It’s easy for liberals to decry the hypocrisy of Republicans, the putative party of family values, embracing Trump as its avatar. But there is no real hypocrisy here. The core value is patriarchy, which can take different forms. There is an older patriarchy which wears the mask of chivalry, and offers women protection in exchange for submissiveness. But the age of chivalry is no more. We now have raw patriarchy, which asserts its rights through naked displays of power. And the president, with his porn star mistresses, his boasting of sexual assaults, and even his phallic tweets about the size of his nuclear button, is the perfect leader for conservatives’ post-chivalric world.
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Thanks for sharing all that.
I think it’s a bit of both. Things are somewhat different, but lots of this stuff is still pretty taboo to talk about, as we can see with the backlash against Metoo.
You’re hitting on an important point here that often gets ignored. Not all women’s experiences with gender roles are exactly the same. There in fact has never been a time when working class women (especially black working class women) didn’t work. In the 1950s, when being a housewife was what middle class women were expected to do, working class women were still working.
I think that’s true, but they also ignored working class women, too. And black women. The second wave had some important points, but they also missed a hell of a lot… and for many of these second wavers, their daughters ended up having to pick up the home slack when they were working. But again, working class young women always had to pick up the slack at home.
We can learn all we want… but until men also acknowledge, listen, and learn, we’ll keep running into this same brick wall where we end up doing double-duty and being excoriated for it.
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I disagree… just like it’s not up to black people to dismantle for white people racism over and above what they’ve already done, it’s up to men to make changes in their own lives and in masculinity more generally. Men have to be part of the change and at the forefront of it, or we’ll keep being on this merry-go-round for another generation. Men have to be willing to share power, share responsibility, share the effort of changing the world, change themselves, or nothing will change.
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Oooo… I like that phrase! I might steal it!
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I know.
I have a book by Bergen Evans from the 1940s in which he remarks how tiny is the circle of firelight in which modernity exists (he’s talking about why superstition and really bad ideas persist). I wrote that post after reading a really depressing series of posts on Engadget about the lack of women in STEM, regurgitating the old rubbish, cherry picked statistics and so on, how women didn’t really want difficult jobs, given a chance they would all want the nice jobs, no women miners or plumbers, ad nauseam. These people have enough intelligence to log in to a website and write posts in fairly acceptable English but they seem to be only a small stage advanced on the Taliban.
So please take my comment as what it was, a somewhat despairing remark.
Slavery in the US did not end because the slave owners became more aware. It ended for a lot of reasons, one of which was that the British saw that abolition could be used against the United States in the War of Independence and during the Napoleonic Wars, and one of which was that slavery was simply inefficient - a lesson the Prussians did not learn until 1945. Racism in the strict sense seems endemic in parts of US society (he says based on time spent in the Mid-West) in a way it isn’t in Europe, whereas I get the impression that the white people trying to combat it are mainly younger, urban people. The racists, if they are dying out, are a long time a-dying. In fact, currently they feel they are winning again.
So while I entirely agree with the point you are making, if we are going to have to wait for the majority of men to change, we may have to wait long beyond my lifetime.
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The silence on the left is easily explained by scandal overload.
No, in my case it’s because I’m sex positive. I see nothing wrong with the porn industry or sex work, to the extent that I think prostitution ought to be legal nationwide. I also think what a politician does in their private life should stay private, as long as it does not affect their ability to do their job, and as long as it is between consenting adults. IMO extramarital sex can be okay, under certain conditions, and extramarital cheating can be a scumbag move but is a far cry from rape or sexual assault.
Then again, I’m on the left, not a Democrat.
It’s easy for liberals to decry the hypocrisy of Republicans, the putative party of family values, embracing Trump as its avatar. But there is no real hypocrisy here. The core value is patriarchy, which can take different forms. There is an older patriarchy which wears the mask of chivalry, and offers women protection in exchange for submissiveness. But the age of chivalry is no more. We now have raw patriarchy, which asserts its rights through naked displays of power. And the president, with his porn star mistresses, his boasting of sexual assaults, and even his phallic tweets about the size of his nuclear button, is the perfect leader for conservatives’ post-chivalric world.
Can we just agree that the Republican party has no moral compass, and runs mainly on tribalism and unrestrained id?
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It’s not up to black people to do that, but it’s what’s happening. Look at movements like Black Lives Matter. Don’t expect the dudebros to carry the banner for that movement.
I actually expect them to ignore it entirely, but I’m a bit pessimistic…
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Well now I’m depressed…
How many men wore #Timesup pins and yet said nothing on the red carpet, and will do nothing differently in their careers or private lives? And how many women spoke out, at their professional peril, and are creating foundations and movements to right the wrongs they see?
Seriously, I’m back on the #BanAllMen train. (Yes, I said ALL!)
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I know… I think it’s true, though. It’s hard coming to terms with the fact that there is only so much we as women can do to make change. We can certainly keep doing what we’re doing to help facilitate change, but at the end of the day, if men are unwilling to change their behavior, I’m not sure what we can do, except form our own all woman society somewhere…
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But, but, but… They all wore black suits!
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When it was clear that Margaret Thatcher was losing her marbles, a respected backbench MP (Sir Anthony Meyer) was persuaded to run against her - not to win but to demonstrate that it was time to change.
Thatcher’s supporters went to various journalists to tell them that Meyer had a mistress, which was supposed to discredit him.
The journalists knew that Meyer’s wife was bedridden with an incurable illness, and refused to publish the story.
And that is an example of how things have in some ways gone backwards since the late 1980s.
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Yes, @MarjaE, that’s even better than Joyce’s, “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Wow.
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I fucking like that one too!
Jesus, I need better quotes about history!
I like the “history isn’t even past” and “history is a foreign country” and also marx’s “history weights like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (paraphrasing, obvs).
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What the hell do they teach you in history school?
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I mean, how to understand historians and to conduct research! Clearly, GSU needs a graduate class solely devoted to cool quotes about history!
[ETA] Maybe this needs it’s own thread?
Apparently, it did - Thanks @MarjaE !
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Barbara Kingsolver aims for the vitals.
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Yisssssss!
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One quibble:
If any contract between men required the non-white one to adopt the legal identity of his Caucasian companion, would we pop the champagne? If any sport wholly excluded people of colour, would it fill stadiums throughout the land? Would we attend a church whose sacred texts consign Latinos to inferior roles? What about galas where black and Asian participants must wear painful shoes and clothes that reveal lots of titillating, well-toned flesh while white people turn up comfortably covered?
The answer to that is, sadly, yes.
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Sure, but she’s aiming at the people who think they’re moderates in that paragraph. The people who think they’re nice and polite and we’ve moved on and things are so much better now.
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The answer to all of that is, been there done that got the t-shirt.
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