I’m going to try to write this without jumping all over anyone’s ass, because I think the male liberal blogging cabal—-while no doubt a conspiracy that has absolutely no relationship to paranoid anti-Semitic myths—-is composed of a group of generally pro-feminist dudes. But I ground my teeth when reading this post at Lawyers, Guns, and Money and the link to Brad DeLong’s observation:
Moneyblogging vs. Sexblogging
At the moment “Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill” has 116 comments, while “The Geithner Plan FAQ” has only 89 comments. I confess this leaves me somewhat disappointed: I thought money would be dominating by this point…
And DJW at LGM added:
It’s a fair point. The mockery of Douthat’s all too public sexual peculiarities is a grand internet tradition, but at the end of the day, we all knew that Bill Kristol’s slot would be filled by a ridiculous person, and the particular nature of that ridiculousness is pretty inconsequential.
Everyone understood it at the time that the Douthat quote was shocking not because he was bragging about someone wanting to fuck him, but because it was so nakedly misogynist. It’s not a “sexual peculiarity” that he was expressing, and sadly it’s not that peculiar at all to see a man like him whose loathing of women runs so deep that he can’t get an erection unless he’s threatening his sex partner’s safety and bodily autonomy. It’s not even that peculiar that he’d brag about it—-our culture is awash in the message that women deserve to be shat upon for daring to have either sexual desire or independence. And while it’s true that the slot was reserved for a conservative who is almost surely going to be a misogynist, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use the opportunity to point out how acceptable this sort of hatred of women is in mainstream culture.
I’m bothered by the assumption that “sexblogging” (actually, blogging to protest near-violent hatred of women) should garner less feedback than a post about the economy. This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that women’s rights are treated like a boutique issue, when it’s an issue that is as important as the economy. This isn’t about saving one old oak from being cut down by developers—-we’re talking about the basic rights of half the human race and the economic and familial well-being of the entire human race, well-being that relies on women having basic control over our bodies that people like Douthat would deny us.
If anything, I’d say the struggle over women’s rights is actually one reason this country is so deep in manure right now. Why do I say? Because without anti-feminism to garner votes from people whose economic interests are better served by Democrats, then there wouldn’t be a Republican party to speak of. I don’t like it any more than anyone else that Republicans can squeak out electoral victories by scaring people about gay marriage, abortion, and Title IX, but that they can shouldn’t be that surprising, really. Because these issues are important. How many children you have, who does the majority of the housework, who gets to make the final decisions in a family—-these things all matter to people as much as the economy. In a sense, they are economic issues, since much of anti-feminism is about getting women to do more work for less money to benefit men. But it’s also about something that’s profoundly important to people: identity and the sense of self. Like check out this guy who commented at Hugo’s place:
How can (men) feel valued as a human being if there’s basically nothing only they can do that women cannot while there’s a lot of things men cannot do that women can’t[sic]? You either get detachment or service in this situation, but service, of couse, is requiring social checks on women - some kind of affirmative action for men, which one may call patriarchy. Which leaves a bit of a problem: reject patriarchy and you’ll get male detachment.
I’m not going to pretend to understand why conservative men are so damn jealous of women’s reproductive and sexual functions, though I can see why they’re scared that women will reject them if we don’t need them. (Because I myself reject these men out of hand for sucking, and I’m sure they have every reason to believe the women in their lives would, too.) But there it is, in all its naked glory—-the belief that half the human race needs to be subjected to violence, coercion, and abuse to keep us as a permanent underclass so the other half can feel good about itself. (Of course, as Hugo points out, it doesn’t even work that way and a lot of men don’t feel good about themselves in this circumstance.)
I’d bet a very large sum of money that guy voted for Bush, and probably would again even if he sees his savings go down the tube or loses his job. A whole lot of men share his neurosis, and the Republican party caters to it expertly. With stuff like this. Or the gun nut stuff, i.e. the phallic enhancement program. Or code phrases like “family values”. Or anti-choice nuttery. Even libertarianism doesn’t really function without anxious masculinity to fuel it, and Ayn Rand knew it and used phallic fantasies to lure in her followers. War-mongering is impossible to pull off without appeals to anxious masculinity and the sad hope that blowing some other country with expensive weaponry will make the National Penis that much bigger. I’d even blame male entitlement for a lot of the bone-headed decisions you see coming out of D.C., because a lot of men, especially Republicans, are so used to being treated like they’re smart because they’re white men that they never actually bothered to develop any intelligence. But thanks to the patriarchy, everyone is in on the sham. (My favorite example might be discovering that ex-congressman Duke Cunningham made it so far in life while being unable to write above a 3rd grade level.) If we actually created a truly feminist society, a lot of problems would cease to exist, but the Republican party would likely be the first to go. I’m just pleading with liberal male bloggers to remember that when the urge to write off misogyny as a less important problem than others, including the economic crisis.
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I have an issue with any theory that does not base itself on materialist analysis.
Thanks for this post. We’re supposed to be the political movement that can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let’s demonstrate that, eh? We can think about the economy, energy policy, education, health care, reproductive freedom, and criticize rank misogyny, all without needing to spend weeks between topics clearing brush to let our foreheads cool down.
I always hated comment count comparisons, anyway. Why is it surprising that more people have more interesting things to say about misogyny and terrible writing than about the financial crisis? When it comes to the latter, about the best that most of us can do is read the comments of genuinely well-informed people like Krugman, DeLong, and Geithner, and try to get some thin sense of what’s going on. Frankly, the discussions on Douthat were much more interesting, because they were much better-informed.