Feminism and Disrespect: Can I Please Have Someone Else to Vote For

Feminism and Disrespect: Can I Please Have Someone Else to Vote For September 29, 2016

I don’t really want to think/write about politics at all any more. However, the debate on Monday irritated me. So, to pick up what I said yesterday, as a way of jumping back in, I will quote myself, “The aggressive, mannish posture of many women in politics–the boxy clothes and insistence on equality–rob women of their natural advantage.”

It’s not just the mannish posture and boxy clothes though. The woman “making it in a man’s world” is having to ape (not to micro-aggress apes) what she thinks men are doing to get ahead. And this is where men not being decent has ruined it for women trying on the mantle of masculinity. Women–and I’m really I’m just guessing here–mistake and therefore misunderstand the aggressive hierarchical male world. Looking in from the outside, they imagine that to get ahead they must treat men the way men treat each other, which must be jockeying for position and putting each other down. But they don’t really understand the subtlety of male relationships. There may be bluster on the surface, but the core of men relating to each other is respect. It may not appear so on the outside, and certainly women don’t think about it all that much, but respect is the air that men breathe, the thing that keeps them mentally and spiritually healthy.

But, if you distilled down the feminist’s misunderstanding of masculinity, you would find that they had a brewed a clear and pure brew of disrespect.

This must be so else how can one explain the belittling manner of so many women towards so many men. In spite of all the chatter about respecting others and respecting ourselves.

If you really want to understand why great swaths of people, but especially poor white men, think that Trump is just what the HMO ordered I would put five whole cents down to it being the disrespectful tone that men endure at the hands of a “feminized” culture. A man, of whatever color and economic status, wakes up in the morning and he is told what to do by women. His mother, his wife, his teachers, the media. He is lectured. He is blamed. He is put up with. He is endured. He is never, though, understood or allowed to express dissatisfaction over his lot. If he is sensible, he will throw off his cis identity and become a “woman”.

I don’t say this in any way to victimize the man. I think if more husbands listened to their wives instead of pandering to them, or nodding dejectedly, or hiding in the world of sports, they would find that the average woman wants someone who will say what’s on his mind, even if that thing is offensive to the prevailing wind of the day.

But I do think that in a woman’s world, the men endure, and endure, and endure, and then some of them vote for Trump, and others of them conclude they have nothing to lose and join up with Black Lives Matter.

Disrespect is the drink that we all drink every morning. Either we are pouring it out or drinking it in. It is so much the one cup from which we all drink that most of us don’t hear it or feel it any more. Except under the bright shining lights of a presidential debate. There, the mutual disrespect of one for the other shines forth in full color. “With all due respect” a ready signal that something disrespectful is about to happen.

It’s not that we’ve lost our love of virtue (we have). It’s not that we’ve lost our religion (we have). It’s not that we’ve squandered the pillars of intellectual thought that have carried us so far (we have). It’s that we have lost the centrality of that foolish, ancient truth born into the world by Jesus himself, that if you put yourself first, everything else will slip through your fingers. And when you put yourself in the center, everything and everyone else must go away. To stay there, to live there, on the holy mountain of yourself, Disrespectfulness and Pride will be your food and drink, the substance of all you are and all you do.

Masculinity unmoored from self sacrifice, femininity unmoored from life giving become empty, impatient, disrespectful shadows of their former selves. The woman in politics who beats her way up the ladder, her manner aggressive and unkind, shouting that she cares for others when everyone can see she cares only for herself is perfectly matched by the corrupt, womanizing wonder who so deeply loves himself that he forgets even to appeal to the people of the nation he hopes to lead.

If we wanted to reorder our ways before the Lord, in the hopes that he would have mercy and give us someone else to vote for, a single small step might be for the women of this nation to question the manner in which they are speaking to the men in their lives. And at the same moment, the men might emerge from the shadows and margins and take responsibility for the death of virtue, the objectifying of women, the infantilization of themselves even as so many actual infants perish. Or we could just go on the way we are, but that seems like a tragic proposition to me.


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