“Mr. Trump...your presidency?
I love your presidency.
I call it “Disgrace the Nation.”
You have more people marching
against you than cancer.
You talk like a sign language gorilla
who got hit in the head.
In fact, the only thing your mouth
Is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s
[bleep] holster.”
Remember that time,
back in January,
when millions of Americans fired up Pinterest,
broke out their gluesticks,
and went arts & crafts wild like kids at camp?
Armed with thousands of colorful banners,
posters and signs,
an estimated four and a half
million people around the world took to the streets
on January 21, 2017 for the Women’s March.`
To remind ourselves of just a few of the reasons
why people were out that day,
let’s pause for a moment
and listen to some words from our
Commander-in-Chief that helped inspire this
tremendous event.
“I did try and fuck her.
She was married.
I moved on her like a bitch.
But I couldn’t get there.
And she was married.
You know, I’m automatically attracted to a
beautiful - I just start kissing them.
It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.
[laughter]
I don’t even wait.
And when you’re a star,
they let you do it.
You can do anything.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Grab them by the pussy.
You can do anything.”
Yeah, that’s our President
back in 2005 when he was
merely a billionaire reality TV show host,
proudly admitting how he abused his power and
celebrity to sexually harass and
assault vulnerable women.
And by the way:
this may be the most famous example of Trump
telling us what he considers to be the real
“Art of the Deal”
but it’s by no means the only one.
Even before Trump announced his
candidacy for President,
every news cycle about him
was like being stuck in a game of
Rape Culture Jumanji.
And partially in response to his blatant, abusive
misogyny, upwards of 4.6 million people gathered
in more than 550 cities in the United States alone,
many of them wielding some seriously spectacular
signs displaying messages of resistance to
systematic racism, sexism, and other forms of
oppression.
But unfortunately, not all the images or chants
back in January were inspirational.
In fact, when you get right down to it,
some of the signs and slogans
didn’t just lack creativity –
they actively reinforced precisely what the people
holding them thought they were protesting.
Punchy doesn’t always equal progressive, y’all.
When you’re “joking” about the unusually small
size of someone’s hands,
or laughing at pictures of him in homoerotic
scenarios, you’re actually feeding the same logic
that encourages someone to think they can,
well, “move on someone like a bitch.”
Our culture tells us how a “real man” should think,
what he should look like,
and who he can dominate.
These messages are toxic.
They depend on a version of masculinity that says:
“Real’ men use power to dominate.
They take what they want,
in business,
or politics,
or in their relationships with women.
And yes, these messages equate having
small hands -- or small anything
with being less of a “real” man.
Let’s look at some more examples to help us
unpack how this works.
In August of 2016,
our last blissful,
pre-election summer,
a statue appeared in New York City’s Union Square
of a very naked Donald Trump.
The size of this statue’s genitals was clearly
intended to be an insult to the man whose greatest
leadership experience up to that point may have
been the two times he fired Stephen Baldwin on
The Celebrity Apprentice.
"You're fired."
From public art and social media
to protests and marches,
renderings like this statue are everywhere.
It’s impossible to avoid the memes about
hand size, poorly-executed spray tans,
and combovers that are are meant to offend
a certain thin-skinned individual
who has a tendency to rage on Twitter and also
has access to the nuclear codes.
In addition to the sea of miniature members,
tiny hands,
and aggressively orange bouffants,
criticism in public spaces has included numerous
images of Trump and Putin taking their diplomatic
intimacy to the physical level.
Valentine’s Day proved to be a pretty great
opportunity for artists intending to defy Trump,
to use some homoerotic imagery
to get in some jabs.
But in this case, homoerotic
equates to homophobic.
If you use gay imagery to insult someone, the
implication is that homosexuality is itself
something shameful.
These images don’t just criticize a political
relationship.
They emasculate Trump by using make-up,
pregnancy, and even his position as
the “little spoon” to suggest his effeminacy.
These images also mock the notion of two men
being together sexually or romantically,
which communicates to all onlookers that,
in 2017, intimacy between two “real men” is
laughable.
People who would consider themselves LGBT
allies are deploying the kind of rhetoric that implies
that anything other than stereotypically masculine
or heterosexual behavior is wrong or absurd.
What do we mean when we say “stereotypically
masculine”?
Well, the media we create and engage
with too often depicts aggression,
physical strength, pride, protectiveness,
and even short tempers as “manly.”
We’ve elevated those traits from “manly virtues“
to masculine requirements –
and any deviation from
them makes a man suspect.
The end result is that at times our entire culture
seems like a backslapping locker room full of
chuckleheads, and we get a President who learned
diplomacy from The Little Rascals.
“And what do you say if we form a new club...and
call it the ‘He-Man Woman Haters’ Club’?”
These images are so pervasive,
And so socially entrenched,
that we’ve come to accept them as natural and
true, like the sun rising in the east or every
odd-numbered Star Trek movie being total crap.
But there’s nothing objectively true about the way
our culture dictates how to be a man.
In fact, this version of masculinity is only
recognizable because we contrast it with its
opposite: weakness, humility, and vulnerability:
in other words, “femininity.”
If being a “real man” means being stoic, strong,
and rational,
then being a “real” woman wins you a lifetime
supply of timidity, weakness, and hysteria.
Bonus round: the word “hysteria” comes from the
Greek word for “uterus.”
Associations of compassion, vulnerability, and
emotion with femininity are no more intrinsically
true than associations of aggression and
dominance with masculinity.
But in setting up this contrast,
and by defining
behaviors, bodies, and appearances
as either masculine or feminine,
our culture says that men should exhibit masculine
attributes, and conversely, women should exhibit
recognizably feminine traits.
Cross or blur that culturally-defined line,
and you’ve got a real problem on your hands
– no matter how big or small.
The truth is that cultural ideas about masculinity
and femininity limit all of us to one degree or
another,
though people who identify as men and people
who identify as women are impacted
in very different ways.
In our culture, the attributes associated with
femininity are deeply shameful for “real men” to
possess.
There’s nothing more insulting a man can say to
another man than to question his masculinity or to
call him some colorful synonym for woman.
Why?
Because as we continue to perpetuate this strict
system of only two gender options, femininity
continues to be regarded as something negative.
“Well, what am I then?
“What are you?
You are my bitch.
That’s what.
My own, personal bitch.”
“I’m gonna make you my bitch’s bitch.
You’re gonna be my grandbitch.”
“Stop being such a pussy!”
“You fucking shot me!”
In actuality, people of any gender can possess any
personality trait,
and can find themselves within
the binary of male and female,
somewhere in-between,
or outside of it entirely.
But, as long as our culture maintains and
normalizes rigid expectations related to gender –
like, continuing to prize masculinity while
denigrating femininity –
these ideas about gender will contribute to the
oppression of particular groups of people,
including women, trans folks,
and non-binary people.
Ok, so you may be asking,
what does all this have to do with insults hurled
at Donald Trump?
Let me be very clear about this:
I AM NOT defending Donald Trump.
This is about recognizing that “jokes” about who is
and isn’t a real man are the kinds of things that
Trump himself would laugh at.
Yeah, we know that this kind of stuff drives Trump
up the wall.
But that’s not a good excuse to participate in
it.
We’re better than that.
We’re certainly funnier.
We need to challenge what many of those
criticisms and insults are actually saying about
men, women, gender, and sexuality,
because they reinforce harmful patriarchal ideas
that actually benefit people like our current
president.
Sure, it can be gratifying to carry a sign or share
a Facebook post that would get under the skin of
our quick-tempered, fast-tweeting,
rarely self-reflecting President.
And because Trump buys so fully into deeply sexist
ideas about masculinity and power himself,
questioning his masculinity can seem like an easy,
effective way to knock him down a peg.
But we have to think about the message we’re
sending when we insult anyone using the idea that
small hands are unmanly,
or that two men loving each other is embarrassing
- even a president who was leaving a bad taste in
people’s mouths with his personal line of steaks at
the Sharper Image...long before he was offending
and embarrassing us as Commander-in-Chief.
If we rely on patriarchal ideas of masculinity to
insult and protest against someone who clearly
benefits from patriarchy and misogyny,
and from his own position as a straight, white,
tremendously wealthy man,
then we help to perpetuate these same norms.
These are the very norms that help enable
someone to laugh off their own history of sexism
and sexual assault, and still get elected to the
highest office in the land.
What would actually be transgressive and
challenging to Trump is a resistance that works to
dismantle the very notions of patriarchy and power
that helped propel him to the presidency.
A resistance that defies rigid notions of
masculinity and femininity and loudly embraces
people of all genders and all gender expressions.
So let’s stop resorting to body shaming or
homophobia when what we’re really trying to do is
critique the misogyny,
the history of sexual assault,
and the abuse of political power by someone who
should have done us a huge favor and
disappeared from the public sphere
following his cameo in Home Alone 2.
"Excuse me, where's the lobby?"
"Down the hall and to the left."
"Thanks."
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