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Culture warriors' embrace of radical masculinity and feminity will bite them in the end [1]
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Date: 2022-07-10
Rush Limbaugh, coiner of the term "feminazi", is seen admiring a bronze bust of himself. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
One prominent culture war argument made by red hatters is that men have become too feminized (see Medium article by Johnny Robish, dissecting a recent quote by Andy Biggs [R-AZ]) and too many women have become feminazis (see WaPo article about Rush Limbaugh by Monica Hesse, shortly after his death in 2021).
A 2020 analysis by Rebecca Solnit in LitHub and a new opinion piece by Ana Marie Cox at NBC News corroborate this assertion by illustrating, respectively, that right-wing masculinity is all about radical selfishness and that Tucker Carlson’s greatest fear is powerful women.
But when you examine it more closely, all this extremist hype is hollow and stupid. In practice, it turns out that “radical masculinity” favors machismo and bombast over male wisdom and honesty, and that “radical feminity” (which is called “radical womanhood” by culture-war Christians because the word femininity is too similar to the word “feminism”) favors servitude and submission over female leadership and independent thinking.
Within this context, the obvious question becomes … why the hell are conservative thinkers pushing ineptitude and ignorance as the historically-defining characteristics of American Exceptionalism? Why are wingnut culture warriors worshiping stupidity over smarts?
During the heyday of “the greatest generation” (i.e., before the Civil Rights and Feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s) the vast majority of women subserviently took their husband’s name as their own — as in Mrs. John Doe. Their husbands were allowed to have bank accounts in their own name, but married women couldn’t open their own accounts or take out loans without their husband as co-signer. It didn’t matter if the the woman was actually smarter with numbers and more savvy about the account requirements than the man. She was still a second-class citizen, by virtue of being born too few decades after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.
It wasn’t that long ago that conservatives argued vociferously that employers would never pay less to a more qualified woman because that would be bad for business. The marketplace, they then claimed without exception, directed employers to hire the best qualified person they could get (at a fair wage) regardless of gender.
None of that rhetoric cuts it any more on the right flank of politics. In perhpas the most glaring example of this hypocrisy imaginable, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) eagerly attempted to define the term “woman”, after Ketanji Brown Jackson politely declined to do so.
I think we can all agree that unqualified women (e.g., MTG) should not be elected to public office, but if the woman is more qualfied and more capable than her male counterparts (e.g., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elizabeth Warren, Stacy Abrams), it would be a huge disservice to America for her to be sidelined because a few fearful (and moronic) culture warriors say she belongs at home.
The next time you are confronted by a red-hatted culture warrior, ask them whether Jesus subscribed to radical masculinity (as defined by Tucker Carlson)? Ask them if Jesus favored braunpower over brainpower? Jesus was no wimp (...as the Pharisees would affirm), but he knew the value of listening, he never claimed superiority over women (or other races), and his most inspiring act required self-sacrifice.
The right-wing culture war is so full of illogic and anti-rationality that it is decidely un-American. It is doomed to fail and we can help it along by exposing its massive weaknesses every chance we get.
To paraphrase the title of a 1960s TV program hosted by Art Linkletter, “Conservatives Say the Stupidest Things”. Let’s be sure to ridicule them every time they do.
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