Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

“The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young men will do better under Trump, but at least they will feel pandered to.”

That’s from Emily Witt’s look at the manosphere, particularly misogynist Andrew Tate. It got me thinking about something many people have pointed out, that the guys who buy this line of bullshit (not an inconsiderable number, but Tate’s not as overwhelmingly popular as sometimes portrayed) see themselves as edgy dudes, pushing back against the womanized, feminazi status quo. They’re edgy rulebreakers, saying the things society wants to cancel! (For the record, anti-feminist women pretend the same thing).

No, they’re not. Saying “men should be in charge” or “men have the right to beat their wives” is common enough that it’s banal. 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.

As I’ve mentioned before, they’re only “edgy” within a very narrow, approved range. Treating women like shit is edgy, but much as they may complain about how modern capitalist society won’t let them have breadwinner wages, attacking capitalism (“My boss got a $12 million handout from a crony running the state welfare funds — I’m hacking his account and giving it all to the poor!”) is somehow not edgy. Andrew Tate is not suggesting ways to gaslight your boss or report their lawbreaking without getting caught. Like Witt says, their supposed radicalism is just clinging to the status quo where men run everything.

The same thing is true of right-wing Christian misogyny. As Jesus and John Wayne says, religious conservatives fantasize that by promoting a toxic masculine version of Christiantiy, they’re pushing back against mainstream orthodoxy that gives women all the power — they’re not only godly, they’re daring rebels against the status quo!

Nonsense. We live in a country where men earn more than women for the same work and there’s systemic bias against women in lots of other ways. Men don’t worry about getting raped if they walk home late at night, yet it’s women’s sexuality that’s constantly policed. Few men have to deal with threats to provide sex or lose their job. Brett Kavanaugh gets on the Supreme Court despite plausible rape allegations; alleged domestic abuser Pete Hegseth is now SecDef. We live in a culture where dozens of rapes happen every day and the vast majority go unpunished. Where misogynists cover up for other misogynists. Yet some men manage to convince themselves women are the oppressors.

We live in a country where men — at least some men — are expected to receive himpathy for their actions: “I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a ‘real man.’ Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.”

Similarly, as Echidne of the Snakes says, male artists who despise women get respect a woman who despised men the same way would not.

Here’s one horrific example of oppression: a church in Minnesota where church leader Daryl Bruckelmyer knew church member Clint Massie was a pedophile. There were multiple cases and Bruckelmyer’s solution was to order the girls to forgive Massie and hug him. And then to tell Massie (or so Bruckelmyer claims) not to touch little girls again — except when he kept doing it, the response was “I told him not to!” The prosecutors decided rather than take action against Bruckelmyer, they’d just remind him he had to report cases like that; he didn’t. That kind of shit put a long list of girls through hell.

Not that this doesn’t happen in secular situations too. The right wing celebrates Riley Gaines for becoming an anti-trans activist after she and a trans woman tied for fifth place. As one of her acquaintances said, however “You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.” Protecting cis women from trans women is way, way more important to the right than actually protecting women.

Kristen Kobes du Mez has pointed out how Jeffrey Epstein was the heart of a massive web of corruption. Lots of rich, important people knew what he was doing; even if they didn’t participate or actively cover up, they did nothing. Rightwing jackass Steve Bannon was one of them, willing to work with Epstein for political gain (more on that here).

Misogyny isn’t edgy. Rape isn’t edgy. Well, unless you consider being evil or allying with the established power structure edgy.

“We’ve dropped the [price of] infertility drugs to make lots of Trump babies“

“Young women in this country have become a very scary demographic.”

“This is not a rare disease that randomly strikes an unlucky few,” Campi said. “This is part of the hard-working body system that half of us manage, that makes 100 percent of us possible.” — from a University of North Carolina group, FlowForward, working to end period poverty.

“At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion… newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime” They then made up the public-safety documentation later.

“We’re in an era of real masculinity thanks to the bold, muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.” — Monica Crowley. Who has a point, if you define real masculinity as assaulting women and refusing to take responsibility for anything.

“Until you have at least 1,000 names of clergy sex abusers in a database — including those credibly accused — please stop telling us what you’re allegedly going to do.” — Baptist News on the Southern Baptist Conference’s repeated failures to come up with an abuse solution.

Last month, Megachurch pastor Robert Morris got only six months for sexually abusing a child.

Prosecutors in 19 states are suing over a Felon Administration rule that bars states from providing services to sexual assault and domestic abuse survivors who “cannot immediately prove their immigration status.”

““That’s not fair!” they’ll cry, like a small child watching another child getting a cookie when they didn’t get one. That childish cry for fairness isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. We all wailed like that as small children — “It’s not fair!” — when we imagined we were being excluded or denied something. But we didn’t yet understand enough about the world outside of our own selves to ever yowl that same thing when we witnessed someone else being excluded or denied something.

Everybody understands “justice” when they’re the one who didn’t get a cookie. Even Trump and his MAGA followers get that. But if some “social justice warrior” points out that someone else is being denied a cookie and says, “That’s not fair,” this confounds and confuses them. So what? That person is not me. So that’s not a matter of justice, merely of “social justice,” and that’s just some sin-of-empathy, woke-mind-virus, cultural Marxism argle bargle.” Discrimination against women wasn’t the specific topic of that slacktivist post but it’s certainly applicable.

“MAGA opportunistically portrays the solution to men’s distress as a zero-sum game: in order to improve the status of American men, we have to “take back” from the usual suspects – women, our trading partners, the intellectual elites, environmentalists, the “deep state” and the historically disadvantaged.” — Paul Krugman

When religious conservatives say the Southern Baptists are no worse at dealing with abuse than any other organization, perhaps they mean prisons.

Faculty sexual misconduct drives some women out of their chosen field.

NBC looks at the Assemblies of God pulling a Southern Baptist impersonation — the church hierarchy in both cases knew there were predators in pulpits and did nothing. In both cases some people argued the church should take action; in both cases the church leaders worried taking any action would make them legally liable. In the case of the Assemblies of God, the article (and much as I criticize the mainstream media here, this shows what they can do when they have a mind) says stopping child abusers from getting new jobs would “defy a core biblical command: to forgive.”

Um, no.

Victims can forgive the one who wronged them or abused them. The pedophiles and rapists didn’t wrong the organization so it can’t forgive them. What it can do, and should have done, is stop them from abusing others (to the extent they have the power). Not doing that is not compassion, it’s cowardice, it’s apathy towards the past and future victims, it’s morally appalling.

It may tie in with Fred Clark’s comment about the discomfort of forgiveness: “The Powers That Be cannot abide the idea of the previously powerless having power over them, even so seemingly abstract a power as the granting or withholding of absolution. (And even though such absolution is something that none of their actions has previously shown them to desire or care about.) And so TPTB will not allow the victims of injustice to offer forgiveness, they will simply take it from them, thereby restoring and re-blessing the previous imbalance of power.”

Nobody in the article says the victims were forced to forgive (or say they forgave) their rapist, which has happened in other churches. Or as happened in this case, which involves a cop and a police department (there are lots of predators outside pulpits). I wonder, if someone embezzled from the church or set fire to one, would they react the same? Or would they decide attacking the institution rather than women and kids was actionable?

I’m sure the decision to let predators go free involved a lot of the rationalization that “well, he’s learned his lesson, he probably won’t do it again.” Spoiler: several of the guys who were outed as predators did it again. As one HR person put it a few years back, the questiona to ask are “what if he keeps doing it? What if it’s not even the first time?”

It’s unsurprising a right-wing religious culture, steeped in misogyny, reacts this way. As Methodist Minister Madeline Southard put it, when a woman’s status depends on being “the wife, mother, daughter, concubine or mistress of some man,” rather than “a person in herself,” men may have respect for their own kin and contempt for any woman outside that circle (unless she’s the property of some more important man). Under Wilhoit’s Law, if your man’s status doesn’t make you part of the protected in group, you’re fair game, a stray lamb ready for the predator’s maw. When Rep. Ted Yoho called A-OC a fucking bitch, she replied that saying that to her tells other men they can say it to his wife, his daughters. I’m sure Yoho thinks that would be outrageous — his women are in the protected circle because they’re his!

That consent is unimportant to many people on the religious right is also a factor.

Shitbag Southern Baptist leader William Wolfe thinks the SBC’s own assault and abuse issues are less important than women having authority in the church — and besides the SBC’s no worse than other groups. As I say at the link, “Even if true, the women’s accounts show the church is still unique — colleges and corporations can’t invoke God as a defense against accusations or tell a victim God demands she keep quiet.

Even if they were, say, “no worse than IBM” or “no worse than the FDA” (I’m picking those name entirely at random), so? Isn’t the point of Christian theocracy supposed to be that it will uplift people and make us morally better? Many leaders of the religious right want to be recognized our moral superiors, they don’t want to put in the effort to achieve that level of morality.” As witness, “it’s no big, we’re no worse than anyone else is not a moral of Christian stance.” It’s butt covering by a misogynist right-wing bullshit artist (they’ve been whining for more than a decade about how Christians will be jailed for their beliefs. It hasn’t happened).

I’m not sure where I read that title line recently, but I think it’s spot on. It goes back to the yosta bees who turned hard right after 9/11. Or the anti-anti-racists and anti-anti-feminists — no, they’re not misogynists or racists, they just support the Necrotic Toddler because the push for equality has gone too far (no, it hasn’t. Give us one day without rape or harassment and we’ll talk).

Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, for instance insists he’s a centrist who only voted for the Felon because Biden was obviously losing it. Which given Biden was not on the ballot, is dubious reasoning. Michelle Goldberg notices his new film, After the Hunt, is classic reactionary centrism: “a loathing of wokeness so intense, it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump.” Grazer has specifically said the movie — about the damage spawned by false accusations of rape (or harassment or something bad — it’s unspecified) is to dramatize how MeToo has gone too far.

Suffice to say it hasn’t, but lots of important men — and men not so important — recoil from the thought that they, or someone like them, can be held accountable for the way they treat women. Columnist Ron Hart, who believes putting an innocent man to death is an acceptable price of having the death penalty, has also written that he finds false accusations of rape absolutely unacceptable. So killing a man isn’t as bad as accusing (not imprisoning, nor convicting, nor even charging) him of sexual assault. The Felon bragging about “grab them by the —” for some people, was a sign that voting for him would bring back the good old days.

The media, of course, give excuses too. Biden was too old and losing it. Hilary Clinton didn’t manage her email servers properly. Yet the Felon administration is as bad on both counts and we still get coverage asking is Portland in ruins or not? It’s not. This is not a subjective assessment. The Felon Administration is lying.

Or consider this: “NBC News eliminated its teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups” This seems to be partly a response to Republicans’ ongoing war on POC and LGBTQ but I wonder if it isn’t also that the people at the top of the company are happy not to have to show interest in that stuff any more (much as Ronan Farrow’s bosses at NBC weren’t excited about him exposing Harvey Weinstein). Certainly the media were conscious about diversity when they were sending reporters to single out white Felon voters and ask what they think.

Paul Campos probably has a point about how one of the fuels for Trumpism is how the “practically universal experience of sexual frustration gets ideologized among young men into a kind of pervasive nihilistic rage against the world in general and women in particular.” He lists several other factors driving the shift to the right, as do some of the commenters (“It’s crucially important that this is mostly a movement among culturally Christian white people. No group suffering more has anything like the institutions telling white-wingers how they’re entitled to have all the power and all the goodies.”).

Aaron Huertas defines the problem as reactionary centrism: “Someone who says they’re politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right.” (which would include anti-anti racism). These are people who for whatever reason claim to believe Both Sides Do It — the left are just as bad about X as the right! And yet when they start throwing punches, as Huertas says, they throw them more at the left. People who think MeToo goes too far never give more than lip service to “sexual harassment is bad too.”

Rather than the centrist standing in the middle between two extremes, they wind up getting hooked by the right, even as they deny it.

So we wind up with the recent reveal that Young Republicans in private texts drop ethnic slurs, joke about loving Hitler and sending people to the gas chambers, crack rape jokes. I doubt we’d find anything as extreme in text messages on the left (I wouldn’t be surprised to find some rape jokes, though) — “Stalin was so cool! Yeah, let’s send everyone in the Republican Party to the gulag!” And JD Vance would not be defending them as kids making edgy jokes (the youngest person in the group chat was in their late 20s). People who want to be edgy, like so many centrists, are far more likely to decide being misogynist and racist is cool rather than mocking rapists and Klansmen.

The idea that men and women are fundamentally, innately different is the basis for all of the other undead sexist cliches I blog about. According to this cliche, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men crave sex, women crave love. Men are logical, women are irrational. Men are smart, women are stupid. Men are competitive, women are not. Everyone knew this until feminists came along pretending that women could or should do what men do but they can’t and shouldn’t. All nature proves it. Therefore there’s nothing hypocritical or discriminatory when we judge women and men differently for doing the same things.

As I put it in a post three years ago, “Of course there are fundamental differences between men and women. Women get pregnant and undergo menstruation. Men can pee standing up. Men are more prone to colorblindness. But sexists see vaster, more profound differences, which conveniently explain why men run everything.” They ignore that many of the differences are circumstantial or cultural, for example why some women don’t enjoy sex, or that a woman who’s competitive may be judged more harshly than a competitive guy.

The truth, though, is that there is nothing in the universe more like a human man than a human woman, and vice versa (this also applies to intersex and nonbinary people). We have a massive overlap in skills, preferences, emotional and physical capabilities. Take child-rearing: compared to most animal species, most human men are incredibly involved with their kids (even though women still wind up with the brunt of the child-care). For all the talk about our differences being fixed, diaper-changing tables in men’s rooms would have sounded insane when I was a kid — why would we need them?

Men can clean house, raise kids, cook meals for the family. Women can fight in the military, perform brilliantly in science, right books and be skilled, enthusiastic lovers. Statistic — most men are better than women at X, say — have no relevance to the individual. Most men are taller than most women but that hasn’t prevented me being shorter than average.

The irrevocable differences is one of the foundational pillars for patriarchy — men run things because they’re superior. Women simply can’t be leaders/scientists/CEOs/whatever, men deserve their superior status, now go make us a sandwich.

It’s bullshit. The only reason for not having full gender equality is that men don’t want to share. Equality makes logical sense. Equality makes moral sense, and benefits society more than patriarchy, which forces us into roles regardless of competency. That’s great if you’re a mediocre white man who wants more than you deserve but it’s not good for anyone else, or society as a whole.

Plenty of people in my lifetime have complained that equality is too extreme and feminists should compromise. Equality is the compromise position between absolute male dominance and absolute female dominance.

As Frederick Douglass says, power never has, and never will concede anything without a demand. So let’s keep demanding.

It struck me recently that feminists are, in Walter Brueggemann’s sense, prophets.

In Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, he argued the role of the prophet is to see the unimaginable — that the status quo is unjust and can, in fact, be toppled; that there’s a new, better world we can build, even if it’s never existed before. At the link I mentioned Martin Luther King, because his words captured the vision of an equal future so well. But everyone who worked in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement — they were living the prophetic imagination even if they didn’t speak it so beautifully. Because they had the vision, the imagination, to see we didn’t have to live in a hierarchical society.

Hierarchy is appealing if you’re high enough in the ranks. For men, patriarchy is seductive (and some women who benefit from supporting it). The advantages you get if you’re promoted or paid better than women. The advantages at home if your wife handles all the cleaning and childcare. Even if there’s no such advantage, there’s the psychological benefits. 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.

If you benefit from hierarchy it’s hard to imagine a world without it; even people on the bottom levels are often more interested in climbing than reforming it — a common tactic by “dirty whites” such as Italian or Irish immigrants was to loudly embrace WASP racism, showing they belonged on the same level of the hierarchy as Anglo-Saxons. It’s often said that if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression; beyond that it’s hard to imagine a world without oppression. Someone has to be on the bottom rungs; if women/blacks/gays don’t want to be there, clearly they intend to switch places with white straight men.

Pat Robertson (at the second link above) assumed that if black America takes the whip from whites, it’s so they can whip whites, not to make a world where nobody is whipped. Anti-feminists routinely predict feminist-ruled dystopias if women aren’t kept in their place. A new novel predicts gay rights leads to oppressing straights.

In the 1920s, when the Soviet Union officially abolished men’s property rights in their families (I’m not sure how much that affected the reality), many Americans assumed the women — as they obviously couldn’t be without some sort of owner — were now the property of the state, probably working as sex slaves.

Equal rights movements can imagine what the oppressor does not: an end to oppression, rather than simply shifting the whip from hand to hand. They can imagine equality. Abigail Adams could envision it more than 200 years ago, suggesting husbands give up the role of “master” for “friend”: “put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.” (None of the men in her era had that sense, alas).

Mary Wollstonecraft did too. So did the feminists of my teen years. And Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, gay rights activists, they all imagined a world where the accident of their condition did not put them in “the power of the vicious and the lawless.”

Looking at the world now, I often feel the dream is inconceivable and unattainable. But it was more inconceivable when they lived and fought and yet they didn’t give up on it. We can’t either.

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Even though he wouldn’t have been in sympathy with these movements, it still applies: “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.”