Category: The Dish

“Traditional Masculinity Has To Die” Ctd

A reader writes:

You posted a tweet with the hashtag #yesallwomen (no issue with that), but then you refer to the sad events this past weekend as “in the wake of the misogyny-fueled rampage near UCSB.” While I agree that Rodgers hated women, if you look at anything he’s put online, he clearly hates other men as well. In fact he seems to hate everyone, including members of his own family. He hated people for many, many reasons, including “you” appearing to be “better” than him. This was true if you had a nicer car than he did, as well as if you had a girlfriend – doubly so if Rodgers found her attractive.

He snapped this past weekend. He had a lot of targets. For whatever reason he started with his roomates, then he went to target some of the women who stood in for women who have turned him down. No doubt given enough time he would have gone after other people he was jealous of.

It is reckless to refer to this as a women’s only issue or to pretend that the only victims or targets were women. By framing it as you did, you imply that. He was a young man who had serious mental issues and had been doing his best to avoid the treament his family was trying to get him. That is the real issue – that, and how he got himself a gun.

Another quotes me:

“What we need is not grandiose and thereby doomed projects of cultural re-education, but a more powerful appeal to men to be gentlemen, to see maleness at its best as a tamed wildness.” Some of the most misogynistic men I have ever met considered themselves to be perfect gentlemen. They claimed that because they would never treat a woman like all those other assholes do, would never ever take her for granted, that they were better. But in reality they felt owed, just like Rogers did.

My ex is a prime example.

When we broke up, after years of me trying to explain, he clearly still didn’t understand why I didn’t just love him back. He was, according to him, the perfect boyfriend! He deserved my love. This totally disregards the fact that he had no respect for my intellect or my ability to think for myself. He treated me like a fragile doll and never understood that I just wanted to be treated like a person. I’m in no way perfect and did not want to be held to his incredibly unrealistic standards. But he always opened the door for me and bought me whatever I insinuated I would maybe eventually like to own. In return, I owed him love, right?

He would be deeply insulted to be called a misogynist. But that’s what he was/is. He never saw me as a fully formed person. I am a woman, so I am different. I am “less than”. I am a trophy to be earned or bought. And he was what you would call tame. I can only imagine what he would have been like if he was “wild”.

A male perspective:

By the end of your counterpoint to deBoer, I think you’ve actually ended up in very nearly the same place as he is (“we need … a more powerful appeal to men to be gentlemen, to see maleness at its best as a tamed wildness”). And if your desire is an appeal for bros to be gentlemen, then I think you’re pretty well asking for an end to (modern American) “traditional masculinity” as we know it. If you’re a gentleman, you don’t exhibit an over-the-top, hyper sense of “aggression, dominance and power.” If you wish to tame those very base instincts, then you’re ending up with a very different version of masculinity than “Murrican dudebro.”

Maybe it’s more of a “macho American” thing, but I was definitely brought up with the societal expectation of being more sexually aggressive. And that’s not just making the first move with a woman; outside of my mom, I was never really pushed back on for chasing girls or ogling them (without considering if it caused them any discomfort). I’m only in my early 30s, but I look back on the teenage me as a not-very-nice person. I’m sure everyone feels that way, but I feel it far more acutely now that my best friends are women.

Forget “expected male” behavior. If all we are is a pack of randy cocks whose excuse is “well it’s testosterone,” then we shortchange ourselves and insult our own capabilities. And forget “taming.” A “tame” animals merely tolerates the presence of humans. I don’t want to merely tolerate women; I strive to be their equal.

Update from a reader:

It seems a tad harsh for your reader to accuse her ex-boyfriend of misogyny for mimicking the classical virtue of chivalry as an attempt to get her to love him back. Based on what she reported, he was guilty of nothing more than ineptitude or incompetence.

Is every male failure, especially in their interactions with women, now an expression of misogyny? What hope do we have when we become contemptible and loathsome women-haters merely by not knowing what we’re doing?

I feel such a conflation not only trivializes the word “misogyny” but all male-female relations. We can now decide whether a male is relating successfully to women by measuring him on this simplified misogyny scale. I have a feeling that male-female relations are actually much more complex than that, given the whole thing is clouded over with issues of self-worth and self-esteem, which men deal with just as intensely – if differently – than women.

The entire discussion all seems besides the point. As other readers have pointed out, Rodgers problem wasn’t being rejected, and it wasn’t women. He had a severe neuropsychiatric disability and mental illness. The argument could be made that in his illness he internalized some of the worst aspects of our culture, and his mental illness amplified those aspects towards violent ends. However, this doesn’t justify cherry-picking aspect of his pathology and ignoring all others.

We need laws in place to empower mental health professionals and law enforcement to stop episodes like this in their tracks, to protect people from those whose mental illness leads them to make tragic, irreversible decisions, and to protect the mentally ill from themselves. That’s the primary, urgent, life-or-death discussion we should be having right now. Trying to pigeonhole this tragic story into a story about misogyny distracts us from this conversation.

Another:

In reference to the reader you quoted regarding Rodger’s hatred of men, yes, he hated other men, but that was quite clearly secondary:

I hated all of those obnoxious, boisterous men who were able to enjoy pleasurable sex lives with beautiful girls, but I hated the girl’s even more, because they were the ones who chose those men instead of me. It was their choice. They are the ones who deprived me of love and sex.

He didn’t just snap this past weekend. It had been premeditated for a long time, and he was quite specific about why he started with his roommates:

On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery. The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber. After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats.
[…]
This First Phase will represent my vengeance against all of the men who have had pleasurable sex lives while I’ve had to suffer.

His “Second Phase” represented his “War on Women”, beginning with the sorority house. Women were undoubtedly the main focus of his hatred. He certainly didn’t have any rants about men comparable to this:

Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.

He then goes envisions his perfect world:

The first strike against women will be to quarantine all of them in concentration camps. At these camps, the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death. That would be an efficient and fitting way to kill them all off. I would take great pleasure and satisfaction in condemning every single woman on earth to starve to death. I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die. If I can’t have them, no one will, I’d imagine thinking to myself as I oversee this. Women represent everything that is unfair with this world, and in order to make the world a fair place, they must all be eradicated.

When Southern Baptists Backed Abortion

It was as recently as the 1970s:

Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Eye-opening.

Hey, Wait A Minute, Mr Kramer, Ctd

A reader is incredulous:

This quote from Kramer surprises you? This is the Larry Kramer of the novel Faggots piping up. This is Fred Lemish, not Ned Weeks, the Kramer alter-ego who disdains everyone who enjoys his sexuality unshackled by the particular strain of Puritanical self-restraint (or self-denial) that Kramer/Lemish prefers. In this construct, condoms require foregoing a certain amount of pleasure; therefore they are courageous and virtuous. A pill doesn’t reduce the pleasure in sex; therefore it is a morally cheap and cowardly alternative. That Mr. Kramer is consistent in this since the 1970s doesn’t make it any less deluded and irresponsible.

No, it didn’t surprise me. Larry has been consistent in all this for ever – and wrong about it for ever. What still shocks me is that his moral agenda actually trumps preventing the spread of HIV. Another reader speculates:

I have nothing more to add to what you wrote, other than to say that the combination of safe sex, education, anti-virals and now Truvada may have finally put the disease on a path to oblivion, and as one result, Kramer may be losing the issue that defined who he was and is these past 30 or so years. Not to make a false equivalence, but it’s kind of like the neocons who can’t accept that the world has changed and there is no need for the US to be the world’s policeman anymore. Letting go of something one has fought for or against for a long time can be a loss.

I’d put it a little differently – and I explored this a little in my essay “When Plagues End” in Love Undetectable. Plague creates an entirely new persona – embattled, on guard, constantly afraid and always mobilized. And demobilization is never psychologically easy. Camus brilliantly saw this in La Peste. When I first read it, I didn’t really believe that the inhabitants of Oran would resist the good news when the nightmare lifted. But they did. And then I saw it in my own life – in the truly shocking wave of abuse I got when the essay first appeared in the New York Times Magazine and then, when my own viral load went to zero, in the deep depression that knocked me flat on my back. Humans are conservative. They get attached to what they know – even if it is brutalizing – and fearful of change.I think we’re seeing exactly the same psychological reaction to the amazing Truvada and anti-retroviral breakthrough. The reasons people are giving for opposing Truvada are so irrational and knee jerk they only make sense in the context of a deep aversion to change, even for the better.

Another reader asks:

Did you watch The Normal Heart, and if so, what did you think?

Yes, I did. So how to put this diplomatically?

I thought it was really helpful in showing people what it was like when the plague first hit, and in revealing the appalling, early indifference of the majority of Americans toward it. I thought Matt Bomer did about as good a job as possible in portraying the gruesome decline HIV visited upon so many. If that’s all the movie did, it was worth making.

But in general, I thought the production revealed the weakness of the original script – which works best in a theater as a kind of agit-prop set-piece designed for the 1985 moment. The best speech in the play, for example, is Bruce’s telling of the tale of the AIDS patient being treated literally like garbage in his final hours on earth – quarantined, untouched, brutalized and then sealed in a black plastic bag, ready for a garbage truck. The speech has real rhetorical power and forces you to imagine such cruelty and callousness – for the AIDS epidemic was not merely about pain and suffering, it was about adding stigma and discrimination to pain and suffering. But in the HBO movie, the literal depiction of the scene robbed it of almost all its force, although I wonder whether Taylor Kitsch’s mediocre talent could have pulled it off anyway. Or take one of the really powerful moments at the end of the play, when the names of the dead cascade over the stage in the hundreds of thousands. In the movie, it was about rolodex cards.

The play itself, of course, is a massive vanity project. Larry Kramer was Chad Griffin avant la lettre. Its politics are as crude as its cartoon characters. The added scenes were just excruciating. Ned Weeks in the White House screaming in the hallways? A Reagan official literally asking if the plague could affect someone who hired hookers? Embarrassing. Then there’s the underlying message – that nothing ever happened to beat back HIV, that the plague is as powerful as ever, that Reagan is still murdering people, and there’s no hope unless you follow Larry Kramer. The fact that AIDS deaths plummeted after 1996, and that we have a solid prevention tool and a powerful treatment regimen could not be mentioned, because it would detract from the pure drama of it all. And when you are engaged in pure drama, it’s hard to beat Larry Kramer’s talent for it.

Larry was dead right to write this play and a hugely important figure in helping gay men fight back at the hour of our deaths. None of that should ever be gainsaid. I honor him and feel great affection for him. But this movie? Meh.

The EU Encourages Corruption?

Reihan entertains the idea:

There is a longstanding view, rooted in the rise of the centralized fiscal state in early modern Europe and, more recently, in the rise to affluence and power of states like South Korea, that states often adopt growth-enhancing policies when they’ve run out of other options, e.g., when they face a formidable military threat and find themselves unable to extract aid, or enough aid, from allied states, thus forcing them to rely on internal resources. (Nicholas Eubank’s work on Somaliland offers a distillation of some of this literature.) Yet when states have an easily-accessible resource at their disposal, like point-source natural resources (oil and gas) or government-to-government transfers, they don’t necessarily have to adopt growth-enhancing policies, as political elites can take the easy root of just turning on the spigot and skimming off their cut.

Dalibor Rohac, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, has thought deeply about this question, and when I asked him to write something for The Agenda on the subject, he kindly agreed to do so. If Dalibor is right, the European Union hasn’t just failed to prevent the deterioration of liberal-democratic norms in central and eastern Europe. It has exacerbated the problem. Dalibor calls this “the curse of European structural funds,” and I think he makes a rock-solid case.

The heart of Rohac’s argument:

The inflow of EU funds into countries with weak institutions does not mean just wasteful spending but also breeds corruption. The impact may be hard to quantify but is very visible. Before joining the EU, Eastern European countries had made significant progress in reducing cronyism and corruption – mainly because of the numerous reforms they had to adopt in order to qualify for EU membership in the first place. After the accession, not only did the progress come to a halt but some measures of corruption actually deteriorated.

Why Take Vacations? Ctd

A reader responds to the question:

Vacations are the best way to build a family. When out in a tent for a week with the kids, the whole family is doing nothing but family activities and building family memories. Same applies now that the kids are out of the house.  A vacation with my wife is “us time”.  Vacations together bind families together.

Another adds, “Because when I’m dead, my daughters aren’t going to say to each other, ‘I really wish that when Daddy was alive, he’d spent more time at work.'” Another:

I’m not sure “happiness” is the proper measure for why or why not, vacations should be taken. I don’t travel to increase my happiness.

I think you could make the argument that if one never took a vacation and never saw something new, one might be happier never having known the vast diversity of all things on this earth. It’s like that expression, the grass is always greener; if one never knew about the grass on the other side, then perhaps one would be content with their own grass on their own side. I travel because I want to visit that grass, to smell it and see it, and to compare it with my own. Had I never travelled to Europe as a teenage, backpacking for a couple months on my own, I would never know how disgusting soda is warm with no ice, or how fantastic fresh pasta tastes when its authentically prepared, as they do in Rome.

I take vacations in order to explore the world. To see the diversity of lifestyle, of cuisine, geography and language. Exploring the world doesn’t make me happier; it just makes me, me. And with each passing trip, be it a trip to Peru or a plop vacation to an island, I learn a little bit more about myself, a little bit more about what I like and what I don’t, and in doing this I feel more at peace with myself. Vacations are good in that way. They help define who we are when we return home.

Another puts it this way:

One of the best parts of vacation is making home seem new again.

Update from a reader:

In a truly wonderful letter, Kurt Vonnegut advised a group of students to “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”

I write to make my soul grow. It’s also why I travel.

When I move through the world with open eyes, I gain a few inches. I earn a little valuable perspective. The dullness of everyday life is swapped out with an intense curiosity that wipes clean my mind’s carefully constructed sensory adaptation. That to which I was once blind is temporarily laid bare in plain sight. Like a good night’s sleep restoring the well of willpower, travel rejuvenates my dwindling childlike wonder. Music, food, nature and people are furiously alive with rich detail and flavor.

When I travel, I am reminded of our fundamental goodness as I my see comfort zones, slide past them ungracefully and get by with the help of strangers and newfound friends. Because everything seems so different, the bonds between people get a fresh take and deep look as I see mothers caring for children, brothers jostling each other out of childhood, or friends soaking up the familiar rhythm of their rapport.

When it’s all over, travel remains with me. My self-imposed demands to be less blind and see more of what I call home. The new imperatives to be less passive and act more. The stories I relate to friends and family among the soft early mornings and the hazy late nights. The hopeful wanderlust and sense that adventure is just over the horizon.

Most of all, what remains from travel is the becoming and the growth of my soul. If nothing else, that’s why you’ll find me hunting the world for the unknown. To become. To grow my soul.

Essential Reading For Rightwingers

Nicole Hemmer looks back at three political paperbacks released in the spring of 1964 that sold an astonishing 16 million copies between them in just six months – a publishing phenomenon she calls the “leading edge of conservative media’s first presidential campaign”:

Appearing in rapid succession, the books startled observers with their dark and conspiratorial interpretation of American history. In None Dare Call It Treason, John Stormer spun a tale of internal subversion and weak-willed foreign policy that marked “America’s retreat from victory” in the Cold War. “Every communist country in the world literally has a ‘Made in the USA’ stamp on it,” he wrote. Phyllis Schlafly, author of A Choice Not an Echo, accused “a few secret kingmakers” in the Republican Party of conspiring to keep conservatives out of power. J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon served up 200 pages of greased palms, stolen elections, and suspicious deaths to argue that President Johnson was better suited to the penitentiary than the presidency.

Haley’s claims rivaled the darkest and most bizarre Clinton conspiracies.

The author, a Texas cowman, called Johnson an “inordinately vain, egotistical, ambitious extrovert” and claimed Lady Bird Johnson mirrored “Lady Macbeth’s consuming ambition for the growth of her husband’s power.” Of the Kennedy assassination he wrote, “What a strange coincidence.”

These “hatchets with soft cover sheaths,” as the Chicago Tribune characterized them, owed their success to the conservative movement’s innate populism and its institutional architecture. Conservatives, like most populists, harbored deep suspicions of institutions not under their control, particularly the media and the Republican Party. If the newsmen of the Washington Post and the grandees of the GOP were left to shape the campaign narrative, the right believed, Goldwater’s campaign would be over before it began. So conservatives used their own media to craft an alternative campaign unmediated by outside institutions.

China’s Panda Diplomacy

GERMANY-ZOO-PANDA

Dara Lind examines it:

When the Chinese government started the current wave of panda loans, [researcher Kathleen] Buckingham and her coauthors discovered a pattern: pandas were sent to trade partners shortly after major trade agreements were signed, as a way of expressing a desire to build a long-term trade relationship. …

The choice of which zoos get pandas within a country is important, too.

The pandas loaned to the United Kingdom, for example, don’t live in the London Zoo, which would be the logical place for them — they were sent to the Edinburgh Zoo, as an acknowledgment of $4 billion in trade deals for exporting Scottish salmon and Land Rovers to China.

But China also uses panda loans (as well as the trade deals themselves) to exert political pressure on countries. China turned to Scotland for its salmon imports, for example, as a replacement for longtime salmon supplier Norway. After the Nobel Peace Prize committee gave the award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, China took its salmon money somewhere else. Sometimes economics and politics intersect: the panda loan China and Denmark agreed to just last month could be seen as an expression of Chinese interest in Greenland’s natural resources, or as a reward for Denmark walking back its support of Tibetan independence five years ago.

(Photo: Picture taken on July 5, 2000 shows Bao Bao, the oldest captive male panda in the world, in his enclosure at the Berlin zoo. A gift from China to former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Bao Bao died at the age of 34 on August 22, 2012. By Stephanie Pilick/AFP/Getty Images)

Girl Power In Ukraine

Anna Nemtsova profiles the female militants taking part on both sides of the civil conflict:

Women build barricades, pour gas for Molotov cocktails, or throw bricks at policemen — sometimes with more passion and anger than the men. On the Maidan, some of them joined Unit 39, a largely female group within the demonstrators’ Self-Defense Forces, where their tasks included persuading members of Berkut, the paramilitary police, to defect. Last month, activist Irma Krat, one of the leaders of the Maidan’s female militia forces, was detained by rebels in Sloviansk. The interrogators have accused her of torturing anti-Maidan activists and killing a Berkut officer.

But the pro-Ukrainian contingent certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on women militants. Since late April, leaders of the separatist movement have been calling on both men and women to mobilize and prepare for a real war against Kiev. Last weekend, a pro-Russian website issued a video that showed four masked women warriors from Lugansk declaring “a war against the junta,” as pro-Russian forces refer to the interim government in Kiev. In the video, women dressed in camouflage with Kalashnikov rifles slung across their chests introduce themselves as female fighters in the Russian Orthodox Army: “We took up weapons because we’re fed up,” one of the women says.

It’s not just young women, either. Last week, Julia Ioffe took a look at the role grandmothers (baby, plural of baba) were playing in separatist movements in eastern Ukraine:

Baby were reportedly deployed in April outside Slovyansk, where the Ukrainian government’s troops, in a massive embarrassment to the provisional government in Kiev, surrendered their tracked and armored personnel carriers, as well as their assault rifles, to the rebels.

How did it happen?

The machinery rolls in, and a battalion of grannies surround it, hectoring and jeering at the young men in Ukrainian uniform, shaming them for coming to kill them. The Ukrainian soldiers were not going to shoot or plow through unarmed babushki, so they sat there and waited while the grannies hooted and hollered. But before the soldiers knew it, their men arrived, with guns, and the game was lost.

Just last week, Russian state media reported that, outside Slavyansk, Ukrainian troops were again turned back by the granny shock troops. When the Dniepropetrovsk unit had stopped outside town, it was surrounded by baby, cooing at the young soldiers. Then they fed them cakes packed with sedatives, and when the soldiers fell asleep the separatists came and captured their weaponry.