Douchebags, Thugs, Bullies, and Donald J. Trump: The perils of wounded masculinity

May 25, 2016May 26, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 16 Comments

May 25, 2016

Last summer when I began pointing out the parallels between white supremacist tactics, fascist movements and the rhetoric of Donald Trump I felt like a lone voice in the wind. Now the concern that Trump is bringing a populist form of fascism to America is bouncing around the mainstream, from the Village Voice to the Brookings Institute. Of course, last summer I thought the Trump crazy-train would derail by Thanksgiving as Bush or Rubio became the rational choice of the Republican Party. I have never been so wrong in my life. I completely underestimated the number of deluded people willing to dive into a cult of personality. They aren’t a silent majority, they are a very noisy minority. A very noisy white minority.

Much has been made of the fact that the core of Trump’s base is “undereducated” (Trump’s word) white males. Yeah, many of those are whites who think Latino youth in the streets of Albuquerque protesting Trump are the shape of things to come. But as important is the “male” part of the phenomenon. According to a recent Gallup poll, 7 in 10 women have a negative view of Trump. Another poll found that almost half of Republican women can’t see themselves voting for Trump. Trump doesn’t really want the minority or female vote and heaven help us all if he wins the White House without it.

I’ve been writing about how Trump reminds me of the white supremacists I’ve studied for thirty years. He also reminds me of another idiot I’ve studied; myself. He reminds me of myself before I became a feminist. Before I grew up. You have to ask yourself one question, why do women hate Donald Trump so much? Are they just “dumb bitches” who don’t understand politics? Should they just be seen and not heard and vote the way their men tell them? I think I get Trump and the thugs who love him. I used to walk in their shoes.

Much has been written about Trump’s horrible treatment of women, especially since the recent New York Times article, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private.” As soon as he declared his candidacy, his voluminous amount of sexist comments were trotted back out. The guy who said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass” might become president. Women are just eye candy for his beauty pageants and women who oppose him are “ugly.” His first wife implied that he raped her before he dumped her for one of his lovers. His groping of women is Cosby-level. And it goes on and on and he, oh, he just won another state. What the hell is going on? (And don’t dare suggest that he has small hands!)

The larger answer relates to the concept of backlash. There’s a white backlash similar to the one that Ronald Reagan, with his mythical tales of black welfare queens, rode to the presidency in 1980. They see Black Lives Matters protestors and Latino protestors threatening their special rights as whites (aka, white privilege). But there’s also gender backlash, the same one that Susan Faludi wrote about in her bestselling 1991 book. The advancement of women threatens male power and so the war on women begins again. Trump doesn’t want to have to be “politically correct” and neither do his followers. And nothing is more threatening than the prospect of a female president. After eight years of a black president, then a lady president? What’s next, a gay president? It’s hard out here for a straight white man. Save us Donald! Our essential masculinity is under attack!

I used to buy into that kind of thinking, the zero-sum game between men and women. We were opposite sexes. I performed the role of masculinity I was taught, defending any attack by “manning up.” Then I took out a loan on a clue and went to college. Women are not the opposition, they are the salvation. Instead of dismissing them (and raping them), we should be listening to them. I tell young men the most revolutionary thing they can do is ask the women in their lives what they think and then actually listen to their answers. Donald Trump has never done that (or at least the Trump caricature he performs for his flock). And his beauty queen wife stands behind him. “He’s not Hitler!” she promises.

Here’s what makes Trump the king of the douchebags. It’s not his endless lies that his followers ignore, dismiss and excuse like battered wives who will put up with the abuse as long as the husband promises to take care of them. (“Believe me.”) It’s the simple fact that Trump cannot admit that he’s ever made a mistake. Even the bashing of Heidi Cruz was not really a mistake to him, he just wishes he’d done it differently. He routinely says he has no regrets. He as no ability to share his internal monologue because his internal monologue probably just sounds like, “Tits, ass, tits, ass, tits…” What does Donald J. Trump have to regret anyway? He’s the perfect American, he says.

Meet the regret king, me. As you evolve, you probably look back at the last version of yourself and shudder. I was using the word “feminist” before I knew how to act like one. I was callous with the women I dated, used sexist language, and, worst of all, failed to really hear those I was in serious relationships with. I’d like to apologize to all those females, including a Facebook friend who’s bra I snapped in eighth grade. And I’m sure 2026 Randy will think 2016 Randy still had a lot of work to do. To be a decent person you need humility and to know that you’ve probably been wrong more than you’ve been right. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Instead we get Bully Trump who “hits back” twice as hard when he thinks he’s been hit. Maybe somebody should tell him about the guy to asked us to turn the other cheek. He wants to build a wall around America like the wall he’s built around himself. It’s the wimps that wanna listen and share their feelings. He just wants to knock the hell out of his enemies. He’s a sad man who reminds me of so many sad men I know and the one I once was.

The media has tried to create a similar narrative on the left, the “Bernie Bro.” Supposedly there are an army of Sanders supporters rioting in the streets who will use sexism to defeat Clinton. It’s a myth easily dispelled by the wide support Sanders has from women and minorities, but it’s still something to guard against. Clinton and Sanders and their supporters don’t benefit from the same lack of introspection that Trump celebrates. None of us do. And throwing rocks at cops just drives the sheep into Trump’s tent.

Look, there are plenty of white people who don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement or Latino protestors taking to the streets. Are they racist? Well, some believe America is being handed to “underserving savages,” so those people are. Even more Trump men see their old-fashioned John Wayne masculinity threatened by empowered women, gay, lesbian and transgender people. They can’t even protect their females from the mythical transsexual predator in the Ladies Room. They’ve already surrendered the toilets at Target. What’s next? America? Where is the white man’s man who can make America great again?

This election is going to be decided by women. Will they follow their men into Trump’s douchbag circus of doom or stand on their own, vote their interests and save the rest of us dumb-asses from ourselves?

Douchebag note: I have to be honest, I’ve never really known what an actual “douchebag” is. About a year ago a female friend suggested it might be more sexist language I should abandon. I listened but the sound of the word fits so well with who it describes, I held on to it. My friend Jen just sent me a note on the word and I defer to her feminist wisdom. She said, “This issue I have is that you are comparing a man to a dirty vagina that needs to be cleaned and in this scenario the vagina is a) dirty and needs to be douched to get cleaned which is obnixous and false b) he is lower than a dirty vagina and c) because he’s so sexist equating him to a vagina cleansing product implies that the worst thing he could be is a woman’s vagina which is in fact one of the most amazing things on the planet.” Agreed, vaginas rule! She also offered the other argument with this piece: Could “douchebag” be a feminist insult? Thanks, Jen!

Earlier Trump blogposts

Who the Hell is supporting Donald Trump?

I told you Donald Trump was a fascist!

Mr. Trump, kiss my anchor baby

Trump Part 2 – This is what fascism looks like

Donald Trump is the new face of white supremacy

Farewell to my Good Wife

May 4, 2016May 4, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

May 4, 2016

Alicia Florrick, I can’t be ready for court without you.

As a feminist sociologist, I’ve lectured for decades now on the problematic world of television. It’s easily dissected as a tool of patriarchal social control, with the camera lens as a metaphor for the male gaze. As a kid who grew up on incredibly messed-up shows, like Three’s Company, there is plenty to talk about. And don’t get me started on the commercials that still run during daytime soaps. In this blog I’ve taken on current fare like The Bachelor and the short-lived NBC show, The Island. The Miss America beauty contest is still coming to a network near you.

But something has been happening since the days of jiggle TV.

Some of you know I have a toe in the Hollywood pool (more like a cuticle at this point), and it is evident that the “old boy network” that ran the town is caving in. There are more women writers, directors, and producers each year. According to Variety, women now make up 23% of executive producers in TV Land. Variety reports that shows with at least one female executive producer have significantly more female characters. Add to that the long-held knowledge that women watch more TV than men and now we have some programming that would have been hard to imagine when the best thing females had was Charlie’s Angels. Have you seen the Reddit discussions on Comedy Central’s Broad City? It’s off the feminist hook!

One of those shows is CBS’ The Good Wife that, sadly, ends its seven-season run on Sunday. I’ll be stuck in front of the TV begging Alicia to run away with Jason into a spin-off where they fight crime on the streets of Chicago. The Good Sex Partners.

The Good Wife hit the airwaves in 2009. I was oblivious. CBS seems to have a lot procedural crime shows that people love, but I just don’t have the time for. You’d think as a criminologist, I’d be all over CSI: Toledo, or whatever it’s called. But I kept seeing the show win awards and my curiosity started to ask, “What’s up with this good wife?” I’d see the show’s star, Julianna Marguiles (who is roughly my age), at numerous awards events, like the Golden Globes, making speeches about women finding new roles in television and I was reminded that this was something I cared about.

So when Andrea and I got pregnant during the 2013 holidays (well, I had something to do with it), I decided we had the perfect opportunity to play America’s new favorite game, binge-watching. It was time to enter the complicated world of one very smart and funny lawyer. While we waited for Cozy to arrive, we burned through several seasons of the show that follows the adventures of defense attorney Alicia Florrick and her legal compadres in a twenty-first century version of Perry Mason. It was clear that the title of the show, The Good Wife, was an ironic one. She performed the role of the good wife to her philandering husband because it served her own interests. Needless to say, we were hooked. How could a network show be this well-written? One more episode.

As a criminologist, I could have written lectures about crime and the law from these episodes. Topics like the problems of forensic science and eye-witness testimony, institutional racism, intellectual property rights, and the corrosive impact of incarceration were presented by writers who knew the research. Intelligent topics for people looking for something a little deeper than Teen Mom 3. The shows were often “ripped from the headlines.” Even though I was enjoying my paternity leave from Portland State, I was looking forward to bringing Florrick and associates back into my classroom.

Now that Andrea works at a law firm in Portland, it was fun to compare her daily dramas to the nighttime dramas CBS provided. Much law work is really just paperwork. Very few cases ever make it before a judge and especially before a jury. But each case has its own human story about how we manage to exist in such a complex society. Turning that into something that’s actually compelling viewing is the result of some insanely talented people whose names I will probably never know.

As a feminist, there was so much to unpack and debate about this show. For once, a show built around a woman who refused to bend to the will of the men in the cast because she was female. Julanna Margulies played the role with great pathos, including Alicia’s need for another glass of wine or a sexual diversion with her law school sweetheart, Will Gardner. We got to see the world through her lens and it was eye-opening. And she wasn’t the only ferocious female in the cast. Women representing a wide range of ages and skin tones created the type of intersectionality that’s often absent when the the focus is just on gender politics.

There are a ton of essays debating feminism on The Good Wife (just click on this word, Google). But the proof is in the pudding. When Margulies says young women regularly tell her that they are going to law school because of the show we know that television can change power structures. An army of female attorneys with an affinity for red wine and lovers on the side is nothing to be trifled with. Like how female TV producers have changed the portrayal of women and girls in media, they will change the very institutions that have worked against the interests of the feminine half of our country. Throw a female president into the mix, and we may hit a critical turning point.

TV shows come and go. I’ve leaned not to get too hung up on their passing. (I still remember bawling my eyes out after the last episode of M*A*S*H.) But Sunday nights at 9 pm have become important, especially for a lot of women of my generation. They, and their daughters, benefit from something that looks like a grown-up version of the Romper Room mirror. “I see Alicia, and Kalinda, and Diane and Lucca and a world where women are full players in the game.”

And if you’ve never seen an episode of The Good Wife, I have two words for you; binge watch.

The Feminine Mystique: Stay-at-Home Dad Edition

April 14, 2016April 14, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

April 14, 2016

When Norton Books published Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 it opened the door for the great “second wave” of feminism. Friedan, who had been a labor reporter, had a revelation after a college reunion with her classmates at Smith College in 1957. After surveying the women about their lives in 1950s domestic tranquility she found that they were far from happy. A life of staying home and taking care of your husband and children as “Mrs. Joe Blow” was not exactly satisfying to a human being who was taught to follow her own path in life. Friedan labeled this the “problem with no name” as women suffered at the hands of what was supposed to make them blissfully happy, a prison with a picket fence.

She named the problem and it was sexism. These (mostly middle-class and white) women were taught to find happiness in cleaning products, perfect dinners and occasionally entertaining the husband’s boss. Their own dreams would be packed away in a hope chest. My mother, who was married in 1962, once told me, “I should have finished college and maybe become a lawyer.” But women went to college to find husbands and a chance to move out of their parents home. They traded their father’s name for their husband’s name and kept the “father knows best” machine moving forward at the cost of their own personhood.

The book created a revolution on a macro level, waking up a generation of women to the lie of domestic bliss. Some recently awakened feminists worked with their husbands to create partnerships and trade “Mrs.” for “Ms.” Others just walked out the door to find their freedom. But, at its core The Feminine Mystique is a micro-level psychological evaluation of the soul crushing way patriarchy takes a female’s humanity away and replaces it with a myth, propped up by bottles of “mother’s little helper.”

Fifty-three years later women now make up 47% of the total U.S. work force and while they still have to work over three extra months to earn the same income as men, there is an unspoken norm that women can find their path outside the home. The converse is that men can stay home and take care of the domestic front. (According to the latest data, 16% of stay-at-home parents are men.) So it shouldn’t be surprising that we men are experiencing some of the things Friedan wrote about in 1963.

When is my time?

I used to love showing my students clips of episodes of Leave It To Beaver from the late 1950s and early 1960s and leading discussions about how far we’ve come in such a short time. What do we know about Mrs. Cleaver after six years of the show? Hardly anything! Besides cooking and cleaning and taking care of The Beaver, the rest is a mystery. It should be made clear for those who don’t know, The Beaver was her young son, Theodore. Beyond that, one can only guess.

I’m the 2016 June Cleaver. I have a Cozy instead of a Beaver and my day is pretty full with her. I thought I’d have all this time to myself but a toddler just vacuums it right up. We drive Andrea to work at the law firm by 8 am and then we’re off. I have to get her dressed for the day and fed a healthy breakfast, half of which will end up on the floor. Maybe when Sesame Street comes on at 9 am I can jump in the shower and check my email. I try to clean while she plays but I’m often just cleaning up after her playing, trying to keep my cool as she’s spreading Andrea’s coloring pencils all over the floor or trying to pull a Basquiat on the living room wall. After lunch, she takes her much needed nap. I would like to nap as well, but her nap is much needed because I’ve got some laundry to do and, if at all possible, a bit of writing.

Afternoons we run errands and try to make plans for dinner. The good thing is the folks at the grocery store love Cozy (we are there enough). The bad thing is that doesn’t get us any free pie. If it’s sunny we might go to the park or blow bubbles on the porch, but whatever it is, it’s for the house or the kid, and not for me. Then there are ants in the kitchen, a missing sippy-cup half-full of milk and a horrible stench coming from the diaper bucket. By the time we pick up Andrea downtown at 5, I’m wondering where the day went. “How was your day?” she’ll ask. “Good. Cozy didn’t eat any crayons,” I’ll say. And through this there are an infinite number diaper changes (nothing in a diaper can shock me now) and plenty of carrying the baby around trying to turn her grumpy mood around. It’s wonderful and yet it feels like it is erasing me.

The Second Shift

When Andrea gets home, I like to imagine it’s going to be a shift change and I’ll just crack open a beer. But she’s just put in a full day of work at a very busy firm. She needs to just unwind and veg out of a while. Doing the dishes or making dinner seems extra difficult when you’ve been just been slaving 8 to 5. “How about take-out tonight?” There’s some time to play with baby and wife, but I prefer just playing with the wife by that point. Then maybe a TV show and story time and hope we’ve got a little body memory left once the kid hits the sack.

But I’m lucky. My wife knows how this transition has been like for me. I went from a fulfilling career that impacted many lives to spending my days trying to figure out what’s in the kid’s mouth. I went from long discussions on the complexities of Queer Theory to babbling about poop. “Baby make a caca?” So she’s given me a free pass to the bar or the coffee shop whenever I need it. Of course, I want to go to those places with her. Bars really need daycare areas. But I do get a night out for a show each month. Last week I saw Ages and Ages at the Doug Fir and slammed whiskeys on ice to make up for lost time. It’s a brief window into the person I was.

There should be enough time in the day to get everything done in the house but there never is. Cozy is a tasmanian devil and if there’s anything left from the tax return, I’m buying an apron that says, “I hate housework.” I feel guilty asking Andrea to help but she does anyway. Unlike the working husband who has no clue what is stay-at-home wife’s life is like, she has a pretty good idea of the daily strain of being Mr. Mom.

Walk a mile in my slippers

I first read The Feminine Mystique in grad school as a “feminist scholar.” Now I feel like I’m living it. The great irony is that millions of men are living it and probably bitching and moaning and wondering when they can have three hours just to sit and watch a baseball game. Alone. Hopefully they’ll see that this experience has been the norm for so many women for so long. It explains why a generation of moms got lost in handfuls of Valium and stacks of romance novels. More than once I’ve eyed the booze and muttered, “Calgon, take me away!”

But it might be slightly different for men for two reasons. The first is that I had my time in the self-actualizing world of work. I made something amazing and then left it behind for childcare. Friedan’s women mostly went from school to marriage. In a sense, they didn’t know what they were missing, they just knew they were missing something. Those women are now finding out. But men who leave the work world leave a world that defined their core identity. Then: “What do you do?” “I’m a sociology professor.” Now: “What do you do?” “I think about what I did.”

The second reason is the American definition of masculinity has laid heavily on the idea of being the breadwinner of the family. That iconic image of the working man is still a giant pillar of popular culture. To not occupy what feminist theorist Dorothy Smith called the “public sphere” is hard enough, but to not be the primary income generator is counter to all the gender socialization men have had for generations. In Trump America, to be not be financially strong is to be a “loser.”

One of the purposes of this blog is to mark all the times that I get it. Those little micro-moments that women have experienced a billion times that are blocked out by my lens of male privilege. And I’ve had many. But as the balance bounces a bit, it may be time to write a new version of The Feminine Mystique for men who are at home with the kids and wondering if there is more to life than uploading e-coupons and catching the first half of Ellen.

I truly love this time at home with Cozy. And there’s an extra thrill when Andrea is a excited when I’ve come up with a new spin on macaroni and cheese (mushrooms and avocado!). But I am anxious to get back to work and reconnect with my outside-world self. The other option is that I’ll be writing articles for Cosmopolitan about how to turn your woman on with the right macaroni and cheese recipe. (Mushrooms and avocado!) But to my mother, yes, you should have gone to law school, but thank you for all that mac and cheese.

A Zombie Ate My Baby! Social anxiety and the Walking Dead

March 28, 2016March 31, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

March 28, 2016

As we all get ready for next week’s season finale of The Walking Dead it is understandable that our collective thoughts turn to zombies. I’ve loved the zombie genre ever since I saw the low-budget 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. It was at a midnight movie in Stone Mountain when I was 13 and I didn’t sleep all night. But as a parent, my consumption of zombie media has changed a bit. After the last Walking Dead episode I had a flash of stepping into the nursery and seeing a ravenous walker chomping on my daughter. Cozy had a look on her face that just said, “Daddy help me.” The horror. And if you know anything about the undead then you know by that point it’s just too late.

Let me point out before I go any further that there is no such thing as a zombie. Sure there are some people wacked out on bath salts or haunting 80s dance nights that might seem like they are zombies. And of course there are kids who “die” on the operating table and their parents convince them they went to heaven and should write a book that might technically be zombies for a moment. But other than some meth head that thinks your arm is a corndog, there are no zombies. So don’t waste a second worrying about World War Z.

But the question remains; What is up with zombie-mania? And is there a feminist take on it? We’ve got movies, TV shows, video-games and comic books. You can buy zombie toys, costumes, t-shirts and even doorstops. We’ve gone zombie crazy! Are we hoping for the zombie apocalypse as a preferable alternative to a Trump presidency? Or is it perhaps an excuse to unleash our inner Rick Grimes and kill at will? What’s the appeal?

Not surprisingly a “sociology of zombies,” has been around for awhile. I would recommend Todd Platt’s “Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture” (2013) for a recent overview. Usually, the explanation is rooted in some type of social anxiety, whether it was the Cold War and the fear of a nuclear apocalypse or now, in a post-9/11 world, it is a fear of the collapse of western society. We play out these “What If?” scenarios and imagine how we would respond when the shit hits the fan for real. Would we recreate a new authoritarian hierarchy, form a collectivist team response, or just devolve into every man for himself? (Women and children don’t usually fit anywhere in that last one, at least not in a good way.)

One of my right-wing pals told me yesterday that we don’t need illegal immigrants. And I said, “Who is gonna pick your food?” His response was that there was a time in America when most Americans worked on farms. I said, “Yeah, maybe 1816. In 2016 kids don’t even know what a fucking tomato looks like.” Face it, most of what we eat is processed. After your Kroger gets looted, next on the menu is your family pet. We would not do well in an apocalyptic setting where the food delivery app on your phone stops working.

So maybe the zombie thing is a reflection of our fear that society could collapse at any moment and we would be tested on our social survival skills. It seems like we are perpetually on the verge of the big flame out. Would you just blow your brains out or “man up” to fight the undead? Ah, there is a little clue to another explanation.

I was in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and my little brother was a sweet kid who had a touch of the developmental disability. He loved video games and taught me how to play Halo (which I found infinitely boring). His big fantasy was a zombie apocalypse so he could kill thousands of zombies. He would go into great detail of how he would shoot them, behead them, and set them on fire. It became clear that the zombies were stand-ins for all the people in his life who he wanted to dispatch with a sharp blade or a shotgun blast. He had a whole list of people he dreamed about killing.

In war movies, we don’t kill human beings. They are nips, gerrys, gooks, and hajis. In Westerns it’s savages. Science fiction body counts are aliens and robots. And in zombie shows, films, and games it is the undead. Each one a less-human than human enemy that we have permission to kill. For its time it is the act of dehumanization that allows us to vent our violent bloodlust against those who threaten our world somehow. Indians and Muslims and Zombies, the infected. Much was written about how the westerns of the 1960s used Native Americans as stand-ins for African Americans who threatened whites living on the urban frontier. Guns and blades allow us to re-establish the white male order over the chaos of the “diseased” other. And if we can bring a few women and people of color (and Michonne) along, all the better.

If you watch The Walking Dead, you know (and probably love) the character Daryl Dixon, played perfectly by Boondog Saint Norman Reedus. I’ll admit I have a man crush in Daryl and would give anything if my hair could be that greasy (without my under-carriage being equally rank). And here’s why. Daryl is the iconic strong silent type and on a steel horse he rides. He’s best on his own. He doesn’t talk about his feelings or much of anything. He squints and kills in a primal way. He is Clint Eastwood in the the first 20 minutes of High Plains Drifter (1973). He is everything that is right about a film or show set in an apocalypse. He is also everything that is wrong with masculinity in our culture. (And Norman Reedus is absolutely nothing like this fictional character.)

In the real world, men don’t need to kill, abandon the group (Oh, there goes Daryl again.) and keep their emotions buried deep behind their “I don’t give a fuck about you” (sultry) eyes. I love Daryl because he is who I was told I was supposed to be when I was a boy. I used to practice squinting like Clint Eastwood when I was a kid. I tried to be silent and menacing. It sucked (or I sucked at it). That way is pain and loneliness. Feminism gave me permission to be a human instead of a cartoon character male. I don’t want to ride into the sunset. I want to hang out with my friends and family. No slaughter necessary.

The same right-wing friend asked me what I would do if some guy called my wife a “cunt.” I told him I’d tell the guy that vaginas are awesome and probably let my wife take it from there. He (and a very confused female friend) were horrified. How could I not immediately respond with violence? What would Daryl do?

I will continue to be a zombie fan. I live for the post-episode discussions of The Walking Dead on reddit. TWD fans are brilliant and clever and can find humor in deep meaning in the handle of Carl’s gun. (Oh, Carl.) I just wonder how much of the appeal is based on the push to use of violence against those who would challenge the existing order. Maybe I should be rooting for the walkers. Just don’t eat my baby!

Violence is the answer: I’m over football.

February 2, 2016February 3, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 11 Comments

February 2, 2016

I give up. I was ready to give up on American football before Concussion, the recent Will Smith movie that focuses on the NFL hiding the issue of the staggering number of serious head injuries among players. I was ready to give up before the endless stories of boys in high school who have died while playing football. I was ready to give up before the continuous stream of stories about college and professional football players beating the women in their lives. I was even ready to give up before Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson’s bra off at Superbowl 38 and the controversy was more about almost seeing her nipple than it was about the implied sexual aggression against women. You can have it, but I’m giving up.

I was ready in 1978, the day I sat on the bus after a B-team football game with the rest of the members of my team at Redan High School. We had lost the game and I took it in stride. But I questioned another player who was in tears. He said, “If you don’t care about this team to cry when we lose then you don’t belong on the team.” And then he beat me up. I quit the next day and joined the punk rocker team.

It might surprise some folks that I was a huge football fan as a kid. I was obsessed with the Miami Dolphins in the early 1970’s and can still name the starting offensive team (including kicker Garo Yepremiam). In 4th grade I wrote a letter to coach Don Shula asking him why the Dolphins never played my hometown Atlanta Falcons. After that the O.J. Simpson poster was on the wall right next to Farrah. There was nothing more blissful than a Sunday watching the NFL highlight reel and all the great tackles shown in slow motion.

In my podunk Georgia county (Dekalb in the 1970s), there were no middle schools. So 8th grade was the first year of high school. You want to feel small? And I skipped 5th grade so I was essentially a 7th grade kid in high school. The only way for a 12-year-old boy (or any boy) to stake his claim for Southern masculinity was to join the football team. No cuts. You show up to practice in the sweltering Georgia sun and you are on the team. You might be tenth string but you get to wear the jacket and be in the team picture and sit in the front at pep rallies. Oh, and you get cheerleaders cheering for you. And the only people that get to beat you up are your teammates.

So I rode the bench as an outside linebacker (#53) for three years. I was skinny but fast so when I did get to play I channeled those NFL films and did recover a fumble in one big game against Cross Keys High School. At most of the games me and the other sideline jockeys would smack our helmets against the bleachers to make it look like we got in some good hits. When I left in 10th grade I was happy to let the jocks have their game and get out without a serious injury. (The first year I broke my tailbone. The second year I broke my thumb. The third year I ripped a muscle in my back and got to sit in the hottub during afternoon practices.)

But it’s hard not to be a casual football fan with all the billions spent on hyping college and pro football. Even last year I wondered if feminism and Super Bowls could exist side-by-side. Football is the only major sport where there is not some reasonable equivalent for females. (And don’t you dare say, “Lingerie Bowl.”) At least Major League Baseball has women’s softball to narrow the gap. If my daughter wants to become a part of the NFL, her best option is to become the wife of a player and risk abuse that comes from a guy who is being exploited and has been hit in the head too many times. Or she can be a cheerleader, cheering on the guys and getting paid minimum wage. But who cheers for the cheerleader? Even management in the NFL is an old boys club. What’s a female football lover to do?

The abuse of women by players (and fans) is an old sad story. The new wrinkle to that story is the growing understanding of the cumulative effect of countless head blows that players get as part of their job description. And this starts when they are unpaid players in school. Yet people are still making millions off these young men killing themselves for our entertainment. A few will make it to retirement with a nest egg but more are just chewed up by the machine. There is even a Wikipedia page for NFL players who died while still playing and you have to stop wondering when you see all the suicides. But go team!

There is, of course, a racial and class element to this as poor boys from inner cities and rural communities are told their one way to the American Dream is through professional sports, especially the hyper-masculine world of football. They can have everything they see dangled in front of them on ESPN, including super-model wives. All they have to do is sell their soul (or brains, ACLs, and spines) to the game and hope they are one of the few that has a post-career life worth living.

This issue is finally getting some attention. The NFL reports that this season there were 317 reported concussions of NFL players. (Who knows how many are unreported?) And that number may be down because of better helmets for teams that can afford the latest, most expensive protective gear. I doubt the inner city high school team is in line for the new top-of-the-line Xenith helmets any time soon. And there is a new effort to decouple the violence on the grid iron from the violence in the home front that is encouraging. You just wonder if the neurology of football can counter a few well-meaning PSAs. But I have to say I have a big ol’ man-crush on former LA Ram Terry Crews and his efforts to bring these issues to the audience that needs to hear it the most. There are feminist football players, y’all.

In a society that claims to preach, “Violence is not the answer,” why do we still obsess over the macho violence of football? In football, violence IS the answer, and the harder the better. I’m not immune to this. As a kid in Georgia I would go to stock car races and PRAY to see a big crash. The game itself can be fascinating and artful and (in those slow-motion NFL films) can look more like ballet, than war. But there is a growing body count that is part of the cost. And that includes battered women who are beaten by brain-damaged players and former players.

I’m just not sure it’s worth all the hype. Sure it’s fun to meet friends to watch a big college bowl together. Maybe you even went to that school 100 years ago. And I know some people want to watch the Super Bowl “for the commercials,” but your are going to see every single one of those commercials a thousand times over the next three months (including whatever sexist crap GoDaddy and Carl’s Jr will throw at us). There certainly is a thrill to watching a live sporting event as it happens, and not TIVO’d (or like with the last Olympics, on a 3-day tape delay). To share in a global experience can be unifying and exhilarating. (Just witness my freak out for the World Cup every four years.) It crosses political, racial, class and even gender lines. I bet even Bernie Sanders has a pick for the big game. (I can hear him say, “I’m quite impressed the the Carolina Panthers ability to reduce the inequity between the salaries for its support staff and its management.”)

I won’t hold it against you if you are all in for the sport and Sunday’s Super Bowl. I’m out. I’ve devoted enough time watching reruns of players getting folded, spindled and mutilated and just thinking, “That’s awesome!” This year, out of respect for the dozen boys who died playing high school football in 2015, like 17-year-olds Luke Schemm and Andre Smith, I’m going to spend Sunday hanging out with my daughter. Maybe we’ll go to the duckpond or go shopping. And I’m trying to teach her to play catch so she can play softball someday.

Edit: I’m supposed to watch this Frontline story: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.

A Star Wars for Our Daughters

December 19, 2015December 20, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

December 19, 2015

There are no major spoilers in this post about The Force Awakens, including anything about the Wookie-Ewok wedding at the end of the film.

Now that the long wait is over, I can reveal what makes The Force Awakens perhaps the best Star Wars film of the series. This opinion is greatly influenced by the fact that I am now the father of a little girl and have a vested interest in the world being a fairer and kinder place for females.

When the first Star Wars film came out in 1977 I was a 13-year-old boy waiting in line for the first screening at the Lefont Tara theater in Atlanta. The word was out among comic book and sci-fi fans that this was a different kind of space movie. I bought a program that listed all the actors who would soon be icons. When that giant Empire ship moved across the opening scene, all our jaws dropped. I don’t remember any girls in the audience but there must have been a few.

Later that year, at the Atlanta Comicon, I entered a costume contest. We didn’t call it “cosplay” yet. In honor of the Marvel Kiss comic book, I went as Paul Stanley. I was beat out by a Jawa and a Sand Person. Star Wars had taken hold of the universe.

When the third Star Wars film, The Return of the Jedi, came out in 1983 I was a 19-year-old college boy (I saw it opening day at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta). This is the film where Princess Leia (Carrie Fischer) is enslaved by the grotesque Jaba the Hut and forced to wear a bikini with a chain around her neck. The image was featured prominently in the movie posters and promotional materials and is the only thing a lot of fanboys remember about that film. I should point out that badass Leia ends up strangling Jaba with that chain in what could be viewed the greatest feminist metaphor in all film history. (Similarly, I’m sure some claim Game of Thrones is feminist because a few of the many rapists on the show get beheaded. Um, no.)

But that image has remained iconic among the sci fi boy world. Not the killing of the slaver but the eroticizing of the slave. Carrie Fischer has said how much she resented director Richard Marquand putting her body on display in that scene. But how many boys wanted a slave Leia of their own? I’m willing to bet that 99% of comic conventions have at least one “Slave Leia” cosplayer in attendance with Jaba the Hut-like boys getting wood right and left. Even Kim Kardashian has worn the outfit. So there’s that.

I try not get sucked into the pop culture hype machine (Adele, meh.), but I would be lying if I didn’t say my 13-year-old self was reawakened by the fact that J.J. Abrams was doing the next chapter of Star Wars, the follow up to The Revenge of the Jedi. Besides the cool Star Trek/Star Wars link, Abrams is just two years younger than me and has the same reverence for the Skywalker mythology.

And a mythology it is, deeply rooted in the most ancient heroic tales. If you’ve never heard religion scholar Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth) discuss the links between Star Wars and the ancient myth of the reluctant hero, you should. It’s a life-changing analysis. These are old tales. But they are typically stories about boys and men.

That’s why The Force Awakens is such an absolute joy. Yeah, it’s great to see our old heroes rolled out of the prop closet. (Harrison Ford looks only a bit more rusted than C-3P0.) But our reluctant Skywalker hero is now a female named Rey, played genderlessly by newcomer Daisy Ridley. The nearly all-male cast of the original has been expanded to include plenty of amazing female actors, including Fischer, Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, and Oscar award winner Lupita Nyong’o.

The cast is also much more ethnically diverse, including Finn, the other reluctant-hero, played by black Brit John Moyega, and a Latino X-wing fighter named Poe (Oscar Isaac). This made my Mexican wife very happy but of course it infuriated racist trolls and Donald Trump supporters who lamented the “political correctness” of the casting and mounted a pointless #BoycottStarWarsVII campaign on Twitter.

Having a female hero like Rey surely means a lot to the scores of female fans. When Finn tries to hold her hand during an attack by the bad guys, she rips her hand away and assures him that she can take care of herself. And that’s the sub-plot of the film. What at first appears to be a “damsel in distress” scenario gets turned on its head and here comes our girl to the rescue. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler.) Even Han Solo recognizes her badassness. She’s ultimately a Skywalker-Solo hybrid who drives a giant movie on her never uncovered shoulders.

There’s sort of a sad test to measure the “feministness” of a film called the Bechdel Test. Do two women in a movie have a conversation about something other than a man? Lots of “chick-flicks” have a female heavy cast but the dialogue is often about their men (i.e. every Jennifer Lopez movie ever made). The Force Awakens has several scenes that pass including one with (now) General Leia Organa and Rey.

J. J. Abrams has a teenage daughter so I have to think he thought of her and how her experience sitting in a theater would be different than a girl sitting in the theater in 1977. Abrams and producer Kathleen Kennedy have given us an epic tale that puts a female protagonist at the center for at least three films (Star Wars 8 and 9 are scheduled for 2017 and 2019). Along with this year’s successful Mad Max film, it serves to rewrite the narrative that boys like action and girls like romance. (The other side of ledger would be films that deal with the romantic emotional lives of boys and men. Where is this generation’s Woody Allen?)

When we think about movies and video games that are targeted at boys and boyish men, there are usually lots of explosions, chases, shooting, and scantily clad women who need to be rescued. It’s a male-driven narrative. The Force Awakens has plenty of those tropes but seriously tweaks the primary one and that may be a game changer for a generation of fanboys and their sisters.

Like 1977 (and 1980 and 1983), I was in the theater Thursday for the opening night of The Force Awakens. I had our tickets months in advance. I could barely contain myself with excitement as I fell through a time hole to my adolescent self. And like 1977, the theater audience was 90% male. (Do these guys have wives or girlfriends? Some brought Star Wars toys, though. That may be part of the puzzle of patriarchal pop culture.) When the John Williams score started and the Star Wars logo appeared on the screen, we all screamed with approval (as we did whenever any of the original cast of characters and spaceships appeared). The film was wonderfully loyal to the original trilogy in all the important ways, but was a huge departure in one very significant way. Hopefully that evolution continues. Carrie Fischer made it clear to her young female cast mates, “Avoid the slave girl costume.”

Andrea and I always have a good conversation after a film and it was immediately clear how important it was to her to have a female protagonist in such a massively hyped film. She loved having a hero that looked like her. It was a subtle message buried inside an epic tale that all those boys in the audience will hopefully digest without even thinking, Oh, the main hero was a girl! That’s how change happens. After our post-film analysis, Andrea excitedly said, “I can’t wait until our daughter is old enough to show her this movie.” Me either.

Explaining the world one tragedy at a time.

November 30, 2015November 30, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

November 30, 2015

The world can seem so chaotic. Does it ever take a break?

Sometimes, in my line of work, things get a little busy. I’ve been getting a lot of media time lately. From local hate crimes to the global terror alert, from suspected Klan activity in Oregon to responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. Throw Paris into it and a few other issues in the news flow and I’ve been in overdrive lately. I’ve written about playing the role of “expert” in the media and hopefully I mentioned that I never get paid for any of it. But there’s a reason I’m on your TV.

The world can seem so chaotic. But a lot of it is our media-saturated culture. Sociologist (and now Lewis & Clark University president) Barry Glassner wrote about this in his 1999 book, The Culture of Fear. Just think about the local news. When I was a kid it was on for a half-hour at 6 and 11 pm. The local news in Portland starts at 4 am and then occupies at least 8 hours of daily broadcasting on each channel until 11:35 pm. That’s a lot of space to fill. And “if it bleeds it leads” can drive each one of those hours. Terrorism abroad, mass shootings at home, and a story about packages being stolen off porches for good measure. It’s enough to keep a person inside their house and watching TV. Suffice it to stay, research shows that the more TV people watch, the more fearful they are of the world.

I can either try to ignore it or subvert it from the inside. So the reason I say yes to most local, national, and international media requests is that it provides an opportunity to slip a critical perspective into the shockingly uncritical news paradigm. And this is usually a feminist perspective. For example, the numerous mass shootings I’m called to comment on must include an analysis that this is male violence in a culture that promotes violence as an acceptable means for men to express themselves. Can you imagine if all these shootings were by females?

So we hop from crisis to crisis trying to patiently explain things to people who are often resistant to anything other than the explanation that fits their picture of the world. A perfect example is the folks who blurt “All lives matter” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. These people are either ignorant (which is something we all share about different things) or they are straight up racists. So here is the simplest explanation I can offer these folks: “Black lives matter,” means all lives matter, including black lives that have been devalued by the criminal justice system and racism in general. Got it? It does not mean your white life doesn’t matter. Now shut the fuck up.

Often I offer an analysis to try to explain a very complex social problem and what gets on the air is a three second sound byte that really doesn’t explain much. That’s why I prefer live TV and radio because you can go for the one point that really want to make. I learned this the hard way when I appeared on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. Bill O’Reilly just talked over me the whole time. One of my conservative friends emailed me and said, “You just should have yelled over him.” I guess that’s how Fox rolls. Lesson learned.

There is a root cause that links most of this together and it’s patriarchy. Friday’s shooting at the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic is an obvious example. Conservatives wage a war on women’s advancement and rights. A Trump follower commented on this blog recently, “Does your wife bring home the bacon while you blog and change diapers or take of your children? Very manly there. Get a real life fool.” Trump, Fiorina and others spread lies about Planned Parenthood to their war-loving moronic minions who just want to bomb SOMETHING. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that this week’s domestic terrorist (aka, right-wing white male) attacks a women’s health center with an AK while ranting about Obama and “baby parts.” This is what patriarchy looks like.

There is also feminist perspective on the racial issue. The dehumanization of other people, including African Americans and Syrian refugees (who my cousin compared to snakes and Ben Carson likened to rabid dogs) starts with the dehumanization of women. Religions with male gods do this especially well. It’s easy to claim power over someone who you think is a child or an animal or a thing. Or a terrorist.

There’s just not a lot of places to get the macro analysis in the mainstream media. We just get little corners of the real issues that are at the core of the nightly news stories. Where is bell hooks or Noam Chomsky being interviewed on the news? Lord knows, there’s enough time to fit them in. But instead we get sound byte analysis for the short-attention span masses. Here’s a clip of Trump mocking a disabled person. Here’s a talking head saying his followers could care less and on to the next non-story.

I became a feminist in my head a long time ago because it helped to explain the big picture throughout human history. I became a feminist in my heart with the arrival of my daughter and the hope the world could finally make a great leap forward for her generation. That the trifles of Trump and travails of war would become artifacts of the past. (This optimism may come from watching too much Star Trek.)

And I’m happy to take my show on the road. Last week I was in Washington, D.C., making a case for the re-evaluation of hate crime laws at a meeting of criminologists from around the world. This week I’m off to New York City where I’ll be discussing how plea bargains institutionalize racism at a university in Manhattan. You can’t shut me up. These issues are too important. And yeah, I’m going to continue to be pissed off at the people who choose not to get it. Their world is changing and they are becoming an obnoxious minority (not a “silent majority”). But that keeps me going and at some point we can talk about the big picture.

See ya in the funny papers.

Why Paris is different. Why everything is different now.

November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

November 16, 2015

Do you get the feeling that things are about to get really ugly?

Sometimes the world shows up to pull the rug out from under your little plans. There was a Friday in 1994 when it was announced that Kurt Cobain had died. Over 150,000 people on Earth die every day but this was personal. I felt like we were friends, fellow travelers. I was incapacitated. How was I expected to I go on without him?

Last Friday was a another day like that but on such a grander scale. The attacks in Paris came when people who had no vested interest in the global jihadi conflict were just out to enjoy a Friday night in the City of Lights, including doing something I would normally be doing B.C. (Before Cozy), going out to see a band. And it was a band I had been out to see before, maybe on a Friday night, The Eagles of Death Metal. Suddenly coordinated attacks by men, heavily armed suicide bombers, executing Parisians, Americans, and others, flooded our news feed with horrific images.

I was a student in London on July 20, 1982 when men from the IRA set off two bombs in the city, killing 11 people. One of the bombs blew up a bandstand in Regents Park. Seven musicians were killed, with dozens of civilians injured. I had been sitting on the grass next to the bandstand a few hours earlier. It was my introduction to the randomness of terrorism.

Friday night I thought about my many trips to Paris, often hanging out in Les Halles where some the attacks took place. I thought about some of my friends in town for the weekend’s big U2 show. Mostly I thought about what kind of world my french-named daughter, Cozette, would inherit. It was too much to process. And then came time to talk the media but I could only speak as a father who was crushed with sadness.

My obsession with Paris started in 1978 when I was 14, reading the liner notes from Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia album. Patti lead me to poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Rimbaud led me to the bohemian world of Paris. I finally got to Paris when I was 20, and ended up watching the 1984 LA Olympics with a bunch of hash-smoking American girls I met on the Champs-Élysées. It was the first of many trips and wild adventures in Paris that included being chased down Boulevard Saint-Michel by French police for spray-painting my girlfriend’s name all over the Latin Quarter.

But this isn’t about my crazy youth in gay Paris. This is about why this attack is of profound significance. About how on 13 Novembre 2015 the world changed.

My good friends on the left will point out that terror like this happens in the brown and black world all the time and the media never bothers to go into hyperdrive. People don’t change their Facebook profile picture when there is a bombing in Maiduguri, Nigeria. All lives matter, not just white lives in Paris. Brown and black lives matter, too. My good friends on the right will comment that that attitude, while it may be true, cheapens the importance of mourning the innocent people killed in one well-orchestrated heinous attack by Muslim jihadists hellbent on destroying modernity.

I can see the merit of both sides. I’ve written about how we need more empathy in the world, including for parents escaping Syria with their children, fleeing the hell created by ISIS and Assad, as well as bombs, drones and missiles from Russia, America and France. (Who was it that said war is just terrorism with a bigger budget?) I’m also aware that we could now think of ourselves as living in World War IV. World War III was the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, fought on proxy battlefields, like Vietnam and Nicaragua (with very real casualties). World War IV, according to some neoconservatives, is the war between the Western world and Islamic fascism. I have to say referring to the attackers in Paris as “warriors” insults all men and women in the armed forces who fight based on some (occasionally ignored) rules of engagement. These men were criminals not warriors. Mass murderers not soldiers.

Someday I’ll go to Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower

I want to make two points about why the November 13 attacks are different and require our global attention. First, I’ve been lucky enough to go to Paris many times. I have a favorite bookstore and a favorite café to sip cappuccinos and people watch. But even if you haven’t been there, you’ve surely imagined traveling to Paris at some point in your life. We all have an idea about ourselves in Paris, whether it’s hanging out with artists in Montmartre, or studying the gothic majesty of Notre Dame, or walking with a lover along the Seine, or visiting all your favorite spots in The Da Vinci Code. I’ve never been to Maiduguri or Damascus. I’ve never even imagined myself there. Those people matter as much as folks in Paris, but, in my head, I am in Paris quite often and, like Kurt Cobain, they are people I know.

Why do we go to Paris, in our heads, in our hearts, and on our credit cards? Because Paris represents all that we aspire to be. It’s more than the values of liberty, fraternity and equality. It’s the bohemian ethic of art for art’s sake and the right to express yourself in the purest of forms. Since the 1840s American expatriates have moved to Paris to live a genuinely expressive (“authentic” is so overused) existence. It’s in Renoir’s paintings of café-goers that must have looked much like the cafés where people were slaughtered on Friday night. Obviously, the real Paris has lots of real world problems. (Try getting good cellphone service in the 27th arrondissement.) But the mythology of the artist capital is strong. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) is such a great representation of this. Paris is what we all want our cities to be. I love it when Portland is referred to as the “Paris of the Pacific Northwest.” Sounds so much better than the Mogadishu of the Pacific Northwest.

The triumph of reason over religion

The second reason is Reason. Paris is the birthplace of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. This is a topic all my students know well. When French philosophers like Rosseau, Condorcet, and Montesquieu took Immanuel Kant’s ideas of rationality and empiricism as a mandate, the days of theocracy and monarchy were numbered. There was a reason Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin went to Paris, and it wasn’t the hookers. Casting off the yoke of Churches and Kings for the rational system of democracy inspired the American Revolution and then, on July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille in Paris and the start of the French Revolution.

Paris stands as a monument to the triumph of reason over the irrational rule of religion. The Enlightenment gave us modern science, the concept of the balance of power, a belief in individual freedoms and the radical idea that people have the right to pursue their own talents. All these values are in direct contrast to the beliefs of the radical jihadists who defame the name of the 1.6 billion Muslims on earth. They don’t represent modern Muslims any more the Ku Klux Klan represents modern Christians. These men with guns and bombs hate women, music, and art. They executed people at a rock show, for Pete’s sake. They hate Paris and everything beautiful that Paris represents.

These extremists are so much like the people I have studied for 30 years. They are anti-feminists of the highest order. They reject the feminine in favor of the worship of violence and worldview that has no shades of grey. Their women are slaves and their only joy is in the sociopathy of destruction. And yet, they are human beings like me and the people they seek to oppress and murder. The good news here is that there are plenty of former jihadists, like former racists, who have seen there is a better way to live on this planet. In those men their is great hope of a way out of this mess.

But I fear it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The difference between September 11 and 13 Novembre is the sinking realization that we are not going to exit this nightmare anytime soon. In 2001, there was hope that, once we eradicated the Taliban it would be all over. That delusion is long gone after Friday for all of us. I’m headed to Washington DC this week and I can’t not think I could end up in another pile of bodies on the evening news as this conflict widens. (A new ISIS video makes it clear that DC is the next target.) If that happens, I hope people won’t say, “Well, even more people died in Syria that day.”

My wife and I still plan to take Cozette to Paris when she’s old enough. I want her to see the fountains in the Jardin du Luxumborg and the brilliant statues at the Centre du Pompidou. When she’s older we can smoke a joint at Jim Morrison’s grave and I can show her Pont Neuf, the bridge I was going to jump off of when was a heartbroken 23-year-old, thinking I was the subject of a silly sad French song. I want her to live in a world where art and freedom are lived with each breath and not sacrificed to fear and religious fanaticism. We are not trapped in medieval times.

The world is at a turning point and it’s time to realize there is no “us vs. them,” only us vs. us. The religious people on both sides who want to bomb and shoot and destroy will only drag us into a war of all against all. That is not rational. That is not a world that has room for love. When I put my daughter to bed on Friday night, with tears in my eyes and her arms around my neck, I sang “Frère Jacques” to her and hoped the world would choose peace over violence when the morning bells were ringing. Recherchez la paix et poursuis-la. (Psalm 34:14)

Gender: Nature vs. Nurture 4: She’s gotta be free!

October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

Cozy has made it to 14 months. I was a little nervous about the 13 month spread because of the Stevie Wonder thing. (“Thirteen month old baby, broke the looking glass…”) So we’re at a year and two months and still no clear gendered behavior. I’m going to knock on wood before she walks in here with a picture of Barbie that she has uploaded on my smartphone. She is still just a person. Hooray!

It’s funny how we think about gender in terms of opposites; that there are opposite sexes. A local rock club posted a noticed that “Opposite genders” were not allowed in their bathrooms. (The note came down after some trans-sensitive folks had a word with the owner.) Genders have no opposite and men and women have more in common than we acknowledge. It’s not like boys walk on their feet and girls walk on their hands. This is not Dr. Seus-land.

But the gender binary is a powerful idea. We do construct the idea of gender in this culture, at this time, in terms of opposites (although less so than previous generations). Men are active and strong while women are passive and weak. Men are stoic and women are emotional. Men are earners and women are spenders, and on and on. Of course there are a zillion examples of how this is not true and the core of the liberal feminist agenda is that women can do anything men can do, including fight wars. (Radical feminists have a different take on that, as discussed in the post on Second Wave.) But patriarchy establishes that men assert the desired quality and then the opposite is relegated to the feminine. Men are brave heroes and women are crazy bitches.

One of the characteristics of this gender dichotomy is the idea of autonomy. Men are supposed to be free to come and go. High plains drifter. Papa was a rolling stone. The world is there for men to explore, block by block, continent by continent. Chart your own course, dude. Make your own dreams, homeboy. Hit the road, Jack Kerouac. In contrast females have a thick rule book to play by and are not supposed to be autonomous. They are supposed to be dependent little princesses, sitting around in their parents’ castle, singing, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” In my mom’s generation, women typically said yes to the first man that proposed to them because it was the only way to get out of the parents’ house. This was long before Sex and the City.

Of course, any single mom now would laugh at this simple dichotomy but there are still vestiges of it around. When I was in college, there were plenty of women who would joke that their major was “pre-wed,” and they were in college to get their “Mrs. Degree.” There’s a Bible college south of Portland where the female students are still fond of saying, “Ring by spring or your money back.” For those women I would require a viewing Mona Lisa Smile, the 2003 Julia Roberts movie. If your life is dedicated to finding a husband to take care of you, you are in for a sad awakening at around age 29.

I want Cozy to be autonomous. I want her to roam free and drive her own car, not sit in the passenger seat (or the backseat with the other guy’s wife). She roams the house and has only fallen down the stairs once. (Please don’t tell anybody.) Of course, as a parent I keep a close eye on her, but if she wants to play with her blocks or look at books, she can. We are trying to instill a sense of her own independence while keeping her safe from falling down a well. (Little girls falling down wells was a big fad in the late 1980s.)

Baby’s are generally the opposite of autonomous. If she’s headed for the street, I’m going to pick her up. If she’s munching on spilled coffee grounds, I’m washing her mouth out. If she’s trying to turn on the TV and it’s not Sesame Street time, I’m going to shut it off. And I am always taking something out of her hands. Sorry, kid, grown ups are in charge. But at the same time, she has to discover her own freedom. She can be a rolling stone as long as the door to the basement is closed.

Andrea and I went to go see Madonna’s big Rebel Heart concert last week. At 57, she is a great example of what a woman can do when left to her own devices (and a dumptruck full of Botox). Madonna couldn’t have happened in the 1950s. She needed the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s saying that a material girl has the right to her own life and dreams, so go for it. Be like Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan, not Roberta. Or be like Roberta in the end of that movie. But get an education so you don’t have to keep all your belongings in a Port Authority locker in a bus station. (OK, there’s been way too much Madonna in this house since the concert.)

Parenting is such a balancing act. The challenge of raising an independent child who doesn’t get mowed down by a drunk driver at a parade. It seems like our society is always trying to strike a balance between our freedom and our safety. On top of that, I don’t want Cozy to think she is some princess who’s singular dream is the arrival of Mr. Right to think for her once she leaves the nest. It’s nice to see the rejection of the princess thing by so many parents and girls. We don’t live in fucking medieval Europe. Unless she’s the mother of dragons, we are looking forward, babe. A rolling stone with roots, that’s what we want, not Repunzel. Besides, Cozy has already decided she is going to be a soccer star or a contractor. She can hire Prince Charming to manage her payroll.

Maybe you should sit down to pee.

October 6, 2015October 18, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

October 6, 2015

I’m learning that internet trolls hate all things feminine or gay (shocker, I know). In the wake of recent blog posts on Donald Trump, fraternities, and last week’s Roseburg shooting, commenters have called me a “pussy” and a “fag” and have accused me of wearing panties and (my favorite new putdown) sitting down to pee.

This is nothing new. If you think about how boys bully other boys, it’s typically some attempt to feminize them. They’ll accuse them of being gay or, worse, being a female, or even worse, being a vagina! I know this first hand because when I was a teenager my name was transformed from “Blazak” to “Gayzak.” I remember one bully named Ted who stopped me on my way home and announced, “Gayzak, you’re a pussy.” Being a little too quick, I responded, “Well, I guess you are what you eat, dick.” Ted then punched me in the face, not for being homophobic but for meeting his feminization with a better one. (I’ve mentioned this story before in a blogpost about vaginas but I should point out that at our 20 year high school reunion, a few days after 9/11, a very emotional Ted apologized. It meant more than he knew.)

Now I regularly get called “Ballsack” by “clever” trolls who are stuck in the fourth grade and can’t mount an actual critique of my positions. But it all fits into the larger paradigm that’s behind the toxic masculinity that drives schoolyard bullies and school shooters and I would guess explains a lot of what drives America’s favorite bully, Donald Trump. It was clearly a factor in Roseburg. The shooter was mad at the world because he was a still a virgin. If you are a 26-year-old virgin, you probably shouldn’t be angry at anybody but yourself. This theme parallels last year’s mass shooting in Isla Vista, California (six killed, fourteen injured). Don’t die like a boy, go out “like a man.”

The root behind all of this is the devaluation of the feminine, the hallmark of all patriarchal societies. Females are less than fully human. While this predates the demotion of Eve from the Mother of Humanity to the Original Sinner (that BITCH!) by ancient Hebrew priests, it is not universal. Despite the mythology of the essential nature of male dominance, not all cultures are patriarchal and cultures get less patriarchal the farther you go back in time. Cavemen did not rule cavewomen. Hunting and gathering societies were mostly gathering and evidence relays that men and women shared in both tasks.

There is a lot to be said about patriarchy but here are two quick ways that men can keep power over the women who gave them life.

1. Create a god in your image. For most of our human history, men and women have bowed down to goddesses, the source of life. But early nomadic tribes and their warrior gods invaded goddess cultures, like Crete and Anatolia. Over thousands of years, goddesses were replaced with gods and then just one male God. And as Mary Daly said in 1973’s Beyond God the Father, “If God is man, then man is God.”

I’m going to write more about this important point later, just know if you worship a god who has a penis instead of a vagina, you are part of patriarchy. Also, is your god circumcised and if so, who did it and where is God’s foreskin now? (Sorry, I wonder about these things.)

2. Devalue all things associated with females, whether it’s ovaries or reproductive rights. Women are “girls” and men who you want to rank over are “ladies.” If a guy is being a pain, call him a little bitch (or the weirdly homoerotic “my bitch”) and accuse him of being on the rag. Call him anything to do with feminine anatomy; fallopian face, labial loser and the ever useful “pussy.” (The hatred of vaginas by these guys really makes you wonder.)

There is a right-winger who posts a lot of crap on my Facebook page. This is a guy who thinks Russian dictator Vladmir Putin is a bad ass and Syrian mass murderer Bashar Al-Assad is a hero. When I called him out on his sexist language he posted an image of a woman in t-shirt that said, “Obama is a pussy.” My response was, “You must really hate pussy.” He seemed confused.

This is the weird conflicted psyche of the misogynist. In devaluing the feminine you end up looking kinda, well, gay. You think women and “pussies” suck. So what DO you like? Men and cocks? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Holla!) I’m quite fond of the vagina and find it infinitely fascinating, so if you call me a pussy, I will take it as a great compliment. And when I think of the awesome gay people I know and what they have to go through because of asshole bigots, well, I couldn’t think of a better thing to be called. When I hear, “That’s so gay,” I translate into “Fabulous!!”

But of course, that’s not what the He-Man Woman Haters mean. If you Google “Obama is a pussy,” you also find plenty of images of Obama as a female. That’s the put-down. Female, like your mother/wife/daughter, is the worst thing you can be. Patriarchy makes these boys and men so sexually confused, no wonder so many of them are deathly afraid of cunnilingus. According to the male God bibles, that’s nothing but a dirty devil hole. “She was bleeding from her whatever!”

One more story. Before my neighborhood got the shit gentrified out of it, there was a brothel on my block. A pimp named Freddie hung out there and the license plate on his Caddy just read “TNB.” One day I asked, “Hey Freddie, what does TNB stand for.” He answered, “That’s my street name, Trust No Bitch.” Without thinking of the time Ted punched me in the face, I replied, “Oh, does that include your mother?” That was the day I learned you don’t talk feminism with a pimp.

How anyone with a daughter can hate the feminine so much is beyond me. You have to feel sorry for any woman who is married to a guy who hates pussy and tells other men they are going to be his bitch. Don’t these men know they came into the world through a vagina? (Shout out to my C-Section peeps!) What happened to them that they loathe females so much? Oh, that’s right, they grew up in a patriarchal culture. Eve, that nasty-ass skank biotch.

I have a baby daughter. Besides the fact that keeping her vagina healthy is an important agenda item, I’ve also learned to not wake her when she is blissfully sleeping. Since the bathroom is next to the nursery, one way to achieve this is to pee sitting down. (Trust me on this one.) When you pee sitting down, you can check your email or read a few paragraphs in the latest issue of Men’s Health. It’s kind of a cool thing. (Sitting down is also handy if you are drunk, hungover, really tired, or drunk.) But I also eat quiche, watch Ellen Degeneres, sometimes I wear pink and always call myself a feminist. When I was a boy, I might have been afraid of some of that. (I think a lot of “disco sucks” crap I was into as a teenager was driven by fear of the feminine.) Fortunately, I grew up.

The point of all this is that if boys and men started listening to women instead of hating them or only viewing them as sexual objects to be cum upon, they might learn some important lessons about how to live. All week I’ve been asking people to ask why boys and men go on these shooting sprees. Perhaps the better question would be to ask why girls and women don’t go on shooting sprees. Stop calling people pussies and start really hearing what people with pussies have to offer.

I don’t have all the answers, just this thought. Maybe men should just sit down and shut up and have a nice pee.

Note: Plenty of liberal guys engage in “bro talk.” You don’t have to be a right-winger to fear the power of pussy.

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