The FREQ Show: 00.02 The Unmanning of Trump

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This is the second episode of Feminist Frequency’s new series, The FREQ Show! With The FREQ Show, we’re answering the question, “What do representations of race, gender and sexuality in pop culture have to do with our current social and political climate?”

Despite Trump and his bumbling administration giving us no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticize and mock them every day, many people resort to homophobic jokes and body-shaming insults in an effort to lampoon our current disaster-in-chief. In this episode of The FREQ Show, we break down what makes this “problematic” humor such a problem, demonstrating how it reinforces the very ideas of traditional masculinity that helped propel Trump to the White House in the first place.

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“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.”

Yes, 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.

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

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.

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