“The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young men will do better under Trump, but at least they will feel pandered to.”
That’s from Emily Witt’s look at the manosphere, particularly misogynist Andrew Tate. It got me thinking about something many people have pointed out, that the guys who buy this line of bullshit (not an inconsiderable number, but Tate’s not as overwhelmingly popular as sometimes portrayed) see themselves as edgy dudes, pushing back against the womanized, feminazi status quo. They’re edgy rulebreakers, saying the things society wants to cancel! (For the record, anti-feminist women pretend the same thing).
No, they’re not. Saying “men should be in charge” or “men have the right to beat their wives” is common enough that it’s banal. There’s nothing edgy or daring about supporting patriarchy or defending rape — it’s evil, but it’s trite evil. The New York Times spent far more column inches discussing men’s fears of #metoo ruining their lives. than what it was like for women to face less harassment.
As I’ve mentioned before, they’re only “edgy” within a very narrow, approved range. Treating women like shit is edgy, but much as they may complain about how modern capitalist society won’t let them have breadwinner wages, attacking capitalism (“My boss got a $12 million handout from a crony running the state welfare funds — I’m hacking his account and giving it all to the poor!”) is somehow not edgy. Andrew Tate is not suggesting ways to gaslight your boss or report their lawbreaking without getting caught. Like Witt says, their supposed radicalism is just clinging to the status quo where men run everything.
The same thing is true of right-wing Christian misogyny. As Jesus and John Wayne says, religious conservatives fantasize that by promoting a toxic masculine version of Christiantiy, they’re pushing back against mainstream orthodoxy that gives women all the power — they’re not only godly, they’re daring rebels against the status quo!
Nonsense. We live in a country where men earn more than women for the same work and there’s systemic bias against women in lots of other ways. Men don’t worry about getting raped if they walk home late at night, yet it’s women’s sexuality that’s constantly policed. Few men have to deal with threats to provide sex or lose their job. Brett Kavanaugh gets on the Supreme Court despite plausible rape allegations; alleged domestic abuser Pete Hegseth is now SecDef. We live in a culture where dozens of rapes happen every day and the vast majority go unpunished. Where misogynists cover up for other misogynists. Yet some men manage to convince themselves women are the oppressors.
We live in a country where men — at least some men — are expected to receive himpathy for their actions: “I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a ‘real man.’ Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.”
Similarly, as Echidne of the Snakes says, male artists who despise women get respect a woman who despised men the same way would not.
Here’s one horrific example of oppression: a church in Minnesota where church leader Daryl Bruckelmyer knew church member Clint Massie was a pedophile. There were multiple cases and Bruckelmyer’s solution was to order the girls to forgive Massie and hug him. And then to tell Massie (or so Bruckelmyer claims) not to touch little girls again — except when he kept doing it, the response was “I told him not to!” The prosecutors decided rather than take action against Bruckelmyer, they’d just remind him he had to report cases like that; he didn’t. That kind of shit put a long list of girls through hell.
Not that this doesn’t happen in secular situations too. The right wing celebrates Riley Gaines for becoming an anti-trans activist after she and a trans woman tied for fifth place. As one of her acquaintances said, however “You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.” Protecting cis women from trans women is way, way more important to the right than actually protecting women.
Kristen Kobes du Mez has pointed out how Jeffrey Epstein was the heart of a massive web of corruption. Lots of rich, important people knew what he was doing; even if they didn’t participate or actively cover up, they did nothing. Rightwing jackass Steve Bannon was one of them, willing to work with Epstein for political gain (more on that here).
Misogyny isn’t edgy. Rape isn’t edgy. Well, unless you consider being evil or allying with the established power structure edgy.
