Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

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.

Elsie Dominguez, a member of the Merchant Marine, says she was raped by a naval captain in 2021. When she told her superiors she was “discouraged from reporting, dissuaded from seeking medical testing, denied access to confidential reporting, and had her job threatened.” Finally she filed a legal complaint. As detailed at the link, the Department of Labor decided being doped and assaulted was an injury she’d sustained in the course of her duties, therefore a worker’s comp matter … and they denied her claim.

A 13-year-old middle schooler reported a classmate had raped her. The school and the cops decided it didn’t look like she was struggling, decided it was consensual and took no action.

18-year-old Jesse Butler comes from a prominent Stillwater, Oklahoma family. Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to charges including “first-degree rape, domestic assault and battery by strangulation, attempted rape in the first degree and rape by instrumentation” from when he was seventeen. He was charged as an adult, then dropped down to juvenile; instead of a 78-year potential sentence he got a sentence of community service and counseling.

These are not new issues. The military has a long history, like many organizations, of ignoring rape; it used to be acceptable to grant clemency to officers convicted of sexual assault. Lots of judges, prosecutors and cops think they can tell it’s consensual even when it isn’t: if she’s not literally trying to fight him off, hey, she probably wanted it. I get into this a lot in Undead Sexist Cliches. However they’re still an outrage and we should keep on being outraged. Shrugging and declaring that’s just the way of the world solves nothing. We won’t know if we can end rape until we try. We won’t know if we can reform institutions to deal with rape better until we try.

The media fail us too. When E. Jean Carroll first mentioned the Toddler raped her, the media largely shrugged. “Worse still, when outlets did cover Carroll’s claims, most seemed to lead not with her harrowing account, but with Trump’s denial of it.” Likewise the New York Times spent far more newsprint covering Hilary Clinton’s alleged email scandal than on the Toddler bragging about grabbing women by the you-know-what. And look what happened next. We see similar distorted coverage on other topics today.

After a while this becomes easy to normalize: Toddler supporters don’t care he’s a rapist, so what’s the point in writing about it? Because while rape is normal — in the sense of happening a lot, and rapists getting away with it — it’s still monstrous and we should never resign ourselves to thinking otherwise. This is hard because as I’ve said before, contemplating the reality of sexual abuse and assault is like living in a Lovecraftian horror — accepting the true nature of reality feels insane.

As Scott Lemieux says, the argument rape accusations won’t affect his base is bad too. “Hearing yet more new accusations of sexual assault might not change the mind of any swing voters or demobilize any educated suburban Republican voters, and then again it might. More to the point, since when is “will it materially change the outcome of elections?” the standard for determining whether something is newsworthy? By that standard — particularly if we’re talking about individual stories — almost nothing is. What are we even doing here then? If you’re a political reporter and believe something is only news if it will turn hardcore Trump supporters against Trump, the logical conclusion is find something to do for a living.”

Lemieux also quotes an LGM commenter making the same point: “regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape. In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts. We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape* if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.”

Push back. Fight. Stare Cthulhu in the eye and say no, you are not acceptable. It will be a long time before we can end rape but reminding everyone, even the apologists, how evil it is, is a beginning.

Rep. Max Miller, running for re-election in Ohio, is allegedly (not that I doubt the allegations) a slimy, abusive creep who withheld his daughter’s favorite plush toy, the one she can’t sleep without. For some reason, that kind of petty cruelty creeps me out even more than the openly brutal abuse he’s accused of (no, I’m not excusing that). An article in American Prospect shows that much like the Toddler in the White House, Miller has an (alleged) track record of being spiteful and vicious to everyone who crosses him.

Nevertheless he’s choosing to stay in the race so Republicans are stuck with him. His best defense so far? Well, if Emily Moreno had been abused, would she have cooked him dinner? Yeah, it’s not like women with psycho partners ever make nice out of fear, hoping to defuse them.

In any case, Florida State Senator Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee says the abuse not an issue: ““We’re gonna support our nominees …We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side.” He dismisses the accusations by saying “there’s not many things worse than divorce.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s father in law, did come out against him but as I mentioned last week, he took his time, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over.

Given the Toddler of the United States has shielded multiple creeps and sexual harassers from federal investigation this is not surprising. Even for a sane political party, there’s pressure to be cold-blooded and practical, to turn a blind eye. And if it’s something like adultery that might be the right choice; even if we disapprove, we typically don’t have a better candidate to pick.

But if, like Gruters, we have no lines in the sand, we also have no principles. At worst, Gruters is one of those shits who think a man has every right to treat a woman that way; at best he opposes abuse in general, just not when he’s forced to criticie a fellow Republican. Come on, don’t you have sympathy for his position? He has no choice but to back Miller.

Wrong. He does have a choice. And the choice me made says he doesn’t oppose abuse, even if he tells himself otherwise. “Against abuse when it’s politically safe” is no better than “honest when convenient.”

Power cannot be the only standard. Democrats abandoning a credibly accused rapist such as Graham Platner was the right move, even if it had guaranteed Susan Collins gets re-elected (from what I’ve read, the seat is still in play).

Paul Campos at LGM quotes a commenter who makes another relevant point re Miller and the Toddler: “as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people.” That’s not an attitude we should encourage.

I see a lot of that attitude in the way our society deals with rape. We live in a country where judges have said flat out that they don’t want to prosecute a teenage rapist because it would ruin his future. If Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t gotten his SCOTUS seat, he’d still have had a lifetime position on the federal bench. Even a slight bump in a man’s career over rape allegations was too much for some conservatives. Drawing lines in the sand and responding appropriately when those lines are crossed matters. Show that this shit is unacceptable and, ideally, that there are consequences. Miller has avoided them for most of his life.

As commenter Murc says at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Platner, rapist or not, would still be better in the Senate than Collins. When earlier allegations about Platner’s cheating and bad behavior came to light, “still better than a Republican” was one of the defenses raised. As Murc says, “the flip side of that is ‘there are in fact actual red lines beyond which this calculus no longer applies’ … Standards matter. There are more important things than the naked pursuit of power, and frankly orienting yourself purely towards power seeking is almost going to completely eliminate your ability to effectively USE said power.”

Someone else at LGM linked to a post at Slacktivist about the temptation to divide people into “ours” and “theirs”: “one of the obsessions I obsess about here became one of the obsessions I obsess about there — the toxic danger of distinguishing between “people” and “our people” and the realization that no good can ever come of pursuing such a distinction. And so now, for me, “Taking care of our people” is just “Taking care of people.””

As the Prospect article shows, the media have been astonishingly supine about Miller. The author suggests reporters just gave up because there’s no “shaming the shameless” and none of the coverage he did get has to date hurt his career. I think that’s inadequate as a reason. It’s unprofessional as far as news coverage but it shows the advantage the right-wing noise machine has. They’ll repeat accusations against Democrats day in and day out until it defines them and even the mainstream media start to accept that framing.

As I want Republicans to have increasingly little power, I hope Miller goes down. But I also want him to go down because if the allegations are true he’s a horrible human being. He does not belong anywhere near power or, well, other human beings he might hurt. I hope Ohio’s voters agree.

As I’ve written before, that so much of our society embraces a hierarchy of races, genders, religions, etc. is perhaps America’s greatest weakness (though it’s not unique to us). “Back when I was born, every WASP man knew even if he wasn’t at the head of the line, he’d never be at the end of it. Jews, African Americans, Asians, women, they would save him from being a loser. At least, he could imagine so.”

I think that’s one reason for the old line that Americans don’t see themselves as poor, they see themselves as billionaires having an off-year. If a man can look up at the wealthiest people or the Washington power wielders and see men like himself, hey, he’s part of the ruling class! Ditto for white people. Feminism, black power, gay rights, everything that threatens to level the hierarchy, they take that fantasy away. They mean a white man could indeed end up at the bottom of the heap, the biggest loser. And that’s unacceptable.

As I wrote at the link, hierarchy is so bedrock to our culture, many people can’t imagine a world without it. If feminists don’t want men ruling over them, it can’t be that they want equality — they must want to replace men at the top. Hence the many SF stories and dire predictions I’ve seen over the years where feminism really means men will wear aprons, stay home to cook and clean while women go out to office and factory jobs. The hierarchy cannot change, all that matters is who’s on top.

In that light, change is not just about losing power and status, it’s about the fear that if someone else is on top, they’ll be as ruthless as you are, only now you’ll be on the receiving end. Muslims can’t possibly want religious freedom, they must want to establish theocracy, just like conservative Christian leaders (Muslim theocracy is a thing in parts of the world but there’s no sign of American Muslims imposing sharia law).

Another way in which men imagine themselves ennobled by the achievements of other men is when they look back at the past. Who achieved everything? Men. Who performed feats of daring? Men. Who built America? Men, specifically white men (that much of America was literally built by black slave labor goes unmentioned). Any examples to the contrary? Outliers.

So men accomplished everything. According to sexist scholar Roy Baumeister there were no barriers to women doing the same — but why bother when “men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.” So the history of male accomplishment proves that men are the superior gender because there were no laws or culture pressures or anything like that restricting women. Which is the equivalent of looking at when the Ivy League didn’t accept women and pointing out that all the Harvard and Yale grads are men.

Like the current hierarchy, some modern men think this endows them with heroic status: they’re men, men created and organized everything, therefore they share in that awesomeness. Never mind they’ve never accomplished anything equivalent. By this thinking, since all the science and crafts and everything were developed by men and built by men and all the innovations were by men (they weren’t), therefore women who assert equality are taking these male fields away from men! Men did all the sciencing ever (this is not true) so by what right do women get to whine about sexism? Wouldn’t society already be egalitarian if women were really equal? Or blacks, or any other group not at the top?

This kind of thinking makes leveling the hierarchy an even longer labor than it has been.