“Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.” – Kamala Harris, November 6, 2024
I went down a pretty deep rage hole after Trump the Rapist won Tuesday’s election. The list of things that made him unfit to be our president was as long as an Alaskan winter night, including being found liable for a sexual assault by a jury of his peers, which the judge described as rape. Remember when Mitt Romney was disqualified from the Presidency because he left the family dog on top of his car? That Trump the Rapist won the popular vote defied comprehension . I found myself quoting the line from Marilyn Manson’s “Irresponsible Hate Anthem,” that screams, “I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers.”
So I unplugged for a few days. I didn’t want to see the gloating MAGA memes or sit through MSNBC’s Monday morning quarterbacking. We know what happened. The Putin-Musk disinformation campaign pushed millions of gullible Americans into Trump’s cult of personality, while the Democratic Party sat around and got high on the smell of their own farts, clueless to the reality on the ground. The White House, the Senate, and probably the House, now the playthings of a sociopath and his self-enriching oligarchs.
We know it’s going to get bad. It already has. The day after the election, African-Americans of all ages started receiving texts stating that they would be enslaved to pick cotton. Many texts mentioned Trump, saying things like, “Our Executive Slaves will come get you … be prepared to be searched down once you’ve enter the plantation.” In the last few days, Trump’s misogyny has unleashed an army of male trolls who have been harassing women (and girls in school) with the chant, “Your body, my choice.” And this thing is less than a week old.
After a few days of screaming at the sky (and one night of poker and much whiskey), it may be time to lick my wounds and figure out how to prepare for what’s to come. And how to fight it. Step one is to let go of the hate. That’s their game. There was a news story today that Iran was working on a plot to assassinate Trump to avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani, but the FBI caught the three plotters. My immediate thought was, “I guess Iran didn’t have a Plan B.” But that doesn’t cure America of the sickness that is Trumpism. It would only elevate the calls for more blood.
Resisting the lizard brain mandate to blindly fight my supposed enemies is part of this. Who are these enemies? I can generalize them as “MAGA morons,” too dumb to see through Trump’s con act. But these “morons” are people I know. Some of them are my students and family members. They see us as “evil” and we see them as cognitively impaired. Neither is the reality. (Well, Trump is most certainly cognitively impaired, and if he makes it to January 2029, we’ll see the 82 year-old sitting with a drool bucket, staring at the sun, on Inauguration Day.) But falling into the us vs. them binary just turns a needed conversation into a mindless war and, again, that’s not our thing.
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be ready to fight. I’m already geared up for the 2026 midterms. Cozy and I will make pink pussy hats for the coming marches. I’m dusting off my civil disobedience skills and will be a 60-something monkey-wrench in Trump’s march to authoritarianism. Don’t think I’m making the case for resting on my white male privilege.
But I think we can do it without the vitriol. Yeah, millions of women voted for Trump the Rapist. Are they just bimbos and battered women suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Or are they complex human beings with multiple motivations that, with love instead of hostility, can be cleaved away from the misogynistic cult of Trump the Rapist? And the men who love them may follow.
I had a publication in 2004 titled, “Getting It: Women and Desistance from Hate Groups.” It was based on my research on former racist skinheads. Their exit stories followed a similar path; a woman in their life, a girlfriend, a teacher, a step-mother, gave them the gift of empathy. They said, “Listen to what I have to endure as a female. That’s what you are doing to people of color.” Lightbulbs went off and the skinheads walked away from hate. There is no greater hate group than MAGA, so why wouldn’t that same strategy work again?
So it’s time to unclench the fist and open the hand and start rescuing people from this death cult. I didn’t know how to truly put women first until I became a father of girl. I wonder how many MAGA bros would vote for Trump the Rapist if Trump raped a women they loved. (Well, besides Ted Cruz.)
So here is my Three Point Strategy to get us out this nightmare. 1) Let go of the hate and the us vs. them narrative. It stops meaningful action in its tracks. 2) Circle the wagons. We need to let know those most vulnerable know that we have their backs. This includes members of immigrant and trans communities. Their fear-level is off the charts. (We’re locking down Andi’s citizenship before the Inauguration so we don’t have to worry about her being disappeared by the “Day 1” plan for mass deportations.) And 3) Reach out with soft hands to those that voted for Trump the Rapist, especially the women. Let’s be Pied Pipers of love. The alternative is a war of all against all and we’ve done that. We don’t want MAGA civil war re-enactors 150 years from now in red hats, screaming, “Your body, my choice!” at Gettysburg.
Deep breaths, America. And let’s get in there where we are needed.
I was 18 or 19 when I first heard the line, “Real men don’t eat quiche.” I remember being so confused because I loved quiche! Eggs, pie, it’s the perfect meal! Was I not a real man? What if I ate quiche with one hand and bashed someone over the head with lead pipe with the other? Where was this guidebook for what was and wasn’t the permitted behavior for real men, so we wouldn’t become fake men?
Judith Butler, the philosopher who wrote Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), took issue with any attempt to define “real men” or what makes a “natural woman.” These are human inventions, invented by humans who have no actual authority over such designations. Sociologists know that gender is fluid and changes across time and space. What was masculine in 1954 is quite different from what is masculine in 2024. My own research on racist skinheads found them largely motivated by this changing nature of masculinity, as their manly factory jobs were offshored and “their women” declared their independence and began bringing home bigger paychecks. For Butler, gender was a performance and, boy, did the skinheads perform.
So it’s with great amusement that I watch the buffoonish performance of masculinity by former President Trump. This child of privilege, who has never lifted anything heavier than a golf club, has routinely pretended to be a strongman. On his first run for president, he regularly told his supporters to “knock the hell out of” protestors. When, as president, he contracted COVID, he defiantly ripped his mask off on the White House balcony (and was then whisked off to be treated by the nation’s top doctors). When an assassins bullet barely grazed his ear, he raised his fist and chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” His endless admiration of dictators like Orban and Putin is all part of the act. Former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly had to beg Trump not to praise Adolf Hitler in public. Admiring Kim Jong Un is one thing, but Hitler, well, that might be a PR problem.
One of the themes of this election has been the 18 point gender gap between Trump and Harris supporters. And it’s not just uneducated white men that are breaking for Trump. It’s also a lot of uneducated brown and black men. Even Obama has been enlisted to try to convince black men to vote for the black woman. Is Kamala Harris this year’s quiche?
Patriarchy is the oldest power dynamic on earth. Older than capitalism. Older than racism. It doesn’t go all the way back, but as long as we’ve been defining God as “He,” men have enjoyed the privilege of being the king of the hill. Over the last 100 years, men have been slowly pushed off their throne, but they are not giving up without a fight. More women are fully employed than men. More women are graduating from college than men. And now a woman is favored to be Commander in Chief. What’s a fragile boy to do? Trump’s appeal to these broken men is as He-Man, the Master of the Universe. Ah, those were the days.
So it’s not surprising that men from every generation who still buy into 1950s myths of masculinity have glommed onto the the fake bravado of the Richie Rich from Queens (who wears a girdle). They want their UFC, their trad wives, and their unrestricted access to women’s bodies and paychecks. Trump is the incel icon. His conviction for sexual assault only endears him to the lost boys of the twenty-first century. He claims he will restore the moral authority to the days when manly men (like him?) ruled the roost. Masculinity in Harris’ America is under assault from DEI, illegal immigrants, and drag queens, according to Fox News/MAGA doctrine. Trump even referred to radio host Howard Stern as a “woke beta male” after Stern interviewed Harris this week.
Trump’s dive into the cesspool of the manosphere, doing interviews on bro podcasts and bumping chests with misogynists like Logan Paul, may be intended to stiffen his limp poll numbers, but they’re likely to have the opposite effect. Trump should have taken note of the response to his Mini-Me, JD Vance, who tried to define what was and wasn’t a “real woman.” (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t childless cat owners.) The quip rallied women from across the political spectrum who collectively said, “You don’t know me, Couch Boy!” Trump’s pathetic performance of toxic masculinity may endear him to a small number of women who have Stockholm syndrome after years of abuse, but female voters are the proverbial sleeping giant. Just look at the turnout anytime abortion restrictions have been on the ballot.
The vast the majority of these self-declared “alpha males” (pffft!) have women in their lives who have caught glimpses of life outside of patriarchy. It’s a world where they have control over their lives and are safe(r) from sexual harassment and violence. They don’t want to go back to being Mrs. John Doe. A lot of the “alphas” are materially supported by women, even if it’s just living in their mother’s basement. And these women who have their alpha ears are telling them that real men support women’s autonomy and that, if not respected, they could easily take their love to a man who sees women as human beings. My guess is that those men who are still falling for Trump’s macho con don’t have women available for honest conversations. Like Logan Paul, they are flailing in a world that sees alpha men as vestiges of the bad old days.
That’s why Harris running mate Governor Tim Walz is so refreshing. Like me and Kamala, Tim is Generation X (all three of us were born in 1964), and grew up in an era when women gained immense economic and social power. We saw our moms move from housewives to career havers. Walz has all the manly credentials (veteran, football coach, fried food eater). He’s also a girl-dad (of a Swiftie, just like me!) and a defender of queer kids and women’s reproductive rights. The sad incels can try to define him as “soft” (“Tampon Tim”), but Walz’s version of masculinity is something painfully out of reach to them. His 30-year-marriage, compared to Trump’s serial philandering, stands as a model of how men should be in the world. (If you think any of Trump’s marriages were happy, I’ve got some stocks in Trump Steaks I’d like to sell you.) If Alpha Boy thinks he’s going to have a 30-year marriage with a trad wife, he hasn’t spoken to an actual female off the internet.
The conventional wisdom is that it will be female voters that save us from the strongman authoritarian trip of Trump and his Handmaid’s Tale Project 2025 vision of making America 1954 again. Many of those women will be telling their men they are voting for Trump and in the privacy of the voting booth pulling the lever for Harris. But I think a bunch of those alpha males will be voting for Harris, too. Because their girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters told them that real men vote for women.
One of the most depressing things about the 2020 election was seeing more white women move into the Trump voting pool. While only 47 percent of white women voted Republican in 2016, 53 percent voted for the GOP in 2020, according to Pew Research. While women of color largely remained Democratic voters, the “soccer moms” seemed to be falling for Trump. Those Republican women were rewarded in June 2022 when the Supreme Court took away their reproductive rights in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. Dobbs woke many of those Republican women up. That fall, conservative women in redder than red Kansas voted, en masse, against a proposed state abortion ban. Was the sleeping giant waking?
Dissertations are being written on why so many white women support a convicted felon, who brags about wanting to date his daughter and grabbing women by the genitals. “And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. A man who was found, by a jury of his peers, liable for sexual assault, in a case the judge equated with rape. Why would white women support this pig? What woman would tell their daughter that, “This is a good man and should be our president”? My theory is that their racism trumps his sexism. They see themselves as white first and women second.
Now, of all possible running mates, Trump has picked first term Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his wingman. While it’s not surprising Trump picked a white male MAGA loyalist (who won’t stray like that Constitution-abiding Mike Pence), it is a little surprising that Trump would pick someone as anti-woman as Vance. Vance opposes no-fault divorce and wants a national ban on all abortion, even if a girl is raped by her father. (As J.D. says, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”) You’d think forced government birth for rape victims would not be a good look for the G.O.P., who should be trying to lure female voters back after Dobbs. But there is no G.O.P. anymore. There is only Trump, a party of one. In high school, I learned this was called “fascism.”
So the Trump-Vance ticket is the most misogynistic ticket of this century. And, suddenly, they are up against, not Old Man Biden, but Vice President Kamala Harris, who has also been a successful senator, state attorney general, and prosecutor of the same crimes for which Trump has been convicted. Sunday, after Biden’s announcement, I dove into right wing social media and charted the avalanche of racism and sexism that was being unleashed by the white men of MAGA. Then I took the shower.
Accusations that Harris is “incompetent,” “slept her way to the top,” and is a “DEI hire,” should be familiar to every single woman who has tried to find equity in the workplace. This includes Republican women – the ones in the workplace, not the ones homeschooling their kids. That women have to work twice as hard and get half as much is a lived reality known to all working women (and people of color). These are the women that belt out the line from the Taylor Swift song, “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” But the fact that this avalanche of “women are not qualified” misogyny is coming from the supporters of Trump-Vance may work in Harris favor.
Kathleen Blee’s pioneering 2008 book, Women of the Klan, found that women joined racist hate groups with their racist men, not on their own, and were challenged by the sexism that went hand in hand with the racism. Trump women who fawned over Trump at the RNC, with fake bandages on their right ears, may start to fall away when they hear the uncheck anti-woman rhetoric coming from their men, especially when they start to understand Harris has their back.
I’ve already witnessed this. Don’t tell anyone, but I belong to a Gen X Swiftie Facebook page. (Not all Taylor Swift fans are 9-year-old girls, like my daughter.) Swift is a strong feminist and has come out as a Democratic supporter. The 2020 documentary Miss Americana tells the powerful story of her political coming out. Taylor’s epic break-up song, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which is an updating of Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” contains the line, “And you were tossing me the the car keys, ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ keychain on the ground.” Of course, being a feminist Swiftie over fifty, I went straight to Amazon and bought a “Fuck the Patriarchy” key chain.
After the Republican convention last week, which was the pinnacle of patriarchal bullshit, I posted a picture of my keychain on Gen X Swifties, with the tag, “Current mood.” I got hundreds of likes but some anger from a few Swifties that felt I had introduced politics into their “safe space.”
Then something amazing happened.
The other women on Gen X Swifties started a conversation with the “no politics” women. Not a “You’re stupid!” shouting match but a calm conversation that clearly stated, Taylor is political and so being a Taylor Swift fan is political. That Taylor has strongly come out for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and against politicians who oppose those civil rights and you can’t separate these things. To be for Taylor is to be for women’s and queer rights and the taking of a strong stance against those that would suppress those rights is in line with Swift’s values of equality. People began posting memes of friendship bracelets that said, “In our Kamala era,” and repurposing Swift lyrics, like, “Kamala’s a relaxing thought.” And those “no politics” women didn’t bail. They stayed and listened.
I’d like to make a prediction. Swift’s Eras tour returns to the United States in October. As boyfriend Travis Kelce joined her onstage in London, there will be night when the vice president takes the stage. Preferably it will be during “You Need to Calm Down,” Swift’s brilliant anti-homophobia anthem, and Harris will do her famous Kamala dance. Swift will wink and that will be that. No words will be said and the massive Swift voting block will be activated.
So let Trump-Vance and their MAGA droogs unleash their pathetic misogynistic attacks. It’s like water off of Kamala’s back. She’s heard it all before. It can only work to peel those coveted white women, formerly known as soccer moms, away from the Trump cesspool and into the Harris camp. They may tell their men that they are voting for Trump, but in the privacy of the voting booth they’ll pull the lever for the prosecutor, not the felon. And when Taylor Swift sings, “Screaming, crying, perfect storms, I can make the tables turn. Rose garden full of thorns, keep you second guessing, like ‘Oh, my God, who is she?” They can sing along and say, “Yeah, that was me.”
I don’t remember what Beatlemania was like. I was born in February 1964 as the mop tops from Britain invaded the U.S.. The footage of them on Ed Sullivan and the girls screaming is exhilarating. We now look at that month as the moment the 1960s started; when the black and white era of the Kennedy assassination became a technicolor explosion of youth counterculture. But not everyone loved the Beatles in 1964. Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, wrote in the Boston Globe, “The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”
Buckley wasn’t alone. A chorus on the right proclaimed the Beatles as “communists” and encouragers of “race mixing.” They were framed as untalented puppets, designed to upset the American moral order with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. John Lennon, in a lengthy interview with a British columnist in 1966, briefly commented on the sad state of contemporary religion. “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity,” he said. The comments were reported out of context in the United States and the backlash was fierce. Right-wing stalwarts, the Ku Klux Klan, organized boycotts of Beatles concerts and claimed Ringo was “a Jew.” Conservative southern radio stations held Beatle bonfires and there were numerous death threats against the band. The Beatles quit touring and retreated to the studio to find other ways to speak to the youth of the world.
I was just a baby for all that. I didn’t experience Beatlemania first hand. But I am experiencing Swiftmania and if feels like basically the same thing. If the Ku Klux Klan could burn Taylor Swift music streams, there would be bonfires across the nation.
First things first. This is not about Taylor Swift’s music. Old people always hate young people’s music. My dad thought AC/DC was not music and there a million people my age who think Taylor Swift’s music is also noise. I recently posted on a classic rock page that Swift will be my daughter’s Joni Mitchell, and some of the Boomers shit bricks. And then I posted the Buckley quote about the Beatles, and they just grunted. The word “crap music” was use repeatedly. OK, boomer. I did an episode on my YouTube channel about Swift’s 2023 Midnights album and how it as essential LP for any vinyl collectors collection. There is little doubt that Swift is immensely talented. This is not about that.
This is about gender and what happens when a woman is in control of her own life. Especially on Super Bowl Sunday. Taylor Swift has sold over 200 million records but I hear more about the existential threat she poses to America itself than the countless people to whom she brings joy. She’s got seven albums on the top 40 of Billboard’s album chart at the moment, but, apparently, she’s ruining football and America as we know it.
Susan Faludi, in her seminal 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, gave us the roadmap for the conservative freakout about the girl from West Reading, Pennsylvania. Faludi argued that anytime in American history women gain power there is a patriarchal “backlash” to put them “back in their place.” One hundred years ago, women gained political power by winning the right to vote. The 1920s then generated flappers and housewives as the new feminine ideals, to push women away from using their collective voice at the ballot box. During WW II, women gained economic power as an army of Rosie the Riveters traded their dish rags in for blowtorches to build the weapons of war. And they had their own money to spend since their men were off on the battlefield. The end of the war brought back the demand that women return to the kitchen, or focus on the glamour like the new phalanx of blonde bombshells on the silver screen. Backlash #2. In the 1960s, women gained social power as the second wave feminist movement, again, worked to liberate them from domestic drudgery, as Mrs. John Doe flowered into Ms. Cindy Nobra. Faludi argued, in 1991, that the third backlash came in the form of the supermodel and the media message that women’s primary value is in their ability to attract men.
Faludi’s work was seen as helping to launch the third wave feminist movement of the 1990s and 2000s that culminated with the #MeToo movement in 2017. But by 2017, the fourth backlash was in full swing. There was never a greater movement to put women “back in their place” (and back into back alleys) than the rise of Donald J. Trump. I’ve reported here about my 2018 conversation with Gloria Steinem. When I asked Ms. Steinem how she explains the rise of Trump, she told me, “You know when a women is at most risk of being killed by her abuser is the moment she tries to escape him. When the battered wife tries to leave, that’s when he is his most violent. That’s where we are.” The way the MAGA movement has characterized the obese elderly Trump as a virile, chiseled, hyper-masculine macho man has become patriarchy’s ultimate weapon against women and their basic rights of self-determination.
Enter Taylor Swift.
Swift’s storied career, from her 2006 debut album to now (“Cruel Summer” is STILL on my radio in this cruel winter) has been a tale of wrestling control from men. Whether it’s songs dishing on ex-boyfriends who have done her wrong or fighting to reclaim her back catalog from Scooter Braun’s Big Machine record label, this has never been a woman who is going to shut up and just be pretty. She has, throughout for her career, stood up for the underserved. In 2015, when Apple was going to premier its new streaming music service with a three month free offer, they announced that artists would not receive any payment for their music being streamed during those three months. Taylor, who could afford the dip in income, saw how smaller artists were being ripped off and pulled all her music off the platform until Apple changed its policy. It did. Swift has donated millions to a wide variety of needs, including libraries, schools, flood, tornado, and hurricane relief, police departments, and victims of sexual assault. She’s paid off fans medical bills and student loans. Her philanthropy makes the “Christian charity” of her accusers look like pennies tossed in the church collection plate.
More than endorsing Joe Biden, it’s this persona of a woman in control of her life that triggers fragile conservative men most. Trump has said, defending his “Make America Great Again” slogan, America was last great in the 1950s, in the era of Father Knows Best, when women (and especially trans women) did not challenge the “natural” authority of men. (Make America Backlash 2 Again) Swift is not interested in going backwards in time to make men happy. In the most simplest of terms, Taylor Swift does not give a fuck. So American men are putting their wife beaters on and popping open a can of Bud Light (whoops, triggered by that beer) and getting ready to teach Taylor and all women like her a lesson. And they are manning up for Super Bowl Sunday, ready flex their atrophied muscles.
Let’s try to first extend a wee bit of empathy to these fragile men. The world has changed a lot since Trump says America was last great. Men are no longer the kings of their castles. Unlike in 1964, women can now have their own credit cards and punish sexual harassers. More women are going to college now than men (I see this in my classroom) and the workforce is now dominated by female labor. Unlike the days of Father Knows Best, now three fourths of women 25 to 54 are full time employees. Young women no longer marry the first man that asks them as a means to move out of their fathers’ houses. They do they same thing men do. They play the field and ditch the guys that don’t meet their needs (and sometimes write songs about them). In the 1950s, the average age for women’s first marriage was 20 (that’s average, so that means for every “spinster” that finally married at 30, two 15-year-old girls got married.) Now the average age for women’s first marriage is over 28. Swift is 34 and don’t expect her to “settle down” anytime soon. Her life is just getting started. (And let’s be 100% honest; Some of those young women in 1964 who bowed to social pressures to get married, weren’t interested men as romantic partners. Being out and gay now is another trigger for men who feel they are entitled to women and their bodies.)
So you can imagine manly men are feeling a little threatened. Their manly man world is fading in the rear view mirror of the the Kia Forte. Taylor Swift represents everything that wrong with their picture of how the world should look. And now she’s a fixture in the very last arena of the manosphere, the NFL. What’s a boy to do?
Fortunately for these fellas, the real manosphere, aka “society,” is dug in and fighting back, especially in a backlash. You don’t have to wade into the dark web as it vomits out deep fake nudes of Swift and endless discussions of the best methods to sexually assault her. It’s right there in the mainstream media, including among some women, like former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who carry the water for the fragile men. (Kelly tried to organize a boycott of Swift for her support of relief work for children in Gaza. It failed miserably.) The conservative bashing of Swift has been, well, swift, including a bizarro conspiracy theory that Swift is a George Soros-funded Pentagon psyop operation to hand the Kansas City Chiefs the Super Bowl win (Isn’t San Fransisco the bastion of liberal politics?) and put Joe Biden back in the White House. Seriously.
The freak-out men are having about the “feminizing” of society is shaping the electorate as well. Recent research from Stanford University found that, while Gen Z women around the world are moving toward liberal positions, their male counterparts are moving to the right. Among the younger generation, there are really two cohorts, Gen Z women who are voting to regain their abortion rights and flocking to Taylor Swift concerts so big they can be seen from space, and Gen Z males who are tracking down fake nudes of Swift and trying rebuild their grandfather’s vision of gender roles, where the men where men and the women were REALLY good at making sandwiches. The fact that Swift has actively been registering these young women to vote must terrify these men, who are convinced this is the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Republican Party could embrace these young women, but as usual their party is the old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn. Their fantasy of themselves as manly warriors will translate as more misogyny towards Swift, and towards women and girls in general. And there will be violence. Violence towards women who stand up for themselves and violence against other men as men signal that they are the volatile sex, so beware. But women, like Taylor, will shake it off and work to fix men’s mistakes, just like they always have.
As the father of a daughter who is growing up with the music Taylor Swift on the radio (Hearing Cozy riff the lyrics to “Cruel Summer” in the back of the car is pure bliss), I’m glad this pop singer is driving a massive wedge into the fading world of manly men. My daughter’s world will embrace her in a way my mother’s world never could. Like Madonna 40 years earlier, Swift will lead the charge against this generation’s backlash. “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” as she sings in “The Man.” My daughter’s future will have more space for her as a human being because of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kesha, Lizzo, Cardi B, and all the other women on the charts who are doing this pop music thing by their own rules. But there are a lot of terrified boys and men to win over. Don’t fight this, boys. Mother is telling you it’s going to be OK. Enjoy the game.
Postscript: For all the women who don’t have the wealth or white privilege of Taylor Swift, but are in the trenches day in and day out working for gender equity without a subculture of fans to protect them, let’s lift them up in our songs, too.
I haven’t always had the best relationship with Mattel’s Barbie Doll. As a boy, the dolls we played with were called “action figures” and had “Kung Fu Grip,” not endless accessories. I’m sure my GI Joe took a few rifle scopes on the Barbies that lived across the street. I do remember my Evel Knievel doll driving his motorcycle at full speed into Barbie’s Malibu Dream House, causing screams of horror and delight. There was one boy in my small town that was known for beheading Barbies and hiding their heads on the “trail” behind our houses. As far as I know, he’s still trying that in a small town.
When I became a feminist sociologist, my war on the doll became more academic. She was a perfect example of gender socialization. Barbie was an early teacher of girls that their looks were their most important asset. Yeah, they could become doctors or astronauts, as long as they stayed skinny and their feet were forever contorted for high heels. When Talking Barbie appeared in the early 90s, with lines like, “Math is hard!” it made my point for me. I delighted my students with stories about the BLO (Barbie Liberation Organization) that secretly swapped the voice boxes of Barbies and G.I. Joe’s, so Joe said things like, “Let’s go shopping,” while Barbie now said, “Vengeance is mine!”
When it became clear that our neighborhood in Portland was generating more female babies than boys, in a very Portland way, we declared it a “Barbie Free Zone.” My daughter, Cozy, has never had or wanted a Barbie and I take that as a win.
So I figured the MAGA boys would be thrilled with a movie that encouraged their wives and little girls to become anorexic and worry more about shoes than votes. Lord, was I wrong about that.
The Barbie movie has now passed the one billion dollar mark (after only 17 days in theaters) by taking what Barbie was and turning it on its head. Director Greta Gerwig turned the “problematic” doll into an epic feminist dissection of patriarchy that actually names patriarchy, and, boy, are the boys triggered. I’m waiting for Kid Rock to blow away some Barbie dolls with his AR-15 and Jason Aldean to write as song called “Try That In a Small Town, Girls.” But why are these men so aggrieved by a movie about a doll?
First, let’s get his out of the way. “The go woke or go broke” chant from the bigots on the right was just revealed as a great lie. Barbie is one of the biggest movies on earth and is the biggest movie on earth directed by a woman. I took my daughter to a sold out screening on a WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. Woman and girls applauded at the end and hugged each other. “I finally feel seen,” said a woman in the row in front of us. The MAGA cult can brag about how many Bud Light workers have been laid off because of their hissy fit, but the amount of money Barbie will make is a tsunami compared to the ripple Cleatus caused at Anheuser-Busch because he traded in one shitty beer for another shitty beer.
So this feminist sociologist has a two-part answer.
The first is that gender socialization starts before we are even born. There’s a reason female babies are aborted at a higher rate than male babies. (Just ask China and India where all their women went.) A person’s value is (still) based on their sex. Patriarchy begins in the womb. And that socialization is non-stop through our lives. Even the most radical feminist has internalized male supremacy. Ask yourself, are there any empowered women in congress who dare to fly their grey hair? I mean, how old is Nancy Pelosi? She’s like Methuselah. But she’s gotta dye that hair because there’s a different standard for women. We get the message that men and women are “opposites” and that “It’s a man’s world” from our family, our schools, our religion, our peers, and the media. Constantly. God is a man. Eve was created for Adam. Father knows best. Becky is a slut. And on and on and on. Life in plastic, it’s fantastic.
No wonder patriarchy feels natural.
In the 1990s, I did an experiment with my students to convey the “natural” feeling socialization gives us. I’d ask them to spend a day wearing their watch on the other wrist. They’d report being disoriented all day long. Now that no-one wears watches, I ask the students to leave their homes for one hour without their phones. Those that actually dare do it, describe going into convulsions, not being able to function, fearing they might miss a text or the opportunity to take a selfie. That’s how patriarchy works. A fish doesn’t know it’s in water until you take it out of the water. Then it gurgles, “WHAT THE FUCK!!!!”
All the Barbie movie does is take Barbie and Ken out of the non-patriarchal Barbieland and plop them into very patriarchal America. The difference is immediately clear to Barbie. Ken is thrilled that everyone is looking at him. But for Barbie, it feels more like, well, violence. Later, she says of her brief time in reality, “Men look at me like I’m an object, girls hate me.”
The film does an excellent job of doing the opposite for the audience. With humor and pathos, it holds a mirror up to us and our persistent power dynamic. Every girl and woman, whether or not she calls herself a feminist, understands the countless ways this power dynamic plays out in their daily lives, but for men it must be shocking. Like when Toto pulls away the screen revealing the real “wizard” of Oz, Barbie pulls away the screen that women have any meaningful equality in 2023. America Ferrera’s rousing “It’s literally impossible to be a woman” speech has resonated with women and girls across the political spectrum, but for many men, it must sound like an indictment. And watch them fall into the ludicrous “Feminism is about hating men” trope.
Holding the reality of patriarchy up to men (conservative and otherwise) is like asking them to leave their homes without their phones. It’s a full body reaction. Seeing females as just as human and entitled as they are is contrary to the messages about gender that we are told from the womb. They can’t handle it on a cellular level. And the anti-woke mob wants to declare the planet (not just America) a Barbie Free Zone for much different reasons than my little parent group. The men on Fox News and the men on TikTok are bashing Barbie’s messages of equality. But all those men came from a woman’s womb, so they better take a deep breath.
So the first reason is the emotional shock a glimmer of truth about patriarchy gives to the fragile male ego. They imagine themselves becoming a dickless Ken in a world where their demands for attention go ignored.
The second explanation for the Barbie Backlash is just the cultural shift we are in right now. America is changing. There are more women working than men in the current economy. And there are more people of color moving into the white enclaves of suburbia. The Father Knows Best ethic of the 20th century is fading, but it’s not going down without a fight. Ron DeSantis’ war on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is a perfect example of the new Jim Crow. As Susan Faludi outlined in her brilliant 1993 text, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, throughout history, every time women have made gains towards equality, there is a sustained cultural push to put them back in their subordinate role. And we’ve been in a hell of a backlash. It includes incels, ending legal abortion, and Donald “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump.
The chorus of men who are so challenged by a doll are the same men who were freaked out by Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” zooming up to #1 on the pop charts in 1972. “What will happen to us if women have all the same privileges we have?” they quaver. “It won’t be privilege anymore!” This is a cultural moment where straight white cis-gender men feel like their “natural” authority is being challenged (it is) and is evaporating (it’s not), so they are rushing to the barricades, hoping to make America 1953 again. As Gloria Steinem once told me of this moment, the abusive husband might win. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally break free.
The oxymoron of “conservative women” has always vexed me. Why would any woman participate in an ideology that sees her as a less autonomous version of men? Of course, the answer is we reward them for doing so. They are tools of the status quo, so you will hear some women complain about “woke Barbie.” But a lot of those Trump-voting women are sitting in packed movie houses right now feeling very validated by the very simple effort Barbie attempts in just trying to humanize girls and women. That theme of humanization is central to the film and the long historical arc to smash patriarchy.
Feminism is the radical idea that women are human beings and are entitled to all the basic rights and privileges that men humans have been afford through time. The final scene in Barbie makes that point in a very simple (and hilarious) way. The massive success of Barbie might not mark the end of patriarchy, but is a sign the that women and girls of Gen Z, including my daughter, are not going to be put in any pink toy box so easily. And there will be plenty of their male peers who will see the great benefit of that. As Ken says at the end of the film, “To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses I lost interest.”
It was a challenge to come up with the right Christmas present last year for my wife, Andi. We were a month into our separation and I definitely couldn’t half-ass it. Half-assing it through the marriage is what got me in this horrible situation. I got her a LSAT study book (which she used) and a trip to Paris (which she didn’t use). So, a year later, I really wanted to show up. It was time to center her instead of my idea of her. We’re back under the same roof, but still separated. I want her to know I’ve learned something this year.
There are always “things” we want. (If I don’t get The Beatles Get Back DVD from Santa, I’m buying it myself.) But things are transitory. They matter and then they don’t. What if there was a gift that was both lasting and reflected a partner who pays attention? A gift that recognizes the personhood of the recipient, not just their role as a gift receiver.
One of the great works I read in grad school was Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). If the home is a metaphor for society, it’s the man’s house. Rooms for women are assigned specific gendered tasks; the kitchen, the laundry room, the nursery, the sewing room. Men get their den to just exist in. What is women’s equivalent of the man cave? Woolf argued if women are to write fiction, they need a room of their own. If they want to live outside the constraints of their proscribed roles, they must have a safe space inside their own homes to explore their options. Like men do every day.
I bought my house in 1999 and turned every room into my own. That included a room for my vinyl collection and a separate room for my CDs. When Andi moved in in 2013, we had to shoehorn her life into my space. My closet for her clothes. My kitchen drawers for her pans. My walls for her paintings. She was a lodger in Randyland. How could she ever feel like she truly belonged here?
So that could be my gift; a room of her own. Andi plans on going to law school in the fall and will need a study space, or just a “be” space. My CD room was upstairs with big east-facing windows. It was the perfect candidate to be de-Randified and transformed into a comfy study. I had to build shelves in another room to store my thousands of CD. It had to be all her room, no Blazak artifacts. Since it was upstairs, I could work on in while she was at work or “out,” without her knowing what I was up to.
So I got to work, painting, fixing cracks in the wall, finding a desk and a comfy reading chair, and framing the book cover of Woolf’s classic for the wall. Cozy helped too, contributing a plant and a framed picture of her and her mother. Oh, and a white furry rug she found at IKEA. A bottle of mescal and a note in the desk and the job was done. I purposely under-decorated. It would defeat the entire idea if I filled her room with my ideas. She can create the space in her image.
I wrapped a copy of A Room of One’s Own (sans cover) after inscribing in it, “The rest of this gift is upstairs,” and placed it under the tree. I put Cozy to bed (after watching Home Alone) and hoped she’d be home in time to open presents in the morning.
Christmas Morning
Like Santa, Andi arrived in the wee hours and we opened presents. Cozy was most excited about the Minecraft Lego set. (Mr. Claus went through the ringer for that one.) Andi’s present for me was a Joni Mitchell biography. The last gift was her Woolf book and then Cozy and I led her upstairs to see the room I’ve been working on for several weeks.
I think she liked it. “It’s probably the most thoughtful gift you’ve ever given me,” she said. I want her to have her space in this male owned house. I want her to want to stay.
Masculinity is a truly fragile thing. In our youth, we are hit over the head with the message pushing male bonding. No girls allowed in the treehouse. There are plenty of negatives associated associated with that, including that it devalues all things female and blocks girls and women out of the avenues of power (“Bros before hos!”), but there is an unintended benefit to all the bro-time.
Men aren’t supposed to talk about their feelings and that’s what gets us into trouble. “When boys cry, they cry bullets,” I remember a child psychologist saying on The Oprah Winfrey Show after the 1999 Columbine shooting. But when we do manage to share a bit of vulnerability, it tends to be with our bros, maybe after a few beers or a lost match. We learn that we can lean on our male friends without being called a “cry baby” because they are looking for the same thing. Then after opening up, we have to “cowboy up” and revert to the same stoic bullshit.
So what happens when we get married?
The story goes that marriage means leaving our male friends behind on the playground, soccer pitch, or tavern. Male friends celebrate the interest of a single man and now he must trade his dudes in for a woman. John Lennon had to leave the Beatles for Yoko and her screaming. And now the wife is the “best friend.” On one feminist level, that makes a lot of sense if the man is leaving the toxic grab-ass world of Bro Culture to finally see at least one woman as an equal partner, but on another feminist level what does this really do for the wife?
This is exactly what happened in my marriage.
And soon as Andi and I connected and certainly after we got married and became parents, I shed my wonderful posse of friends, most of them men. No more going out to shows together, planning weekends at festivals, or just hanging out after work. She became “my world.” That can seem very romantic and much of it seems like a wonderful dream, but I never once saw the burden I was laying on her by making her “my person.”
She suddenly was cast into numerous roles, from my therapist to my financial (and fashion) advisor, all of which were unpaid. I relied on her opinion and no-one else. In co-dependent relationship, we often give people power they don’t actually want. You can put me in charge of the criminal investigation of Donald Trump, and while that might sound awesome, I don’t actually want that power. And it is a power thing because it’s not equally shared. If I played the exact same roles for her, it wouldn’t be an issue. I didn’t expect her to do the laundry but I did expect her to “fix” me.
I would often be confused by her response to me saying things like, “You saved me.” I considered it a compliment. But it wasn’t her job to save me. And who was supposed to save her if she was spending her time on the project that was her husband? She couldn’t save herself because she was supposed to be saving me. All this saving. It didn’t occur to me to just save my goddamn self. After all, I had her to do that.
It’s not surprising that my wife began to quietly resent me. My broad social circle shrunk down to just her and it must have been suffocating. She was my “rock,” which meant I relied on her for everything, without really returning the favor. Where, previously, I might complain about work with my friends over a beer, it was now on her shoulders. The encouragement to make it through the matrix of life now only came from her (and phone calls with my other female/therapist, my mother). Where was the reciprocity?
One of the wonderful things this separation has given us is the space to save ourselves. Watching her evolution this past year, free of my emotional burdening (and constant need of her approval) has been wondrous. I now have an amazing therapist who I pay to do the emotional servicing I expected from Andi. And I’m rebuilding my friendships with peers. I live in a city with countless coffeeshops and bars. There are plenty of places to share some bonhomie with my dudes.
The division of labor makes sense. Brothers, don’t expect your wife or girlfriend to be your “everything.” It’s not fair to them. You are not their project. Learn from my mistakes, save yourself. And get a good therapist.
I got a text yesterday morning to turn on the TV. I was worried that someone famous I loved had died or there was another 9/11 unfolding. It was much worse than that. The health and safety of girls and women of child-bearing age was being thrown under the bus by five people, Clarence Thomas, Samual Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kananaugh, and Amy Coney Barratt. Remember their names. They pulled the lever to turn the United States into Afghanistan.
Going against the will of a vast majority of Americans and 50 years of precedent, Roe v. Wade was overturned on a Friday morning in June. The Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t end abortion (despite the spontaneous celebrations of tools like Marjorie Taylor Green), it just returns the practice to the back alleys of Mississippi and Missouri. And girls and women will die. But, apparently, America cares more about guns than girls and women.
The Friday morning news woke up my seven-year-old daughter, Cozy, who now, as a female, had fewer rights than she did the day before. She wondered what all the yelling on TV was about. Seven-year-olds should not know about abortion. That information should be reserved for 11-year-olds who are raped by a family member. I didn’t know how to answer her. How do I explain this to a child? Of course, she’s heard the word “abortion” and she’s gonna hear it a lot now thanks to the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court.
Knowing that that word was going to be everywhere and that I would be dragging her along to a reproductive rights rally in downtown Portland later in the day, I decided to have “the talk” with her. Sort of like how black parents have to talk to their kids about how to the police might kill them if they don’t understand how racism works, millions of parents now have to talk to their daughters about how the state might kill them because of how patriarchy works.
So yesterday afternoon, after she came in from playing in a neighbor’s new tree fort, I sat her down on the couch for America’s new family tradition. The word is now everywhere. She’s an inquisitive child, so I knew she had questions.
Me: Hey, Cozy can we talk a minute? (She gets a worried face, like she was in trouble.) No, it’s not a bad thing. Well, it is a bad thing for society, not for you at the moment. I just want to talk about something that’s been in the news. Have you heard the word, “abortion.”
Cozy: Yes (She got uncomfortable, feeling like we were going to talk about sex.)
Me: Do you know what it means?
Cozy: No
Me: I know you’re hearing that word a lot right now and I just want to explain it to you. So when Mommy and I first got together, we really wanted to have a baby one day. And the day Mom found out she was pregnant with you was one of the happiest days of our lives. We were so excited. But sometimes women get pregnant and they are not happy about it. Maybe they’re too young, or they already have a lot of kids, or having a baby might be really bad for their health. So there this little operation called an abortion that lets women decide if they want a baby or not. Women have had the right to make that decision for 50 years. But this morning some judges picked by Donald Trump decided women no longer have that right.
Most Americans believe that women should have this right but some people think abortion is bad because it stops a baby from being born, so there is a lot of fighting about it and people get really angry on both sides. You really don’t have to worry about it now but let’s say 20 years from now you want to be able to decide whether or not you want to have a baby, you will want to have the right to make that choice.
Cozy: How long until the law changes back?
Me: I don’t know, sweetheart. That’s why we have to vote, and march, and fight for you and Mom’s rights. So we’re going to a demonstration downtown later today to protest the decision these judges made. Just imagine if judges said we can have slavery again, how much that would hurt some of your friends.
Cozy: Yeah, that would be really bad.
Me: We have to protest so we can get your rights back. Hopefully it won’t take long. You’ll see a lot of angry people today. I’m angry. Your mother is angry. You might even hear some bad words because everyone is so angry. But you can ask me anything you want about it. You know how much I love your questions. Do you have any questions?
Cozy: Yeah, can I go back outside and play?
And she did. I know it was a lot to lay on a kid, but the Supreme Court and the Trump cult has foisted this upon our families. I shouldn’t have to talk to her about these things.
Later, we headed downtown to the rally. I told her if it got crazy we would leave. Black clad anarchists have a tendency to hijack demonstrations for their own narcissistic reasons and start fires in the middle of the street. (Haven’t they heard about the CO2 problem?) She was a little uneasy walking into the large crowd, but she’s a veteran of marches, rallies, and protests. So she settled in to the cacophony. She only had one question.
Cozy: Daddy, what’s the deal with the coat hangers?
Me: Can I answer that one later?
We were joined about about 1500 other Portlanders in a panic over the rollback of rights. At the moment, women and girls in Oregon are safe, but we could easily have a Republican governor (a horrid anti-choice woman named Christine Drazen) elected in November and be as bad off as Mississippi. Democratic Socialists at the rally told the crowd to vote for them and not Democrats, which is exactly what the anti-abortion Republicans are hoping for. I just let all the chants and speeches wash over my daughter and I. I wanted her to be able to say she was there.
After about an hour, Cozy asked if we could leave. It seemed like a good time as I saw the teenage anarchists in their black uniforms start to circle the diverse crowd like hungry sharks. Often, I’m right there with them, sharing in the rage against the backward slide. But today I wanted my daughter to still believe in non-violence and the democratic process. I wanted her to believe in Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Margaret Sanger. It’s too soon for me to teach her about the politics of desperation or how enemies send agent provocateurs into demonstrations to start fires in the street to make demonstrators look bad on Fox News.
But, apparently. It’s not too soon to talk to a seven-year-old about abortion.
Note: They (anarchists, agent provocateurs, Fox News producers, whoever) did start a fire in the middle of the street last night. But don’t be surprised if the next fire is women burning down the Supreme Court building.
In the 1990s, I assigned a book entitled Men Are Not Cost Effective to my criminology students. June Stephen’s 1991 book makes the case that men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes and each of those crimes carries a financial burden represented in the costs of policing, courts, incarceration, parole, probation, rehabilitation, and crime prevention programs. Since half of the tax bill for funding all this falls on women who are not committing these crimes, Stephenson argues men should pay a “man tax” to pay for their bad behavior.
How little things have changed in 30 years. From shootings on New York subway trains to the genocidal violence being levied by Russians against the people of Ukraine, men’s bad behavior seems completely unrestrained and even facilitated by some women. After I returned from Ukraine, a story broke about a Russian soldier whose wife gave him permission to rape Ukrainian women. This was reported before and after numerous stories of Russian soldiers raping the victims of their invasion. What is wrong with men?
It should be of no surprise to anyone that Donald Trump’s Supreme Court is doing exactly what he said it would in snuffing out women’s bodily autonomy by reversing Roe v. Wade. In Trump’s misogynistic world, women’s and girl’s bodies belong to men. Their “pussies” are there to be grabbed by MAGA men and raped by Russian soldiers. Their duty is to look good to male eyes and not challenge male authority. And they will be rewarded for maintaining that status quo whether it’s the small college scholarships from Trump’s uber-creepy Miss Teen USA contest, or being handed “careers” while towing the big lies of the Trump administration (I’m looking at you, Kayleigh McEnany). When women play their “be a good girl” role, the rewards follow. Women and girls are to be looked at, not to offer opinions about their ownership of their bodies. A similar case was made a hundred years ago against “giving” women the right to vote. Why did they need to vote when they had husbands to do that for them? Seriously, what’s wrong with men?
The traditional way of defending the radical idea that female human beings are human beings ain’t working. The ballot box has failed us. Post-reproductive women in the Senate, like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowksi (64) and Maine’s Susan Collins (69) just voted against codifying women’s reproductive rights into federal laws. And batshit crazy Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert are chomping at the bit to force American women and teenage rape victims to give birth. They are only one or two degrees away from the Russian wives encouraging their husbands to rape Ukrainian women. So if putting our faith in Election Day and singing, “We shall overcome, someday” is playing out as moving us backwards in women’s rights, what’s the better strategy?
The murder of George Floyd in 2020 woke up a lot of white people. Folks of all races took to the streets. Shit got fucked up. There were fires this time. And even though 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful, the riots captured the news cycle. We now know that President Trump wanted federal troops to shoot BLM protestors in front of the White House. But like how the riots following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. pushed Congress to pass the Fair Housing Act, the turmoil of 2020 worked. Research shows that cities that had BLM protests saw a reduction in police killings. There were countless policy reforms and, while some were merely cosmetic, they reflected the shift in America’s opinions on institutional racism in the justice process. Deep conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) became normalized in private and the public sectors. (I can’t count how many workshops on implicit bias I conducted after the tear gas cleared.)
There are a lot more women and girls in America than black people. The summer of 2022 could make the summer of 2020 look like the summer of 1020. (I’m assuming the summer of 1020 was pretty chill, but Wikipedia just told be that Italy was on fire.) The patriarchal line is that women are more relational and less action oriented than men, but those people weren’t here in Portland to see women (and many teenage girls) on the front lines. The Wall of Moms, anarchists, high schoolers, and the founders of Black Lives Matters; everywhere in 2020 women were up in The Man’s face demanding change.
According to every Republican running for governor in Oregon, “violent protestors” were burning down cities in 2020. I live in Portland and was at the protests numerous nights. There were a couple of brief bonfires set in the middle of the street and a handful of trashcans set on fire. Portland was not “burned to the ground” or even burned. But those images sure got a lot attention because the fire next time was potentially real. In 2022, there may be a value in a few well placed dumpster fires, particularly from Alabama to Texas (what we can call the Gilead Belt), but there’s a larger question that needs to be addressed first, what’s wrong with men?
What is it in men’s psyche that keeps them thinking the oppression of others is in their long term interest? Whether it’s old white men, like Mitch McConnell and his boss Vladimir Putin, or younger sex-traffickers like Matt Gaetz, or just the average Joe Blow on the street, it seems like men as a whole are hell bent on doing jack shit to end their oppression of women and girls. From unequal pay to sexual assault to endless public commentary on Hilary Duff’s (airbrushed) body after birthing three kids (gasp!), patriarchy remains firmly in place, and no amount of elderly white ladies in Congress, or their younger white counterparts who are backed by the fanatics of MAGA (Make America Guys Again), will change that.
We need spies inside the halls of patriarchy to find answers. In 1963, feminist writer Gloria Steinem went undercover as a “bunny” at the Playboy Club in New York City. Her exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” revealed how adult women were treated and harassed in Hefner’s clubs that were the symbol of modern masculinity 60 years ago. Maybe a new generation of women can attach themselves to the arms of the captains of industry, hang out at gun shows, or get jobs at whatever strip club Samual Alito sneaks into, and find out why these men are so fragile. Why does the oppression of women, immigrants, the poor, and minorities make them feel powerful? Why does using young men to be rapist soldiers in their wars of choice make them feel like their penises still work?
Speaking of penises, we might get a little help from Freud here. Psychoanalytic feminists look to Freud’s idea that early childhood experiences subconsciously shape our adult personality. Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), argues that children are all initially intimately connected to their mothers as the primary sources of sustenance and nurturing. But then boy children are pulled away from their mothers and expected to attach to their fathers. This separation anxiety becomes a psychosis in which the mother is framed as the source of rejection and that anger is levied at all women. In addition, since the separation was not boys’ choice, the desire to control others choice becomes a subconscious mandate.
It’s not a stretch to guess that Trump has serious issues with regard to his Scottish mother, Mary Anne, as Putin likely does with his factory worker mom, Maria. On the other side, Joe Biden seems to have a long and loving relationship with his mother until her death in 2010 at 92. Is understanding why so many men are invested in patriarchal control (and why others seem less so) as simple as understanding the separation anxieties they feel toward their mothers? It would explain why the so many men take a dim view of therapy. If therapy can repair early childhood trauma, what’s left for the misogynist? Being a god is much more affirming than just being a human being.
Pyscho-babble aside, the old strategy of politely asking men not to oppress women and girls in every single aspect of society and phase of life, from the devaluing of female babies to the invisibility of older women, is not working. Until we can fix men’s fragile minds, there might have to be some shit that gets set on fire. It’s worked in the past.
If there was ever a time America needed a leader, it’s now as COVID deaths surge past a quarter million. But sad Donald Trump is in his bunker, tweeting madly that he won the election “by a lot.” No stimulus program for Americans falling into homelessness. No national mask mandate to save additional lives. Just Baby Donald having a temper tantrum and a circus of sycophants too afraid to tell the Emperor that the world is laughing at him.
The pathetic end of Donald J. Trump is not only a lesson in how not to be a president. It’s also a vital lesson in how not to be a man. Of course, Mr. “Grab’ em by the pussy” has provided that service for years.
The lockdowns of 2020 have certainly presented challenges for single people, but there have been challenges for those of us that are boo’d up as well. The pandemic has forced many of us married and “coupled up” (as they say on Love Island) to learn how to truly co-exist in a confined space, without the easy exit hatch of “let’s just go out.” There’s only so much Netflixing you can do. At some point, it gets real. And as if providing (finally) some kind of national service, there’s President Hissy-fit giving the men of America a perfect example of how not to handle this moment.
From the very beginning, Trump has made it all about him. From his word-salad lie-fests before his adoring cult crowds to his denial of the Biden victory, “America first” has always been code for “Trump first” and you almost feel sorry for the schleps that still fall for this con man. (“Quick! Donate to President Trump’s legal team so he prove those black votes in Detroit and Atlanta were illegal! We take PayPal!”) Trump always centers himself and you don’t have to look at Melania’s face to see that that’s his fatal flaw.
But this isn’t about Trump. It’s about all us men who do the same thing. We’ve been socialized to believe it’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world and women are there as our support system. (BEHIND every great man… is a woman who should be out in front.) The world is about our male hopes and plans and adventures and successes and failures and wet dreams. That’s why Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) resonated with so many women. It simply asked, but what about me? Arn’t I a person, too?
Sadly, the second wave feminist movement that Friedan helped launch did not fully humanize females in America. It made a lot of progress (Thank you, Title IX and hello Vice President Harris!), but it still looks like a penis-centered culture. At least American Ninja Warrior puts the the top two female contestants through to the finals. We can find plenty of reasons to find cracks in patriarchy. (I’ll credit Nancy Pelosi for keeping Trump’s nuts in a vice grip and the daughters of NFL fans for prioritizing Beyoncés BLM anthems over Go Daddy commercials and cheerleaders in halter tops.) We can see progress all around us (if we turn blind eye to the epidemic of rape in the country), but there are still people who want to make America “Father Knows Best” again.
We can talk about this on a societal level (RBG was right. We’ve had generations of all-male Supreme Courts. When do we get an all-female Supreme Court?) But this is about the personal journey of men stepping away from the destructive (including to men) effects of patriarchy.
More than that, this about me learning how to love my wife.
If patriarchy, on a macro-level, is about centering men’s voice and minds in society, on a personal level it’s about doing the same Goddamn thing in our relationships. Hi ladies, welcome to my world. Can you make me a sandwich? Feminist Dorothy E. Smith has written how women are given control of the “domestic sphere” so men can have pretty much everything else on earth. And that can include the space in a relationship.
Now, to be clear, I have claimed feminism as a core value in my life since the 1980s and proudly left my job to become a stay-at-home dad, inspired by my favorite househusband John Lennon. I can thrill you with stories of escorting women into abortion clinics past the screaming banshees of Operation Rescue and challenging students to accept that God is most likely female, but I still internalized patriarchy in the same sad way I internalized white supremacy.
That became most clear this year during long, under quarantine, conversations with my wife. Like most people, we’ve had our fair share of COVID-magnified conflicts; about money, about parenting, about who is going to wash the dishes. She was quick to point out how quickly I would go into defensive mode and try to “prove” my case, like we were on opposing debating teams. We’re on the same team! I forgot! But it became all about me and how I was somehow aggrieved.
What I should have been doing is asking questions. Why do you feel this way? What can I do to help? I should have centered her and put my amazing wife first in the discussion, but instead I retreated into “Randyland,” wondering why she had a “well, fuck this shit” look on her face. Maybe if I slept downstairs I could comeback, refreshed with an even clearer articulation of my position, complete with PowerPoint slides. Meanwhile, my wife felt more and more alone as I plotted strategies in my head instead of re-coupling (also a term from Love Island).
This is going to sound completely basic to many people (and maybe a few men), but I have literally burned through every relationship by doing this. By making it about me. That’s not how love is supposed to work. You’re supposed to put your partner’s emotional well-being before your own, but in patriarchal America I didn’t get that role modeling, not from my father and not from Starsky & Hutch. The result was relationships crashing and burning and me thinking that I was just a “psycho-chick magnet.” If they were psycho, it was because I centered myself instead of them.
There is a parallel phenomenon here with regard to race called White Fragility. America has the handbook and is starting to figure that out. (Thanks, Robin!) It’s not about you, Karen, so stop centering yourself and start centering black voices. Maybe, we need a book called Male Fragility: Why Men Get Their Panties in a Wad.
My wife is strong as hell and sure enough doesn’t need a guy like me who doesn’t put his partner before himself. I should have gotten that lesson a long time ago. I’m not the king of my castle. But somewhere, between long, hard conversations with her and watching Baby Trump center himself instead of the nation we hired him to lead, I got it. Don’t be like Trump. Hey Donald, it’s not about you. It’s about America. She’s trying to tell you how she feels. Please listen.
Watching the Wheels 