I’ve blogged a lot over the years about the Southern Baptist Conference’s (SBC) long history of ignoring and covering up sexual abuse, harassment and assault by members of the church hierarchy (here, here, here and here, for instance). The Houston Chronicle’s blockbuster investigation some seven years back found 700 credible victims and 400 culprits over the previous 10 years. Given that the SBC also covered up that Paul Pressler — one of the men who shifted the SBC into a Republican Party arm in the early 1980s — assaulted underage boys, I suspect there have been many more victims in the decades in-between (and Pressler unsurprisingly never stopped). As Karen Swallow Prior says, this man, with his warped view of power, gender and morality, shaped the SBC as it is today. Perhaps it’s not surprising they’re such a mess.
As attorney and abuse survivor Rachael Denhollander said back in 2022, the SBC did right in commissioning a third party review of its practices and failures. That’s more than the Catholic Church has ever managed, or many other churches (for example). However, she said, they were also 10 years behind most organizations in their understand of sexual abuse and best practices for dealing with it. In the four years since, things have not improved; plans for a better reporting system and a database of accused church leaders have come to nothing.
Electing Willy Rice, a conservative who thinks SBC is too woke and “the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis was more hoax than reality” presumably means the effort is dead for the foreseeable future. Rape apologist and Trumper William Wolfe is a loyal ally. And once again the convention passed the Mohler Amendment against women becoming pastors — they can manage to take action on that, but not on preventing abuse. And they hate that SBC women have opinions on this.
The standard defense Wolfe, and some conservatives I’ve known is that the SBC is no worse than any secular organization. And no question, lots of secular organizations have horrible track records on this. Um … so what? There’s a systemic pattern of rape and harassment in the SBC, plus refusal to deal with the problem. That is objectively wrong, immoral and unacceptable. “Other people are just as bad” is not an excuse, any more than “I haven’t raped as many people as Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein” excuses rape (though many bad judges have decided first-time rapists shouldn’t be punished). Particularly in the case of an organization that claims its policies are based on a higher morality which is why they should get their way.
The SBC does not, however, can talk about its moral superiority all it wants. Its actions give it the lie. I believe religious groomers, because they can invoke God as their authority (as discussed in the documentary Shiny Happy People), are the worst kind. And in the case of the SBC, their theology is the fruit of a poisonous tree and no good fruit can come of it.
As someone put it on Facebook, the SBC can forgive a man for being an abuser. They can’t forgive a woman for being female.
The title comes from George Orwell’s scathing comment about British “jingoists” — warhawks — of the early 20th century: “The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” The same thing, I think, applies to masculinity: a great many people who aren’t tough, manly men will talk very, very loudly about manhood and toughness as if that were a substitute for being a man.
This is not a new thing. More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh was whining that the NFL doing better to shield football players from concussion was a sign America was becoming “chickified.” Easy for Limbaugh to say, as his high school football days were long behind him. Like Orwell’s “true patriot” he wasn’t getting anywhere near the front lines. Back in 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz whined that an Army recruiting ad focusing on a female corporal meant our military — in which he’d never served — was emasculated. How could a girl compare to the might of Putin’s testosterone-laden Russian warriors (the same ones now getting their asses kicked in the Ukraine)?
Or Donald Trump Jr. arguing that Joe Biden is such a wuss, he doesn’t scare our enemies the way Trump Sr. does. Sure, Junior’s never accomplished anything that didn’t depend on Daddy’s name, but his Daddy can beat up Hunter Biden’s daddy!
Or pundit Matt Walsh, who demonstrates masculinity by screeching bullshit online, declaring that women want to marry manly heroes like the first responders in 2017’s Hurricane Harvey — that’s manhood! Dude, if that was true, you wouldn’t be married, neither would I. Neither of us meet that standard of manliness, which isn’t a standard at all (plenty of women are first responders).
As I’ve discussed earlier, part of this is the toxic-masculine insistence that there’s only one way to be a man. Because if there are alternatives, then that concept of manhood — it doesn’t matter if we’re toxic, we’re guys, we can’t help it! — becomes invalid. It’s one option among many. Which means meeting the benchmarks of stereotypical guyhood — chasing women, smoking cigars, watching sports or whatever — no longer prove you’re a man. And without proof of manhood … OMG, what if I’m not one?
On top of which, Cruz, Walsh and Starnes are engaging in the toxic-masculine equivalent of slut-shaming. In the book Slut! Leora Tanenbaum discusses how women slut-shame each other as proof of their own virtue: “Sure, I’ve blown a couple of guys but I’m not a slut like Janet! She’s a total tramp!” What the guys are doing is the same thing. Watters is obsessed with sneering at other guys’ masculinity — it’s effeminate to use a straw! It’s effeminate to eat ice-cream cones! By so doing, he (in theory) shores up his own masculine cred. Which I imagine he feels a need for, given his manliness consists of sitting on a Fox News set and sneering at other people’s behavior.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Watters or Cruz or Walsh not being tough, macho guys; I’m not either. Being a pundit rather than a first responder or a soldier on the front lines is a perfectly legitimate choice. And while it does make their macho strutting pathetic, even if they were tough guys, that wouldn’t excuse sneering at other men for not being butch enough; right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly served as a Marine in Iraq and that doesn’t make his bashing other men any better.
Platner is the Maine senatorial candidate notorious for the Nazi tattoo, and for the debate whether, even though he’s not a Nazi (from what I’ve read), thinking a Nazi tattoo is cool makes him unacceptable. Is he too Nazi adjacent or is this that old bugaboo, a “purity test” that will lock us out of the seat? I’ve heard different assessments on the left but as I’m not a Maineman and won’t be voting I don’t have to figure out who’s right. I’d definitely a prefer a candidate without Nazi tattoos but I don’t find him as horrific as I did Aaron Coleman.
That said, it’s worth nothing that some people are rushing to support Platner in the wake of an NYT story about his personal history — drinking, womanizing, adultery (according to his wife they’re working through it) and often something of a dick. Though not, according to his lovers, a monster or a rapist. The creepy thing is that some pundits on the left think this is awesome because Platner is a Real Man. He represents “a rejection of Dem HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. The Argument lists multiple other examples of pundits explaining that if you want a flesh-and-blood human being to run for office, expect them to have messy lives: “Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite.”
Well, no, it isn’t. As the post says, it reflects that in most elections we have limited choices; someone who might turn down an adulterous candidate may not have a better option. It doesn’t mean people who support Platner are drawn by his cheating machismo. And it’s telling that like Stoller, one Ken Klippenstein sneers that the alternative to Platner is “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. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” It must astonish Klippenstein that not everyone who stays faithful to their spouse is devoid of a sex drive.
As Liberal Currents puts it after posting more of Klippenstein’s sneering, Klippenstein’s declaration fidelity is for wimps and asexuals “is a puerile and chauvinistic sentiment. It’s the sort of high school cafeteria misogyny you’d get from an 80s sex comedy. It’s derogatory to women, to the people offended by Platner’s long list of misconduct, and to politicians Klippenstein simply sees as weak and unmanly.” And then Klippenestein posted photos of the women in the race — wow, these ugly old broads obviously have no sex scandals (that’s an interpretation, not Klippenstein’s statement).
This comes off as another version of the toxic masculinity stereotypes Dr. Nerdlove complains about: obviously you can’t expect a genuine authentic man to behave decently. We can’t expect them to be perfect, whether they’re in politics or not. However there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “isn’t a decent person.” Nor is a person who tries to live a moral life and fails the same as a serial philandering hypocrite (that’s a general observation, not targeted at Planter).
Like I said, Platner’s fate is up to Maine voters, not me. But these excuses for his conduct come off worse than anything I’ve heard Platner say in his own defense.
That was Jamelle Bouie’s argument, quoting Lincoln in a recent column: “‘Broken eggs cannot be mended,’ Lincoln observed in a reply to August Belmont, a leading Democratic Party organizer and financier in New York, who had forwarded, to the president, the comments of an angry Louisiana slaveholder who wanted restoration of the Union ‘as it was.’ Not much later, Lincoln repurposed the quip in different form. ‘Broken eggs can never be mended,’ he wrote in reference to the fate of slavery as the war carried on, ‘and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.’ Fort Sumter broke the Union and with it, slavery. Whatever the nation was or would be in the aftermath of the war, neither the nation nor its Constitution would protect, support or sanction human bondage.”
Bouie’s point is that if Democrats secure power in 2026 and then 2028, they need to do more than undo the Toddler’s wreaked havoc. Republicans have been pushing the restoration of white male supremacy and a presidency that’s truly imperial, free of any constraints (unless the president is a Democrat). That gives them a vision of the future, even if it’s an ugly one that reduces America to a third-world banana-republic oligarchy.
The Democrats, Bouie says, are working on plans for 2029 and the ideas are good: “break up utility monopolies, support child-rearing, regulate social media and artificial intelligence, and curtail corporate abuse. But none of this reflects or represents a far-reaching or comprehensive idea of what the nation might be. There is no coherent worldview at work, nor does there seem to be any inkling or awareness of the obstacles — structural, political and institutional — that will confront, and likely stymie, all but the most threadbare and ineffectual Democratic agendas for governing.”
Bouie looks at the Republicans’ radical vision for Reconstruction as a template. Paul Campos says Reconstruction’s ultimate failure should be a warning: “It’s a platitude that the confederacy lost the war but won the peace. That platitude is also largely though not completely accurate. The attempt to roll back that latter victory that continues to be captured however vaguely by the phrase ‘the 1960s’ is a battle that needs to be fought again and again. America is now a white supremacist plutocracy; it has been and can be something else. That the latter sentence gives the entire Democratic consultant class a heart attack doesn’t make it less true.”
I don’t think that means concrete proposals like “curtail corporate abuse” are bad — specific plans for improving things, along with a grand vision, matter a lot. People who may not be into grand visions may still support programs that make their lives better. And definitely being against the Toddler, Republicans and the Heritage Foundation is good: show what they’re advocating and supporting, call them out and support the opposite. As Masha Gessen says of Orban’s defeat in Hungary, “previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.”
I agree with Bouie, structural reform is a necessity: blocking the Supreme Court’s increasing support for white supremacy and its double-standard regarding Democratic and Republican policies, for instance (if you think the Toddler’s immunity from prosecution for “official acts” will apply to a Democrat — well, the Supreme Court will be amazingly flexible in defining “official”). The often proposed idea of adding Puerto Rico and DC as states would be good. There are other problems which will be tougher. As Campos points out, rural, sparsely populated Red states exert influence all out of proportion to their population because they still get two senators. I have no idea how we deal with that; I’ve not heard anyone who does.
I doubt there’s any reform that can neutralize the anti-democratic forces for good but if it takes them, say, 30 years to regain their current clout, that’s 30 years we can be thinking up further moves. As Bouie says, however, the opposition to radical positive change is huge. I don’t see having a vision will change that.
As far as a grand vision, here’s one: full equality for all: women, LGBTQ people, POC, non-binary, the disabled. immigrants and anyone else I’ve forgotten to list. Which will require an active commitment to change society and make it more equal; the Roberts Court’s position that they oppose any action to fight racism because anti-racism is racist is bullshit. Before the children of slaveowners and the children of slaves sit down together, we have to work to level the playing field they’re sitting on.
Another suggestion: end rape. As long as men can and do rape women with impunity there is no true equality. And I still think the words from Micah “everyone shall sit out under his vine and his fig tree and none shall make them afraid” could be a good road map (regardless of gender, obviously). I’m not as sure as Bouie that a big vision is necessary but it can have positive results. Framing these things as the end game shapes how we proceed forward and generates new ideas. Working towards them can produce good results; even cutting the number of rapes in half would be a blessing.
However…. having typed all that I find I’m also slightly annoyed. It feels like the same thing that happens time and again when a Democrat replaces a Republican administration. Republicans run up the red ink, deregulate disastrously and make things worse. Then the Democrats have to clean up the mess while simultaneously finding ways to improve on the status quo. And do it while bringing the budget back into balance because both Republicans and the media will suddenly discover reckless spending is a major problem. Biden did a lot of good work and got little credit for it. Given the constraints on him (Republican Supreme Court, hostile media) I’m not sure how much of a new Reconstruction he could have accomplished or whether there was much voter support for reconstructing — though the DOJ going after the Toddler for J6 and any other crimes would have been a good step.
I do think there might be more interest in radical change now. As one piece from The Bulwark suggests, swing voters are vacillating between “change” and “burn it all down” (I have not read the whole article yet so I cannot comment on its ideas beyond that). Of course the flip side to that is that, I don’t believe for a minute that everyone is enthused about radical change; lots of people would probably prefer specific concrete improvements to some grand reshaping, even if it’s necessary. Whatever reforms, sweeping or careful, that the Dems come up with, it won’t satisfy everyone — as witness Bouie’s dissatisfaction with those proposals he mentioned.
We’re a lot less united on the future we want than Republican fascists are. Repubs are united in their desire to annihilate us; as Bouie’s argument shows, we’re not united the same way. I think most of us agree stopping Republicans is essential but we don’t agree on whether “Republicans are evil” is the primary message or “We’re going to fix things” or “we’ll burn it all down and start fresh and better.” And, of course, calls for radical change guarantee the media will freak. Despite their supposed radical elitist leftism, they’d have freaked if the Toddler had been indicted for J6; they’ll probably do the same if it happens after 2028 (“Democrats criminalize policy differences! Are Republicans right about weaponized justice?”).
Take my talk of full equality. A lot of the media (and people in general) suffer from the delusion equality is not a midpoint (between white supremacy and black supremacy, between patriarchal tyranny and matriarchal tyranny) but the most extreme option possible, which makes its supporters radicals extremists. Why not compromise? Find a midpoint between the extremes of white male supremacy and equality? The right agrees not to lynch anyone, black Americans settle on “not second class citizens but for now we’ll be a little less than first class”? Then we’ll have peace and unity!
There will also be endless arguments in our big tent that even if the policies are good, we’re doing liberalism wrong. Not extreme enough. Not centrist enough. Not appealing to Republican voters. Focusing on the wrong issues. I read an argument on FB recently that lecturing a struggling POC trying to support a family about how they need to respect trans pronouns is a losing strategy. The “change or burn it down” article similarly says responding to anti-trans bullshit makes Dems look like their priorities are those of out-of-touch upper-class liberals not caring about anything but niche issues.
Neither argument advocated throwing trans people under the bus but they both leave me uncomfortable. The idea that Dems should let Republicans rant and vent trans hate because they’re shooting themselves in the foot (at least outside red states) — sorry, that’s wrong. Uncontested it normalizes that anti-trans discrimination is an unremarkable, acceptable position. Even if opposing that is not the center of the campaign, we need to stand up for equality. As for the FB argument — is anyone actually doing what the OP complained about? There is a large difference between a candidate supporting trans rights and using people’s preferred pronouns and lecturing the poor and downtrodden that this should be their number one issue; as the post doesn’t offer any examples of the latter, I suspect the people saying this only exist in the poster’s imagination. As someone put it in a recent Lawyers, Guns and Money comment, Democrats aren’t just fighting Republicans they’re fighting the imaginary Dems in people’s heads.
Fixing this country will take a shit-ton of work, whatever the right path is. If we want to live out our lives in a decent nation, and enable other Americans to do the same, it has to be done.
E. Jean Carroll won a defamation lawsuit against the Toddler with the jury agreeing that he sexually assaulted her. As the Toddler believes he should never suffer any consequences for anything he’s done, his mob mouthpiece Todd Blanche— is now suing her. More detail here. As Paul Campos says, “we should judge every lawyer working in that office, and in every other office in the DOJ, on the following basis: You have found yourself in a position where you are working as an attorney not for the United States of America, which is the job you thought you signed up for, but rather for Donald Trump, because the DOJ is now Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Do you want to be Donald Trump’s lawyer, which means being a mob lawyer for a mob boss, doing mob lawyer things? No? Then quit. Today.” The corruption is inescapable.
2)The Toddler sent a suggestive nudge-nudge, wink-wink birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, something the Wall Street Journal wrote about. The Toddler is once again suing the WSJ for hurting his snowflake fee-fees and reminding everyone how desperate he and Todd Blanche are not to dig too deeply into the Epstein files. Hmm, wonder why? Pam Bondi, ex-AG, refuses to talk about the cover-up to Congress, and says it’s all Blanche’s fault.
“Three teenage boys have walked out of court in Hampshire without having served a single minute of jail time between them, despite being found guilty of raping two girls. The girls, then aged 15 and 14, were attacked in separate, deeply harrowing incidents in November 2024 and January 2025 by two 14-year-old boys. A third boy, then 13, was convicted for his involvement in the second assault, during which the boys egged one another on, laughed, and filmed the assault on their phones, later sharing the footage online …. The judge, Nicholas Rowland, said that he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young” boys. Boys who, you might say, criminalised themselves the moment they decided to subject two young girls to prolonged sexual attacks from which they will never fully move on, one of them at knifepoint.”
Young, yes. So young they couldn’t conceive what they were doing was bad? Nope. Young people do stupid shit but this ain’t stupid or an error in judgment, it’s deliberate cruelty. And yet “the judge also praised the boys for their conduct during the trial. These girls were forced through the ordeal of a five-week criminal trial in which the boys denied responsibility and sought to discredit them. One claimed the second victim had been “flirting” with him and lied to explain her absence to her parents. He denied using a knife.” One of the mitigating factors the judge cited was that one boy had a “limited concept of consent.” That’s an argument against him, not for him.
As I wrote some 15 years ago, many Republicans prefer someone who says the right things, even if they’re a sleazebag and hypocrite in private, over an ethical liberal. A faithfully married liberal who supports gay rights and opposes patriarchy is morally inferior to someone who’s banging their secretary but mouths the right platitudes about chastity, slut-shaming and gay-bashing. Sure, maybe they didn’t live up to their stated standards, but that makes them human, not immoral cesspools with no values like liberals (it’s a given for a certain type of conservative that liberals don’t have a different moral code, they have no morals at all). Or that no matter what someone’s done in the past, Christianity is all about forgiveness. A standard conservatives never apply to any Christian who’s not on their team.
As I pointed out elsewhere on this blog, trying and failing to be a good person does not make you a hypocrite. However if you then lie about your failings (“I would never look at porn online!”) you’re sliding into hypocrisy. And in many cases, particularly in politics, there’s no reason to think the hypocrite was even trying. Someone mouthing “moral” sentiments may not believe in any of them, as witness how quickly some companies dropped any support for DEI when it became inconvenient.
As noted at the first link, George W. Bush dodged the draft by his own admission but gave lip-service support to the Vietnam War. John Kerry served with honor but criticized the war. Conservatives who swore they despised Clinton as a draft dodger were all in on supporting W and treating him as a war-hero jet-jockey badass (by the time he took office, he’d been grounded from flying because he blew off a National Guard physical checkup back in 1973); Kerry was a traitor and probably faked his war wounds. Which was a lie — Kerry simply had the wrong stance on the war, and that mattered more than what he did.
The same thing is happening now with James Talarico, the Dem Senate candidate in Texas. He’s a Christian and apparently a moral, decent person so they hate him. And claim he’s a pedophile or at least gay. Or (gasp) vegan so he doesn’t understand Texas barbecue (Talarico quipped that he’s been eating barbecue since before opponent Ken Paxton’s first indictment for corruption). Or at least his girlfriend is vegan!! Or Talarico sacrificing children to Moloch (this could be a Qanon reference or simply a metaphor for abortion).
The same thing pollutes how right-wingers deal with sex. It’s been documented that comprehensive sex education coupled with access to birth control reduces teenage pregnancy and abortion rates. Republicans have a documented history of killing programs like that while supporting abstinence only sex ed that prevents nothing — not STDs, not pregnancy, not abortion. Because what’s important is not preventing abortion or pregnancy but sending the right message — teenage girls should not have sex! If they don’t want to get pregnant they should keep their legs closed!
Ditto the obsession with performing masculinity: Florida Republican Dan Weldon has quipped that — well, see for yourself.
As John Rogers says at the link, “I have to ask as a 59 year old straight guy who’s been married 34 years, worked on a pipeline, tagged a lot of markers for traditional masculinity — isn’t doing this gender thing all the fucking time exhausting? How do these people get through the day running ‘gender performance’ code?” Yes, I imagine it is, but it’s better than someone thinking you’re the unmanly one. Idiotic arguments like Weldon not only supposedly serve to other Talarico as Not A Real Man, they implicitly affirm Weldon is — he could sure identify obscure wide receivers! He’s got three Y chromosomes dude!
As Liz Plank put it a while back, “The men running the internet aren’t just controlling the narrative, they’re starring in their own all-male drag show, desperately performing masculinity for each other. Musk, Zuckerberg, and their billionaire boy band are so obsessed with proving who’s the most alpha that they’ve lost the plot. They’re not exuding strength; they’re just insecure men rigging platforms and rewriting algorithms like a group of closeted frat boys terrified of being the least manly guy in the room. At this point, their version of masculinity isn’t just fragile, it’s camp.”
As I blogged about back in April, Scott Galloway, the current guru on how to fix men’s and boys’ problems, sums up the solution as “protect, provide, procreate.” Which is an improvement over, say, misogynists such as Andrew Tate or Roosh (their interest in protecting women is zero) but as I say at the link, “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.”
By implication that puts some of the burden of Real Manhood on women: they must let the man protect them, let the man provide for them and provide him with children. Which fits with Galloway’s argument that men need women as human guardrails to keep them from crashing off the road of life (as noted at the link, not a new view). Both arguments suggest the burden of solving men’s problems fall at least partly on women. For many people who make this argument, women are obligated to accept second-class status for the good of men, which was the topic of my first Undead Sexist Cliche. Not necessarily a horrible second-class status, just compromise a little on full equality. Men need women to do it.
This story about high school boys making and sharing deepfakes of female students (not a unique case) make me wonder if a better mantra is “see women as people like you.” To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, women are not means to an end, they are ends in themselves (the same is true of men, intersex and nonbinary people, of course). That applies even if the end is your orgasm or your masculine pride. The teens in that story didn’t see it that way. Digitally stripping their classmates naked, hey, it’s funny! As one of the interviewees said, the guys may do it for “social status, entertainment, money, sexual gratification, attention.” Plus of course, cruelty and deliberate humiliation of the girls.
This is horrible for the girls, obviously — well, not obviously, the school didn’t take the case half seriously enough. It’s also bad for the boys. Corrupting for the boys. For every five boys who delighted in humiliating the girls and high-five the AI creator for putting the girl in their place, there’s probably one who didn’t think about the girl at all. And another who doesn’t think this is cool at all but when his buddy shows the photos and gets the high fives, Mr. It’s Not Cool high fives him too. Because anything else would mark him as uncool and his buddies would think less of him — what, you don’t want to see Helen St. James naked? What kind of wimp are you?
As C.S. Lewis put it “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.” Once a kid crosses that line, they’ll probably cross it again; it’s harder not to, because they’ve already established what they’re willing to accept to be in with the in-crowd. Over time, it won’t be a pretense; the mask they wear will become their face.
Teaching men (and boys) not to think of women as sex toys, that women don’t exist just as means to men’s ends, seems like a better path forward than “protect, provide, procreate.” Not that this trio are bad things but they’re also not the only path to being a man, let alone a good man. Teaching men (and boys) to see women don’t deserve to be slut-shamed or humiliated, and that rape is wrong even if the guy wants sex this very minute and the bitch said no!!! and that being turned down for a date is a woman’s right, and does not cheapen the guy’s manhood or his honor — those would go a lot further to creating good men that Galloway’s formula. If we eliminated rape, the world would be a much better place. Even cutting the number of rapes in half would be a huge improvement. Literally that means thousands fewer cases of rape every day.
How do we get to that point? Well, there you’ve got me. A prophet, as Walter Breuggemann puts it, must both see the hollowness of the World That Is and visualize the long path to the World We Can Make. I can only manage the first part. At this point, though, society isn’t really trying. As that article about the high school deepfakes says, the school made little initial effort to stop this form of cyberbullying. Society makes little effort to punish or prosecute rapists. Being a sexist or misogynist jerk is never an obstacle to your career, as Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth have shown. Misogynists and harassers back up others of their kind because they don’t see any problem. And there’s a critical mass of them out there.
That’s a lot of resistance to overcome, but if we don’t work at it, it won’t change. To paraphrase G.K. Chesteron, gender equality hasn’t been tried and found wanting, it’s been wanting and never tried.
John Roberts has spent his years on the court whittling away at democracy in favor of Republican dominance. Most recently we have the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the typical twisted “logic” of the Roberts court: sure, gerrymandering purely for racist purposes is bad but if you disenfranchise POC for political advantage, that’s not racist. Yes, it’s bullshit, and it takes a sledgehammer to the political power of black Americans. It’s the Republican yearning for the days of the 1950s (only with fewer civil rights marches) made concrete.
What white Republicans want is not only to get “their” country back but to get back the days when the status of whites was unquestioned. Having white men in charge was the way things were and everyone accepted that. There never was such a time — the fight for equality goes back to the birth of America — but they imagine there was. And that if we go back there, they can shut out the whisper in the back of the brain that they really aren’t better than African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays, etc. (though I’m quite sure many of them have buried that truth where they will never have to face it). The Republicans on SCOTUS (the “Sinister Six” as some call them) are all in and not really trying to hide it. LawDork discusses some of the legal fallout. Paul Campos looks at the underlying obsession with undoing the 1960s.
2)Another court has blocked the FDA rule that allows mifepristone to be prescribed without an in-person visit. At the link, Jessica Valenti explains that yes, it’s still possible to obtain mifepristone legally, or to use misoprostol only, though that’s a slower process. The decision is still serious but Republicans are playing it up as A Total Ban, Mifepristone Abortions Are A Crime Now. They’re lying. LawDork’s link has more about that too. SCOTUS has laid down a short ban on the ruling taking effect.
And here’s some good news on abortion and maternal health care.
3)In the Toddler’s desperate quest to build a legacy that will after him, he’s pushing to build super-battleships. At the link, Paul Krugman points out drone warfare works very well against battleships. And each battleship would cost $17 billion. “Each of these ships would, for example, cost almost twice the pre-Trump annual budget of the National Science Foundation, although the NSF, like all funding sources for research, is now facing savage budget cuts. On the other hand, it would be hard for Trump to stick his name on research grants.” As Krugman puts it, we’re the Death Star and the Iranians are the rebels kicking our ass (that is, obviously, about asymmetric military power, not morals).
And now Pete Hegseth has begun bringing his wife to Pentagon meetings, even though she has no military status or any official role. And he’s appointed his brother as senior adviser. I see no way this improves things. And not for the first time, I wish reporters would ask how, given the obvious strain Hegseth is under, he’s coping with avoiding alcohol.
I’ll close with a gift link (I think it is) to a grim article on the ways the sniveling Toddler could disrupt the midterms rather than endure what looks like a humiliating defeat. Which will lead to a de facto dictatorship which will make everything worse.
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.
“[Deepak] Chopra and Epstein were in regular contact, joking about picking up girls, attending retreats, brokering lucrative deals and relaxing at Epstein’s residences. Part guru, part wingman, Chopra’s advice to Epstein includes the now widely circulated comments: “God is a Construct. Cute Girls are Real.” “Come to Israel with us. Relax and have fun with interesting people. If you want use a fake name. Bring your girls.” “Anything we share is between us. I share nothing with anyone but trust you.”
When Epstein informed Chopra that a woman had dropped a civil case claiming that he and Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her when she was age 13, he responded “good.”
In a recent conference Melanie Trump denied any connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s some speculation why she spoke up.
“The same man who built an empire trafficking girls was also grooming boys to hate them. He monetized girls’ bodies and radicalized boys against them. He hunted girls and recruited boys. Those aren’t separate phenomena. They run on the same logic. If you normalize the idea that women are owed, that consent is negotiable, that power excuses everything, you don’t just get one trafficking ring. You get an ecosystem. Epstein didn’t have to abuse every girl personally to profit from a world that already excused men who did.” — from an article about how Epstein promoted the manosphere. Which may also explain henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell’s online activity.
As noted at that link, Epstein made the world worse for women and gender equality. It’s not just him, though. If you remember #metoo, you remember how many women spoke up and said “me too!” They need the support of the system and of individual men: “It would be good if courage changed sides too. This isn’t impossible: one of my male friends, discovering the sexual abuse (this time of young men) rife in his faculty, became a whistleblower, sticking to the facts through counter-accusations and gaslighting. I think, too, of many other male friends, who love their partners, raise their boys well and must want more for their daughters than that they learn, aged fourteen, how to give a rich old guy a great blow job.”
