Republican Phallus / Femiphobia Theory

Wake up and face the evidence. You lost the last elections because the people wasn't convinced by your policies.That's all. You'd better ask What went wrong? instead of posting emabarrasing pieces of cranky liberal journalism like this.

Now I'm thinking this article might be more on spot than I had believed. Look at how folks are getting their backs up about it.

Only out of fear that you guys are being brainwashed by this kind of stuff.

Quote:

Only out of fear that you guys are being brainwashed by this kind of stuff.

You worry about Us being brainwashed?

Perhaps you should call up some of your own pundits and tell them to cut out the divisive speech; I'd start with Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, and O'reilly.

Cycloptichorn

FreeDuck wrote:

Now I'm thinking this article might be more on spot than I had believed. Look at how folks are getting their backs up about it.

Only out of fear that you guys are being brainwashed by this kind of stuff.

Doesn't it bother you that the Ducat wants to keep conservatives and liberals so seperated? He writes about conservative housewives, conservative homosexuals, conservative officials, as though there could be no way a right thinking, moral liberal could ever do any of those things. There is no way a liberal woman would stay home and be a house wife, no way would a liberal homosexual write about other homosexuals.

How many times have I quoted Hannity, Limbaugh or O'reilly?

One of the things that I find most distressing about politics, is that many people treat it almost like a religion................my party is all correct, and yours is all wrong. Personally, I think that both political parties have huge, gaping deficiencies. It is up to me to weigh the options, and then choose what I think is most appropriate for me, and my country.

Very interesting articles about Republican / Conservative femiphobia follow. . . .

Stephen J. Ducat: It's a culture based on male domination and a culture in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied. In such a culture, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.

. . . The problem is that domination--either in a personal or a global context---can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

Relating back to the article, it is interesting that the male machoism and slamming of feminism is more akin to what's taking place in the Middle East, where women are tortured, abused, and even murdered by their own government for what is considered egregious acts against the Koran (adultery, for example). We may be a much more civilized society, but when you have a Harvard professor stating that women are below men in so many ways, that certainly doesn't help the American debate in defining what it means to be "equal" in this country.

BuzzFlash: You also have a chapter called "Vaginas With Teeth and Castrating First Ladies -- Fantasies of Feminine Danger From Eve to Hillary Clinton." Clearly, she evokes something in the right that was on an atomic scale in terms of negative reaction. Is it that she represents the embracing and smothering mother, the woman who overpowers the man, who is not submissive to the man, but thinks for herself, thinks about her own future, is self-sufficient to a great degree? Do these characteristics threaten anxious masculinity to such an extent that she was like the nuclear bomb to them psychologically?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Her being perceived as a powerful and, most troubling, a self-authorizing woman, was regarded as profoundly threatening and evoked a kind of misogynist dread and revulsion exceeding even that generated by Eleanor Roosevelt. What's interesting about this, and what makes it an example of political irrationality, is that she's not that liberal. I mean, she's pretty much a centrist, as was her husband.

BuzzFlash: This really reveals so much and connects so many dots by going a couple levels deeper and trying to figure out what's going on beneath the surface. This construct of anxious masculinity triumphing over threats from feminine forces, from dominant, smothering mothers or uppity wives, seems to explain so much about what's going on with the Republican Party. But then what do you make of someone like Condoleezza Rice in positions of power?

Stephen J. Ducat: He put a woman in a position of power to implement his policies and cushion him from information that he doesn't want to know about. And you have to keep in mind, as highly placed as Condoleezza Rice is, she is his underling. She does the bidding of the core group of neo-cons.

BuzzFlash: If you're a woman, we'll let you in the club as long as you act like the guy on top?

Stephen J. Ducat: As long as you support and act like the guy on top. Of course, having Condoleezza Rice in her position doesn't translate into anything meaningful for other women. I think Condoleezza Rice's current position is evidence of how failure is no impediment to promotion in the Bush regime.