Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

My blogging about Undead Sexist Cliches focuses primarily on the myths about women: good women don’t use birth control, rape is buyer’s remorse, etc. Men, however, are also saddled with cliches about how they have to behave, many of them packaged into the soup called toxic masculinity. Currently popular how-to-fix-men pundit Scott Galloway’s recommendation — men must “protect, provide, procreate” — sounds more positive. However as Celeste Davis points out at the link, it’s not new — it’s another undead sexist cliche that goes back decades, at least. And it’s a flawed solution, partly because (as I’ll get to), it’s still suggesting there’s a precise path to manhood when as Davis says, we need a garden with dozens of paths.

I’ll pause here to say I haven’t read the book so there may be great stuff in it (you can find some analysis here and here.. Still “Protect, provide, procreate” isn’t some startling new insight, it’s going back to old-school thinking about what a man’s role should be. It would describe the male lead in lots of old 20th century family sitcoms: Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver. And protecting and providing are certainly commendable (procreating is a personal decision — I don’t think it’s automatically good or bad).

However holding this up as the solution to men’s woes reminds me of George Gilder, the anti-feminist right-winger who argued men are animals with no ability to adult unless they have a woman to take care of. Either women marry men and let them become protectors or men become gang-banging, drug-using psychopaths in the street (for the record I was unmarried until I was 50 and somehow avoided that dark path). Ergo, women have an obligation to put their plans and dreams on hold to save men. Which includes giving them kids: if a man doesn’t have the satisfaction of becoming a father, all that he is will be dust in the wind. I don’t know that Galloway would be down with all of Gilder but he does believe without a girlfriend/wife/partner men fall apart.

The idea that Men Must Protect isn’t new either. Not that protection is bad but as Susan Faludi has written, it’s part and parcel of the idea that women need and must accept protection and, conversely, don’t do any themselves. There are women cops, women firefighters, women paramedics, women on the front lines and in the National Guard — framing protection as a male thing conforms to longstanding sexist images. There’s a shit-ton of writing out there about how women must accept protection and men must provide it, even if the woman can handle the trouble better. I sincerely hope I’d take a bullet for TYG if the occasion arose; she’s damn tough though and I could see her ending up protecting me. I’d be okay with that too.

In 18 years of being with TYG, however, I have never had to protect her from anything (unless you count driving her home after surgery). We’re not on the frontier, we’re not living in a war zone; protection doesn’t come up. In evangelical circles (John Piper is one example) this gets handwaved: the man’s willing to protect his spouse, ergo she should accept his role as head of the family who’s word is law. Her submission is a daily thing, in return for an event that may never happen — and as Faludi says, many men when the crisis hit did not live up to their duty.

Which is part of the trouble with Galloway’s prescription: if men are to provide, protect and procreate to feel like a Real Man, then a woman’s role is to be protected, provided for and pop out the babies. Senator Josh Hawley similarly calls for a Christian economy where one man can support his wife and children as God intended — and he’s quite specific that he means “men” not people. They’re supposed to be in charge (more on his views in this article); the right-wing dream of reviving factory work is partly because it’s Manly Work and the dream includes women happily staying home once they have a man to support them. Never mind that lots of women who did have that arrangement walked away from it when they could.

To be sure, some women would be happy with that arrangement, given the right man … but not all. And if a woman brings in more money or the man chooses to stay home as primary caregiver for the kids (or they go without kids), that doesn’t make him less manly, nor does it mean he’s failing his duty. Nor does it make her less of a woman or mean she can’t find a man (my first ever Undead Sexist Cliche post touched on this). Women aren’t a hive mind any more than men: a given woman may need someone who’ll listen when she vents about work or cooks dinner when she’s working late or rehearses lines when she’s memorizing for her role in a play. Being a good husband is about being the man she needs, not following some generic formula.

Just as many women rebelled against the 1950s sitcom style marriage (whether by divorce, getting a job or otherwise renegotiating arrangements), plenty of men were happy to see their own sons move up to white collar work, as Natasha Zaretsky discusses in No Direction Home. Hawley, a banker’s son, former Heritage Foundation intern and lawyer, has never felt any need to prove his manliness by blue-collar work; to paraphrase George Orwell, he probably thinks talking about the alternative of manly labor is a substitute for actually doing it.

The whole point of writing about Undead Sexist Cliches is that these ideas — women shouldn’t vote, women shouldn’t have sex before marriage, women’s brains aren’t as smart as men’s — have been around decades, it’s only the details that change. Women’s brains are inferior because they’re smaller. Or because the important parts of the brain are smaller. Because the two sides of their brain are less connected than men’s. Or more connected. Because of testosterone. If one rationale goes down, switch to another. The cliche lives on (if you want details on any of these, you can find them in my book).

However there are always new cliches coming up that I haven’t encountered before (which is not to say they’re new rather than new to me). Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the big worry for conservatives was teen moms — babies having babies! Lots of young moms! Usually with a subtext that birth control wasn’t working so we’d better teach all those teenage sluts to abstain until marriage (and pay right-wing groups and churches to provide abstinence only education in schools. There’s always an angle).

Now though, as we face a dwindling birthrate, conservatives are very concerned women need to have more babies, and they need to start young. According to right-winger Dr. Marc Siegel, “the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, till they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner.”

Wow, how crazy. Imagine telling 15 year olds to wait to start a family until their life is more stable, they’ve found a good partner, they can afford a baby. What are we thinking? Think how many more babies she can pop out if she starts young! The problem with birth control isn’t that it lets teenage girls become sexual, it’s (according to Stephen Miller’s wife Katie) that it stops them getting pregnant! An option they hate, which is why they’ve been trying to ban contraception for years (a goal the Toddler administration is in favor of).

Let’s break this misogynistic bullshit down. First, it’s about the claim (as noted at my first link) that America needs more babies to keep our work force up, pay into Social Security, etc (I guarantee you if they axe Social Security they’ll still be demanding women become breeders). It may be the shrinking population is a problem — but simply demanding women have more babies, or taking away the option not to become pregnant, are not the answer. Women are not means to an end. They have their own ends and they’re entitled to strive for them, even if those ends do not include children.

Having a lack of young workers is a problem; fine, let’s solve it. Immigration is a simple way but that means America would no longer be a white-dominant, Christian-dominant nation and that horrifies forced-birthers. Never mind that immigrants have been coming here for more than a century, and despite being shat upon as not Protestant, not white, not Anglo-Saxon, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Polish, the Chinese, etc. have become as American as anyone (though Republicans viscerally recoil from admitting this). It will happen with future immigrants too. There may be other solutions, too; if we can spend billions on ICE and on the Toddler’s Iran stupidity, we can fund Social Security and Medicare.

For that matter we could provide serious support for women. Pay for their ob/gyn care. Police companies that don’t provide a space to bottle breast milk. Fund child care. This wouldn’t turn all women into happy homemakers but it might influence a number of them. Republicans have discussed this idea for years; nothing ever happens. One “pro-natalist” couple hand-wave giving financial support in favor of giving women medals for children and deregulating daycare.

Second, but equally important, it’s a way for men such as Siegel and his ilk to shore up patriarchy (one reason proposals that would help working mothers rarely get buy-in from the right). The right-wing shrieks about groomers a lot but they’re fine with teenage marriage and resist efforts to raise the age limit. A girl of 15 is much easier to control; pass her from her parents to a husband while she’s young and she may never learn to stand on her own. She’ll have much less opportunity to get an education or a job because becoming a mom is time consuming. As Anna Kendrick says at the link, men can enter parenthood with a good chance it won’t disrupt the rest of their life; women, not so much. A standard talking point on the right is that this is fine — have your kids, then tackle your career, you’ll have time. As plenty of women have testified, starting into the workforce when you’re late 30s or early 40s ain’t so easy.

If women can’t get an education or an independent income, they’re much more dependent on marrying a man who can support them. Which some shitbag misogynists such as Scott Yenor consider a plus (Yenor wants a world of “public men and private women”). If that also makes it harder for young girls to escape an abusive, violent husband — well, I doubt anyone on the right gives a crap.

I used to think talk about the right-wing seeing The Handmaid’s Tale as an inspiration were a little exaggerated. It’s been quite a while since I was that naive.

“it’s not just ads for abortion clinics or pills that would be illegal—even providing information about how to get them might be prosecutable. In addition to banning the sale and distribution of abortion pills, the law makes it a crime to advertise anything “in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.” — Jessica Valenti on a new South Dakota law.

“Days after his inauguration last year, Donald Trump pardoned two dozen activists convicted of violating the FACE Act—the federal law that prohibits violence against abortion clinics. Just one day later, the Department of Justice announced that they’d stop enforcing that federal law, and Vice President JD Vance told tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists at the March for Life that they would “never have the government go after them ever again.” — from another Valenti Substack post about the rise an anti-abortion violence. Republicans are not the law and order party. More from Valenti in this old article.

Just last week, the DOJ announced that the Biden administration arresting forced-birth protesters at clinics was religious persecution. No, it was arresting people who break the law, as witness nobody’s getting arrested for preaching that abortion is wrong.

Valenti again: “U.S. House Republicans have introduced legislation that would make it illegal for women to flush their miscarriage or abortion remains when using mifepristone. The Clean Water for All Life Act, introduced by Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, would instead require women to use “catch kits” when their pregnancy is ending—forcing them to bag up that tissue and blood and bring it back to the doctor as medical waste.” This accomplishes nothing in terms of protecting forded birthers’ beloved fetuses but it will make it easier to hurt and oppress women. “They want women who end their pregnancies at home to be shamed, and what better way to do that than to force them to bag up their own blood?”

“The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Thursday that it is investigating 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion services.”

“A Tennessee woman says Ascension St. Thomas Midtown canceled her scheduled sterilization surgery Friday morning hours after she had been admitted and an IV had been placed. The woman said she had been seeking a salpingectomy — a surgery that removes the fallopian tubes — after years of trying other birth control options. “Since I was young, I’ve never wanted kids. And I’ve wanted to pursue sterilization since I learned that that was something that a person could do,” she said. “I’ve tried a lot of different options for birth control. None of them have worked for me.” — from a woman who was denied sterilization at the last minute because the hospital ethics committee “cited a ‘duty to protect her sacred fertility.'”

Hospitals’ willingness to investigate minority pregnant women for drug use has encouraged the erosion of reproductive rights.

From a couple of years back, JD Vance explains rape victims should be forced to bear their rapist’s child — it doesn’t matter that the child’s birth is a problem for society. Which erases the fact it’s a problem for the women.

Or consider Stephen Miller’s equally loathsome wife Katie Miller who recently lamented that “Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72 percent. Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth.” It used to be the right opposed teenagers using contraception because they opposed them having sex. Now they see them as breeders for the right race — and, of course, getting a girl saddled with a baby will kill her chance of independence (Katie Miller would, I suspect, be fine with a Handmaid’s Tale future — provided she got to be a wife, rather than a handmaid).

Mother Jones responds to Miller’s assertion that “You don’t need to wait for that perfect moment to have kids, you just need to have them.”: “It would take reams upon reams to unpack the arrogance of Miller’s assertions. But it’s her last claim, that women “just need to have” kids and forget the factors that go into the decision-making process, that elides the legitimate and troubling reasons why so many of us can’t decide. A short list: anxiety over the climate crisis, conflicts over career ambitions, the physical stresses, regret over the first one, and fears of identity loss. Then there are the brutal realities of having a child in a country lacking family-friendly policies: paid family leave, affordable child care, flexible working arrangements, and access to affordable fertility treatments.”

Ms. Magazine has some thoughts on fighting back: “Applying King’s arguments to current day abortion laws, we can ask several questions: Do abortion bans uplift or degrade human personality? Do they “distort the soul and damage the human personality?” Do they give people supporting them “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion feel “a false sense of inferiority?” Do they “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship, and relegate persons to the status of things?” I would answer an emphatic “yes” to all of these questions.”

It always has been, even when “it”woke” meant things like the Tougaloo Nine reading books in a segregated library.

It is, however, effective for rallying whiny white males — Erick Erickson below declares that threatening to destroy Iran is a fair trade for the Toddler’s attacks on trans people.

Consider, for example, whiny misogynist Matt Walsh. According to Walsh (spoiler, any statement that begins that way will be followed by bullshit) “Beginning in 1960s as part of the radical transformation of the civil rights era, Democrats decided to reject, you know, fundamental American principles.” According to Walsh the Democrats forced people to hire POC and women (not true) and unleashed destruction on American cities — “The civil rights era brought horrors beyond imagination to innocent men, women, and children throughout the United States.”

I’m pretty sure the real horror for Walsh is the steps America took towards equality for all. And that he’s much more troubled by that than, say, the horrors of Jim Crow such as brutal lynchings. Walsh’s complaints about hiring POC are understandable considering he also thinks the black middle class “is almost entirely a tax-funded function of the government” which provides them with bureaucratic jobs. There was a black middle class in this country long before the civil rights movement, though white America often burned it to the ground. And one may ponder with black-humored amusement that a guy whose entire career is spewing hate on the Internet complains about other people having worthless jobs. And that a man who’s triggered by pretty much everything thinks people shouldn’t be offended so much (by racist jokes).

Walsh isn’t the only fragile snowflake on the right, terrified of anything that vaguely suggests white male Christian supremacy is not a good thing: “In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.””

The religious right is constantly demanding that gay people lose the right to marry. While I would never bet on the Supreme Court doing the right thing, gay marriage is massively popular — and the Republican loyalists may not want to give the public another reason to vote Dem. Even a lot of elected Republicans don’t want to push the issue.

By contrast there’s a steady drumbeat of support for ending women’s right to vote. They talk a lot about how women’s suffrage ruined America but the real issue is simple: denying the right to vote denies that women are equal citizens. I will add that the NYT article linked to beyond the first link in this paragraph treats the anti-suffrage movement with way too much seriousness — it’s close to “Should Women Have Rights? Opinions Differ.”

Then there’s the attack on birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment says anyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen; Republican white supremacists like Stephen Miller hate that. The Necrotic Toddler lies that no other country allows this when many countries do.

Then there’s the raging fear that if whites become a minority, they might suffer as they’ve made others suffer. There is not the slightest sign that will happen. Nevertheless the fantasy crusade to protect white men goes on. Harmeet Dhillon, one of the Toddler’s attorneys weaponizing the Department of Justice, is investigating whether some medical schools are anti-white in admissions.

In discussing how we can keep boys from turning into creeps, one suggestion is to have them mix with girls as equals. It’s not guaranteed and not always safe, but I think the former Boy Scouts accepting girls is a good thing. I’m not surprised that misogynist male supremacist Pete Hegseth does not. Why it’s almost like saying girls are as good as boys, which is no better than castrating him! And “Whiskey Pete” continues his commitment to purging the military of anyone but straight, white, Christian men.

“The idea that white people are the biggest contemporary victims of systemic bias and unfair treatment is the central pillar of Trumpism.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the belief that society can’t exist without hierarchy — is one of the obstacles to equality. If you believe one race/religion/gender/orientation must rank over others, then equality is impossible: feminists and civil rights activists really want to turn the tables and make women and POC the superior class. Hence the many stories I’ve read over the years where women’s equality translates into men reduced to slavery or at least being forced to stay home and clean all day.

On top of which, patriarchy makes men stupid. It tells them a system that’s still predominantly shaped to their needs and interests is right and natural — they deserve to be in charge, to not be slut-shamed the way women are, to have their wife or partner handle most of the cooking, cleaning and childcare. It’s awfully tempting not to question a system that tells you something like that. And as Celeste Davis points out in some of her posts at Matriarchal Blessing, equality gains women status and power compared to patriarchy. For men it’s not only that equality feels like oppression, it’s that if they’re doing “women’s work” or filling a “woman’s role” then they’re no longer Real Men. Not to mention their buddies might make fun of them for being girly. As Davis says, it’s difficult for men to swim against that tide.

However there’s more to the tide than merely guys not wanting equality. As Susan Faludi pointed out 35 years ago, the backlash against feminism has been consistent and ongoing since the 1980s. A lot of that backlash is directed at women but a lot of it preaches to men too. It assures them there’s no need to listen to women — they’re so irrationally angry.

The religious right in the 1980s began preaching the women belong in the kitchen. The Reagan administration pined for the 1950s, when men had their (supposedly) rightful place as family head (an illusion that lives on today). When sexual harassment became a legal concept, there were plenty of articles about how men were miserable at work, terrified of being sued; there were a lot fewer articles about women feeling safer. Rush Limbaugh preached the evils of all things liberal, including feminism, and like many conservative pundits claimed a woman’s no can mean yes. Warren Farrell’s Myth of Male Power claimed men are the truly oppressed gender and presented rape as a woman having “more sex than expected,” the equivalent of eating too many potato chips at a sitting.

Gen Z men are more sexist than Boomers and Gen X, longing for a marriage where they’re the boss (though apparently a wife working outside the home and acting tradwife inside it is their idea) and bring home a breadwinner wage. Never mind that even in the 1950s, not everyone had a breadwinner wage or lived in a one-earner family; in the 21st century economy, it’s even less likely. Which Noosphere at the link suggests is one reason men long for a home in which they can have the authority and status that’s their due.

There is no shortage of influencers, pundits and online shitbags to tell them this. Matt Walsh, Allie Beth Stuckey, Suzanne Venker, Andrew Tate, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal. Plenty of others who will insist white men can’t get jobs any more. Extremists like neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who use misogyny as a marketing tool. The Heritage Foundation embraces it as policy. Mainstream voices who think incels have a point when they demand the redistribution of women. Or claim that women had more liberty in the 1800s. Or that AI will improve men’s prospects because it will take women’s jobs first.

The religious right’s positions haven’t gotten any less misogynist: they’re shiny, happy people who preach absolute male authority as the will of god. It’s easy to focus on slime like Andrew Tate; this shit is equally harmful. No surprise Joseph Duggar (brother to infamous sibling-molester Josh) has been accused of sexual activity with a minor. Bethel Church prophet (their designation, not mine) Ben Armstrong allegedly sexually abused a 23 year old years ago, describing himself as “her spiritual father.” The church later portrayed it as an “affair.” William Wolfe is a Southern Baptist who wants to impose his Christian morality on everyone; by his standards allowing women to preach is a much more serious problem than the church’s rape-and-cover-up scandal. He clams his views are God’s views; if that were true (I do not believe God is a misogynist rape-apologist), then I think it’s time to say, a la Huckleberry Finn, “Stop the rapes and go to hell for it.” It’s not surprising more Christian women seek help from therapists than pastors.

Not that Christianity is unique. All kinds of power structures give men the power to abuse women; women in similar positions can abuse their subordinates but it doesn’t seem to be as common (i.e., power matters but gender appears to matter too). Legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez abused women and assaulted underage girls; he was a power in his movement and it went unchecked. Hispanics who admired him are now having to deal with his evil side. Kevin Levin looks at how schools named for Chavez should approach the issue. Columnist Gustavo Arellano discusses separating the man from the cause.

Talking about Chavez, Jill Filopovic looks at another form of backlash, the claims women are really the ones in power (Farrell built his whole book around that premise): “It’s bullshit. And this insistence on eclipsing where real power lies and how real power manifests is precisely why men like Chavez got away with horrific crimes, and with many smaller indignities and acts of misogyny. This denial of small-time interpersonal misogyny is how we get denials of horrific abuses — a good man would never believe himself to be more powerful than his wife; a good man would never harm the girls and women around him; being honest about what we see in front of us would create a fissure in a good family, bring down a good movement.”

Endless propaganda doesn’t excuse those who buy into it. None of what I’ve said excuses Epstein, Cosby, or the countless unnamed rapists, harassers and misogynists we never hear about. At the same time, I do believe the problem with achieving equality runs deeper than an innate male resistance to change.