Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

The Felon administration’s ongoing war against diversity, equity and inclusion is not a principled opposition to racism. It’s an unprincipled opposition to equality, whether between races, between between genders or between sexual orientation.

It’s undoubtedly true that a lot of DEI in corporate America is performative and meaningless, as LGM says. But (as LGM also says) it was never going to stop there. Under Pete Hegseth’s opposition to “divisive” thoughts, the Naval Academy has decided the “blacks are mentally inferior” book The Bell Curve stays on the library shelves; a book challenging The Bell Curve got removed. West Point is in the same boat, and collaborating with Hegseth. Oh, and the Naval Academy removed a display on female Jewish graduates before Hegseth visited.

It’s a combination of Republican’s hatred for education (which shows people reality is against them) and the conviction that military officers are too woke. Meaning, I presume, they’re neither racist and misogynist enough, and not willing to kill protesters the way the Felon wants (there is no greater crime than saying the Felon isn’t the best little baby in the world).

According to Hegseth, “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology are incompatible with the Department’s core mission,” whereas trying to purge the military of any question that white men are the summit of evolution does not, somehow distract. It’s the same logic some Christian racists embraced during Jim Crow: working for civil rights distracts from evangelism but preaching against civil rights doesn’t do that. Or Augie Boto at the Southern Baptist Conference who claimed dealing with the SBC’s history of predators in pulpits would distract from spreading the gospel. He did not, as far as I know, see a conflict between evangelizing and the SBC working on right-wing politics or against gay marriage.

It’s once again MLK’s words about getting out of Egypt. There was no divisiveness in Egypt when the Israelites were content to sit around and bake bricks as slaves. It was Moses standing up and saying “Let my people go!” that divided everyone and stirred things up! Why can’t blacks and women stop demanding equality? Wouldn’t everything be better? And for the white supremacists, misogynists and homophobes who make up so much of the Republican ranks, it probably would be.

It’s telling that while Republicans continue opposing any sort of refugees entering the United States, they’re quite happy to welcome the poor, oppressed white people of South Africa. I’m pleased the Episcopal Church is calling them out on their shit. Unfortunately American conservatives were in love with apartheid before apartheid was cool (joking: it was never cool).

Also fighting back: New York State. And the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

All those millions of good-paying jobs the Felon is promising? His administration isn’t helping women land any of them. Eliminating Head Start will make it harder for moms to work — why, it’s almost like Republicans want women back in the home or something.

Bizarrely, the administration’s opposition to DEI leads to them dictating other countries must end programs.

“White middle class boys are only slightly less likely to go to college than white middle class girls, with only a 2% college enrollment gap (51% female vs. 49% male). Black male students, meanwhile, comprise just 37% of Black college attendees. Yet the discourse around the “boy crisis” often seems to revolve around the problems faced by white, middle class boys.”

Is the boy crisis the result of pissed-off fathers? Or maybe it’s the right’s increasing contempt for decent male behavior. Or any human decency.

Andrew Tate’s a misogynist and alleged rapist. Our law-and-order administration is keen to set him free.

Missouri wants to create a state registry of pregnant women at risk for an abortion. No way that could be abused, right? Texas to Missouri: hold my beer.

How to be anti-abortion and anti-vax simultaneously: “Certifiable whackjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now claiming that there is “a lot of aborted fetus debris” in the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.” You will be shocked, shocked, that he is lying.

Republicans say they hate groomers — but they’re all in on child marriage.

“Feminism is just leftism in a skirt.” — old fart Andrew Klavan who seems to think this is a serious critique.

A cop took a young rape victim for a rape kit, then sexually abused her.

More forced-birther bullshit.

“Of course, the theme in all this is ultimately men creating a sacralized hierarchy that crowns their genitalia at the top. Driscoll once told the men of his church their penis was God’s penis. He said, “Knowing that his penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.””

“It’s always a female human and a male beast.”

Mohler sneered that empathy is “an artificial virtue,” calling empathy “destructive and manipulative. Empathy means never having to say no,” Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.”

“Let’s be clear: The Tifton police themselves say this was a miscarriage. They’re not claiming it was an illegal abortion—and even if it were, Georgia law doesn’t allow the prosecution of people who have abortions. So why is this a police matter? Why did they send the fetus to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Lab for a fucking autopsy?”

“The Greens and their supporters (many of whom are, or were shaped by, their support-ees) frame this dispute in a dishonest and self-serving way. They believe that IUDs and emergency contraception are “abortifacients,” they say, because of their religious belief that “life begins at conception.” But that’s a dodge. This dispute is not about the belief that life begins at the moment of conception. It’s about the belief that conception occurs at the moment of ejaculation.”

“Women are presumed to care about other people, and are therefore too emotional to be on the Supreme Court, and even their most blatantly text-based arguments must somehow spring from this well of irrational feeling that sits in their skulls in place of a brain. Men, on the other hand, are presumed to be rational actors, even when they spend most of their public lives behaving with what can only be described as a shocking level of emotional incontinence — behaving, literally, like unruly children, screaming “you’re a dummy!” “no, you’re a dummy!” at one another.”

Remember, though, it’s not all bad: “Things get better and they get worse, at the same time … we’re resisting and we’re being crushed at the same time always, like they’re parallel tracks.” Here’s a look at two women in the 19th century who fought for their rights. And what happened when 90 percent of Iceland’s women walked off the job.

The desire to end feminism and shove women back into being stay-at-home moms has been around since the Reagan years. That’s when right-wingers began invoking the 1950s (or more precisely, a distorted fantasy of that decade) as the point of America’s perfection, before the fall from Eden of the 1960s. Men go out and work, women devote themselves to family and housekeeping, what could be more ideal?

That lots of women worked even in that decade, and that lots of women chose to ditch the 1950s sitcom-wife lifestyle (when job discrimination became illegal and no-fault divorce an option) — well, that was just some feminists using Jedi mind tricks! Patriarchy knows what women want! Allowing women to choose motherhood or not, based on personal preference, is just crazy talk.

Unsurprisingly the right wing is still obsessed with making women breed (I discussed WaPo’s profile of two of the “pronatalists” a while back). And this, in turn, justifies all there are other undead sexist cliches: women shouldn’t have careers because then they’d be at home, raising (white, conservative, Christian) babies. It should be perfectly acceptable for men to discriminate against women and advance other men at work! Etc., etc. And of course, they think birth control is bad and only sluts use it. And if a woman disagrees, discredit her by calling her ugly.

One of the reasons women are less enthused about having kids than men is they know they’ll do most of the child care. Men don’t have to see it as a major disruption in their careers; women do. Republicans want to maintain that dynamic because they’ve no interest in making life easier for women. So we have ideas such as giving medals for motherhood, $5,000 cash bonuses for kids and sex ed that teaches girls to track their menstrual cycle and make it easier to conceive (meanwhile, Indiana’s legislature removed any requirements to teach about consent in sex ed). Oh, and the Heritage Foundation, rather than worrying about teen pregnancy, is only worrying about unmarried teenage pregnancy. Which fits with the 1950s fetish: teens marrying and having babies was quite common back then. Did I mention Texas wants to ban birth control for teens? See also this.

The whole concept of undead sexist cliches is that misogyny and sexism’s view of women’s role never changes, only the rationales and the justifications for keeping women in a narrow, confining box.

For more on forced-birthers, check out Undead Sexist Cliches, available in ebook, in paperback, or you can order the paperback direct from me.

In Celeste Davis’ discussion of why men aren’t going to college, there was a quote from someone arguing that the whole educational experience is designed for women. Girls are happy to sit there and listen as a teacher tells them what’s right or wrong; boys are too independent, too rebellious! They’re going to jump up, declare “Screw you! You’re wrong and I’m doing it my way!” and then off they go to do that.

The quote isn’t arguing the teacher is wrong (certainly teachers can be), it’s arguing that accepting the teacher as an authority to listen to and to obey is inherently unmanly. As I’ve written about before, this undead sexist cliche goes back at least to the early 1990s, and it’s bullshit. The further back we go in history, the stricter discipline gets, so why is the problem happening now (Celeste Davis’ piece offers some possible answers)? Indeed the entire educational system has been designed for boys and young men rather than women: college was all male for a long time and women getting advanced education used to be controversial.

The idea that women make the rules and manhood consists of defying them is an old one. Playboy columnist Asa Barber used to write about how in his boyhood the girls would try to tell him how to play and he’d defy them because he was a boy and boys do that, dammit! Yet it isn’t women who run society or dictate how it runs — the culture as we see it was largely designed by men. Not because they’re inherently superior or better rulers but because they’ve had the power and women have often paid a price for defying it. If women built society men wouldn’t have controlled their finances, their lives and denied them the vote for so long.

Likewise, Amy Otto at the Federalist argues that women used to control dating and mating but now men are in charge. As I put it at the link, “That would explain why a hundred years ago women could take as many partners as they wanted while men who slept around were tarred as “tramps” and treated like dirt. Oh, wait, history was nothing like that. A male-dominated patriarchal system has always set the standards: pushing women to marry early (still held up as the ideal by multiple conservatives), restricting their options if they didn’t marry, hand-waving rape cases away.”

If men are natural rebels, why is it the military is overwhelmingly — until recently, entirely — male? Why do so many men fill the ranks of middle management and salaryman in the corporate world, jobs that require they do as they’re told? A friend of mine in upper management says men are far more likely to talk tough and act like docile drones; women are much more likely to take a hard line because they have to fight to exert their authority.

If men are rebelling against teachers I suspect it’s more the fear of being too girly. If women are going to college, studying hard and learning from teachers, then some guys will do the opposite because (as Davis says), there’s nothing worse than being a girl. As Davis mentions in another article, for some guys “precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action.” I discuss the challenge of dealing with this here. The Davis link has more thoughts and, I think, better ones.

It’s also possible that it reflects that for most men, women are the first lawgivers they meet — a mom, a sister, their granny, their nanny. Some men respect women for that; others see them as a tyranny that has to be smashed to be free.

For more on misogyny, sexism and the constricting nature of patriarchy, check out my Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook.

As I’ve written before, I think of society as about 10 percent heroes or saints, 10 percent villains and 80 percent who can go either way. This online image — I apologize to the creator because I don’t know who to credit — sums it up very well.

For every predator there’s a lot more men who contribute to rape culture, the set of behaviors and assumptions that give tacit support to rapists and none to the victims. And to be fair, some women too — plenty of conservative women will insist that certain women were “asking for it.”

Lately I’ve been pessimistic thinking about the 80 percent. As we see so many people grovel before the Felon or otherwise sell out, it feels hopeless — that the 80 percent are perfectly happy to see others illegally sent to a black site if it means they have a chance to escape the same fate. As the image points out, the 80 percent aren’t a monolith. The guy who gets some sort of satisfaction out of rape but wouldn’t do it himself isn’t in the same headspace as the guy who underestimates the issue. The person who doesn’t like seeing what’s happened but is too scared to act isn’t at the same point along the 80 percent spectrum as the one who engages in pre-emptive compliance or who’s cool with Muslims and Palestinian rights activists getting dragged off — “I’m not one of those, why should I stick my neck out?”

For the person on the left side of the chart, the question is how to encourage them to act. A little further right, it’s about changing their mind to shift left. On the right-hand side the issue is how to stop them from taking action, as their actions are likely to be on the wrong side.

Defining the problem doesn’t provide an answer, I know. But I still think it’s a better way to grasp what we’re dealing with.

“You don’t ask the guy with the boot on your neck to wear a softer shoe. You rip his fucking foot off.” — Jessica Valenti making the point there’s no middle ground to find with forced birthers.

For years the movement has insisted they don’t want to hurt the mothers getting abortions, just the doctors. Many of the people who say this are lying. Now, though, they’re coming right out and saying no abortion even to save the mother’s life, any woman who gets an abortion should be charged with murder (more here). And letting their misogynist freak flag fly, even hating women on their own side. Which isn’t surprising: a big part of misogynists wanting to destroy women’s rights is the desire to control the women in their own orbit — their daughters, their wives, the women in their church.

Montana wants to charge women who leave the state to get abortions with trafficking the fetus. I don’t have the slightest doubt some people will use this to restrict pregnant women’s travel period — sure, she says she’s visiting her mom, but why take the chance? And President Snowflake’s DOJ looks like it might be open to reviving lawsuits against mifepristone.

The Felon is happy to help accused human trafficker and accused rapist Andrew Tate escape Romania. For all his professed concern about other countries sending Bad People here, he’s fine with someone like this. But then, look at his cabinet.

Meanwhile, collaborators terrified they’ll be accused of DEI are firing non-white men right and left. Which is not only bad in itself, it kills the next generation of potential mentors. A story I read in Harvard Business Review some years ago (I wrote about it in Undead Sexist Cliches) told how a woman and man joined an investment firm at the same time, with similar backgrounds — but after a few months the man’s career took off like a rocket. It turned out he’d been invited to play racketball with the partners (all male). They’d tipped him off to a non-profit that needed a financial adviser, and would put him in touch with many potential clients. And it did. The woman never got the chance.

This shit matters. It’s why the Pence Rule makes things worse. I’m sure the white woman suing for reverse discrimination will open the floodgates for more lawsuits that will also make things worse. Ditto Stephen Miller. Ditto the US Attorney’s office refusing to sign an arrest warrant for accused assault against Republican Cory Mills.

Speaking of which, despite all the rants from the Felon’s administration, the military has not lowered standards to recruit women.

Despite the train wreck the Felon’s second term has become, many young men still think he’s awesome. Some older men are thrilled at the thought of male dominance returning (as if it ever went away), for example aging comic Joe Piscopo declaring “there’s masculinity back in America and we’re not afraid to be alpha males anymore. This is fantastic.” Because nobody screams “alpha male” like Piscopo.

Underlying a lot of what’s going wrong — the fragility of men’s egos and the stress of constantly proving yourself a Real Man. “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.“

“Zuckerberg, Mr. Bro-seph himself—despite his testosterone-pumping, UFC-frat-boy makeover—isn’t even living up to his own bro-code definition of masculinity. If hyper masculinity is all about protection, namely the protection of women, Zuckerberg has failed spectacularly.” No surprise: protecting women is never as important as protecting your bros and keeping women in their place.

Unsurprisingly, plenty of centrist Democrats and consultants think the solution to our current crisis is to stop worrying about women’s rights and identity politics and move right, becoming Republican Lite. They’ve been saying this since McGovern lost in 1972 and it’s a bad idea (the suggestions, like going and talking to Real Americans, are cliches by now). As Jamelle Bouie says, “take popular positions” ignores that popularity is shaped in part by what people stick up for and what politicians champion. The Felon’s pushing us one way — we need to push back. As Hilzoy says, we can fight for a better economy and a better deal for working-class workers and still champion women’s rights, gay rights, POC rights, etc.

For more dissection of misogyny, check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, in paperback or ebook. You can also order it straight from me from the Behold the Book page.

There’s a scene in The Paper (1994) where pregnant reporter Marisa Tomei is freaking out from fear her husband, editor Michael Keaton, is too addicted to his job to be the devoted father and co-parent he says he wants to be. At one point she asks him, what if a terrorist broke into their house and gave him a choice — he’ll either blow up the newspaper offices or shoot Tomei. Keaton replies “That will never happen!” “Exactly! You’re waiting for some big dramatic moment to prove how much you love me and missing all the small ones.”

As Don McPherson says in You Throw Like a Girl, being the chivalrous hero protecting your woman is held up as the gold standard for being a good husband (though as noted at the link, some conservative Christians don’t see a problem with being both a protector and an abuser). Trouble is, McPherson goes on, protection may not be what she needs. As that conversation in The Paper drives home, a woman doesn’t need constant protection: on a given day she may need you to cook dinner, handle the laundry, or listen while she vents much more than she needs you to stave off an axe-murderer.

Still, the image of what a man should be persists. It dovetails nicely with beliefs about chivalry, and even more with right-wing beliefs that men are aggressive brutes by nature — our lust for violence can’t be contained so women can either help channel it into protecting them or risk it being used against them. Plus women looove manly heroes — every woman wants one for her own! So it’s not just a right-wing thing.

As White Pages puts it, “There’s so much toxicity in the stories that we men internalize about ourselves: about how we are the heroes of ours and everybody else’s lives, about how every time we feel threatened or diminished in any way that we get to throw a fit, about how the world demands our dominance and force more than it begs us to be alive to the humanity of all those who surround us. To say that we are a ticking time bomb is to diminish the fact that we aren’t ticking at all. We’re always going off.” Hence the popularity of fictional protagonists who may be failures as family men but by god, they’ll fight to save their kids! “It is a fantasy that allows many of us to escape (albeit temporarily) the terrifying thought that we don’t really know dad, and that he doesn’t really know us.”

This puts me in mind of John Wayne’s 1949 film, The Sands of Iwo Jima. He’s a Marine lifer, completely unfit for civilian life, let alone family life, and the movie is quite clear that post-war we’ll need citizen soldiers like John Agar much more than Wayne.

The old analogy, as Celeste Davis says, is that while most of us are helpless sheep and some of us are vicious wolves, a few people are sheepdogs, wolves who fight the other wolves for the rest of us. Trouble is, “Men are our protector. Men are our predator. Our protectors are our predators. If men stopped harming women, there would be no need for protection. The person most likely to attack a woman is not some other man, it’s HER man! Her husband or boyfriend.” Plus we’re all sheep: the predators and the defenders aren’t some other species from us, they’re the same as us. “Our problem isn’t that we have an innate predator problem. Our far greater problem is that by needing to be a hero, our “protectors” turn themselves and their fellow humans into predators.”

There are lots of ways to be the hero (male or female or non-binary) our family, or people in our circle need. So let’s bloody well be one.