This is an idea that I’ve seen in multiple different forms, most recently here.
This is kind of funny, given the Toddler in the White House devotes endless posts on Truth Social to proclaiming everyone who hurts his fee-fees or threatens his power is cringe. For example claiming James Talarico isn’t manly enough to eat meat (yes, this idiocy has become a theme on the right) so he eats it, then runs away to vomit. Right-wing masculinity is all about painting their opponents as low-status, which is to say too girly to be men. And of course, there’s Margaret Atwood’s observation that men’s greatest fear with women is that women will laugh at them.
The assumption women are driven not by rational argument but by things like “social status, popular consensus” is an Undead Sexist Cliche, a variation of the cliche that women are too emotional to think rationally (unlike say, the Toddler, who lashes out and applies tariffs for no other reason than someone in Switzerland wasn’t nice to him). I first ran into it 12 years ago, when libertarian Julie Borowski (a glance at her political postings online makes me think she’s one of those libertarians who are right-wingers in all but name — anti contraception, anti-abortion, anti-women having casual sex) declared women don’t want to be libertarians because they’re conditioned to worry about being “socially acceptable and fitting in with their peers” and so they can’t embrace the logic of an unpopular, minority worldview. As I note on the old post, she ignores that most men aren’t libertarians either, and that women, have in fact embraced many unpopular worldviews: women fought for the right to vote, for equality, for civil rights, for gay rights, when all of these were minority positions.
More recently we have Elon “fascist salute’ Musk embracing the position that anyone except high-testosterone alpha males is a sheeple. Implicit in this is that Musk himself is one of those alpha males rather than a pathetic attention-seeker who cheats at videogames. Hardly his worst sin, but telling — far from being a tough guy doing as he chooses, he’s as desperate for approval as anyone else.
As someone pointed out recently, many men seem to be the sheeple they claim women are. They’re happy to obsess over Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and other right-wing misogynists. They’re happy to embrace popular mainstream sexist cliches like patriarchy is good and fighting rape is an attack on men. Or more sadly to repress any part of themselves their buddies might think too girly.
That’s not to say women are immune to shaming or incapable of following the herd. That’s a common impulse in everyone of any gender. Equally common, people can sheeple on one thing, independent on another — a political radical who reads best-sellers, a political conformist who reads the most avant-garde literature, someone who dresses in whatever’s fashionable but roots for an unpopular sports team, etc. And plenty of men have fought for unpopular causes or pushed the envelope of what was acceptable.
But patriarchy depends on thinking of men and women as two homogenous masses who all want the same thing, not individuals.
For more on topics like this, Undead Sexist Cliches is available in ebook and paperback.
Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.
