femiphobia

Swaggering machismo got a new lease on life after the post-9/11 attacks, as Republicans tried to appropriate not just patriotism but also masculinity as a GOP virtue. Attacking the manhood of the opposition has become a signature tactic of any GOP election strategy. So it isn't surprising that the 2004 presidential election campaign has been played out over the past six months as a battle over John Kerry's masculinity. Be it his "sensitivity" on the war on terror or "girlie-man" preoccupation with the lack of jobs or health care, Kerry has been forced to defend himself from a barrage of rhetoric carefully designed to cast not just him but the entire Democratic plank as the epitome of feminine weakness.

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In working-class culture, hyper-masculinity is understood more in terms with physicality, and it might be expressed in drinking, gambling, fighting, and so on. Over the years, this kind of working-class hyper-masculinity has been appropriated by those in the upper classes. It's seen as being more authentic because it's a more primitive expression of manhood.

Have you seen that movie Fight Club? That’s a movie about white-collar men who are unable to affirm their masculinity, [men] who live in a corporate hierarchy, and need to appropriate brutal pugilism that is their fantasy of working class masculinity. I think it relates, in part, to the inchoate sense that working as a paper shuffler, or as a bureaucrat, or in a cubicle, that there’s something unmanly about that. The popularity of boxing in the 19th century is actually about middle-class men who were drawn to the sport.

And so you see the kind of swaggering, cowboy pugilism among members of the elite like W. because that almost makes him seem like a regular guy.

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One of the central features of what I call a phallic stance is the denial of weakness – the repudiation of dependency and the need for collaboration in all its forms. This is what we’re seeing. We have an administration that is, almost, congenitally incapable of acknowledging any mistake because to acknowledge a mistake is to really risk their manhood. To acknowledge a mistake, especially a mistake that involves failure to listen to advice – the proverbial refusal to ask for directions – imperils their manhood. And so, instead of this kind of behavior being pigheaded arrogance, it’s framed as manly resoluteness.

AlterNet interviews Stephen Ducat (The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity").