I honestly think that what we are fighting at the moment is more than just an "America Only" war - I think it is a worldwide culture war.
For centuries, patriarchy has been top dog in many cultures. Right now, what we are struggling with is a radical change in the way many people want the world to go - not with more masculine toxicity, bu…
I honestly think that what we are fighting at the moment is more than just an "America Only" war - I think it is a worldwide culture war.
For centuries, patriarchy has been top dog in many cultures. Right now, what we are struggling with is a radical change in the way many people want the world to go - not with more masculine toxicity, but with a female nurturing bias. And this isn't JUST coming from women - a lot of men also want to get away from the testosterone driven slash and burn approach to life. The men (and women, God help us) who have that attitude are fighting a desperate last ditch battle to remain "top dogs" - and don't care what weapons they use.
This isn't a new thing - think how the Suffragettes suffered more than a hundred years ago. I think our greatest (if not our only) weapons are attrition and education. The mills of matriarchy may grind extremely slowly - but they grind exceeding small and with the "education" side of things - what did St. Ignatius Loyola say? "Give me the child until he is seven - and I will give you the man." Woman - Arise!
I keep thinking about this, too. One way of looking at what happened to the GOP is that white men got the tiniest taste of what African-American men have experienced for the last 400 years and all women from the dawn time by no longer being deferred to as automatically at the top of the imaginary pyramid. Rather than think, OMG, is that how black people and women have felt all along, maybe I should treat others as I would like to be treated, they lost their minds and turned our country over to the worst possible con man and whoever bribes him, legally or otherwise, in exchange for permission to be their worst possible selves.
Obviously, not all men, and there are also many women who have drunk this koolaid, but the mere existence of people who say they voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris because she is stupid proves my point.
I don't disagree, and it's a powerful framing - but to put a note of caution there - there are millions of "swing voters" in this sort of culture war. And they can be won over if the excesses of current gender fashions + a basic "boys-and-white-people-are-bad" moral calculus finally cease being defended as a rote orthodoxy that every right-thinking person must conform to. It's really, really, really annoying, for one; and I don't see how - present company excluded, of course - an overbearing rhetorical drive on all the above (even the word patriarchy can be loaded - Ruxandra Teslo compared it dryly to the pre-modern miasma theory of medicine) has helped, even the people it's supposed to help. Liberalism is losing almost everywhere. My particular little crusade is to raise a kind of cultural centrism to normative respectability. There's a lot of work to do without letting eager gender studies department staff choose our values for us, forever.
I honestly think that what we are fighting at the moment is more than just an "America Only" war - I think it is a worldwide culture war.
For centuries, patriarchy has been top dog in many cultures. Right now, what we are struggling with is a radical change in the way many people want the world to go - not with more masculine toxicity, but with a female nurturing bias. And this isn't JUST coming from women - a lot of men also want to get away from the testosterone driven slash and burn approach to life. The men (and women, God help us) who have that attitude are fighting a desperate last ditch battle to remain "top dogs" - and don't care what weapons they use.
This isn't a new thing - think how the Suffragettes suffered more than a hundred years ago. I think our greatest (if not our only) weapons are attrition and education. The mills of matriarchy may grind extremely slowly - but they grind exceeding small and with the "education" side of things - what did St. Ignatius Loyola say? "Give me the child until he is seven - and I will give you the man." Woman - Arise!
I keep thinking about this, too. One way of looking at what happened to the GOP is that white men got the tiniest taste of what African-American men have experienced for the last 400 years and all women from the dawn time by no longer being deferred to as automatically at the top of the imaginary pyramid. Rather than think, OMG, is that how black people and women have felt all along, maybe I should treat others as I would like to be treated, they lost their minds and turned our country over to the worst possible con man and whoever bribes him, legally or otherwise, in exchange for permission to be their worst possible selves.
Obviously, not all men, and there are also many women who have drunk this koolaid, but the mere existence of people who say they voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris because she is stupid proves my point.
I don't disagree, and it's a powerful framing - but to put a note of caution there - there are millions of "swing voters" in this sort of culture war. And they can be won over if the excesses of current gender fashions + a basic "boys-and-white-people-are-bad" moral calculus finally cease being defended as a rote orthodoxy that every right-thinking person must conform to. It's really, really, really annoying, for one; and I don't see how - present company excluded, of course - an overbearing rhetorical drive on all the above (even the word patriarchy can be loaded - Ruxandra Teslo compared it dryly to the pre-modern miasma theory of medicine) has helped, even the people it's supposed to help. Liberalism is losing almost everywhere. My particular little crusade is to raise a kind of cultural centrism to normative respectability. There's a lot of work to do without letting eager gender studies department staff choose our values for us, forever.