patriarchy

Beta Trump: The Day the King Fell Off the Hill

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 12, 2024

I was 18 or 19 when I first heard the line, “Real men don’t eat quiche.” I remember being so confused because I loved quiche! Eggs, pie, it’s the perfect meal! Was I not a real man? What if I ate quiche with one hand and bashed someone over the head with lead pipe with the other? Where was this guidebook for what was and wasn’t the permitted behavior for real men, so we wouldn’t become fake men?

Judith Butler, the philosopher who wrote Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), took issue with any attempt to define “real men” or what makes a “natural woman.” These are human inventions, invented by humans who have no actual authority over such designations. Sociologists know that gender is fluid and changes across time and space. What was masculine in 1954 is quite different from what is masculine in 2024. My own research on racist skinheads found them largely motivated by this changing nature of masculinity, as their manly factory jobs were offshored and “their women” declared their independence and began bringing home bigger paychecks. For Butler, gender was a performance and, boy, did the skinheads perform.

So it’s with great amusement that I watch the buffoonish performance of masculinity by former President Trump. This child of privilege, who has never lifted anything heavier than a golf club, has routinely pretended to be a strongman. On his first run for president, he regularly told his supporters to “knock the hell out of” protestors. When, as president, he contracted COVID, he defiantly ripped his mask off on the White House balcony (and was then whisked off to be treated by the nation’s top doctors). When an assassins bullet barely grazed his ear, he raised his fist and chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” His endless admiration of dictators like Orban and Putin is all part of the act. Former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly had to beg Trump not to praise Adolf Hitler in public. Admiring Kim Jong Un is one thing, but Hitler, well, that might be a PR problem.

One of the themes of this election has been the 18 point gender gap between Trump and Harris supporters. And it’s not just uneducated white men that are breaking for Trump. It’s also a lot of uneducated brown and black men. Even Obama has been enlisted to try to convince black men to vote for the black woman. Is Kamala Harris this year’s quiche?

Patriarchy is the oldest power dynamic on earth. Older than capitalism. Older than racism. It doesn’t go all the way back, but as long as we’ve been defining God as “He,” men have enjoyed the privilege of being the king of the hill. Over the last 100 years, men have been slowly pushed off their throne, but they are not giving up without a fight. More women are fully employed than men. More women are graduating from college than men. And now a woman is favored to be Commander in Chief. What’s a fragile boy to do? Trump’s appeal to these broken men is as He-Man, the Master of the Universe. Ah, those were the days.

So it’s not surprising that men from every generation who still buy into 1950s myths of masculinity have glommed onto the the fake bravado of the Richie Rich from Queens (who wears a girdle). They want their UFC, their trad wives, and their unrestricted access to women’s bodies and paychecks. Trump is the incel icon. His conviction for sexual assault only endears him to the lost boys of the twenty-first century. He claims he will restore the moral authority to the days when manly men (like him?) ruled the roost. Masculinity in Harris’ America is under assault from DEI, illegal immigrants, and drag queens, according to Fox News/MAGA doctrine. Trump even referred to radio host Howard Stern as a “woke beta male” after Stern interviewed Harris this week.

Trump’s dive into the cesspool of the manosphere, doing interviews on bro podcasts and bumping chests with misogynists like Logan Paul, may be intended to stiffen his limp poll numbers, but they’re likely to have the opposite effect. Trump should have taken note of the response to his Mini-Me, JD Vance, who tried to define what was and wasn’t a “real woman.” (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t childless cat owners.) The quip rallied women from across the political spectrum who collectively said, “You don’t know me, Couch Boy!” Trump’s pathetic performance of toxic masculinity may endear him to a small number of women who have Stockholm syndrome after years of abuse, but female voters are the proverbial sleeping giant. Just look at the turnout anytime abortion restrictions have been on the ballot.

The vast the majority of these self-declared “alpha males” (pffft!) have women in their lives who have caught glimpses of life outside of patriarchy. It’s a world where they have control over their lives and are safe(r) from sexual harassment and violence. They don’t want to go back to being Mrs. John Doe. A lot of the “alphas” are materially supported by women, even if it’s just living in their mother’s basement. And these women who have their alpha ears are telling them that real men support women’s autonomy and that, if not respected, they could easily take their love to a man who sees women as human beings. My guess is that those men who are still falling for Trump’s macho con don’t have women available for honest conversations. Like Logan Paul, they are flailing in a world that sees alpha men as vestiges of the bad old days.

That’s why Harris running mate Governor Tim Walz is so refreshing. Like me and Kamala, Tim is Generation X (all three of us were born in 1964), and grew up in an era when women gained immense economic and social power. We saw our moms move from housewives to career havers. Walz has all the manly credentials (veteran, football coach, fried food eater). He’s also a girl-dad (of a Swiftie, just like me!) and a defender of queer kids and women’s reproductive rights. The sad incels can try to define him as “soft” (“Tampon Tim”), but Walz’s version of masculinity is something painfully out of reach to them. His 30-year-marriage, compared to Trump’s serial philandering, stands as a model of how men should be in the world. (If you think any of Trump’s marriages were happy, I’ve got some stocks in Trump Steaks I’d like to sell you.) If Alpha Boy thinks he’s going to have a 30-year marriage with a trad wife, he hasn’t spoken to an actual female off the internet.

The conventional wisdom is that it will be female voters that save us from the strongman authoritarian trip of Trump and his Handmaid’s Tale Project 2025 vision of making America 1954 again. Many of those women will be telling their men they are voting for Trump and in the privacy of the voting booth pulling the lever for Harris. But I think a bunch of those alpha males will be voting for Harris, too. Because their girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters told them that real men vote for women.

Why Are Conservative Boys So Triggered By Barbie?

~ 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.”

What is the feminist position on the COVID-19 pandemic?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

May 19, 2020

The nice thing about having a “paradigm” is that there’s a formula to plug in to when challenging issues emerge. Liberals and conservatives, religious fundamentalists and scientists all have “narratives” they can utilize to make sense of the world. Similarly, feminists have a good starting position, that elements in society work to uphold patriarchal male power structures or challenge them. That’s feminist thinking in a tiny nutshell.

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So what’s the feminist position on the coronavirus?

Feminism is not monolithic. There is as much debate within feminist circles. Just mention Hillary Clinton. A liberal feminist, a radical feminist, a Marxist feminist, and an eco feminist walk into a bar… So rushing to a feminist position on a global pandemic is harder than it looks. Even after three months of pondering the matter.

While no feminist would celebrate sickness and death (that’s a male thing), there could be a feminist “I told you so” element to this mess. Mother Earth might be offering humanity a time-out for the bad behavior of waging war and dumping killing pollution. Eco feminists highlight the importance of healing and with endless wars and traffic jams on pause for a minute, we get to experience the joy of a planetary healing. There are sea turtles on Miami Beach and dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice! Will we really want to return to the nasty business as usual after this micro-organism mandated retreat? Regardless, the lesson remains that man does not control this planet.

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And here’s a little “gender equality amid pandemic” point that my wife brought up; Zoom as a great equalizer. Zoom and other remote meeting platforms have become the new way to exist publicly. My classes have weekly Zoom meetings. On these platforms every person has an equal space, both in terms of the size of their video box and their volume. (“Everyone on mute?”) Since we are working and learning from home, the impression management is way down. Women don’t have to do their makeup and men don’t need a tie. We’re all equally casual in our Brady Bunch grids. I’ve done lecture videos after waking up from a nap and done interviews with a beer in my hand. There’s no judgement in a pandemic. We’re all in this bad hair day together. And if a woman is Zooming in to work with a toddler climbing on her neck, all respect for her for even bothering to unmute her video.

The other side of the ledger is less hopeful. There’s plenty of reasons to see this nightmare as another opportunity for patriarchal power grabs. The first thing to come across the wire when all this started was the impact that the lockdown was having on women who were in domestic violence situations, trapped in spaces with their abusers. By April, reports of calls spiking to domestic violence around the globe made the sad trend undeniable. Women began passing desperate messages in code to pharmacists, hoping for a lifeline away from the violence. Similarly, young LGBTQ people who are stuck at home with homophobic adults must be praying for the moment for this whole thing end.

The women on the frontline of the pandemic have taken the brunt of the risk. Working in health care and food services, taking care of the elderly, they are the most essential of workers, and the most expendable when the crisis hits the fan. They clean the bedpans of the infected, while Ivanka fixes her father’s make-up.

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As is the norm these days, Donald Trump simplifies things for us. Watching him puff up his chest in his daily performance as the manly man in charge (He don’t need no mask!), is just a lesson in the absurd limits of masculinity. (The fact that he’s claiming to take hydroxychloroquine just adds to his soft orange underbelly.) But it’s not his buffoonery that props up patriarchy, although if a female leader demonstrated such incompetence, with nearly 100,000 Americans (so far) dead, she would have been eaten alive.

It’s Trump’s “war-time president” rhetoric that’s the big gender reveal. While things are cooling down on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, look at how quickly we long to be going to war against something. And like those wars, it’s always futile. The War on Poverty, the War on Crime, and the War on Drugs didn’t end poverty, crime, or drugs either. And some would argue that they made those problems worse. Likewise, the war on Trump’s “invisible enemy” won’t “defeat” COVID-19. We learn to live with disease, and adapt to the coexistence. If you’ve ever gotten a flu shot or worn a condom, you have participated in that adaptation. Trump’s war has inflated the curve, not flattened it.

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When he refers to the “invasion” of the “Chinese virus,” (most infected folks entered the U.S. from Europe), he’s playing into the “Us vs. Them” binary that masks the naturally complex path diseases take. But he has to keep it simple for his simple base. This has involved the president of the United States of America sending tweets to quasi-domestic terrorists. His call to “liberate Michigan” (governed by “that woman,” as he calls her), and other states governed by Democrats, has triggered the anti-government militia men. Armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers (seriously) these “freedom” lovers in MAGA hats (and a handful of “their women”) have been seen on state capitals, spreading their germs and threatening to launch a civil war if they don’t get back their God-given right to go to the mall to buy camo wife-beaters.

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The “War on” rhetoric is tired but it works. It gets boys to men ginned up to go in to battle. And like all battles, there are casualties. The workers in the meat packing plants in Iowa who have died with ventilators down their throats are just abstract statistics to his base. And mostly brown statistics, at that. Ivanka is still healthy and the family stock price in hydroxychloroquine is only going up. As Sartre once wrote, “When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.” Trump, the four-time draft dodger, is great at pretending to be a warrior (remember his celebration of “his generals”?), but the men, women, and children who will suffer and die because of his hubris are evidence of dire limitations of the blade and the perils of unchecked toxic masculinity.

So has this virus reinforced patriarchal power and the oppression that comes with it?

While we take a break from mass shootings and realize the great labor of all the women who stayed home with the kids without pay, I’m hoping we can use this moment to deflate the dumb puffed up chests of male rule. We have a moment to just talk to each other. Just think of all the conversations husbands are having with their wives because there is no basketball on TV. If ever there was a time to listen to women, it’s now. Maybe, anti-government/pro-Trump “protestors” aside, the earth is turning the corner. We’re ready for a paradigm shift.

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How I Learned to Stop Fearing Teenage Girls and Started Loving Harry Styles

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

June 8, 2017

I love the new Harry Styles album and I don’t care who knows.

Obviously gender socialization has played a role in the music I’ve loved (I was a sergeant in the Kiss Army in 1977, after all), but it has also played a part in the music I am supposed to hate. So much of the “Disco Sucks” movement in the 70s was steeped in deep-rooted homophobia (and racism). Real (white) guys liked ROCK and anybody who liked the Bee Gees must be a “fag.” I chanted “Disco sucks!” with the rest of the boys but secretly thought “Staying Alive” was a pretty damn good song.

This was especially true with teen idols. I was taught to hate them the most. If teenage girls loved them, they must be devoid of any musical quality whatsoever. Those screaming girls care more about their haircuts and cute smiles than their musical chops. I mean, seriously, what kind of name is “The Beatles”? What will they ever accomplish?

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So here’s a secret. Circa 1973, 9-year-old Randy was seriously into The Osmond Brothers. (If you’ve never heard “Crazy Horses,” listen to it now, loud.) They had a cool Saturday morning cartoon (as did the Jackson 5 and Rick Springfield), and since there was no MTV, it was how I first “saw” my music. I would put their records on on my parents’ hifi and go into my bedroom and pretend “my brothers” were rehearsing in the living room. I was the Osmond they never talked about, Randy Osmond. I even had Donny’s album, My Best To You, so “Puppy Love” played in my house.

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I would read Tiger Beat magazine to keep up on all the latest news about my Saturday morning stars, including Michael Gray (Shazam!), Vince Van Patten and Kristy McNichol (Apple’s Way) and Johnny Whitaker (Sigmund & the Sea Monsters). I even learned a bit about religion. The Osmonds were Mormons and the Jackson 5 were Jehovah’s Witnesses. (I’m not sure what Sigmund and the Sea Monsters were. Lutherans?) That was until one day in late 1974.

I remember it as clear as a bell. I was standing in the hallway in our house with a copy of Tiger Beat trying to pull out a pinup of some fresh faced star (Anybody remember the DeFranco Family?). I already had one of David Cassidy on my wall. Then my 32-year-old father said, “Randy, you know those magazines are for girls, right?” It was a gender bomb dropped on my world. He signed me up for Boy Scouts, got me a subscription to Boy’s Life magazine and I quit the Osmond Brothers and switched my allegiance to Elton John. (I really hope you can see the irony in all this.)

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It was the beginning of bashing of all things teen idol related. Selling my soul to rock and roll was, at least in part, a way of publicly affirming my masculinity. When teen heartthrob Leif Garrett set a concert at Six Flag’s Over Georgia my friends and I made plans to go and throw tomatoes. (We didn’t.) And it’s been like that for every moppet that’s come along since then. Bay City Rollers? How about the Gay City Rollers. O-Town? More like O-Crap.  N’Sync = N”Suck. All the way through to Justin Bieber. I started a Twitter account to troll him called “Justin Bieber’s colon” and the Biebs himself started following my snark.

Now I couldn’t name you a single One Direction song. I know the tween lassies went potty for them in the early 2010’s, so they must suck, right? I just knew that they had stupid haircuts (unlike the stupid haircuts I had at that age that were perfectly cool). Just that week’s version of the Osmond Brothers filling the need for poster material in Tiger Beat.

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Then I saw the one with the stupidest haircut perform a track from his “solo” record (barf) on Saturday Night Live. It was Harry Styles and the song was “Sign of the Times.” Fuck me, it was good. Really good. Like Elton John good. It’s the kind of music that has been missing from Top 40 radio this millennium. Could there be more? The second song on SNL, “Ever Since New York,” was even better. Young Harry was playing guitar and there was a serious Badfinger influence. I wanted more.

When the album came out I wanted it and so did my wife. We were at Music Millennium Record Store and I completely chickened out and made her buy it. What would these lords of vinyl think of me if I plopped this CD down on the counter? Even if I stuck it between CDs by Sun Ra and Flogging Molly. Guys don’t buy this kind of dreck. She was slight angry at me about that one.

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Harry Styles has been spinning non-stop ever since. Pure pop bliss, with a dose of T. Rex and 70’s flair to sail over the heads of the One Direction Fan Club. It’s still the modern production formula with teams of songwriters helping Harry write the songs (Beyoncé does the same thing), so you never know if the sentiment belongs to the artist or one of the other five other guys credited. The producer is the guy who gave us “Uptown Funk.” There are plenty of reasons to hate it out of gate, but somehow it works. Every song is a gem and I am fully out as a Harry Styles fan.

The whole thing has caused me to reflect on over 30 years of a knee-jerk reaction that anything embraced by teenage girls is, by default, crap. It’s steeped in patriarchal thinking that somehow the musical tastes of 13-year-old boys are inherently superior to their female “teenybopper” counterparts and that the tastes and emotional lives of girls are irrelevant and to be devalued and mocked. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich once wrote that the wave of Beatlemania that swept America in 1964 was the first real flush of feminism for many baby boom girls. They were loudly proclaiming their sexual freedom as a collective voice. “Ringo! We want to rip your clothes off!” When I see the boys in the crowds at those Fab Four mob scenes, I always think they must really have been secure in their fledgling masculinity to be there (and incredibly lucky).

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Evolving is all about checking the crap you do without thinking. It’s time to stop writing off music because “girls” like it. I bet there might be a New Kids on the Block or Jonas Brothers song that’s not too bad. Frank Sinatra and The Monkees were in this category once. Maybe I actually should be paying more attention to what these screaming girls like. They were right about The Beatles. So thanks, Harry, for helping me to see the light.

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Trump Lessons 1: Is this sexist?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 14 Comments

December 22, 2016

In this holiday season, I’m looking for silver bells and silver linings. Barring a half dozen dead hookers being found in a closet in Trump Tower, this practical joke on America is going to be sworn in as president on January 20th. The educator in me wants to figure out how this is a “teachable moment.” How can we glean some value from watching the United States jump the shark?

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As a feminist scholar, there’s a game I play in the classroom when trying to reveal the nature of cultural power imbalances. It’s called, “Put the Stiletto on the Other Foot.” If you want to find out of something might be sexist, flip the sexes and see how plausible it might be. Would there be much a debate about abortion if men got pregnant? What if men were evaluated primarily on their looks instead of their acts? Hey, how about if sorority houses were known for sexually assaulting male students? What if all the men in congress dyed their grey hair and the women in congress didn’t? We could go on and on.

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One of the best examples of this was during the Trump-Clinton contest. A meme went around that asked what the media chat would be Hillary Clinton had five children with three different men? What if Hillary Clinton bragged about grabbing men’s penises and moving on them without restraint? What if Hillary Clinton walked into the dressing rooms to catch boys naked because she owned the contest they were in? Can you imagine?

The point is that there’s an ancient Affirmative Action program called patriarchy that gives men a lot more latitude for bad behavior. Just like our black president had to be the perfect scandal-free executive and it still wasn’t enough, women have to meet a standard far above their male colleagues. On the surface, there should have been no choice between an overly-qualified states-person and a ham-fisted, morally challenged (at best) buffoon. But one was female and held to a completely different and unrealistic standard. Welcome to the world of women.

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So, for the next four years, every time Trump gets a pass at something that Hillary Clinton (or any other woman, for that matter) would have been raked over the coals for, let’s all shout, “There’s the gender card!”

Much was written during the campaign about the sexist double standard in evaluating the candidates. This includes Trump’s countless and daily (hourly?) lies while castigating everyone else as a liar. “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary.” How did he pull it off? If she called him on his shit, she was instantly labeled a “bitch.” It was a no-win situation, invented long before Mr. Trump came along. Smile, honey, but not too much.

The campaign is over. The Russians, I mean, Trump won. But the shit show is just starting. The bar for both Donald and Melania has been dropped to the sub-basement by the droogs that voted for him and continued to support him even after he told them to their faces that 90% of what he said at his rallies was complete bullshit. “Yeah! Huh? Yeah! Drain the swamp!”

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The Stiletto on the Other Foot game has lots of other applications, race being the most obvious one. This time imagine if Obama had five kids with three different women and bragged about sexually assaulting women and then tried to write it off as “locker talk.” These mental games often allow folks to get creative. There’s a clever 1995 film called White Man’s Burden, starring Harry Belafonte and John Travolta. It imagines an alternative America where black and white positions in society are switched. The movie bombed. Just too much to process I guess.

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I’ve been thinking lately what would being said right now if Trump was Jewish. With all his “conflicts of interests,” pay-for-play tactics, insider trading positioning, and cabinet filled with Goldman Sachs loyalists, he would be viewed as the worst stereotype of the Jew. As it is, his neo-Nazi (alt-right) followers haven’t even noticed. It’s good to be the king!

I imagine we’ll have a chance to play this game every day for the next four years (unless he quits because people stop believing his “just trust me” mantra). The silver lining here is that it should awake a whole new generation of feminists who start telling the men in their lives, “Don’t think you can get away with it just because Trump can.” Then the next question should be, “And why can he get away with it if you can’t?” Donald Trump is the poster boy for white male privilege and he’s going to exalt that to his dying day. He’s clueless. His presidency will do more to discredit unchecked male power than all the Women’s Studies classes in the world.

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Prince Died for Your Sins: Prophecy and Phallacy

~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

April 28, 2016

Dearly beloved, I want you to explore the infinite mystery in your own special way, the God power, the cosmic tick-tock, Yahweh, Science, Gaia, the Holy Trinity, the Hubble Array, whatever you want to call it. But I have a little story for you about the prince of paisley.

I had to listen to Prince records in silence. They were too dirty to play out loud. I worked in a record store in the fall of 1981 when Controversy came out. It was Georgia so we couldn’t play it in the store for fear of offending Bible Belt shoppers looking for the new REO Speedwagon album. But we took turns taking the store copy home so we could play “Do Me, Baby” in the privacy of our bedrooms, under the sheets.

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There are a million Prince-related stories like that, always about sex and shame and how Prince didn’t give a fuck who or how you fucked. When he died last week, everyone who never saw Purple Rain talked about how much they loved Purple Rain. Somehow the sinful sexuality, the androgyny and the personal freedom that were so despised 30-years ago by the PMRC have become the property of the most uptight unsexy-MFers in the world. Did you know that Matt Lauer was a “big fan”? But I’m here to tell you something different.

Prince is a deity and he died for your sex sins.

How do I know this? Because I am his prophet. I first became aware of his divinity on October 13, 1988. That’s when I saw him in Atlanta on the Lovesexy tour. He arose out of the stage and ascended into the air in a red Corvette, bathed in a celestial purple light. I felt something stir deep inside me. There was a ringing in my ears after the show that said, “Don’t turn away from me. I am the purple light.” But I did just that. I forsook my sex lord.

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A few years later, after the Diamonds & Pearls (1991) album, I turned away from Prince and his message of sexual freedom. Oh, sure I’d check in once in a while, I even bought Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999) and Musicology (2004). But of his last twenty-four albums, those are the only ones I let into my world. And my life began to suffer. I experienced copious alcohol consumption, divorce, job loss, I even wore a goatee for many years. All because I let Prince out of my heart.

Then right after he died, a strange thing happened. I was in the laundry room, in the basement of my house, washing whites. Alone. Suddenly a fantastic bolt of light emerged out of the dryer and knocked me off my feet. Standing there was the angel Gabriel, bathed in a purple light, the same light I had seen emanating from Prince in 1988. I could barely breathe. Then, in a high-pitched yet genderless voice, Gabriel said,

“The New Power Generation is here and you will be its leader. I will provide you God’s 23 positions for sexual liberation on 39 golden plates. These verses will become known as The Book of Prince and will lead the rainbow children to the emancipation of Planet Earth and the golden experience of eternal joy.”

And I said, “Right on, Gabe! What do you want me to do?”

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The angel replied, “The new power age will have no churches. There are thieves in the temple. Set up a GoFundMe account and tell each person who sends you $19.99 that, when they die, their souls will be funked up by Lord Prince and they will get off for all eternity.”

The angel then dropped a purple sock into my load of whites, donned a raspberry-colored beret and zapped back into my dryer.

So if you want a funky eternal life, just send $19.99 to: gofundme.com/2chh6ftg

The moral of this story is…

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All religions are created by people. Prophets are people who other people believe to be divine. Holy books are written by people that other people believe to be sacred. There is no religion without human invention. How do you know that Moses or Muhammad or Joseph Smith or me are or are not actual prophets? You don’t. That’s the value of faith. Prince was a Jehovah’s Witness, a religion started in the 1870s and run by a group of “Elders” (i.e. people) in Brooklyn who are in charge of telling followers what the Bible REALLY says. And apparently Armageddon is coming any minute, so get out your debit cards. Every single religion is a house of cards built on the work of human beings that claim they speak for God or gods. Religious followers faith is not in God, it’s in the people who invented the religion; faith that they are not con-men.

That does not mean there is no transcendent mystery in the universe that people have called, “God.” It is entirely possible that when you die you get to see your grandmother and your dead cat and get to jam with Jimi Hendrix (Poor dead Hendrix). There may be an intelligent design to this mess after all. Or it might be a lot of wishful thinking that some very clever people have capitalized on. I don’t know. I’m agnostic. Joseph Campbell, who spent his long life studying the thousands of religions in the world once said, “He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.” I don’t know.

What I do know is that for the last 3000 years, the people who have been inventing religions are mostly men and conveniently created a god that looks like them, typically an old white guy. (For shits and giggles, Google Image “God.”) Jews, Christians, and Muslims learn that God has existed for all eternity and then suddenly created the entire universe in six days. Makes you wonder what God was doing before those six days. Did He Netflix and chill? With himself? Guys.

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I totally respect whatever you want to worship, whatever your god or gods look like. If you want to pray to a lord that looks like Ewan McGreggor or a god that looks like an overly ripe avocado, I’ve got your back. Just know that unless your are a follower of some ancient pagan goddess, there is or was some dude behind a curtain pulling the levers. This is how we got patriarchy (and Melania Trump).

When you look at child marriage in Pakistan, the arrest of women for having abortions in Northern Ireland, the brothels of India, or Ted Cruz and the normality of rape culture in the United States it starts with the idea that God has a phallus and created MAN in HIS image. As Mary Daly so famously said, “If God is man than man is God.” There’s a ton of celebrated rape in the Old Testament of the Bible, in books written by men.

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So the next time someone wants to use some “sacred scripture” to justify something, especially the oppression of some other group of people, ask who wrote that scripture. The answer is that is was a person, just like Prince. You are free to put your faith in the scribblings of some men from the Bronze Age, or the 1800s (or the 1950s if you are a Scientologist). Or you could put on Prince’s Sign o’ the Times album and find some great wisdom there. It’s pretty much the same thing. The men who wrote Leviticus, the Koran, 2 Corinthians and the Book of Mormon were built exactly the same way as the man who wrote, “Your face is jamming, your body’s heck-a-slamming, if love is good, let’s get to ramming.” So lovesexy. That’s what Lord Prince wants. Believe me, I’m a prophet.