Misogyny and Misanthropy Under Musk (and Trump) | Blog#42
These manly men were raised by wolves...
“Men weren't really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.”
Betty Friedan
Apparently, men may really have been the enemy and weren’t the fellow victims suffering from any mystique and they are feeling inadequate when there are bears to kill. What else would you make of the masculinity talk we’ve been hearing? Here’s JD Vance at CPAC this week:
I think that our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge. You should you should try to cast aside your family. You should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place. And I think that my message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.
The cultural message — and I think the president’s and mine is the exact opposite –but our cultural message is I think that it wants to turn everybody in, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same. We actually think God made male and female for a purpose. And we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women. And we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.
Man being a woman’s equal is a bitch! Man being anything other than the chest-thumping, chainsaw-wielding, fecund male exemplar is a real bitch. Somehow, how others live their lives and succeed at it, while being true to their own ideals, is a real threat.
In today’s society, are men being relegated to being what used to be called “metrosexual?” Or is even a hint of the ambiguous je ne sais quoi of metrosexuality a problem now?
Now, remember, the number of votes Donald Trump won the election by:
A similar story happened in 2024. Trump defeated Harris 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and won 2.3 million more popular votes. But had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — which Trump won by just 230,000 votes — then she would have secured exactly the 270 electoral votes needed for the win.
A mere 0.15 percent of voters nationwide was the difference between Trump’s second term and Harris’s first. Is that really a mandate?
Also remember the tight margins of the previous cycles:
Also remember overall participation in the elections:
As you can see, fewer people have been voting with each passing election cycle.
Have American males suddenly become more misogynistic or is it that the people in charge of our government now have the kind of power that enables them to fulfill their own minority views?
Pew Research Center studies these things. Here is some of their research, published in October 2024.
“A majority (57%) say men and women are basically similar when it comes to the things they are good at in the workplace. Still, a sizable share (43%) sees men and women as different in this area.
Views of whether men and women are different or similar vary modestly, if at all, by gender.”
These types of beliefs don’t change from election to election but, rather, are deeply ingrained in society and only change over long periods of time.
We must look elsewhere to understand how, in the face of all the things Americans knew as the elections approached, they voted for the current administration or opted not to exercise their right in an election. That same question applies to understanding the buyer’s remorse that is emerging one month after the current administration took office.
It would therefore be wrong to assign some kind of backlash against the Me Too movement, discussions about toxic masculinity and male vulnerability in the late 2010’s, the impact of such movies as Moonlight, or residual resentments of men who were among the long-term unemployed during the Great Recession.
One important factor we should keep in mind is the assault on social studies curricula all over the United States over the past two decades, with campaigns specifically designed to remove African American and gender studies from the curriculum in public and private institutions. That assault was amplified by Donald Trump.
I submit that this is a reflection of the leadership in power and the beliefs that drive them, rather than the people’s choice, as evidenced by ample new polling on the disenchantment of the electorate, one month after the start of this administration.
What’s with the concubines?
Trump has 5 children from three wives.
Musk has 13 children from three different women.
Musk’s father, Erroll, had seven children (one died); three with Elon’s mother, two with his ex-wife, and two with his former stepdaughter.
See a trend here? By the way, this is not a thing among the general population, and it isn’t only because of the upkeep.
While there has never been any doubt as to the existence of misogyny in America, it has always stood at the intersection of racism and classism. What we’ve seen happen over the past month follows that same traffic pattern, with the demolition of DEI, the mass-firings of our civil service’s leadership with the emphasis on men of color, women, women of color and their replacement (if replaced at all) with all-male, all-white officials, as was done by Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, not to mention the attempt to install former Representative Matt Gaetz as Attorney General.
An illustrative example outside of Washington, D.C., could be the new Los Angeles District Attorney, Nathan Hochman, who, all throughout his campaign to unseat the previous D.A., promised that he would conduct a “fair review” of the Menendez Brothers case. Los Angeles premier TV station, KTLA, reports as follow:
In October, then-DA George Gascón announced that his office would reexamine the case in the light of new evidence. That evidence involves a letter written by Erik Menendez just months before he and his brother, Lyle, killed their parents with a shotgun at their Beverly Hills home in 1989. They were 21 and 18 at the time, respectively.
The letter supposedly details alleged sexual abuse committed by their father, Jose Menendez.
DA Nathan Hochman, who had previously been noncommittal on his opinion on the case since taking office in December, addressed reporters at the L.A. County Hall of Justice on Friday, where he announced that his office has issued an informal response that will request the courts deny the brothers’ habeas petition.
There was a great deal of support for both a resentencing and a possible retrial based on the new evidence.
How difficult is it to have a document tested for age and authenticity?
How difficult is it to look back at the time period of the murder and think back to how taboo it was to talk about boys being raped?
How difficult is it to imagine for oneself how two boys, after being repeatedly violently raped, might end up committing murder? Not that any murder is right, but, under these circumstances, it isn’t unimaginable.
How difficult is it, considering they’ve been in jail for thirty years, to come to a conclusion that time served is punishment enough under the new circumstances?
Masculinity hasn’t undergone a renewed surge in toxicity for a majority of Americans to have lost their compassion and embrace harshness for the sake of some manly way of governing.
Voters don’t appreciate seeing Trump treat accomplished women this way:
Donald Trump picked JD Vance as his vice president. JD Vance’s views on all things social have been well-known for quite some time. The same holds true of Pete Hegseth and his views. These people were picked for their affinity for Trump’s view of the social order.
When the margins are this tight, it doesn’t take a whole lot of apathy for an election to be won. That is what happened this time.
Now, is there a danger that, over the next four years, there will be an effort to bring back male toxicity and normalize it? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that today’s men are too weak or feminine, whatever the heck that means.
A functioning society needs to have a common font of knowledge* and a common set of basic societal beliefs that underlie that society. As we’ve lost more of what we used to know, we’ve become less sensitive to certain lurking dangers. At the same time, the conservative movement, in its quest for domination, has been at war with pluralism and living and letting live. What we are now seeing is the end result of that - nothing more and nothing less.
Pluralism isn’t an insult and it doesn’t only encompass the makeup of a population. The word is deeply steeped in philosophy - something we don’t teach formally at the earliest ages because of the fears by some that it might clash with religiosity.
We have a lot of work to do as we “resist,” and that work must include reacquainting ourselves with the basic norms we achieved, women’s rights, workers’ rights, a well-rounded education, equality among the sexes and races, and on…
Postscript: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was fired over Twitter by Trump today. Hegseth fired the Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti, a female high ranking officer. This is in line with Trump and his cabinet’s behavior over the past month, when it comes to thinning out the top of the ranks.
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