew the line at Muslims. They had no hesitation letting their hate flag fly, telling the Muslims they weren’t Americans and couldn’t be trusted ever: even if they seem nice and law-abiding “if they get power, they’ll cut your head off as believers of Christ.” White Christian Republicans, of course, routinely shriek about violence to their enemies, death to gays, but That’s Different.

Rep. Brandon Gill (one of those shitting on James Talarico as not manly enough) then defended the convention attendees, declaring that America cannot tolerate “cultures that have very different ideas about freedom of speech, religion, separation of church and state, the dignity of women, the role of women in public life.” If I pointed out that all of this applies to the Religious Right and suggested that should affect their status in America, Gill would doubtless be screaming. And it does apply to the Religious Right, a large portion of whom think freedom of speech and religion are theirs alone, church and state should not be separated and women have no role in public life. Plus, of course, religious conservatives are the groomers they pretend they hate.

Then there’s their angry insistence that immigrants can never be real Americans like they can — not even a fourth generation American is American enough. Except of course, the Toddler of the United States is only second-generation and they like him fine. And black Americans, who’ve been here since before 1776, will never qualify. It resembles the way that Americans of a century ago set strict laws on who qualified as white or colored — a single African-American grandparent or a great-grandparent, say — but found workarounds to exempt respected white people. In one case the judge concluded that the grandparent might have had some white blood, which meant the person under consideration might be less than one-quarter black — case dismissed!

This ties in to their proposal to end birthright citizenship: “To prove you’re American, you would need to maintain—and produce on demand—an unbroken documentary chain of legitimate transmission from yourself back to some original conferring event. Every link must hold.” America will be remade in the image of the communist states we once despised, a place where anyone in authority can demand “papers, please” or we become a non-citizen (only it will be a lot more paperwork). As Mother Jones says, “the American dream is the idea that in the United States, people’s fate is determined by their own merit, not the status of their parents. But the executive order would create a caste of people who inherit a lesser status from which there could be no escape.” Except of course, anyone the powers that be approve of — this won’t be formally stated but some people simply won’t face the harsh scrutiny others do.

We can see it in the way revoking women’s right to vote has gone from the fringes to something they’ll openly discuss. Or the way they’ve gone from “no woman will be punished for getting an abortion” to pushing to prosecute them for murder. Or stop people even talking about contraception. Or “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth axing women and POC from being promoted to admiral — in his world view, giving someone like that authority to order white men around would just be wrong.

Much like this discussion of the racist British far right points out, the white supremacists have the advantage of a clear vision and a fierce commitment to achieving it. That makes them look decisive and determined which can appeal to a lot of people. As Jamelle Bouie says, we need a vision of our own, not just cleaning up the Toddler’s mess. As I said at the link, fighting for the equal rights of all Americans and gutting the power of those who hate equality might qualify. Until we can make that a reality, we must also push the white supremacist creed back to the fringes of society. Eventually, we banish it.

The founders had a cramped concept of “We, the people.” We can do better. We have to.

The title comes from George Orwell’s scathing comment about British “jingoists” — warhawks — of the early 20th century: “The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” The same thing, I think, applies to masculinity: a great many people who aren’t tough, manly men will talk very, very loudly about manhood and toughness as if that were a substitute for being a man.

This is not a new thing. More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh was whining that the NFL doing better to shield football players from concussion was a sign America was becoming “chickified.” Easy for Limbaugh to say, as his high school football days were long behind him. Like Orwell’s “true patriot” he wasn’t getting anywhere near the front lines. Back in 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz whined that an Army recruiting ad focusing on a female corporal meant our military — in which he’d never served — was emasculated. How could a girl compare to the might of Putin’s testosterone-laden Russian warriors (the same ones now getting their asses kicked in the Ukraine)?

Or Donald Trump Jr. arguing that Joe Biden is such a wuss, he doesn’t scare our enemies the way Trump Sr. does. Sure, Junior’s never accomplished anything that didn’t depend on Daddy’s name, but his Daddy can beat up Hunter Biden’s daddy!

Or pundit Matt Walsh, who demonstrates masculinity by screeching bullshit online, declaring that women want to marry manly heroes like the first responders in 2017’s Hurricane Harvey — that’s manhood! Dude, if that was true, you wouldn’t be married, neither would I. Neither of us meet that standard of manliness, which isn’t a standard at all (plenty of women are first responders).

Now we’re seeing the same dynamic play out with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a liberal Christian Democrat. He appears to be decent and not all toxic-masculine, therefore his masculinity is invalid. Todd Starnes, a career pundit, sneers that Talarico wears “frilly underpants.” Ted Cruz (again) sneers that nobody would think of Talarico as masculine. Jesse Watters, Fox News’ smirking chimpanzee, claims Talarico is a low-testosterone loser who doesn’t eat enough meat or know enough about football to be a real man (he also claims California Gov. Gavin Newsom is too effeminate). GOP Rep. Brandon Gill hints Talarico’s not only gay but a pedophile.

As I’ve discussed earlier, part of this is the toxic-masculine insistence that there’s only one way to be a man. Because if there are alternatives, then that concept of manhood — it doesn’t matter if we’re toxic, we’re guys, we can’t help it! — becomes invalid. It’s one option among many. Which means meeting the benchmarks of stereotypical guyhood — chasing women, smoking cigars, watching sports or whatever — no longer prove you’re a man. And without proof of manhood … OMG, what if I’m not one?

On top of which, Cruz, Walsh and Starnes are engaging in the toxic-masculine equivalent of slut-shaming. In the book Slut! Leora Tanenbaum discusses how women slut-shame each other as proof of their own virtue: “Sure, I’ve blown a couple of guys but I’m not a slut like Janet! She’s a total tramp!” What the guys are doing is the same thing. Watters is obsessed with sneering at other guys’ masculinity — it’s effeminate to use a straw! It’s effeminate to eat ice-cream cones! By so doing, he (in theory) shores up his own masculine cred. Which I imagine he feels a need for, given his manliness consists of sitting on a Fox News set and sneering at other people’s behavior.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Watters or Cruz or Walsh not being tough, macho guys; I’m not either. Being a pundit rather than a first responder or a soldier on the front lines is a perfectly legitimate choice. And while it does make their macho strutting pathetic, even if they were tough guys, that wouldn’t excuse sneering at other men for not being butch enough; right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly served as a Marine in Iraq and that doesn’t make his bashing other men any better.

Celeste Davis has a related post here.

Platner is the Maine senatorial candidate notorious for the Nazi tattoo, and for the debate whether, even though he’s not a Nazi (from what I’ve read), thinking a Nazi tattoo is cool makes him unacceptable. Is he too Nazi adjacent or is this that old bugaboo, a “purity test” that will lock us out of the seat? I’ve heard different assessments on the left but as I’m not a Maineman and won’t be voting I don’t have to figure out who’s right. I’d definitely a prefer a candidate without Nazi tattoos but I don’t find him as horrific as I did Aaron Coleman.

That said, it’s worth nothing that some people are rushing to support Platner in the wake of an NYT story about his personal history — drinking, womanizing, adultery (according to his wife they’re working through it) and often something of a dick. Though not, according to his lovers, a monster or a rapist. The creepy thing is that some pundits on the left think this is awesome because Platner is a Real Man. He represents “a rejection of Dem HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. The Argument lists multiple other examples of pundits explaining that if you want a flesh-and-blood human being to run for office, expect them to have messy lives: “Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite.”

Well, no, it isn’t. As the post says, it reflects that in most elections we have limited choices; someone who might turn down an adulterous candidate may not have a better option. It doesn’t mean people who support Platner are drawn by his cheating machismo. And it’s telling that like Stoller, one Ken Klippenstein sneers that the alternative to Platner is “the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” It must astonish Klippenstein that not everyone who stays faithful to their spouse is devoid of a sex drive.

As Liberal Currents puts it after posting more of Klippenstein’s sneering, Klippenstein’s declaration fidelity is for wimps and asexuals “is a puerile and chauvinistic sentiment. It’s the sort of high school cafeteria misogyny you’d get from an 80s sex comedy. It’s derogatory to women, to the people offended by Platner’s long list of misconduct, and to politicians Klippenstein simply sees as weak and unmanly.” And then Klippenestein posted photos of the women in the race — wow, these ugly old broads obviously have no sex scandals (that’s an interpretation, not Klippenstein’s statement).

This comes off as another version of the toxic masculinity stereotypes Dr. Nerdlove complains about: obviously you can’t expect a genuine authentic man to behave decently. We can’t expect them to be perfect, whether they’re in politics or not. However there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “isn’t a decent person.” Nor is a person who tries to live a moral life and fails the same as a serial philandering hypocrite (that’s a general observation, not targeted at Planter).

Like I said, Platner’s fate is up to Maine voters, not me. But these excuses for his conduct come off worse than anything I’ve heard Platner say in his own defense.