What Taylor Swift Tells Us About the Fragility of Men: Welcome to the Backlash

February 1, 2024February 8, 2024 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

February 1, 2024

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.

Why Are Conservative Boys So Triggered By Barbie?

August 6, 2023August 7, 2023 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

August 6, 2023

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.”

Seriously, What’s Wrong with Men? Lighting Fires in Post-Roe America

May 13, 2022May 13, 2022 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

May 12, 2022

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 fragile men freak out over a Gillette ad

January 17, 2019January 17, 2019 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 9 Comments

January 17, 2019

I’ve never been a big fan of Gillette razors. Gillette is owned by Proctor & Gamble, one of the least-socially responsible mega-corporations and I remember boycotting them in the 1980s over their commitment to animal testing. So imagine my surprise this week to learn that Gillette was launching an awareness campaign called The Best Men Can Be that acknowledged the issue of toxic masculinity. What wasn’t surprising was the backlash from snowflake “macho” men who saw the corporation trying to dismantle maleness itself.

The ad for the campaign aired this week and it’s powerful, linking the issues of bullying and sexual harassment to the type of “boys will be boys” masculinity that for too long has gone unchecked. And when it is checked, for just one minute and 48 seconds, a lot of bros simply freak out, swearing they will never buy a Gillette product again. These men fall into three categories.

Misogynists who think it is their (male) God-given right to harass women and bully boys and men they view as less “manly.”
Men who think the term “toxic masculinity” refers to all forms of masculinity. (As I’ve written, masculinity isn’t toxic. Toxic masculinity is.)
Men who don’t understand that gender is something that we learn. We learn different definitions of masculinity at different times in history and in different places in the world. Masculinity has very little to do with having a penis.

When gauging the freak out, you see plenty of all three types of men. They’ve already made response videos, which I can’t stomach to watch. And I’ve given up on trying to educate these men in the comments section on the YouTube video. They are in full defense mode, many hilariously claiming the Gillette is a “Marxist corporation.” Seriously.

Here are a few of the prize-winners just from today:

Gillette the gayest a man can get – kdubs_r

Legal system: Innocent until proven guilty. Gillette: Men, guilty until proven innocent. – Nathan Drake

You do know that feminists are quite proud to not shave right? – Ben Haworth

“Because the boys watching today will be the women of tomorrow ” – Taffe M

It’s Toxic Irresponsibility. Not toxic masculinity. Why would you inject gender into this? The fight is against social irresponsibility. There are just as many irresponsible women in society as there are men. Why is the tip of the spear pointed only at men here? – Nic 9Volt

And my favorite;

Men account for around 80% of suicides. Men are most likely to fall victim to violent crimes. Men work the most dangerous jobs. More men die on the front lines of war/ Men have shorter life spans. GTFO of here with your social justice propaganda this is not a man’s world in the slightest – Mickey Rourke

Mickey just made the case that toxic masculinity is killing men without even knowing it!

I have a feeling that someone at Fox News or some alt right website told their mob of triggered bros to flood the comment section, because, it’s pretty hilarious/sad. Maybe I live in a Portland bubble where most men know there are many ways of doing masculinity that don’t include beating up “sissys,” harassing women, of going on shooting sprees for that matter. These mouth breathers seem to think Gillette is describing ALL MEN. Maybe they missed former NFL player and male feminist (and TV hunk) Terry Crews in the ad saying “Men need to hold other men accountable.”

The first category of men, the committed misogynists, are going to see what they want to see in this commercial. They’ve labeled it “anti-man,” “anti-white,” and “anti-American.” They are committed to their inherited rights to have their authority remain unchallenged and will be in high attack mode to prevent a woman from being elected in 2020. (Several of the negative comments on YouTube reference doughy rich boy Donald Trump as the paragon of masculinity.)

The other two categories can be reached through education. Why is violent crime overwhelming committed by men? Toxic masculinity, but there are scores of men who model other forms of masculinity that resists the harm men do to themselves and others because “boys will be boys.” Where does this toxic masculinity come from? We learn it at an early age when we learn that “boys don’t cry” and you show a girl that you like her by punching her. If there was ever a time for a sociologist it’s right now!

This is the message that I’ve been sharing with my students for nearly thirty years. We can construct gender any way we want. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad and I love Marvel superhero movies. This week I called out a guy on Facebook for referring to a female elected member of congress as a “bimbo.” Another guy, a rather well-known former cop named CW Jenson, claimed that I must have “burned my man card.” I told him I proudly burned it in college. “It’s called growing up,” I said. I’m just as much of a man as Mr. TV Cop.

Terry Crews is right. It’s up to boys and men to shut this shit down whenever and wherever it appears, on Facebook and in the office. I was walking Cozy past a schoolyard to the park recently and two middle school boys were beating up a third. I broke it up but where were the teachers? Boys will be boys? Silence is permission and it’s time to get loud. THAT IS NOT COOL!

It’s not surprising to see the Old Boys Club freak out over the Gillette ad. The writing is on the wall. The times they are-a-changing. And the genie is out of the bottle. Women are holding a mirror up to men’s faces and they don’t like what they see. Some men will change. Others will just try to smash the mirror. As Gloria Steinem recently told me, the moment when a woman is most at risk of being murdered by her abuser is when she finally tries to escape him. The abusers are fighting hard as we try to break free. I hope efforts like this will mean my daughter will be safer than my wife is and my mother was. In the meantime, I think I need a shave. Know any good razor companies?

2018 in Review – Grow up and see the world

December 31, 2018December 31, 2018 ~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

December 31, 2018

It’s a universal truth – time passes more quickly as you get older. The span from 1970 to 1978 seemed to be a millennia when I was a kid. The jump from 2010 to 2018 was just a minute. And it doesn’t seem much has changed in those years (other than the fact we had a sane intelligent grown-up in the White House). The #1 song the first week of 2010 was Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK.” Think about the change of music from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1968 – Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” What was new in 2018?

It’s hard to sum up a block of 365 days. When I think of every stupid thing Donald Trump has done in 2018, I also think of Black Panther, the March for Our Lives, and the massive blue wave that brought the grown-ups back to Congress in November. It seemed like this would be the year that Mueller brought down Baby Trump, but let the man take his time and do it right. There are currently 17 (known) investigations related to Trump. There have been numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and prison sentences so far in this “witch hunt.” Trump is the guy who famously said, “I surround myself with the best people. I know the best people.” 2019 will be fun.

The madness of King Donald aside, 2018 on the home-front has been an exciting year that has seen my feet stepping on to more airplanes than ever. My work on extremism has taken me all over the world, including a UN workshop in Abu Dhabi, UAE, as well as scholarly meetings in Oslo, Norway and Washington DC. There were a few presentations in NYC, one in Chicago, and a ten-day community leader exchange to the UK to study countering violent extremism programs. My participation in DC on a congressional panel on hate groups was covered live on C-SPAN. And I did dozens of local presentations and trainings. Andrea came with me for the Oslo (via London) trip and I had a blast bringing Cozy with me on one of the New York trips. (That girl can now hail a cab.) So many highlights.

Every time I left the USA, people wanted to understand what’s happened to America? How could we let something like Donald Trump happen? I had to remind them that all countries have problems with isolationist nationalist demagogues. We just happened to end up with one who was a TV star. This also weighed heavily when Andrea and Cozy went to Mexico this year and we had to have multiple plans in case the racist Trump immigration policy (You don’t hear about any Canadians being deported) separated mother and child at the border.

On a personal level, the search for full time work continues. But I seemed to be working a lot, regardless. I clocked in a full year of teaching at Portland Community College with some of the most amazing and dedicated students I’ve ever had in my almost 30 years of teaching. I conducted numerous diversity trainings and led workshops for teachers. This year saw the birth of Randy Blazak Consulting LLC, to facilitate the work I do on criminal cases and consulting projects for the city. And of course, there were the weekly educational bus tours with the Fair Housing Council of Oregon. The best part was the fact that Andrea began her teaching work at Portland State and we could grade papers together.

I don’t know how to summarize a year. It seems like we started the year with a government shutdown and here we are again. I do know that Cozy went from 3 to 4, and that’s a light year in child development. She started the year ballet dancing in the living room and she’s ending 2018 by teaching us how to hula dance. My favorite new thing has been Andrea and my YouTube channel, Vinyl Fetish, where you can find us (often after too many drinks) discussing records. 2018 whizzed by like a whir of images; Finding Andrea in a record store in Oslo, Cozy heading off to see a Broadway musical (Frozen), me seeing Donald Trump in the back of his presidential limo, tweeting as he pulled into the White House. I have a feeling 2019 will be much more real, especially after the Democrats set up shop in the House.

I didn’t keep up my furious blogging schedule in 2019, but I did get some good pieces out (along with a piece for Huffington Post). Of the 43 articles on a wide variety of topics, my piece on Brett Kavanaugh and bro culture was the most popular post, followed by my Handmaid’s Tale-inspired “America is Becoming a Dystopian Nightmare: What Do We Do Now???” There will be plenty to write about in 2019 as Trump’s house of cards caves in, Cozy turns 5, Andrea and I settle into our roles as teachers, and patriarchy tries to desperately hold on to its violent reign of terror.

Let me revisit one of my favorite moments of 2018, meeting Gloria Steinem at a event I was speaking at in Manhattan. I asked her how she was explaining the whole Trump thing. She said, very clearly, that the moment a women is most at risk of being murdered by her abuser is when she is finally breaking free of him. We won’t be murdered. Let’s break free in 2019.

2018 WTW Posts

Let’s End Duality: Make America Grey Again (January 4, 2018)

In Defense of the Classroom (January 12, 2018)

Our White Supremacist President (January 16, 2018)

Gender – Nature vs. Nurture 7: Baby – Toddler – Girl (January 25, 2018)

Confronting Ableism by “Looking” in the Mirror (February 5, 2018)

On becoming the working poor or How I robbed Peter to pay Paul (February 9, 2018)

The Vinyl Fetish Club is here for your sexy music needs (February 14, 2018)

America is eating its young. Maybe it’s time to get the hell out. (February 15, 2018)

Generation Z will turn this gunship around (February 23, 2018)

My Conversation with Gloria Steinem (March 2, 2018)

Masculinity Isn’t Toxic. Toxic Masculinity Is (March 9, 2018)

Dad Love: An Open Letter to Non-Breeders (March 19, 2018)

What Do We Give the World? (March 29, 2018)

Jukebox Hero 3: Right Here, Right Now Watching the World Wake Up (April 5, 2018)

Dropping F Bombs and White Privilege (April 12, 2018)

Talking About Gender and Violence in the Middle East (April 19, 2018)

Incels: Just the latest chapter in the war on women (April 26, 2018)

Jukebox Hero 4: I’m Wide Awake – U2 (Part 2) (April 29, 2018)

Get out of your country! (May 15, 2018)

Entering the Phallic Phase: Psychoanalytic Feminists, Help! (May 24, 2018)

Guest Essay: The Status of Women by Andi Barrios (May 31, 2018)

Thinking about Racial Reparations (June 10, 2018)

Watching America die, I sent a Statue of Liberty to Donald Trump (June 20, 2018)

America is Becoming a Dystopian Nightmare: What Do We Do Now??? (June 28, 2018)

We’re all intersectional (just some more than others) (July 6, 2018)

Witnessing the end of the American Century from the former British Empire (July 14, 2018)

Imagining a Time After Nations (July 20, 2018)

What I’ve Learned about Countering Violent Extremism (is the opposite of what I’ve been told to believe) (August 3, 2018)

What Do We Do About the Nazis After Charlottesville? (August 11, 2018)

My best friend is 4 (August 17, 2018)

Can I be a feminist, too? (August 24, 2018)

She ain’t heavy, she’s my daughter: Trying to understand child abuse (August 31, 2018)

Are you “friends” with a Russian bot? Taking a stand against idiocracy (September 13, 2018)

Stop saying racists are bad people (September 21, 2018)

Brett Kavanaugh and Bro Culture: Let’s Look in the Mirror (September 28, 2018)

Columbus Day: Celebrating child rapists (October 7, 2018)

Taking Manhattan with a 4-year old (October 23, 2018)

President Trump is not smart enough not to throw America into a civil war (October 29, 2018)

At which mass shooting will your loved ones be killed? (November 8, 2018)

I’ve been given a small space, against the wall (November 19, 2018)

Stone Mountain is a rock with a lot of racial baggage: Finding solutions (November 22, 2018)

“I just had to let it go…” On Parenting and Mortality (December 8, 2018)

Dad’s Top 10 Favorite New LPs of 2018 (December 20, 2018)

2018 in Review – Grow up and see the world (December 31, 2018)

My Conversation with Gloria Steinem

March 2, 2018March 3, 2018 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

March 2, 2018

New York City is always filled with unexpected moments and celebrity sitings. This week my wife saw Robert DeNiro walking down MacDougal Street in the Village while was I was staring at my phone, texting a friend. My moment was when feminist godmother Gloria Steinmem walked into an event that I was scheduled to speak at on Tuesday and suddenly this woman, whose pictures I had pasted into PowerPoint slides and classroom handouts on feminist history, was standing in a room with me. There are few people, living or dead, who are more associated with the modern American feminist movement than Ms. Steinem.

We were in the Big Apple to help launch Michael Kimmel’s new book called Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into-And Out of-Violent Extremism. Kimmel is one of the leading scholars on the pitfalls and promises of masculinity. His 2008 bestseller, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, was required reading for my Social Theory students at Portland State. Healing From Hate follows the story of men who have left the hate movement and it recognizes that it wasn’t hate that brought them in but a deep pain associated with a crisis in their gendered expectations of how the world should be. The event was held at the downtown campus of Fordham University, which is part of Lincoln Center. There was wine and spanakopita, and Gloria Steinem.

I ran into the auditorium to tell Andrea who was in the house. “Go talk to her!” she said. “And get a picture.” It turns out she’s friend of Michael Kimmel’s and came to support him at his event. “Did you see Gloria Steinem is here?” he asked me. I just made some sounds that were not actual words and then, not wanting to wait until she was mobbed made a beeline to talk to her.

“Hi Gloria, I’m on the panel tonight and I just wanted to say hello.” I said something about being a feminist criminologist and I wasn’t nervous about speaking that night until I saw her arrive. She said something to the effect of “thank you for your service” and that we’re here to support each other and that I shouldn’t be nervous. I immediately relaxed and just noticed how, at almost 84, perfectly she had aged from the young firebrand infiltrating the Playboy club, to the founder of Ms. Magazine, to now, the elder states-person of American feminism. So I blathered on a bit about how I fell into feminist theory through my research on racist skinheads and now study the toxic masculinity in prisons. Then I thought, Holy shit, I’m talking to Gloria Steinem. I need to ask her a question.

“Okay, since this is rare opportunity for me. I have to ask you, what the hell is going on in this country. What’s your take on the whole Trump thing?” And then she laid this goddess wisdom at my feet.

“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. We are finally escaping our abuser and he is violently attacking us. But we can do it. We can finally break free.”

Bam.

That said it all in one elegant but ugly analogy. When Trump was elected Steinem’s sister in the struggle, Angela Davis, called the shocking election the “last gasp of dying white male supremacy.” Trump and his bullies want to drag us back to before Gloria and the feminists upset the applecart. He says he is not a feminist but is the “greatest supporter” of women and even claimed to break the glass ceiling “for” women. The man does not know what feminism is and the past year of Trump policies have been a executive version of a drunk husband in his “wife beater” telling the Mrs. to get back in the kitchen. The Alt Right shock troops and their president excusing domestic abusers (“He’s a great guy!”) are all connected. Hell, Trump would have raced into that school shooting even without a gun. He’s THAT macho. America is great again! Now make me a sandwich.

So we talked a bit more about her hopefulness and I added that the kids in Florida are the indicator of where we are headed and that I had a theory about the fourth wave of feminism.

“Oh, I don’t buy any of that stuff about waves. It’s all just one wave,” said the Second Wave poster child.

“Okay, then I guess I shouldn’t tell you my theory.”

“No please, go ahead,” she said nicely, as if I could offer any insight on feminism to the woman who wrote the book.

I told her the next step was what our friend Michael Kimmel was doing, to encourage men to embrace feminism and see it as not only an act of social justice but a way to liberate themselves from the limitations of patriarchy.

“Men, have been doing that since the sixties,” she said, alluding to the men’s groups that pioneered consciousness raising but remained fairly isolated on college campuses and places where white men had the resources to “dialogue” in “rap sessions.” My campaign to expand that discussion to young and diverse men got a positive nod.

“This generation of boys is really different,” I said, explaining how I often go to high schools to talk to classes about these issues. “I love to tell young men about how when I was their age someone started telling us that ‘Real men don’t eat quiche,’ which I hated because I loved quiche. I tell them real men go to the store to buy tampons for the woman in their lives. Half of the teenage boys squirm and respond in horror but the other half say, ‘I already do that!'”

She laughed and told me about how her date that evening had written a piece in the early 70s about how different things would be if men could menstruate (which she rewrote for Ms. in 1978). I felt like I was carrying her torch. That we were parallel lines and it was cool as hell. We got a few pictures together, which I immediately uploaded to Facebook. Even though taking my wife to New York for a few days was an epic treat, that picture will go up on the mantle.

The event itself was incredible. Michael discussed his book and how racist men don’t stop being racist because someone told them their racism was stupid. An excerpt from an upcoming film about the topic by documentarian Peter Hutchison was shown. I’m in it so I wasn’t sure how to react when my face appeared up on the big screen. And then an assembled panel of former racists, representing the organization Life After Hate, and researchers spoke. The two researchers were myself and Kathleen Blee, who has done some amazing work on women in organized racist movements, including the Ku Klux Klan. Gloria sat in the front row and every time I tried to bring the conversation back to gender I’d look at her as if to say, “You’re the reason I’m talking about this.”

I know things like this happen in New York all the time, but there can be magical moments when you connect with someone, human to human, who has inspired you. I’ll always hope I didn’t come off as an annoying fanboy and I’ll sit with the fantasy that maybe she was actually inspired by something I said that night in Manhattan.

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