Betty Friedan

President Snowflake: How Trump’s fragile masculinity made me a better man.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

November 19, 2020

If there was ever a time America needed a leader, it’s now as COVID deaths surge past a quarter million. But sad Donald Trump is in his bunker, tweeting madly that he won the election “by a lot.” No stimulus program for Americans falling into homelessness. No national mask mandate to save additional lives. Just Baby Donald having a temper tantrum and a circus of sycophants too afraid to tell the Emperor that the world is laughing at him.

The pathetic end of Donald J. Trump is not only a lesson in how not to be a president. It’s also a vital lesson in how not to be a man. Of course, Mr. “Grab’ em by the pussy” has provided that service for years.

The lockdowns of 2020 have certainly presented challenges for single people, but there have been challenges for those of us that are boo’d up as well. The pandemic has forced many of us married and “coupled up” (as they say on Love Island) to learn how to truly co-exist in a confined space, without the easy exit hatch of “let’s just go out.” There’s only so much Netflixing you can do. At some point, it gets real. And as if providing (finally) some kind of national service, there’s President Hissy-fit giving the men of America a perfect example of how not to handle this moment.

From the very beginning, Trump has made it all about him. From his word-salad lie-fests before his adoring cult crowds to his denial of the Biden victory, “America first” has always been code for “Trump first” and you almost feel sorry for the schleps that still fall for this con man. (“Quick! Donate to President Trump’s legal team so he prove those black votes in Detroit and Atlanta were illegal! We take PayPal!”) Trump always centers himself and you don’t have to look at Melania’s face to see that that’s his fatal flaw.

But this isn’t about Trump. It’s about all us men who do the same thing. We’ve been socialized to believe it’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world and women are there as our support system. (BEHIND every great man… is a woman who should be out in front.) The world is about our male hopes and plans and adventures and successes and failures and wet dreams. That’s why Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) resonated with so many women. It simply asked, but what about me? Arn’t I a person, too?

Sadly, the second wave feminist movement that Friedan helped launch did not fully humanize females in America. It made a lot of progress (Thank you, Title IX and hello Vice President Harris!), but it still looks like a penis-centered culture. At least American Ninja Warrior puts the the top two female contestants through to the finals. We can find plenty of reasons to find cracks in patriarchy. (I’ll credit Nancy Pelosi for keeping Trump’s nuts in a vice grip and the daughters of NFL fans for prioritizing Beyoncés BLM anthems over Go Daddy commercials and cheerleaders in halter tops.) We can see progress all around us (if we turn blind eye to the epidemic of rape in the country), but there are still people who want to make America “Father Knows Best” again.

We can talk about this on a societal level (RBG was right. We’ve had generations of all-male Supreme Courts. When do we get an all-female Supreme Court?) But this is about the personal journey of men stepping away from the destructive (including to men) effects of patriarchy.

More than that, this about me learning how to love my wife.

If patriarchy, on a macro-level, is about centering men’s voice and minds in society, on a personal level it’s about doing the same Goddamn thing in our relationships. Hi ladies, welcome to my world. Can you make me a sandwich? Feminist Dorothy E. Smith has written how women are given control of the “domestic sphere” so men can have pretty much everything else on earth. And that can include the space in a relationship.

Now, to be clear, I have claimed feminism as a core value in my life since the 1980s and proudly left my job to become a stay-at-home dad, inspired by my favorite househusband John Lennon. I can thrill you with stories of escorting women into abortion clinics past the screaming banshees of Operation Rescue and challenging students to accept that God is most likely female, but I still internalized patriarchy in the same sad way I internalized white supremacy.

That became most clear this year during long, under quarantine, conversations with my wife. Like most people, we’ve had our fair share of COVID-magnified conflicts; about money, about parenting, about who is going to wash the dishes. She was quick to point out how quickly I would go into defensive mode and try to “prove” my case, like we were on opposing debating teams. We’re on the same team! I forgot! But it became all about me and how I was somehow aggrieved.

What I should have been doing is asking questions. Why do you feel this way? What can I do to help? I should have centered her and put my amazing wife first in the discussion, but instead  I retreated into “Randyland,” wondering why she had a “well, fuck this shit” look on her face. Maybe if I slept downstairs I could comeback, refreshed with an even clearer articulation of my position, complete with PowerPoint slides. Meanwhile, my wife felt more and more alone as I plotted strategies in my head instead of re-coupling (also a term from Love Island).

This is going to sound completely basic to many people (and maybe a few men), but I have literally burned through every relationship by doing this. By making it about me. That’s not how love is supposed to work. You’re supposed to put your partner’s emotional well-being before your own, but in patriarchal America I didn’t get that role modeling, not from my father and not from Starsky & Hutch. The result was relationships crashing and burning and me thinking that I was just a “psycho-chick magnet.” If they were psycho, it was because I centered myself instead of them.

There is a parallel phenomenon here with regard to race called White Fragility. America has the handbook and is starting to figure that out. (Thanks, Robin!) It’s not about you, Karen, so stop centering yourself and start centering black voices. Maybe, we need a book called Male Fragility: Why Men Get Their Panties in a Wad.

My wife is strong as hell and sure enough doesn’t need a guy like me who doesn’t put his partner before himself. I should have gotten that lesson a long time ago. I’m not the king of my castle. But somewhere, between long, hard conversations with her and watching Baby Trump center himself instead of the nation we hired him to lead, I got it. Don’t be like Trump. Hey Donald, it’s not about you. It’s about America. She’s trying to tell you how she feels. Please listen.

My best friend is 4

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

August 17, 2018

When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, illusion of the “happy homemaker” was forever shattered. Women were more than “Mrs. Joe Blow,” finding a sublime happiness in a spotless house with dinner on the table at six sharp. Feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith wrote that women were given the domestic sphere of the home so men could occupy the whole of the public sphere. Suddenly, the word was out and girls and women said, “I’m coming out into the wide word. Time for a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T!” (Forever love to our queen.)

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My experience flipping the script and becoming a house husband while my wife went off to work at various Portland law firms revealed some unexpected truths. Expectedly, as Friedan would have predicted, I hate housework. The reality of the that drudgery came rather quickly. But I’ve found a sense of fulfillment out of getting dinner on the table. The thrill of the grocery store hunt for ingredients (“Excuse me. Is pesto a spice?”), the kitchen assembly (while this week’s Spotify Discover Weekly playlist plays behind the Food Network website), and then the ultimate cliffhanger (Will they eat it??). John Lennon once said that, when he became a house husband, preparing a meal that his wife and child actually liked was better than making a hit record. I can totally relate, John. All we are saying is give pasta a chance!

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But the other part that has crept in is the intense bond I have built with my child, who turns four today. That moment when we brought her home from the wild ride of her birth, she was just this helpless little blob that looked like my father but acted more like a slug than a member of the family. In those four years she has become a full-fledged person with the world in her sticky palm. Yeah, she’s cute but,  yeah, she knows how to work it. Somehow she picked up on the social lessons of how to work a room. She’s got work to do before she truly understands how to win friends and influence enemies. She’s still fairly id driven – “What can you do for me? That might work for our emotionally stunted president, but we want her to ask, “What can I do for you?” I guess, until then, she’s just half-fledged.

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My wife can see the bond between Cozy and I. We have our own secret language (called Kupa Sana) and her weird hand mannerisms are the same as mine. (Sorry, kid.) We fill our days with adventures. This week we spent some time wandering around Lone Fir Cemetery, full of nineteenth century headstones of Oregon pioneers and twenty-first century headstones of Russian immigrants who lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet empire. We talked about life and death and how we can be sad when people die but happy because their memories surround us. “You mean, the spirits of all these dead people are floating around here?” she asked. I was worried that the death conversation would traumatize her, but, instead it gave her a sense of calm. I guessing that’s because she’s half Mexican (and really loved Coco).

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A few days later we trucked up to Sauvie Island to pick blackberries on an organic farm. The smoke from the west coast wildfires hung low, but we lost ourselves in rows and rows of sweet berries, learning which ones were sour (“Daddy, this one’s not ready. Can I spit it out?”) and which ones were perfectly sweet. We were in a little cubby hole of fruit, with the occasional tiny green frog crossing our path, laughing and eating more berries than we were putting in the bucket. Her face and hands were purple and I had a moment where I thought she had been sent to me from another dimension to help me connect the real world to the one that exists in dreams.

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It’s strange having such an intense connection to a child. Andrea is right in that we celebrate Cozy as the intersection of that’s everything that’s right about us. We had to bust through some seriously evil roadblocks just to be a couple. Cozy represents everything that is pure about our desire to be together. Her birthday is a reason to celebrate what a good job we’ve done. But she’s also her own entity that’s full of depth and wonder separate from us. Last night we took Cozy to see a band recreate The Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers’ album and on the first note of the third song she screamed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!” This is my child. I vowed not to be the parent in “She’s Leaving Home” and held her tight.

Each moment of these four years has been a gift. I wonder about the fathers who see the “domestic sphere” as an alien, feminine space. Do they know what they are missing? Do they know the unadulterated thrill of having a child say, “Daddy, you make the best spaghetti ever!” (even when you know that they’ve only had spaghetti made by you). As much as I’m ready to return to full-time public life, this experience has given me a great friend and expanded my soul. I might not know who’s playing in town this weekend, but I know someone who digs nature walks,  old Batman episodes, and endless blackberries, and that’s cool enough for me. Happy birthday, Cozy Pozy.

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