Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

The first thing that strikes me about the Alyssa Rosenberg quote is its breathtaking self-centeredness: “How much does masculine culture depend on women and femininity as a reference point?” This reminds me of the conversation that every straight guy has had with their female significant other. I call it the “You don’t have to pretend with me” talk.

Every time we straight guys talk about something we like (sports, metal music, violent video games, scotch whisky, etc.) we get the same response. “There are no guys around. You don’t have to pretend to like that stuff with me. Just be yourself!” What’s bizarre is that there is absolutely no acknowledgment that the stereotypical masculine stuff is stuff that we actually like. I like hockey fights. I like listening to Tool. I like GTA V. I like Lagavulin. Really, I do!

This is what drives me crazy about the contemporary liberal view that masculinity is nothing more than a social construct that can, with willpower, be overcome. All the things that make me a man, things that I enjoy, are apparently just externally forced cultural norms that I am too dumb and weak to transcend.

Masculinity has nothing to do with denigrating women. Period.  There is no greater exemplar of modern masculinity than the character of Ron Swanson … can you imagine him denigrating women?

Many more readers chime in:

OK, straight male responding as requested! First, I will state one thing unequivocally.  Masculine culture (however you want define it) is NOT under any kind of threat.  This notion is as ridiculous as the idea that suddenly Sharia Law is going to take over the American judicial system.

The size, momentum, influence, and sheer predominance of straight, white, male culture makes this a frank impossibility – at least in our lifetimes.  It is the de facto default; our entire society has been built around it for thousands of years.  All the inroads that diversity and inclusiveness have made (particularly in the last 50 years or so) are a drop in the bucket compared to the history and established institutions that inform who we are as a society.

Second, thanks for attempting to bridge the gap between some of these disparate positions – particularly the highly polarized ones.  One on my greatest frustrations in trying to discuss all of this mess is when I see people having conversations AT each other rather than WITH.  As with anything, a little bit of empathy and understanding on every side helps.

On that note, Devin Faraci wrote a damn good explanation of how these gamers feel marginalized by these feminist critiques.  Money quote:

Let me tell you where these kids are coming from, because I used to come from there. The first thing that’s happening is that they’re mostly males who are socially unaccepted. They’re outsiders, losers, weirdos and freaks. And most of them aren’t just male, they’re white males. What’s happening is that these men are feeling powerless in their own lives, and then along comes someone like Anita Sarkeesian telling them that as white men they are the MOST powerful group in the world. And that they should be aware of this privilege and they should be careful how they exert it.

Imagine the confusion this causes. These kids feel like the bottom of the heap, ignored and hated and mocked and here comes this woman – who is successful and admired and gets Joss Whedon to retweet her videos – telling them that they’re actually part of an invisible system keeping her down. This simply can’t compute for these guys.

Another references what might be the best TAL episode ever, which we recently featured here:

I can’t read the catcalls thread without thinking of a stunning segment from This American Life about a woman undergoing a sex change. He (soon to be she) describes vividly how intensive testosterone treatment transforms the way s/he looks at women on the subway and in the street. (I may even have read this passage on these very pages a few years back, but it bears repeating I think). Here s/he describes the period following the first major injection:

The most overwhelming feeling is the incredible increase in libido and change in the way that I perceived women and the way I thought about sex. Before testosterone, I would be riding the subway, which is the traditional hotbed of lust in the city. And I would see a woman on the subway, and I would think, she’s attractive. I’d like to meet her. What’s that book she’s reading? I could talk to her. This is what I would say.

There would be a narrative. There would be this stream of language. It would be very verbal.

After testosterone, there was no narrative. There was no language whatsoever. It was just, I would see a woman who was attractive or not attractive. She might have an attractive quality, nice ankles or something, and the rest of her would be fairly unappealing to me.

But that was enough to basically just flood my mind with aggressive, pornographic images, just one after another. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off. Everything I looked at, everything I touched, turned to sex. […]

I remember walking up Fifth Avenue, there was a woman walking in front of me. And she was wearing this little skirt and this little top. And I was looking at her ass. And I kept saying to myself, don’t look at it, don’t look at it. And I kept looking at it.

And I walked past her. And this voice in my head kept saying, turn around to look at her breasts. Turn around, turn around, turn around. And my feminist, female background kept saying, don’t you dare, you pig. Don’t turn around. And I fought myself for a whole block, and then I turned around and checked her out.

And before, it was cool. When I would do a poetry reading, I would get up, and I would read these poems about women on the street. And I was a butch dyke, and that was very cutting-edge, and that was very sexy and raw. And now I’m just a jerk.

Another:

I happened to read a 2010 article on Alternet today, and it reminded me very much of the issues that you and Alyssa Rosenberg were talking about a couple days ago. The author writes about his time spent as a pornography cameraman and writes in particular about the difference between straight and gay porn.

On straight porn:

What surprised me most though, was the fact that I found within myself a happy willingness to be violent, a willingness to degrade. Though my bosses may have ordered me to organize and record the scenes of degradation, I followed their orders, and not without pleasure. Something cowardly within me, an internal space, suffused with a weak kind of anger, felt satisfied when I saw a woman “take her punishment.” I clung to the sense of temporary empowerment I found through the bullying. Lust-colored aggression and the satisfaction of making “good money” guided me through scene after scene.

Of course, all participants in porno are complicit, both the bottoms and tops. Both genders willingly participate in heterosexual porn, and to some extent, both are marginalized: I was literally ordered not to film men above the waist if I could help it. And while men do make up the majority of porn’s audience, women watch heterosexual porn, too—quite a few likely doing so with major outrage or dissatisfaction. Still, though, straight porn unarguably continues to be the untrammeled domain of male fantasy.

On gay porn:

…the shame, rage, and sexual violence that I had come to associate with porn was almost completely absent. That meant something.

Gay porn, in fact, was so goddamn simple that it approached a type of Zen beauty. I mean, this was guys taking on guys, in every shape and form imaginable, for the most part in good humor and absent-minded lust. They may have stuck to roles of “tops” and “bottoms,” but in the dressing room, we all seemed equals, on the same team. Everyone laughed at me for being a straight guy shooting gay porn. Some tried to entice me to jump in front of the camera for kicks. But we all laughed about it. We all seemed like friends. The sadness and the degradation I had come to associate with my job, with videotaped sex for money, was suddenly absent.

But I’m saddened to think that the only path to the absence of hostility and anger in porn is to remove women from the equation. It doesn’t bode well, especially for a world in which men and women must continue to co-exist. In the first half of my porn-life, I lived inside of a world where it almost seemed like an entire gender was being denigrated, like that was the whole point—where very young women were choked and slapped and written-on with lipstick, simply for the crime, it seemed, of being a woman. You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you.

Wow.  So that was only one guy’s opinion / personal experience but in the light of recent discussions it really stood out to me.

One more reader:

I’m not sure why you’re responsible for defending straight guy culture, but Alyssa’s post is fascinating in the sense that she seems to take for granted that culture is something that is consciously shaped by its members. No one – including you – is saying that there’s nothing loathsome and regrettable about straight white guy culture. There certainly is! But all cultures have defects that don’t offer any redeeming social value and which can be safely excised, in exactly the surgical manner she wants to edit traits associated with straight guys – if only that was possible. It isn’t.

A culture describes a set of human beings. Human beings are necessarily imperfect. And so should our cultures be. What Alyssa sees as the defects of straight guy culture are – for better or worse – part of our culture. Does masculinity depend on women and femininity as a reference point? she asks. Well, yes, just as femininity depends on masculinity as a reference point. I think what she’s driving at is that too much of straight guy culture defines itself by objectifying women. Umm, sure. But that’s a snapshot of a moving target. The real question is trajectory. Cultures do not self-edit; they evolve, and straight guys have, which is why we’re shocked by the sexism in Mad Men, for example. Now clearly it’s not evolving fast enough for women like Alyssa, but they can (are!) pushing that evolution along by raising awareness about the callousness of catcalling. You can say the same thing about culture that you can about weather: If you don’t like it, wait.

And continue to make the arguments. Also, say something if you see a woman getting harassed.

It was huge:

It appears that Republicans will have a net gain of between 300 and 350 seats and control over 4,100 of the nation’s 7,383 legislative seats. That is their highest number of legislators since 1920. Republicans gained seats in every region of the country and in all but about a dozen legislative chambers that were up this year.

Libby Nelson recognizes the importance of these wins:

Republicans now control state government outright in at least 24 states, one more than they did before the election. They control at least 66 of 99 state legislative chambers nationwide. And they cut the number of states with total Democratic control from 14 to seven — the lowest number since the Civil War. …

Republicans made historic gains in state legislatures in 2010. They held on in many states in 2012, or made up for losses in one state with gains in another — even though Democrats won the national election. And they won even more in 2014. This isn’t an accident — it’s the result of strategic fundraising from national Republicans, beginning in 2010, aimed at engineering statehouse takeovers. Out-of-state contributions were shuffled to states where they would make a difference, particularly as congressional partisanship and gridlock made policymaking in Washington increasingly unlikely.

John Hood analyzes the Republican gains:

The 2014 legislative results will allow many more Republicans to serve as house speakers, senate leaders, and committee chairman, gaining critical experience for possible future careers in federal politics. It gives the GOP more chambers with which to advance economic and social legislation. Even if a bill goes to a Democratic governor for a veto, that’s useful to define issues and expose squishes. In many cases, however, newly Republican legislatures will be able to enact conservative reforms with the cooperation or acquiescence of such governors, who are first and foremost political animals. As for state Democrats, their ability to legislate liberal policies has just taken a nose dive. Only seven state governments are fully blue at this point.

These are, of course, just opportunities for Republicans. They could certainly squander them on pointless crusades, poorly crafted policies, or disastrous infighting.

Earlier Dish on the power of state legislatures here.

Jesse Singal, regretting how he’d never challenged a “borderline-compulsive” street harasser he once knew, spoke with Hollaback’s Debjani Roy in an attempt to better prepare himself for such interventions in the future:

[A]m I overestimating the impact one disapproving conversation can have? Probably not, said Roy. [This serial harasser] Harry had probably, like many young men, been in a lot of social situations in which street harassment wasn’t looked down upon and may have been actively encouraged. “We all know about peer pressure,” said Roy. “And I think a lot of the original behavior comes out of that. Like, ‘Dude, why aren’t you hitting on her? Dude, why aren’t you trying to pick up more women? Why aren’t you yelling that at her?’” Having another guy come up and say exactly the opposite, then, can make an impact — even if it’s not guaranteed to.

Singal adds that even just commiserating with or checking on the harassed woman afterwards can be a beneficial way to get involved. He concludes:

What all this comes down to is that, in much the same way that harassing is a socially ingrained part of Harry’s life, not responding to “mild” incidents of harassment is a socially ingrained part of mine. For whatever reason, I and a lot of other otherwise “good guys” have succumbed to the notion that it’s best to just stay out of these situations rather than intervene.

A reader shares his own missed opportunity:

Many years ago when I was in my early 20s and living in Boston, I was on the T late at night and saw this middle-aged Hispanic man harassing a young black woman clearly unappreciative of his advances.

She was very overweight, and after the man sat down next to her, he started leaning in and talking to her and touching her arm while she just shrank into the wall of the car. Occasionally she would turn to glare at him, or say something so softly as to be inaudible. It was a pretty crowded train, but nobody else seemed to be paying attention to the situation and I, having never witnessed anything like it before, sort of froze. I just kept watching and told myself that if he really grabbed her or became belligerent, then I would intervene, but that never happened, and so still I did nothing. He kept harassing her, and I kept watching uncomfortably and wondering what I should do. Several minutes later when my stop came, I asked the group of people standing next to me to please keep an eye on the guy to make sure “nothing happened” and I got off the train.

I have no idea what happened to the woman, but of course something was already happening to her, and it may have gotten much worse. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. Naturally, my regret over that night has only grown, especially after hearing my wife and female friends’ personal experiences with public harassment and assault. For all the consternation about these feminist campaigns and their tactics, the resulting discussion and increased awareness is surely a net gain. The women in my life certainly never told me about any of this stuff until I knew to ask, and I’m now quite grateful for, and influenced by, their perspectives.

As for us men? We’re long overdue to grow out of this crap, harassers and bystanders alike. I definitely wish I had sooner.

I’ve actually been in a couple of similar situations and have actually intervened. “Is this guy bothering you?” is my usual question. Both times, the answer was a demurral. But my just asking that question in public shifted the atmosphere a little bit. And I stood by, watching the dude until he moved away. I guess I could have been foolish and certainly didn’t want a physical confrontation with the dude. But it struck me how potent a simple question can be in making a woman feel a little less alone and a man a little more self-aware that others were keeping tabs.

Read our two long catcalling threads here and here.

Neil Irwin considers legislation that the GOP and Obama might agree on. A big first test:

One way or another, the debt ceiling will need to be raised sometime in the first part of 2015 to prevent a government default, and deals will need to be made to continue funding the federal government without the high drama of standoffs like that over the debt ceiling in 2011, the “fiscal cliff” of late 2012 and the shutdown in 2013.

It will pit two sides of the G.O.P. against each other. One team of Republican leadership seeks to bolster the party’s brand in the run-up to 2016 elections and is responsive to business interests who prefer stability. The other is the harder-right contingent of the caucus that wants to try to shut down Obamacare at any cost. Presidential politics may come into play as well, as potential candidates like Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky push for a harder-edged approach than that preferred by the majority leader Mitch McConnell. (“Let me be clear: There will be no shutdowns and no default on the national debt,” Mr. McConnell said Wednesday in his appearance in Louisville).

Howard Gleckman isn’t betting on tax reform:

Everyone says they want tax reform but once past that rhetoric, they agree on very little. President Obama says he supports corporate reform. Cruz wants a flat tax. Paul Ryan, who wants to be the new chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, favors broad-based overhaul rather than corporate reform alone. House Speaker John Boehner says he favors tax reform but when presented with a plan by Ways and Means Chair Dave Camp earlier this year, Boehner ran for the hills. On top of that, Democrats and Republicans are completely at loggerheads over whether reform should cut taxes, raise them, or leave them roughly the same. Other than that, a deal is imminent.

Republicans may have better luck on Keystone XL:

The new Senate Republican majority creates an opportunity for likely Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to force a vote on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline he’s been waiting years to hold. By The Huffington Post’s count, the new Senate will have at least 61 votes in favor of a measure forcing the pipeline’s approval — a filibuster-proof majority.

Plumer sizes up the Keystone fight:

[O]ne big question is whether President Obama would veto. Some onlookers are skeptical he could hold out forever. “People are fed up on Keystone,” an aide to a moderate Democratic senator told my colleague Ezra Klein. “I don’t know how Keystone isn’t just approved if Republicans take over.”

A lot may depend on the form that the bill takes. If Republicans sent a standalone pro-Keystone bill to the White House, Obama could veto rather easily. But if it was attached to a larger budget bill? If a government shutdown was potentially at stake? That’s tougher.

Trade is another area where bipartisan agreement is possible. Heather Timmons thinks the GOP victory is “good news for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade agreement between a dozen countries that excludes China”:

Republicans are big fans of the TPP, which would drop trade tariffs and regulatory barriers among the participating countries. Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, promoted the TPP last week at a speech in New York, saying: “Instead of just talking about a so-called ‘pivot to Asia,’ the Obama administration should prioritize negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership by year’s end.” TPP member nations are using the APEC summit this week in Beijing as a chance to meet on the sidelines, and plan to discuss the pact Nov. 8.

Actually, Obama already supports the TPP, but key Democrats have blocked the pact, opposing fast-tracked trade agreements over concerns they would send more manufacturing jobs overseas, and in particular hurt the auto industry. Now, Obama may be able to “ride the Republican wave” to get trade deals passed, as Foreign Policy puts it.

Regardless of the issues under debate, Jacob Weisberg is hopeful that the gridlock will ease:

Until this year, the biggest hazard to Republican incumbents came from more extreme Tea Party conservatives. But in this year’s primaries the Tea Party’s power began to wane, as money from wealthy donors flowed to old stalwarts such as Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Pat Roberts of Kansas who were better positioned to keep their strongholds out of Democratic hands. This will be even more true in 2016, since turnout is far larger, and the electorate much more Democratic, in presidential election cycles.

If you are a Republican incumbent who feels that the greatest threat to your job comes from your right, then you take a big risk when you side with Obama about anything.

If, on the other hand, your principal worry is losing to a Democrat, you have an increased incentive to strike deals with the opposition on issues where Democratic positions are more popular than Republican ones.