We love our myths. They bind our cultures together. Whether they are creation myths or heroic myths of the eternal return, they resonate with our collective senses of self, what Carl Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness. This is certainly true of the “exceptional” myths of America.
We’ve been hearing a lot about “merit” lately. Trump/Musk has tried to make the case that anybody in a job who is not a straight white man is a “DEI hire,” who got the position because of some imagined quota instead of their inherent qualifications for the job. After the DC air collision last month Trump railed on former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is gay), saying, “We can’t have regular people doing this job. They won’t be able to do it, but we’ll restore faith in American air travel.” Then he went on about how dwarves are being hired to be air traffic controllers.
The message was clear. Only straight white able-bodied cis-gendered men are qualified for the job. Everybody else is a diversity hire. White men have “merit.”
When I explain the value of meritocracy to my sociology students I describe it basically as the combination of talent and effort. Meritocracy is the belief that anyone in America can make it up the economic ladder and what you lack in talent can be made up for with extra effort. If you want to be an NBA star or a Shark Tank entrepreneur, just put the work in and you’ll get there. And if you’ve got lots of talent AND drive, the sky is the limit. I use the example of Taylor Swift as someone who has loads of talent and an insane work ethic.
But Taylor also has had the advantage of being an attractive white woman. Just look at how Beyoncé has had to work twice is hard for fewer accolades. It might not be the best example but race is a major factor in the merit calculation and it translates to the fact that white men have a much lower bar to be seen as having merit.
Just look at the range of completely unqualified nominations that Trump has put forward, like Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and Robert Kennedy, Jr., just to name a few of many. Their complete lack of merit makes Marco Rubio look like a supreme statesman in comparison. (Maybe that was the intent.) Perhaps Pam Bondi has the resume to be the U.S. Attorney General, but we know how attractive blondes are promoted by beauty pageant CEO Trump. The Trump administration has an Affirmative Action program for bootlickers. Merit matters less than loyalty. (Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s recent comments on Ukraine demonstrate how supremely unqualified he is for this job.)
The kleptocracy of the Trump regime is an illustration of the myth of merit in America, where women, people of color, and other marginalized populations have to work twice as hard for half as much and then see their accomplishments chided as the result of of some set-aside DEI program. It’s not surprising that many white men see valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion as a threat to their path of privilege, because it is. These men have always had an advantage and they are not about to relinquish it so easily.
But as Jim Morrison sang in 1968, “They got the guns but we got the numbers.” These men are a shrinking demographic and a unified effort will pry the keys out of their creaking fingers.
“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 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.
This January 6th we mark the 3rd anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, with the help of his troglodyte hoard, and end American democracy. I’m choosing to, instead, mark the 612th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, and her cinematic campaign to save her nation.
Portland has a wonderful statue to the “Maid of Orleans” in the Coe Circle roundabout. It was erected on Memorial Day 1925, after pioneer doctor (and close friend of Teddy Roosevelt) Henry Waldo Coe saw French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet‘s equestrian statue, Jeanne d’Arc, in Paris. I guess he thought Portland was going to become the Paris of the Pacific Northwest. For the last 28 years, I’ve been circling around the golden teenager, atop Sunflower, her horse, without thinking too much about it. I’d seen the original statue in the Place de Pyramides on one of my early trips to Paris. But other than that, I just thought about it as something “kinda cool.”
This past summer I decided I needed to learn more about this child warrior, so I dove into the deep end. My starting knowledge was that she was a French teen that rallied her nation against the English in the Hundred Years War and was burned at the stake. That was about it. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on, including the insanely well chronicled transcripts of her 1431 heresy trial in Rouen, Normandy, the heart of English controlled France. I watched over a dozen films, from Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917) and Carl Theodor Dryer’s restored 1928 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, to Bruno Dumont’s heavy metal musicals Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) and Joan of Arc (2019). Cozy started to think I was losing my mind, as we took extra spins around Coe Circle to say hello to my new favorite person.
The Joan obsession took me into a wider investigation of the Hundred Years War, which many historians see as paving the wave for modern nation states. That 15th century fasciation took a slight detour into all things Henry V and the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. (I’m currently reading Shakespeare’s Henry V play. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”) It was such a different world, emerging out of the pandemic of bubonic plague, facing a new form of religious nationalism. Oh, wait, maybe not.
First, let’s put Jeanne d’Arc in her historical context. Her birthdate may be a fiction as even she didn’t know how old she was and January 6 is the Epiphany in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. (I just finished off the King Cake in our house.) But she was likely born around 1412 in Domrémy, in an English controlled part of Northern France. Around age 13, she started reporting the religious visions, first from the archangel Michael, telling her to save France from the English and restore Charles VII to the throne. At 17, Joan made her way to the Royal Court in Chinon to ask Charlie for an army so she could drive the English out of their strategic stronghold in Orleans, on the River Loire. Since Joan claimed to be sent by God on a mission to restore Charles’ crown, he said, “Sure, why not.”
In April 1429, Joan, who was the age of a high school senior, had her army and, with standard in hand, sacked Orleans, sending the British running. And according to all the well documented eye-witness testimonies, she was 100% bad ass. The English would taunt her from behind their walls, calling her a “whore,” and she would just say, “OK, I guess you all will now die.” She’d get shot with arrows and keep going. She was nuts. After she got Charles VII his thrown back, her value wore off and he kinda just sorta accidentally let her get captured by the English, who were keen on proving that she was a devil. I mean if God was on France’s side, what did that say about England? And plus, she dressed like a man, which really pissed off the transphobic Catholic clergy. They were the only ones allowed to crossdress.
During her 1431 trial in Rouen, Joan was the same bad ass, dancing circles around the clerics, who really needed to prove she was a witch. This illiterate teenager outwitted her judges at every turn. They tried to trip her up, asking questions like, “Do you know whether or not you are in God’s grace?” Refusing to be trapped, she skillfully replied, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” They were like, “Oh, this chick is good.”
In the end, the political needs of the English overseers won out and Joan was ordered to be burned at the stake. In the intense desire to save herself from the fire, she briefly recanted and accepted a life in prison. But then she realized that would have invalidated her entire life dedicated to faith and France, and said, “Fuck it. Light me up.” (That might not be a direct translation.) On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the Old Marketplace in Rouen and her ashes were thrown into the Seine so there would be no relics left.
Cozy, my daughter (named after another tragic French girl, Victor Hugo’s Cosette), has been asking my why I’m so obsessed by Joan of Arc. After all, now if a teenager told you that God, angels, and saints had told them to demand an army so they could wage battle against foreign invaders, the term “mental health crisis” might be employed. What can a 15th century “religious fanatic” tell us about the challenges in 21st century? Patti Smith, in her blog this morning, posted a tribute to the maid, writing, “I keep returning to her story in order to contemplate the impossible decision she had to make, and her remarkable bravery in making it.” It’s not the religious fanaticism (perhaps schizophrenia) that brings us back to Joan. It’s the commitment to freedom from oppression. For Joan it was English rule and limiting gender norms of medieval Europe. For us it’s something different, but not much.
As we mark this day when we remember Trump’s desperate attempt to replace America’s democracy with some bizarre form of authoritarian rule, the story of Joan of Arc is instructive. Her trial was marked by a bizarre obsession her judges had with the fact she refused to dress as a woman. Ron DeSantis’ and the Proud Boys’ obsession with drag queens and banning gender affirming care for trans kids is cut from the same dogmatic cloth. But there is an even grander call to human potential here. The courage young Joan demonstrated to free France, in the face of older and more resourceful adversaries, will be required as American democracy is attacked from all angles. I’m not equating Putin with Henry V (Henry fought his own battles, for one), but the multi-front assault we face might demand a bit of Joan’s fanaticism and steadfast belief that our cause is just. As Joan said, as she led her legions to liberate Orleans, “All battles are first won or lost, in the mind.”
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.”
Another day, another story about how much Republicans hate trans people. Opportunistic MAGA bigot Kid Rock aside, how did transgender Americans become the primary target of hate mongers? Did the Ku Klux Klan run out of objects of derision? “It ain’t ‘cool’ to hate black people no more. Let’s go after them non-binary kids!”
We have seen a dramatic spike in hate crimes against transgender people. The numbers of anti-trans attacks jumped 29 percent in 2021 over the numbers in 2020. There has been a corresponding increase in anti-trans murders, with black trans women being the primary target. Fueling this wave of hate is a bizarre obsession from many Republican politicians who delight in finding ways to make the lives of transgender Americans hell, especially if they are kids. According to translegislation.com, 2023 has already seen 499 anti-trans bills in 49 states (thank you, Delaware), and 43 that have passed.
How did transgender people suddenly become the demographic that it was politically expedient to hate?
If I’ve leaned anything in my 30+ years of studying hate groups, hate mongers never miss a passing bandwagon. In the 1920s, the “America First” Ku Klux Klan pivoted from anti-black hate to anti-immigrant hate as immigration patterns shifted to bring waves of Catholics and Jews to our shores. In the 1980’s, the KKK got in on the anti-gay hysteria as the AIDS epidemic gripped the country. A few years ago, hate groups leveled up their anti-Semitism as a means of going after Anthony Fauci and any Jewish doctor who thought it might be a good idea to wear a mask. Now that COVID has subsided, it seems to be transgender folks who are in the crosshairs of those that are perpetually angry about something that doesn’t actually affect them.
Let me put an underline on that point. If you are not transgender, another person being transgender has absolutely no impact on you one way or another. There are probably about 1.6 million trans people in the United States (according to a recent UCLA study). You don’t have to do anything or not do anything. Just let them exist. Just like we do with left-handed people (who right-handed people used to think were evil). Fox News would have you believe there is an army of transgender backstrokers competing on girls swim teams. These are the same people who previously wouldn’t shut up about “black rapists” and “Jewish pedophiles.” There’s not. And if there is one or two trans athletes raising the bar, it doesn’t effect you or Travis Tritt.
So why are rednecks across America pouring Bud Light down the drain and trying to find a “less gay” shitty beer? (Good luck on that one, Cleatus.)
Here’s two explanations.
First is the obvious one. Right-wing politicians, like Florida Nazi-wannabe Ron DeSantis, are using transphobia to gin up their white evangelical base. Let’s not forget the previously mentioned white-evangelical outfit known as the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a grip of white Christians that don’t know that Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist and think the Lord approved on shitting on marginalized people instead of gifting them loaves and fishes. This group is easier to manipulate than a prom full of horny teenagers. All you have to do is mention “sex” and “children” and the pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers are officially triggered.
Let’s be clear. Kids are more at risk from child molesting preachers than drag queens or anybody in the entire LGBTQ community. The religious right thinks transgender people are “sexualizing” kids. Not anymore than sex crazed cis-gender heterosexual people are. Everywhere I look I see those folks sucking face. I’ve already written about how not-kid friendly TV shows likeFamily Feudare. Trying to protect my 8-year-old from the nonstop sexuality coming from the non-queer folks is a losing battle. Someone expressing their gender is not “sexuality,” it’s life. And trans kids are dying by not being allowed to do it by an opportunistic political movement that sacrifices them at the alter of MAGA votes.
Second is a cognitive reason and has to do with our less-evolved friends who are firing on their knee jerk lizard brains. Research shows that these limbic brain creatures cannot handle complexity. Everything has to be in a very black or white binary. These are the same folks who feared “mulattos” and “quadroons” a hundred and fifty years ago. You had to fit into a nice racial category so they knew where to put you. Now that over 9 million Americans (including my daughter) are biracial they’ve moved onto to another anal retentive need to put people in a box.
To be fair, the last few decades America has been on a public education project to learn that sex and gender are two completely different concepts. We’ve spent so long conflating biological sex with sociological expressions of gender, you can’t fault folks for having trouble disentangling them. (“Gender reveal parties” are not. Genital reveal but not gender.) But we’re fully past that point now. Anyone who has a brain developed enough to understand the complexity of reality (“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”) gets that gender can be extremely fluid and doesn’t exist in a neat either/or binary. So we’re left with troglodytes, like Kid Rock, who flip out when “dude looks like a lady.” Their brains just cannot manage boundary bending. Take the Bud Light banning morons back to 1883 and they would have coming for biracial people with ropes. Have you ever seen Birth of a Nation (1915)? “Those mulattoes are sexualizing our children!!”
The saddest part of this political fad is that there is already a body count. Trans kids who can’t get gender affirming care have an elevated suicided rate. Trans people suffer from all kinds of health problems because of inequities in our health care system (just ask a trans man with ovarian cancer). Physical attacks on trans people has now taken on a sport-like aspect. There was a brutal murder here in suburban Portland in 2001. The killing of a trans woman named Lani Kai became a focal point of my early hate crime work here in Oregon. The good news is her murder would now be classified as a bias crime in Oregon, but the bad news is her murder is still unsolved 22 years later and joins the increasing number of case files that end up with trans women of color (and other queer folks) chilling in the morgue.
There is a historical parallel the maps the current anti-trans hysteria to the hundred and sixteen years of lynching African-Americans after slavery ended in 1865. The thousands of racial lynchings were driven by an irrational fear, that somehow black people were an existential (and sexual) threat to white people. The modern irrational fear, bubbling over in bastions of hate like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, is that transgender people are a threat to cisgender people. They’re not. They are human beings. The rest is convenient hysteria and it’s fueling the Republican death cult. Where southern Democrats championed the dehumanization of black people a hundred years ago, MAGA Republicans are now dehumanizing transgender people and it has to stop.
Now, I’m all for donating Kid Rock’s brain to science or sending thoughts and prayers into the void that one of Ron DeSantis’s three kids comes out as non-binary, but what I want to do is just beg the MAGA base to chill the fuck out and find a social problem that actually impacts them, like full access to healthcare or full access to lite beer. Whatever. Just leave trans kids alone.
Everything changed on September 26, 2012 at 10:15 AM (maybe 10:17, she was late). But first, the backstory. And it’s messy.
My forties were emotionally confusing. I had successfully risen up the academic ranks to a tenured full professor position but my love life was always in turmoil. I hadn’t yet connected the abuse I experienced as a child to the bad patterns I had perfected in adulthood. And work and romance tended to overlap. Pew research reports that most Americans meet their spouses at work, and I had habit of dating former students (with the emphasis on “former.”) While the university had no policy against relationships among faculty and university students, that line mattered to me. After grades were turned in, two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want. It never was an issue, nor should it have been. There were several respected professors who were married to former students. Let love rule.
About a dozen years ago, I had a brief relationship with a former student that started off fun but, as new relationships sometimes do, quickly hit a dead end. It was clear that not only were we not a good match, there were red flags popping up all over the place. (The university would later deem this woman “unstable.”) I tried to end it amicably but she was not having any of it and went into full Glenn Close/Fatal Attraction mode. She found allies in the administration to champion her cause. They’d drag me into regular administrative tribunals and lecture me about “power dynamics.” (One of these administrators was having a “romantic, amorous, and/or sexual” relationship the administrator who had appointed her to her six-figure job.) I hired a lawyer who shut it all down and I recorded her confession that she made all her accusations up. Hoping to expedite my return to normalcy, I offered to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t date anyone who was enrolled at the university. Although I did briefly date an administrator after that. Because irony won’t be lost on me.
September 24, 2012 was the first day of the 2012-2013 school year and I had asked to teach a Sociology 101 class that started on Monday mornings. I wanted to be the first professor a fresh batch of college students would encounter. So I put a lot of work into that first class. It was a true performance, a sermon on the salvation of critical thinking. There’s always a few students who blow off the first class because they think nothing important happens on Day 1, and it always annoys me because everything important happens on Day 1. I make note of their absence and develop a grudge. One of those absentees was named Andrea Barrios.
So before she walked in late on Wednesday, I already had a bias against Ms. Barrios. Then she walked through the door. I’m not being overly dramatic when I say it felt like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It was an out-of-body experience. (She has told me of a similar experience.) My first clear thought was, “Oh no, universe, do not put this woman in front of me. I signed a contract!” as she sat in the front row and smiled. I was on the tail end of a two year relationship with a wonderful woman that was sputtering because I didn’t have a basic understanding of how to be in a relationship. But I was a good professor and stayed perfectly professional the entire term (while my teaching assistant routinely hit on Andrea). I stayed focused, as hard as that was.
At the end of the term, I posted on Facebook that I was going to see local singer Storm Large at dark club to celebrate the end of the quarter. It was a rainy December night and I was sitting by myself at the end of the bar when Andrea walked in. Of course I was thrilled to see her. She was probably the smartest person in a class of a hundred students and she radiated. She bought me a shot of tequila and said we should hang out sometime. I told her I didn’t date students. She bought me another shot of tequila and we ended up making out at the bar.
A mature man would have stopped right there. I began building my career as sociology professor at 17 as a freshman in college. It didn’t make a lot of sense to risk it over a woman in her twenties, as fascinating as she may be. I invited her to dinner the next night so I could explain the situation, that I had signed a contract with the university and if I dated her I could lose my job. “Maybe nobody will find out,” she said. That’s all I heard. I was already head over heals in love. I just wanted to be near her. She tried to get into another school to avoid the conflict but that didn’t happen. We were two adults who just wanted to be together. Two years later we were married with a baby.
But it wasn’t easy for her. I was only just starting to figure my shit out. The first lesson was how I tended to keep old relationships on the back burner in case the current relationship went south (a product of deep abandonment fears). I learned that only burned the person I was with and I almost lost Andrea. Fortunately, it was a surprisingly easy fix. So many of my other issues, wrapped in my narcissistic tendencies, made her feel invisible. But, as a tenured professor, I represented the stability she craved. Then all that changed.
This is the part of the story that involves a psychotic inmate in an Oregon prison. (“Psychotic” isn’t hyperbole. It’s in his medical records.) He was a “former” racist skinhead who I had worked with before his incarceration. He had decided, for some stupid reason, that I had aggrieved him. He made it his personal mission to destroy me and found allies in the university who were endlessly annoyed by my role as a faculty union agitator. I was dragged back in before the administrative mob, with our daughter in her baby carrier, and asked me if my wife was a university student. “Yeah,” I said, “She’s taking an online Women’s Studies class.” That was it. They had me. I was toast.
My long career was successfully destroyed, not by a nazi skinhead, but my failure to make better choices. I could blame Glenn Close girl, psychotic skinhead, or a university administrator who was banging her boss, but it all came down to bad decisions I made over the course of years. I just wasn’t ready to accept that fact.
Who was I without my career? Certainly not the stable provider Andi and our baby needed. My issues began to cascade. I thought I was one of the good guys, but I centered my anger, creating less and less room for her in the relationship. To her credit, she not only finished her undergraduate work but earned a Master’s Degree and began teaching her own classes. All while I tried to pick up the pieces of my life and figure out how the hell to be a good father and husband.
There are numerous details but suffice it to say she told me in very clear terms what she needed but I was so wrapped up in my pain and anger that I repeatedly failed to deliver. It was when things were at their worst, that I started remembering the experiences of early sexual abuse. But it’s not like one has a realization that leads to an immediate change, “Oh, I was abused. Now I can stop being a self-centered prick.” I still had a ways to fall before I hit the bottom. And that happened on last New Year’s Eve when Andi told me she was in love with someone else. The floor opened up and I was ready to cease to exist. I felt beyond repair. Beyond redemption. There was nowhere to go but oblivion.
After that, as I have written much about, I found a wonderful therapist who helped me not only connect the dots from my trauma to my behavior, but who gave me practical tools to start to change the patterns. My trip to Ukraine to resettle refugees this past spring encouraged me to be a source of healing instead of pain. And Andi’s patience helped me to see how childish my behavior tended to be. I’ve learned that love is more than a feeling but behavior in the small moments; a comforting look, a curious question, a snarky text not sent.
I’m marking this ten year point for two reasons. First, that psychotic skinhead is out of prison and still threatening me. I need a public record of my journey. But the main reason is that this ten year effort to deconstruct myself and build a better version of me may not be enough to be Husband 2.0 to Andi, but it’s been worth the attempt. We all can repair harm and fix ourselves to reduce harm to the people we love. I’m proud of who I am becoming.
There’s so much going on in the world. The Earth is literally on fire. It’s a nice distraction from my personal problems. I can doom-scroll through some GoPro footage from the battlefields of Ukraine or watch endless hours of commentary on the January 6th hearings. I used to drink through the rough patches. Now I just mainline the outside world.
As a Pisces, I tend to be overdramatic. Things aren’t that bad. Just the summer doldrums of separation. I’ve been trying to learn more about co-dependent relationships and, man, did I have one. I’m not 100% sure that learning about it makes you any less co-dependent, or will help Andi end up back under the same roof, but it sure shines a light and why we were stuck and not making any progress. She was the fixer and I was he who perpetually needed be fixed.
I’ve been having some pretty good conversations about the topic with my therapist. Knowing I’m a Pisces, she’s liberal with the diagrams. She drew two overlapping equal sized circles on a piece of paper and explained that in a healthy relationship two people take up equal space and they overlap in the space of their relationship but they have a larger part of themselves that’s not defined by the relationship. And they can both bring in things to share in the overlap or keep them as part of themselves.
In a co-dependent relationship, one person is a bigger circle that completely envelopes the other circle. That enveloped person has a) a smaller space, b) has no self outside the relationship and c) is always struggling against the confines of the bigger circle. That was us. Even though I encouraged her life outside of our relationship (she got a master’s degree and was an elected officer in her union without my help), when we were together, I did a pretty good job of swallowing her back into what I was jokingly referred to as “Randyland” (a term she understandably loathed). Just like how a person of color is forced to define themselves in relation to “whiteland,” her existence was shaped by our relationship instead of the other way around.
My therapist asked me to conjure up a romantic image of us and I remembered our first trip to Andi’s home town of Morelia, Mexico in 2013. Instead of me being the tour guide in Portland, she led me through her beautiful city, holding my hand. I imagined myself as a balloon safely in her grasp, seeing the world through her eyes. But it was just a flip of our co-dependent dynamic. Now I was the small circle, encompassed by her. As wonderful as it felt, it still wasn’t balanced.
Then she asked me to remember another romantic moment that seemed more balanced and I immediately flashed to our trip to Oslo, Norway in 2018, a city that was new to both us. I was returning from a day at a conference and Andi was coming to find me because she had discovered the most amazing record store on earth and when we ran into each other on the sidewalk, we were those perfectly equal interlocking circles.
The reality is that we had those moments (our first week in a youth hostel on Isla Mujeres with sand in the bed and Macklemore playing every night), but there was a lot more suffocation in Randyland. I get why she needed to break free.
OK, this is the part where I link it to Trump. Hang with me.
You know the MAGA thing? That “Make America Great Again” implies that America’s not great but it was sometime in the mythical past. Trump picked 1950 when America was last great. 1950, the peak of Jim Crow segregation. 1950, before the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. If you were a black transperson in a wheelchair, America was not great in 1950. Or a woman. And TVs sucked. Give me my 2022 Samsung flatscreen TV and my pronouns and leave 1950 to your back & white fantasy. Father knew best, or so we were told. The MAGA crowd wants that bullshit past back. They dream of the by-gone days of Jim Crow. Colin Kaepernick “knew his place” in 1950.
But that’s the thing. We over-nostalgize the past. It was always better back then. Music was better. Fashion was better. It was a “simpler” time, blah, blah, blah. In fact, the past was both great and shitty, just like the present. And it was plenty complex, but we were familiar with the complexity. The future is uncertain and the past is a cozy blanket. No wonder people want to go back to it. And that tendency just gets worse the older you get. The 2010s, ah those were the days. The past is a safe haven for the timid. The future is scary as hell. You saw what happened with Bitcoin. But you’ve really gotta embrace the unknown, as frightening as it is. It might kick you in the crotch, but it’s better than spending your life reminiscing about your baseball card collection.
We do the same damn thing when a relationship is ending. “But it was so great! Look at how happy we are in these pictures.” The reality, like America in 1950, is more complex. It was great and shitty. There were plenty of hard times. But I remember it more fondly because I was the planet she revolved around. I was white Father Knows Best guy. For her it was Jim Crow. She was the “colored girl” who needed to get the hell out of Mississippi.
Coming to terms with co-dependency means acknowledging the imbalance. I don’t know if Andi and I will have any more “Oslo moments.” I hope so. But I understand why she had to escape Randyland. I’m escaping it, too.
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.
Watching the Wheels 