The Crisis: Part IV- Figureheads

[This is Part IVof an ongoing series of posts, Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here discussing some aspects of the Crisis of American Masculinity. Previous editions have looked at the Crisis as a Cultural Crisis; the involvement of Homophobia and Anti-Abortion movements as part of the Crisis; and a Theoretical examination of the Crisis from Jiggavegas. In this edition, we will create and identify different Archetypes of Masculinity, and look at a few examples of contemporary Figureheads and how they might fit into the Crisis]

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In order to more fully understand how Men operate in the Crisis, I’m going to start with a Woman: Hillary Clinton. I’m going to start the crisis with the strong evidence supporting it and build the argument in reverse, because the Right’s methods of image manipulation against this one woman are indicative because she fits into an archetype of Women of Power, perhaps the most threatening figurehead that men must endure. Clinton’s actions and political perspectives are supposedly of great consequence to the Right, although it might be argued that Clinton, herself, is simply the problem. Her actions etc. won’t, however, be discussed in this post; the only thing that is important for us to discuss here is how Men behave against this strong female identity.

Hillary Haters

One of the primary indicators of Masculine reactionary tendencies will come forward in the form of overt misogyny. In America, we need look no further than the polarizing figure of multiple Most-Hated Woman Winner (’93, ’97, ’00, ’06 [front-runner], ’08 [predicted] ), Hillary Clinton. From the disappointingly non-bashing David Brock book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham to the constant verbalization of malaise against her, Sen. Clinton has endured something of a political lifetime of scrutiny and disrespect. As Stephen Manerick, NY GOP fundraising activist, says: “Stopping Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most important thing you and I can do as Republicans in the next two years.”

Why?

Bill Ferguson from the Mercury News post has some of the answers with "bitt"s discussion thread over at of the Free Republic discussion forum.

This article operates in simple fashion: It begins with a cringing language game: “Get Used to for Madame President.” This gendered proposition is immediately a catchy title because it insinuates that the reign of Men is at heading to a close. Then Ferguson exposes the Right’s counter-weapon to Hillary: Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. And here the dynamic is set. Reduce the discussion to two women and play out your [men’s] wildest cat-fight and lesbianism fantasies in the next presidential election, but either way, get ready to courtsy to that French-y sounding Madame.

So who, in this discussion, are Rice and Clinton? Take a stroll through the comments to the above post:

“It would be more interesting if it weren't attached to Hillary. She's a ho.” –Thebaddogg

“That SOS called Hillary will never be my president. I would not piss on her if she was on fire.” – Piquaboy

“Nothing - repeat, nothing - could be more destructive to this country than to have HRC as La Presidente. Afemale president...fine...no problem...but let it be the proper woman. Ms. Clinton would turn what's left of our Republic into a festering pseudo-European sh*thole.” –szweig

“Is it correct to call her comrade Hillary? How is it that you address a woman communist? Serious!” – Piquaboy

“With our current crop of spineless Rs caving in constantly, the nightmare of the beast becoming prez is not too far fetched.” –rrrod

And finally:

“There is no question in my mind that America is ready for a female president. We've just been waiting for the right woman to come along.
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What this country is READY FOR is a qualified, conservative President that will start working for the people again, and drive the Congress to work FOR THE PEOPLE again. Gender has NOTHING to do with the issue and should not. Show me a qualified, conservative female candidate, and she will get equal consideration as any male candidate of same qualifications.

Don't even think about Hitlery. God save America. Not only is she NOT QUALIFIED but she is a Marxist, and will always be a Marxist, who has zero credibility and is about as anti-American, anti-Constitution as our dear radical socialists come.

The people of this country should be very concerned about the Washington agenda, and Washington's performance in running this country -- not about what sex, shape, color, size a candidate is...I think we are going to have enough trouble finding a tough, conservative President that will clean up Washington. If the Repubs cannot or will not do it now, with the ultimate control they have now, we are in big trouble.” - EagleUSA

Note how the claim toward gender equality works: “We’ve just been waiting for the right woman to come along,” “let her be a proper woman,” neither of which apply to Clinton, apparently by virtue that there are some imbedded distinct and unalienable flaws within her. In fact, it doesn’t really matter what is said about Clinton, so long as something is being said. Because Clinton, it seems, was simply born with the devil inside her, or, more metaphorically, is part of the female lineage that succumbed to the serpentine threat and took an apple from the tree, cursing men to sin eternally thereafter. She is Lady MacBeth, always searching for the dagger; she is Marie-Antoinette, conniving to take the throne of the King, or at least portrayed as such:

“She was not involved in the plot to swindle the cardinal de Rohan, but the resulting scandal and his eventual acquittal damaged her reputation. She was innocent, in this and other cases, but she could be made to look guilty, as a woman out of place and out of control. Chantal Thomas (“The Heroine of the Crime: Marie-Antoinette in Pamphlets”) outlines the accumulation of criticism in the 1770s and 1780s. Much of it originated at court, and some of it surfaced in print. The voyeuristic and moralistic publications simplified, ridiculed, and standardized the representation of the foreign, extravagant, meddlesome, duplicitous, sexualized dauphine/queen. According to Lynn Hunt (“The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution”), the texts published before 1789 provided models for the more numerous and scurrilous texts published after 1788. Pamphleteers attacked the queen more aggressively than the king because she embodied sexual/gender as well as political disorder. By executing her and suppressing the women’s movement, the Jacobins differentiated male and female roles in the republic of virtue. Elizabeth Colwill (“Pass as a Woman, Act Like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution”) argues that the pamphleteers vilified Marie-Antoinette not only for exemplifying female vices but also for usurping male privileges. They made her look like an insatiable woman and act like a predatory man. In staging her sexual exploits with women as well as men, they exploited and developed the figure of the masculinized tribade.”

But we are more reasoned in the modern age, more than those who pornogrified Marie-Antoinette. We’ll take a woman president [“okay, fine.”], but all we ask is that she must be “Proper,” “qualified,” and of course, Hillary Clinton is not now and never was either of those qualities. Condoleeza Rice is suspiciously absent from any of these comments, while she shares many of the professional attributes of Clinton. She is simply the card the Republicans have to play against Clinton, but she is no Hillary Clinton in their minds. She is the “safer” woman in the game, partially because she has properly aligned herself with the interests of the current Masculine majority.

Clinton is an action-oriented, ambitious, intelligent, and politically viable [generally attributed as “masculine attributes”] woman. I don’t say that because I believe it to be true, I say it because it’s evident by the backlash against her. And the backlash is indicative of the great fear that we have for Clinton: because when a woman usurps those masculine qualities and shows the same ambition and abilities in the same fields, how must we then identify ourselves?


DeLay's Rage

DeLay, the HAMMER! The second-most impressively Manly nickname in the House [after John “The Champagne Division” Culberson, (R-TX)]. There’s plenty in the debate about Tom DeLay, the bold politico who uses brashness and bombastic statements to both rile his supporters to a frothy glow and dismay his detractors. Sometimes, like any crazed man will, he steps out of line. He demanded Homeland Security resources track down, and punish those Texas Democrats who fled the state to Oklahoma during the redistricting crisis which led to the unseating of 4 Democrat Representatives. He has had continuous major ethics violation hearings within the House.

And he sure does hate those activist judges. Those who don’t recall his statements about the 19 separate judges who heard the case concerning the life of Terri Schiavo and decided the courts should stay out of it can be reminded here:

“The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.”

DeLay is ready for action, and vigilante-ism doesn't frighten him. He was a key player in the movement to get the Schiavo case to the Congress floor, where many contend that it simply never belonged. He has been a strong opponent to gay marriage, abortion, and all of the hard-line conservative issues of national politics.

But activist judges he holds particular disdain for. So much that he came vitally close to threatening them, a motion which Big Poppa Dick Cheney himself had to step in to avert
. This is the current state of Masculinity in high-level politics- there are huge Man-Egos at play on the top levels, and until Big Poppa Dick comes in and guides them all back, they do just about anything. So the clash of masculinity occurs: the paternal architect must step upon the throat of the loud-mouthed brutal second-in-command, keep him silent until the time is right.

And so DeLay displays the aggression of American political Masculinity, the same that UN Ambassador Nominee John Bolton uses to move through the ranks. This is the steeled, direct Man, the one that you don’t want to mess with, and frankly, you have no right to. DeLay (along with Bolton and others) work in the realm of the assertive Male, the one who exerts force when force doesn’t need so much brashness. In determining the effects of gender-mandated power struggles, one looks at the way in which power is enacted: In DeLay’s case it is enacted often, one-sidedly, and with overwhelming force. Consider his inky fingers dipped in Texas redistricting, which led to the expulsion of 4 senior Democratic Representatives in place of Republicans. DeLay’s method to spearhead this redistricting brought the Texas House to such a crisis that the Democrats fled the state; at which point DeLay, in a bombasticly Male way, sent the Homeland Security dogs out to track them down like the dirty scoundrel fugitives they were [this is sarcasm].

What is interesting about this is that DeLay doesn’t seem to be getting everything he wants. Despite his personality being vertically aligned with the masculine identity of American foreign policy [remember that little country we invaded? Iraq? Yeah.]. Cheney had to stop his manly vigilante rant; Doonesbury has held vigil over his deathwatch; Santorum has shown some hesitation; Hastert has pulled his cards protecting DeLay from ethics violations.

The Crisis is the bombastic attitude here- DeLay is what Jiggavegas shows as reactionary and dangerous. He will force anything into action via his own methods, and everything that crosses any of his attempts to assert his ideology are destroyed. But the Crisis is also in the danger of the power-play at the top levels. DeLay has been kept in check (barely) by top players like Papa Dick, but it remains to be seen which version of the aggressive Male will come out on top in the long run.


Santorum's Baby and the Neo-Compassionate-Conservative

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), and every person, is due the right to their own private mourning process. This is a vital aspect of emotional humanity- being able to mourn the loss of your own children, if that tragic event occurs, with the compassion and empathy of the world. And for Santorum’s loss, I am saddened.

I am, as well, amazed. First, Santorum has not mourned privately: he has chosen to make his child’s death a public issue, that fits into his anti-abortion stance as an issue of policy. He seems all too willing to discuss it. Privately, Santorum mourns the deeply scarring loss of his son. But, publicly, Gabriel Santorum is a political discussion.

Santorum here seems to be operating within the realm of the modern “compassionate Man” role, a perverse version of Iron John and the mourning father who strikes out in anger. His attraction to the body of his deceased child has an intense Victorian obsession to it: he takes photographs with it, he introduces his family to it, he discusses all of these events publicly. His wife Karen have told the story of their tragedy with pride. And yet, Karen, who has been so affected by Gabriel’s loss she published her written chronicle of it, is kept away from this article by Rick’s office “ (Santorum's office would not make Karen available for this article.)” making this aspect of Santorum’s grief his own. Santorum, then, is free to use this experience as an illustrative event to explain the moral code of his policy. For a vote against partial-birth abortion:

Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, appeared on the Senate floor with oversize illustrations of fetuses in various stages of delivery. He described the process by which a physician "brutally kills" a child "by thrusting a pair of scissors into the back of its skull and suctioning its brains out." He asked that a 5-year-old girl be admitted to the visitors' gallery, though Senate rules forbid children under 6. "She is very interested in the subject," Santorum said, explaining that the girl's mother had been a candidate for a late-term abortion when doctors advised her during her pregnancy that the child was unlikely to survive.

Sen. Barbara Boxer objected, saying it would be "rather exploitive to have a child present in the gallery" during such a debate. Santorum relented, bemoaning Boxer's objection as proof that "we have coarsened the comity of this place."

Santorum, the new version of the Compassionate Conservative, the one who truly feels the core emotion of loss and the distinct value of life, is also not against using those experiences and losses to the most exploitative possibilities. In fact, it all is part of the game for him. And so he uses a version of the Empathatic, Compassionate Male as a way to inject his so-called moral values onto the community and into the legal sphere of policy. There is no distinction between the reactive tendencies of DeLay’s Classic Aggressive Male and Santorum’s Neo-Compassionate Male, and their aggressions are similar as well: a one-way injection of black and white personal identities to be codified into law. Santorum’s method is simply to manipulate this new version of Man for the same old game.

Again, my sincere empathy and sadness for Santorum’s loss. But what concerns me is his willingness to twist the public around this loss, promoting himself as simultaneously a morally-righteous man and an earnest man of emotion, all the while projecting these traits into dangerously public territory.


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[This Concludes Part IV, for now, of this discussion. When it comes to Figureheads of the Crisis, boy, are there lots of them! Some of the unexplored: Gannon, Limbaugh, Cheney, etc. Who are your favorites, kids? Make sure to cite your sources! Tune in next time for either more Figureheads or perhaps some other aspect of the Crisis entirely!]