Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

The point of the “undead sexist cliche” label is that sexist and misogynist beliefs shamble on, refusing to die no matter how often they’re disproved. Case in point, the idea that being a dick to women — or a dick, period — makes you cool.

Until I started this post, I didn’t realize how much I’ve already blogged about this. For example, idea that if you’re a genius, you’re entitled to be a jackhole (and many geniuses and great men were jackholes to their wives). And geniuses certainly shouldn’t suffer for something as minor as rape.

I also wrote about an economist defending his colleagues talking sexist smack about women: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …” Dude, I stand by what I said then: “Just because academics are told they shouldn’t be sexist pigs, that doesn’t make being a sexist pig an act of rebellion. Being a sexist pig is just … being a sexist pig.”

As Andi Zeisler put it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, 1980s pop culture was all about the glories of being a sexist pig, “modeled, with varying degrees of malice, the notion that good, clean teen-boy fun isn’t just about objectifying women. It’s also about laughing at them and mortifying them in a sacrifice to the larger cause of male bonding and group identity … So many of us either knew that girl or were that girl, which makes me consider that perhaps Kavanaugh is telling the truth when he professes not to recall these alleged incidents. In the rarefied milieu of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges that nurtured him, jokes like these wouldn’t have been shocking or even particularly remarkable. They were the unacknowledged collateral damage of male bonding, blithely enacted on young women who didn’t have the luxury to forget about it.”

As a regular movie watcher back then, I can say Zeisler is absolutely right about how spying on naked girls or putting them in their place was a common theme in pop culture. At Atomic Junk Shop, the late Greg Hatcher makes the same point (I’ve linked to his column before, I know). Writing now, it strikes me it’s simultaneously treated as good, clean fun and as edgy rebellion. Rape apologist Camille Paglia, for instance, once wrote that “feminism with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness cannot see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” Of course feminists do grasp that men find rape fun and erotic — they just don’t think that’s an excuse, or that rape is any less of a brutal crime because the rapist enjoys it.

As I wrote back in December, “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.” Our culture gives rapists a free pass and judges frequently do too. Feminists are not running the show; they are the insurgency rebelling against the system. Just consider that anti-feminist hacks such as Katie Roiphe can get articles in major media complaining that if feminists stamp out sexual harassment, office life will be drab and beige: “Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease. Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal?”” A woman who won’t accept Mr. Creepy’s comments on her boobs is setting herself up for heartbreak! Why can’t she see Camille Paglia was right and enjoy the “wild, infectious delirium of guys ignoring her boundaries!

Recently we had bro-type leftwingers gushing about Graham Platner and how his adultery and edgy drunken behavior made him edgy and authentic — not one of those “smoothgroin” guys who never put a sexual foot wrong (even after the rape allegations, some pundits are outraged his authentic working-class campaign crashed and burned). Other leftwingers think Democrats appealing to the manosphere appeals to the working class which is the key to winning elections — never mind that lots of the working class are female. And that women are the bedrock of the Democratic vote; somehow consultant, centrists and left-wing bros never consider appealing to the female side of the electorate important.

Showing again the undead nature of this bullshit, a year ago, the NYT offered an explanation why Dems were losing young men: they avoid saying things like “retard” or “faggot” which means they’re not authentic! “If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness.”

Being woke and not calling people slurs is, apparently not authentic, just like Platner wouldn’t have been authentic if he’d been a faithful husband. “Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege.” Criticizing the bro-casters validates their stance as spokespeople for the oppressed! Erik Loomis, despite being liberal, grumbles that the right-wingers are indeed “cool and funny and hip” so maybe the way to beat them is not fuss about language and not worry about offending people (though he’s also argued that offending people who buy into traditional gender stereotypes is a mistake and we should meet them “where they’re at”).

In another post on Platner, I pointed out how very gendered this idea of authenticity is. A woman who ran wild like Platner wouldn’t have a shot at the senate; woman aren’t supposed to have wild sides. When women call out men for being rapists or rape apologists, that’s not seen as daring, edgy or challenging the status quo, even though they are. No, when they do it it’s “enforced sensitivity.” Nor do they get any plaudits for being willing to offend men by speaking out. Edginess, in this worldview, is something only men get to do. When women do it, it’s a variation on Margaret Atwood’s old line: women’s greatest fear is that men will kill or rape them, men’s greatest fear is that women will criticize them. And a large party of our society accepts that as normal.

For more on misogyny and how stupid it is, pick up a copy of Undead Sexist Cliches. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

“Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.” — Rebecca Solnit in 2025.

Which leads me to Frederick Douglass discussing the Founding Fathers: “They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was ‘settled; that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression.” Though they were as blind to women’s rights as they were to the rights of slavery, the principles the Founders embraced should nevertheless apply to all. Justice, liberty and humanity are final; not slavery, oppression and rape. We need to end rape.

Given how widely spread rape culture is in our society, that won’t be easy. Hell, Jesse Watters of Fox News thinks it’s hilarious to imagine American soldiers getting testosterone treatments running around committing rape. The misogynist Tate brothers have a massive fan base including the White House yet they’re allegedly (not that I doubt it) monsters: “The unsealed complaint against Tristan Tate alleged that he regularly choked, beat and raped a woman with whom he was in a romantic relationship in 2012 and 2013. She told authorities that he regularly choked her to unconsciousness, gave her a black eye and whipped her with a belt on multiple occasions, causing welts and bruises, the complaint said.” As I’ve said before, too many people swallow the idea the Tates are edgy and cool. (Here’s a discussion of the legal aspects).

As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I’ve no idea how to end rape but putting forward the proposal is the first step. Even with a time-frame — reduce rape 10 percent a year for 10 years, say — it’s a tall order. It will be taller than it should be because many people who have raped and gotten away with it, or enjoy the thought that they could if they chose, would scream bloody outrage. So would those who believe that punishing men for attacking women is fundamentally wrong. Celeste Davis: “Masculinity is not in crisis because the definition has changed. It is in crisis because it is currently predicated on being ranked above women and femininity in an increasingly gender equal world.” Not being able to rape women is a sign we’ve taken another step towards equality.

And, of course, even good political aims get derailed by politics and cronyism. North Carolina provides millions in grant money to agencies helping human-trafficking victims. In 2021, the Republicans transferred control of the money to a GOP-dominated branch of the government, despite protests from its employees they couldn’t manage that many grants. They couldn’t, and victims paid the price.

There are already men on the right dedicated to rolling back gender equality, like pastor Joel Webbon: “So long as we have democracy coupled with universal suffrage, you’ll constantly be going against the grain. You’ll constantly have half of the population voting for temperance, tolerance, suicidal empathy.  I don’t think you’re going to get people to vote away democracy. It has to be taken. I think that men, virtuous, ambitious, masculine men have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is their detriment.” Did I mention he wants the death penalty for women who make false rape charges? I’m sure he’d be fine if that resulted in even fewer rape victims speaking up. He’s one of many (though much as I despise the religious right, there are plenty of rapists and rape-apologists outside it).

When the rape apologists speak out, the media will treat their arguments seriously. “Critics says president’s call to end rape is really an attack on masculinity.” “Plan to end rape will offend believers in traditional gender roles, centrist Dems say.” Etc., etc. So we’d need to be ready with answers, and thoughts on how to deal with a media that, like much of our society, defaults to male dominance as normal. In the meantime, a couple of quotes:

“What many of us can do is try to construct a world in which survivors matter & concrete boundaries regarding abusers exist.” — from a Bluesky thread by Mo Ryan

“No abuser sustains a career of abuse alone. At every stage, they have people willing to give them second, third, 30th chance while the survivors keep being unable to pay their bills. those are also choices, and you don’t get to be automatically loved for them. Who gets all the chances speaks volumes” — Mo Ryan again. “Compassion without accountability is a form of enabling”

““How dare you consistently ask that political candidates have the kind of judgment & maturity that the average high school social studies teacher possesses?? Why are you being so mean to this smol bean white guy who displayed awful judgment many times over the years, including right now???? Ughh!!” — another thread by Ryan, on Graham Platner. “When the bar is set below hell, and somebody still doesn’t clear it, yes, of course, the people pointing that out are the problem, absolutely, makes sense.”

“A Texas man is facing federal charges after prosecutors say he created and distributed AI-generated pornographic images depicting women – including celebrities, public figures, and people he personally knew. Federal investigators accuse Arturo Hernandez of Bedias, Texas, of publishing more than 100 online albums containing explicit AI-generated content over more than a year. According to court records, the images allegedly portrayed victims performing sexual acts without their consent.” If he’s guilty, I hope he goes up for a long time.

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.