Author: Benjamin

“Hey Ben, you are still writing these?”

Yes, The month of June has been a busy one, filled with traveling and other writing projects, but always, in my heart and somewhere in my mind, I am asking myself and my community: How can we stop letting patriarchal misogyny ruin our lives?

So for this blog post, I want to talk about the challenges of building communities are are resistant to the influence and violence of Patriarchal Misogyny. I think most of this would apply to any community or group that doesn’t want to be controlled by someone exerting hierarchal authority over the group, but I tend to specifically think about groups that are actively dedicated to dismantling authoritarianism on a large scale, not just existing without it in their group. Perhaps I should take time to explain why, at least in the US (I haven’t really experienced community building in any other country enough to speak on it), authoritarian power structures are inherently patriarchal, but that gets me away from the topic I want to write about. So if anyone is skeptical of that claim, or wants me to try to explain it better, they can ask and it can be the subject of a future blog post. 

So what I have noticed about people working together in groups that have been derailed or destroyed by one or more person attempting to dominate and control the group, in order to steal the power of others?

1. Without talking about how power is used within a group, people who are effective at harnessing and controlling the power of others will do so. 

2. Using or accepting authoritarian methods of decision making and action taking is a trained/socialized behavior of being a US citizen that will serve as a default for the vast majority of people (in groups in the the US) in instances of crisis and immediacy. 

3. Expecting everyone in a group to always be capable of listening openly, considering all possible options for decision making, and then patiently participating in the process of collectively making that decision is unreasonable. 

4. Catching authoritarian tendencies and behaviors early on in a group’s formation and decision making processes will almost always result in less severe consequences and more generous and forgiving group members than when these tendencies are ignored until they can’t be ignored any longer.

5. At the same time as 1 through 4 are all true, communities that over-commit to establishing rules for the flow of power and its utilization can create internal structures that act as controlingly as any authoritarian leader. These institutionalized rule systems can be tricky because they can appear to be for the purpose of not privileging any individual within the group, but the reality is that all rules that get followed are to someone’s benefit. This is why rich and powerful people almost never feel compelled to follow their own rules unless the consequences for breaking them are incredibly swift and powerfully enforced. Think French revolution levels of enforcement on economic and political rulers. 

6. This usually means that groups that are really resilient to the creep of authoritarianism into their power structures and dynamics are not groups that have one certain, specific set of rules in place to stop it, but instead are groups that are composed of people that are comfortable and confident in their abilities to work together to solve problems given the specific contexts in which they arise.

7. It might be more effective if people stop thinking about the idea of community as existing as a static noun, that just is, and might even be commodified into a property that some people directly own, and instead think of community building as verb which its members must keep doing and will only be “done” when that community no longer exists. 

8. Patriarchy arose around the “domestication” of land, the establishment of property, and a need to enforce rules around the distribution and acquisition of property. It will always be present in situations where people are acting as if the community is a property of its members, even when its members might not be socialized or recognized as men. You don’t earn the right to be a member of a community. You practice the values that bring that community together, which means being capable of listening to what those values are and showing how you respect them/live them. 

9. Communities that want to make standing up to authoritarian power structures a part of their community practice have to make talking about power and authority something that is a shared community value that requires a constant and evolving conversation and not a one time workshop or training. 

In Post 44 of 100: Transphobia is patriarchal misogyny, I got very focused on talking about why confronting Transphobia directly, even spectacle-seeking professional transphobic organizations, is necessary. Then I talked about a specific event that inspired these thoughts here in Seattle. 

What I didn’t talk about in that post (although I sort of started to touch on in post 41 of 100: why do some people care so much about gender?), is why transphobia is patriarchal misogyny in the first place. 

Before I, a cisgendered man talk about this, I want to point my reader to “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” as one of the most accessible readings that I can recommend that starts to explain how and why feminism isn’t really feminism if it excludes trans feminism. It also does a very good job of explaining why feminism that tries to exclude trans experience or queer experience from its analysis of patriarchy is ignoring an aspect of misogyny that will always server to strengthen patriarchal systems. Beyond that source, I am probably not going to include a whole lot more links, as I am not trying to replicate a complex academic philosophy paper in this blog. The following is a synthesis of many authors who have shaped my ideas about gender and its multiple roles in society, and if you are interested in any of these ideas, please feel free to ask me about them.

There are as many ways of being trans as there are ways of being a women as there are of being a human being. I would be an idiot to pretend to be able to speak for the experience of trans people, and that is largely why I pointed to the Transfeminist Manifesto above. But I am a human being who has experienced gendering from a social perspective, a familial perspective and a personal perspective. I think there is a reasonable perspective on the topic of misogyny that says “ a patriarchal society that reinforces its gendered hierarchy by sowing misogyny, a hatred of and contempt for women, is going to cause the most harm to people who have experienced life with the gendered expectations of being identified as a women.” This is pretty much the most straight forward way of thinking about the impact of misogyny, AND it would clearly apply to any transperson who began life having the gender expectations of femininity placed upon them, or who experienced life in the world and saw feminine gender expectations as something that expressed and authentic part of themselves. Thus it works pretty well as a starting point for arguing that misogyny affects at least all trans men, trans women, and any non-binary people who have ever identified or been identified as feminine. 

However, I think when you look deeper into patriarchal constructions of social, political and economic power, and how basic concepts of property, citizenship and basic human rights are defined to reinforce patriarchal systems, it becomes clear that the category of women is perhaps the critical element that patriarchy requires to exist. What I am saying it isn’t the existence of men or masculinity that underwrites a patriarchal system, it is the constructed category of gendered being called “woman” that enables the existence of patriarchy. That might seem a little confusing and convoluted, because a universe with only one gender is actual a universe without any gender at all. Because no one would be able to notice or talk about their gender without having something to compare it to. This is true of all identity markers. There is no being alive without death, no being able-bodied without disability, no being healthy without sickness, no such thing as being white without having people who get classified as non-white, and no one is rich, in a capitalist economic sense, without others living in poverty.

So patriarchy requires at least 2 genders in order to establish a society in which one group are innately expected to inherit decision making power over the other. Now, if there always have to be at least two categories in existence for any hierarchy to function, and only one of those categories can be argued to have inherent claims to power and authority because of innate functions of that category, then those categories also have to be innate, or ESSENTIAL, to a person’s functional identity. In other words, for patriarchal logic to function at all, if the category of “woman” is not intrinsic and consisting of traits that are immutable, then there is no functional argument for saying that women are incapable of filling X leadership position, or of inheriting property, or that women have to prioritize child care because their bodies are immutably designed to be baby factories as their primary purpose on earth. This makes trans-ness existing as a real human possibility an inherently hostile reality to patriarchy, even if it is still possible for trans people to believe in patriarchy or perform acts of misogyny.   

In other words, trans-ness itself is an assault on patriarchal authority and that is why people who might never realize they have ever encountered a trans person before can be so easily convinced to support transphobic rhetoric. Trans-ness will always muddle a world view of gender and sex as immutable categories that can be used to define and assign power within a society.

Now there is another kind of Transphobia that is a reactionary response to patriarchal and misogynistic violence, and this is transphobia that gets called trans-exclusive radical feminism, or TERF, and I think its perspective is most clearly and publicly pushed today by J.K Rowling. 25 years ago, I was much more sympathetic to this argument myself, as I was coming to terms with how much violence is perpetuated in the world in the name of masculinity and preserving patriarchal power. Even though I am a cis man, I could easily understand why many woman would want to inhabit a world without men. One of the things that attracted me to books like Refusing to be a Manat this time was wondering whether it was possible to socially deconstruct masculinity in its entirely, and possibly live in a world where gender itself was as useless an identity category as “Roman” or “Saxon.”    

It took me a really long time, lots of reading, and having close friends come out to me as trans to help me see that the problem with the TERF perspective is that it is a perspective that is inherently defined by a trauma that only gets projected forward when you concede to essentializing the underlying characteristics of gender. As a trauma response, it can be acknowledged and accommodated in certain situations for those whom have experienced violent patriarchal misogyny as they heal and recover from those traumas, but I think it is necessary to also question what the need and safety concerns really are when people start placing demands on large scale public spaces built upon TERF logic. In the case of someone like J.K. Rowling, who has enough money that she is already capable of creating a fortress to protect herself from whatever she is afraid of happening from public “women’s only spaces” including trans people, it is pretty obvious that even if her believes in trans-exclusion are coming from a place of personal experience and need, she is being used by patriarchal misogynists to reinforce a society where the kind of violence she is afraid of is going to be rampant and uncontrollable. 

In other words, to sum all of this up: Attacking trans women will never make cis women safer from the violence of patriarchal misogyny. It might protect their racial, class and cisgendered privileges within a patriarchal society, but only by deflecting the attention of the bully/abuser of authority onto a different target. It is impossible to dismantle patriarchy or misogyny, or want to put an end to patriarchal misogynist violence without also targeting transmisogyny and transphobia.  

Pride began 2 days ago. Jonathan Joss was murdered. His husband, who was there, says it was an act of homophobic violence. The police deny this. Maybe the police are lying. That seems likely to me. But I will concede that it is possible that the police are incapable of seeing homophobic violence for what it is because they are trained and conditioned not to connect those dots unless the evidence is overwhelming obvious. I believe they are still going to look like idiots either way as more comes out about this case.

In Gaza, Palestinian people are still starving and Israel military forces are making it as difficult as possible for food and medical aid, including firing upon people approaching aid distribution sites almost every day. Israeli media claims all of this is lies and that it is Hamas that is manipulating world media agencies into propagating lies. According to the Israeli government, it is Hamas who is preventing aid from getting to people in Gaza. This is the same Israeli government, run by Netanyahu, that helped fund Hamas in the first place to prevent a unified Palestinian people. A fact that Netanyahu continues to deny, even though many people in his government and his cabinet do not. Netanyahu expects the world to believe him even though he is still on trail in Israel for fraud, because he has weaponized the word “Anti-semitism” to be a bludgeon he can use against anyone that opposes him or the extreme violence his administration has employed against the people of Gaza. 

In Boulder Colorado a man carried out an attack against a group of mostly Jewish people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Thankfully, no one died in this attack. The man is being charged with an antisemitic hate crime. The man had planned (apparently for over a year) on throwing 18 Molotov cocktails but didn’t cary out his full plan because he got scared and he had never hurt anyone before. Perhaps surprisingly to some, I personally do think this act of violence qualifies as antisemitism, even though Mohamed Soliman has been pretty specific in talking about Zionism and not the Jewish people as a whole, because the attack happened at the start of a Jewish holiday and is having the very real effect of making Jewish people feel like we are under attack anywhere we go. I don’t think intentions necessarily matter when determining whether acts of violence feel targeted to a group of people when it is clear that there are only specific groups of people who are going to be targeted by that violence. Soliman’s target was a “Run For Their Lives” group that claims to be apolitical, but is clearly pro-Israel, with participants carrying Israeli flags, so I understand why some people might disagree with me and argue that Soliman’s attack was anti-Israel or maybe anti-zionist, and not antisemitic, but, for me, the people he attacked are not in any functional way actually connected to the State of Israel’s war machine. I believe unscrupulous actors, like Benjamin Netanyahu, are absolutely overusing anti-semitism in their rhetoric to dismiss anger at the violent acts of an authoritarian, war-frenzied nation, but I also think it places a pretty intense burden of alienation from Jewish communities for any Jew to be expected to deny that this act of violence feels like it is directed at Jews and not the State of Israel. There are real currents of antisemitism that are running along side Israeli State propaganda and if that cannot be acknowledged, it makes it very difficult for avowedly anti-zionist Jews like me to call out how harmful Netanyahu and his like’s  propagandistic use of anti-semitism is actively responsible for hurting Jewish people. It is possible to say that what happened in Boulder was antisemitic violence that makes me sad, but also that people like Netanyahu claiming events like this for political posturing to try to silence dissent against Israeli State violence against the people of Gaza is sickening and disgusting. It is also possible to feel empathy and sadness for the family of Mohamed Soliman, that have been taken into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and threatened with swift deportation (like maybe tomorrow), and almost certainly without any further due process , despite his claim and theirs that no one other than Soliman knew anything about the attack. This is a situation I will be keeping an eye on, because deporting people for the crimes of their families feels very much fascist state violence to me.

And lastly, speaking of the violence of the state against migrant people, families and communities, here in Seattle, a supposedly sanctuary city, people who are trying to follow the legal paper work process of asylum seeking and obtaining work permit through immigration court are having their cases routinely dismissed, and then being immediately detained by DHS to as of yet unknown ends. I have been a part of a Spanish language learning group for the last couple of months that meets specifically to enable communication and support for the folks being targeted by ICE and DHS harassment and disappearance, and have heard directly from observers in the immigration courts and from people who have had family members taken that these things are going on and no one is sure yet whether city officials are complicit in allowing this to happen, or if it is happening behind local government’s back. Either way, it is happening in my city. Children are being separated from their families, families who just a week or two ago felt safe in their immigration status/process are now terrified to show up to the necessary appointments and meetings to continue those processes and this is not yet being reported as news anywhere. 

It is pride month. A time to remember that people and not governments or churches or schools or any authoritarian institutions get to tell any of us who or how we can love, or who or how we get to exist within our own bodies. Maybe it seems weird or disrupting to be thinking so heavily about the relationship between citizenship, sexuality and gender identity during pride, but I cannot help but see the connected violences being perpetrated by people who feel like it is necessary to label the very existence of others different from them as “illegal.” This month I want to fight not just for myself, my family, my friends and my communities and my neighbors’ right to exist as we all are, but to exist as we all are, right here, right now, together, even if the face of so much hate and violence. 

I am going to have more to talk about with anti-trans hate groups organizing across the US and in Seattle specifically, as well as how to respond to them more successfully in the future because trans people are actively under attack from the highest levels of the federal government as Trump and his political allies try to enforce essentialist gender ideology into every state and city they think they can…and the only thing that is going to stop that is loud, constant, in-their-face resistance and refusal to accept all that bullshit. 

But building towards some of those posts, and trying to help my myself and my reader connect patriarchal misogyny; transphobic, gender-essentialist ideology; a racist/fascist/colonial understanding of nationalism; crony capitalism; AND theocratic fundamentalism, I think it is really eye opening to look at this BBC article about the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States.

If you don’t want to read the article, the basic summary points that will be relevant to this blog are:

1. The Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia (ROCOR)  is the most conservative Orthodox Church in the US, it recruits men almost exclusively by preaching misogynistic ideas about masculinity and trans-misogynistic ideas about gender. However, for all of its social conservatism, it doesn’t follow US. Conservatisms inherent nationalistic zeal for things like the sanctity of the constitution or idolization of the founding fathers, nor for blind faith in capitalism. 

2. Its followers idolize Putin and Russia as an ideal nation exactly because of its homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic laws. They see Russia, even soviet Russia, as a still thriving Christian Empire that has lasted for over a thousand years that has always prioritized protecting traditional social values over pursuing endless economic growth, because all individual freedoms must be balanced first by social responsibility. 

3. ROCOR is finding great success recruiting cisgendered men into the fold by presenting itself as the “Manliest church,” that promotes an intensely patriarchal family and social structure and includes religious community building activities like “working out with the pastor,” and participating freely in online rhetorical cultural war battles to espouse deeply misogynistic gender-essentialist ideologies. 

One of the reasons I find this trend so interesting is because, on the one hand, it is almost like a counter conservatism to the kind of “traditional” republican conservatism I am used to encountering in more than 2 decades of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist organizing. It doesn’t inherently look at western civilization and neoliberal capitalism as any kind of divine mandate. In fact it is pretty critical of both of these things. However, it is critical from the most terrifying perspective possible, and that is that Western civilization has been corrupted by the greedy pursuit of economic opportunity into the idolatry of individual freedom.  Thus while traditional US conservatism will minimally have to pay lip service to upholding constitutionally enshrined freedoms (even if that lip service feels nominal at best), ROCOR conservatism is completely without obligation to do so and is prepared to hit the ground running in the promotion of theocratic fascism. The more Trump flirts with Putin and the idealization of Russian authoritarianism, the more he prepares and even invites his most ardent followers to consider abandoning faiths that might still be tied (even vestigially) to semi-democratic organizational and structural principles in pursuit of a faith willing to place absolute authority into just about any strongman politician that enforces totalitarian, patriarchal family values over any other political ideology. ROCOR is about as “anti-woke” as any religion can possibly be and will be very appealing to a base that has become convinced that “wokeness” is the ultimate political enemy. With no need to even pay honorific acknowledgement to traditional, European enlightenment conceptions of liberty or freedom, a ROCOR-styled theocratic fundamentalism will be able to advocate for an abandonment of any constitutional protections like freedom of speech, freedom from government seizure, protection from cruel and unusual punishments, etc. 

I don’t personally think that ROCOR currently has much of a chance of completely sweeping western christian fundamentalism away from the US Republican Party and Trumpism. The churches at the heart of Trump’s brand of Christian nationalism have just spent far too much time and energy into their network building to be completely swept away in any kind of hurry, but Putin is a very savvy political player, who, like Trump, has managed to place himself at the head of a religious fundamentalist movement without personally demonstrating or honoring any of the actual socially conservative values that these movements purport to prioritize, and it must be impossible for Trump and his political allies to see how zealously Russian Orthodox adherents can be to pure bootlicking authoritarianism. Even if it remains a small percentage of the theological demographics supporting Trump, I can see their voice within the movement being given increasing power and privilege the more it is willing to abandon the reliquary accoutrements of “American values,” like democracy, and move Trumpist followers to venerate authority and abandon liberty. 

This will still take some work for the right to accomplish, as anti-communism is deeply woven into the fabric of US conservatism and many of the folks that are economically supporting Trump are doing so from a place of purely capitalistic exploitative interest that they will balk very hard at a shift to a state-controlled economy unless they are given extreme cronyistic control over the state institutions that will be running those industries…but we have already started  to see this in how Elon Musk is getting pushed out of Trumps inner circle of political advisors (at least superficially) now that his political money is no longer working to provide Trump with political victories that couldn’t already be won. And it is not like Putin has been bad for Russian oligarchs as a whole. Crony Capitalism is certainly not antithetical to Russian Orthodox Christian (ROC) theocracy, as long as the depraved flaunting and exercise vice of that wealth is kept out of the national public spot light. ROC is not inherently anti-capitalist after all, it is just anti promoting capitalism as a value over maintaining tight social control over patriarchal family structures. 

Certainly the democratic party’s complete abandonment of anything but the most vestigial socialist economic policies and heavy reliance on promoting itself as a party of liberal social values has paved the way for the US conservative right to give up the need to be so fiercely oppositional to state-control of the economy, but those anti-socialist seeds run very deep in US conservatism, a political movement still dominated by a very old guard of capitalist barons. With the republican voter base gaining ground in young men who are feeling as excluded from avenues of economic prosperity as they are from what they perceive to be their political and social authority as men, it really would not surprise me to see more and more national socialist (read: NAZI) policies creep into the Republican Party platform, as long as those policies can be very exclusionary to anyone but those deemed as righteous and deserving…hence an inherent need for intense xenophobia and anti-immigrant zeal, a very narrow state-defined definition of gender, sexuality and family, and nationalistic purity tests that can be used to surveil and police dissenting thought. 

This is why I find an article about a relatively fringe religious movement in the US so fascinating and concerning. Not because I think the inherent religious aspects of the faith have a lot of potential for growth in the US, but because it is such an obvious match for what Trump (and Putin) are trying to accomplish on a global scale, that I think its voice and influence will be something that all those opposed to fascism will have to keep very close eyes on. 

Yes.

The police are also the enforcers of capitalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism in the contemporary world, but they are fundamentally an institution of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM), even when the cops are women or trying to march in pride or think that they are participating in community oversight or standing against racism. The very concept of creating a class of people whom rich people believe are their to protect everyone (because they believe the police will protect them and their property even when they are breaking the law)…and everyone else who sees law enforcement at worst as a direct threat and at best as useless institution that will never help anyone, is an essential component to most authoritarian hierarchies, but especially one like patriarchy that is dependent on convincing women that they all, universally need protection, and that only the police can safely provide that protection outside of maybe the immediate family structure.

This is why almost all threats of the “dangers of lawlessness” work back into concerns about sexual violence and “who will save the women and children?” even though the police are almost never responsible for stopping acts of sexual or domestic violence in progress and that law enforcement families experience domestic violence at a rate of 40% instead of the national average of 10%. The rise of authoritarians trying to target trans folks as sex traffickers and groomers is always about the fear of young men being convinced to surrender their masculinity or about “deviant men” trying to sexually assault or prey upon women or girls, and the solution is always to expect police enforcement to intimidate trans folks from existing in public spaces and be the shield between their imagined righteous/pure society and the degenerate masses. There are papers about the role of militarizing masculinity as being foundational to purpose of law enforcers, so I am not going to try to go into it too much here, we all new the title of this blog post was just click bait with an assumed answer. 

Instead, in this post, I want to draw people’s attention to this wild statement put out by the Seattle Police Union that sounds exactly like the kind of red-faced stomping and pouting that we see coming out of the Manosphere about how “nobody respects how hard it is to be a man these days” and to just squarely scape goat a (unfortunately) marginal group in terms of state or city political power that is being imagined as waving around far more authority than is actually the case…a pretty obvious parallel to what PM media sources have been trying to say about how the reason men are struggling to be men is because women just have too much power over them. 

Seriously, if you get a chance to read that Seattle Police Officer’s Guild (SPOG)’s press release, it manages to be pathetic and infuriating and comically bad all at the same time. Like, of course one of the reasons I love living in Seattle is because the ANTIFA presence here is real and strong and makes me feel infinitely safer (yes, even me, a white, cis man) than the police ever have, but it is such a weirdly self-shaming flex for the union representing the police to claim that ANTIFA are the ones in Seattle dictating the political terms of public safety. If only this concession were actually true and not just a sadly flat lie to attempt to play the victim card. I have talked previously about how weird it is that the current example of “alpha” masculinity is so adverse to accepting any kind of responsibility for anything and has so fully rejected accountability as a value, so I won’t repeat all of that here, but there is something strangely surreal about essentially seeing the entire police force of Seattle parrot the same sad-boy-loser defense for why they just can’t exert the authority that everyone knows that real leaders and protectors are supposed to be allowed to use. I guess they are just parroting their leader, and trying to sound as much like Donald Trump as possible. But the document really gets weirder. The Press Release seriously claims that the SPD was standing with Seattle in morning the loss of George Floyd to police violence? This is just such bizzaro stuff to claim, at least to someone like me, from a very different part of the the US than one where the police would surrender so much of their image of authority so easily. And then to end on a note of “oh yeah, this poor pathetic, beat down institution of justice is hiring. Come join a collapsing train wreck!” It is all just so weird to me. 

Keep in mind too, as I talked about wanting to talk about in post 44 of 100, the event that inspired this press release was the city allowing a trans-hating organization of very suspect intentions plan a Trans-hating event in a park that the SPOG calls “the heart of ANTIFA land,” but is really just the most blatantly queer and trans friendly park in the city, and then the SPD super over-reacting to some kids allegedly throwing water bottles at the police that were protecting the transphobes. Yes, the out of control ANTIFA that is going to bring forth a new 2020-style “summer of violence” in Seattle, and is forcing hundreds of police officers to retire is apparently armed with water bottles and hurtful words.

To get serious though, SPOG is calling for the city courts and prosecutors to throw the book at 23 protestors who got arrested, very many of them trans, for throwing water bottles, while the SPD sprayed pepper spray all over a busy city park, hitting themselves and many bystanders in the process, and shooting pepper balls into protesters at close range. This is where I think it is really important to see the parallels that are spreading out from Trump’s outrageous, self-victimizing rhetoric about “everyone being out to get me,” into every authoritarian institution and feels like it is seriously gearing up to scream the common patriarchal misogynist  refrain when it really dials up the retaliatory violence: 

“LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!”

I sincerely hope that with the SPD and with Trump and all the rest, that we do just see them give up, because no one will play nice with them, but I think we all need to think through and be prepared for who we really know has the power to set off 2025 as a serious summer of violence. 

I don’t think I emotionally have it in me to write another post like 42 out of 100 as there is little more to say beyond questioning Netanyahu’s statement about Europe trying to pressure the State of Israel into expediting aid to starving children and the elderly that “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” I mean, I think the statement is true, but 29 children and elderly people have died from starvation-related causes in the last couple of days, and they are not Israelis. It is the Israeli’s that are insisting that the UN move the trucks full of aid along dangerous routes that will be the most likely to inspire looting and attacks, according to the UN.  I will probably have to keep coming back to this topic. In updates as it really sits heavily on me, as a human being and father to a child who would be starving in Palestine, but today I don’t have it in me to solely focus on this and go to bed so completely devastated and hopeless.

So instead, I want to talk about a different BBC article, and why it is impossible to really confront Patriarchal Misogyny without talking about capitalism.  It is a little weird to me how much the topic of stay at home fathers and emasculation have ben coming up in mainstream news lately, but I am guessing that a lot of mainstream media folks are all encountering the same Journal of Family Issues research article, “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Breadwinner’ Mother?” And it feels like novel enough information to combine with the latent interest that has been generated by the show Adolescence, for the purposes of in-depth exposés. The reason it feels weird to me, of course, is because I have been doing the stay-at-home parent thing for about a year now, and so it is a particularly relevant topic to me, even if a lot of what is being said about it hasn’t really been my experience. The BBC article, “Why money and power affects male self-esteem” is pretty tame in its political conclusions, but I expect I will soon be reading Manosphere responses to the research the article is based upon soon enough, especially as the people who are most likely to judge stay-at-home fathers are the younger Gen Z adult males. I explored the youth and media angle of this topic in post 28, so I will wait to come back to it until I find some Manosphere “hot take” about the imagined harms to the male psyche of losing economic control over the family, and instead focus on how this BBC article that is probably read as “pro women’s liberation” is just kind of conceding self-worth and one’s importance to the family to capitalism. 

The main (pretty obvious) argument of the article is gender pay parity is likely to result in healthier power dynamics in relationships, and that if men learn to be more comfortable deprioritizing their own incomes, and focus on the relationship-building opportunities provided by being a stay-at-home parent, that we, men, might eventually change the overall social expectations that make some men insecure in the homemaker role. It acknowledges that one of the difficulties of this is that women generally get paid less than men for doing the same job, and thus families with a woman “breadwinner” are often making less money than the same family would if the male was working, although, this is not true for the younger adult generation, as women in their early twenties are earning slightly more than men of the same age, largely because men are falling behind in educational achievement than women. All of this seems pretty true to me, so what exactly am I trying to say?

Towards the end of the article, the author starts talking about how men are changing their understanding of masculinity to one of a “caring masculinity” that places caring, empathy and other “feminine” softer skills above economic skills. In many ways, I think this entire blog project could be considered an attempt to foster an ethic of caring within masculinity, and I I have no objections or disagreements with encouraging men to take on more domestic responsibilities and less economic responsibilities, especially if we can acknowledge that men will need to find other means of taking care of themselves emotionally than can be accomplished by spending money. But the obvious issue to me is that most families cannot afford to have anyone stay home for very long.

Now, to be fair to the article, the author does address this issue in part, by suggesting that nations provide more paternity leave, the shining examples provide a couple months of leave at most, while the other suggestions for achieving gender parity in child care responsibilities focus on men pursuing more flexible working situation that provide them more caregiving opportunities, and all of that is screaming class-based privilege to me. The author’s only real address of this is to suggest that “welfare systems should be doing more to help.” Again, I agree that a lot of gender-based power disparity is rooted in economic systems that demand most people surrender their entire selves over to the pursuit of making money, and that robust social services are pretty much the only way that many working-class families are ever going to be able to meet a minimum level of survival, but that is because, as I have argued before (in post 37 of 100), the kind of capitalism that has come to dominate Neo-liberal world econmics inherently breeds a need for as much individualism as possible.

This article might appear to be countering that by suggesting more equitable sharing of economic responsibilities and caregiving responsibilities within a family, but that definition of family is so nuclear, that it gives itself away as being incredibly class-privileged, white idealism that imagines caregiving only as a role that needs to be provided to children and must be provided by each family unit individually. Maybe it is a my failing, as a citizen in a country that miserably fails to provide for the healthcare and welfare of any of its people who cannot afford to buy those things on their own, but it is nearly impossible for me to imagine state run welfare institutions that provide adequate and respectful care for the all people experiencing the socio-economic disability of “not currently functioning as a laborer producing an income in excess of their personal needs” (so including children; the elderly; many people with long term, chronic or genetic disabilities; but also, it turns out, more than 60% of the people living in the US), that burdens of developing a welfare system that can meet these needs…and not so dependent upon racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, transphobic philosophies of what kind of care that welfare system is responsible for providing is going to result in the kinds of horrific, historic decision-making that resulted in residential schools, insane asylums that locked women up for hysteria, educational institutions that get labeled “pipelines to prison,” and assisted-living centers where people past the point in their lives of viable economic contribution disappear from society except occasionally at family holidays and celebrations. Not for everyone of course. The richest people will grow old and become politicians, members of various governing boards, or social organizations. Their family wealth will be protected by the state while paying the lowest tax rates possible, while everyone else over pays for the most basic services, get taxed at rates they can’t afford, and pretty much lives on borrowed time before they slip into a welfare system designed around preserving the economic and social order for as little money as possible. 

This might seem like a critique of socialism instead of critique of capitalism, but it is really a critique of the authoritarian control over people’s construction of family and community units capable of meeting the needs for care of people on a personal level. When something like “caring masculinity” is only theoretically feasible in a social welfare state that will need to provide humane standards of living for 60 percent of the people, I see the ideological breeding ground for a genocidal techno-fascism that believes itself having advanced past the need for the vast majority of human labor, and thus the need for the vast majority of human beings. Thus while I do value the idea of disrupting ideas of masculinity that require men to be breadwinners and to base their sense of self-worth on what they can own, and I actually like the appeal of how the article tries to encourage men to see the value that can come from socially productive labor instead of economically productive labor…I guess I sort of worry that an attempt to counter Patriarchal Misogyny exclusively by presenting what something like “caring masculinity” can look like without more directly addressing the personal and social harms of what uncaring (read: patriarchal misogynistic) looks like, articles like this (maybe even like the blog posts I keep writing), are basically just providing fodder for the manosphere and the system of patriarchal misogyny currently in power to use to call proponents of something like “caring masculinity” and out of touch delusion that is only possible in a woke/elitist bubble. 

Should more men be involved in providing the social and domestic labor of caring for family and community? Absolutely. 100%. But structuring that as something targeted solely at the fathers of nuclear families, and in particular the ones who just can’t make enough money to be the family’s real breadwinner, or the men who have so much inherent class privilege that they can take a few months off of work to be with their children before turning that domestic and social care work back over to servants (possibly including family members and spouses) is a mistake. Every man should be more involved in the domestic and social care work of their families/communities, focusing that gendered labor expectation change exclusively on men who have had children is way too late, and while children do need to see their father figures more involved in care work, they need to see their grandparents, uncles, family friends, siblings and men involved in their community support networks doing that work too. Expecting Patriarchal Misogyny to surrender the nuclear family over as a tool that was used for enforcing gender inequity over into a tool for accomplishing gender parity feels like it will be about as successful as creating lasting change as expecting the same from having more women CEOs, or how having a black president solved racism in the US. Having a bunch of rich guys talk about how caring their masculinity is while poor guys who have to stay at home because their female partners can make more money than them get ridiculed by gen Z kids online for being failures feels very much like the kind of rhetorical move that gave Donald Trump the presidency. 

I did not want to be writing this post. I wanted to write about the topic of property/land ownership, income disparity and gender. I hope I remember to write that post in the future, because I think it is important to understand how patriarchal misogyny has woven capitalism into gender identity…but thousands of babies are likely to starve in Gaza, perhaps in as little as 48 hours and this is not something anyone in the world can stand by and let happen and still call themselves a human being. Does this topic belong in a blog about patriarchal misogyny? Does women and children dying of starvation have anything to do with a system designed to allow men to treat women and children as property that can be confiscated, controlled and destroyed? I hope that answer is pretty obvious, and I don’t intend to spend much time tonight trying to explain that in the face of what is happening, because letting the people that are murdering children have any opportunity to side track the immediate conversation of “how do we stop this now?” with a debate about definitions is letting children die.

This is also why I am not going to write about whether it is necessary or valuable to call what Netanyahu and his Likud party’s war of the mass murder of children a “genocide” or why it has been such a colossal waste of time trying to create international courts with precise legal definitions of crimes, that have to be proven to judges that powerful nations have now had decades to position and control, because those conversations too are useless to saving children who are starving today.  

The state of Israel is already playing games with people’s lives in many different ways, and for this specific issue, of stopping babies from dying in mass from starvation, they are keep engaging in acts of murder, like pretending to try to provide food to starving mothers, but doing it so slowly and in such restricted quantities that other nations of the world will feel comfortable threatening them with meaningless gestures instead of taking action to remove IDF soldiers from Gaza and accelerate food distribution. The political and military leadership of Israel is playing these games intentionally because they believe that it is ok to threaten children (thousands and thousands of children) with one of the slowest and most painful deaths imaginable, in order to apply political pressure to an unpopular (only about a fifth of the people in Gaza currently support Hamas) political party. 

The State of Israel is not the First Nation to use the starvation of children as a weapon of war, and it will only be the last when the people of the world hold political and military figures that do so to a level of accountability that is far more serious than anything the International Criminal Court has done in 60+ years. That probably feels like a hopeless endeavor to many people, because the wealthiest and most powerful nations of the world have colluded with each other to make holding the leaders of these countries accountable for their crimes against humanity…a hopeless endeavor. Hopelessness guarantees complacence and complicity. We need to believe that people want to put an immediate end to the use of starving children as a weapon of war and bend our rhetoric and our actions to making that happen as immediately as possible. 

I personally think the best way to accomplish that is to save conversations about how this happened or what needs to happen for restitution for a future where the mass-murdering of children for political gain has been put to a stop, and focus relentlessly on the goals of removing the IDF from Gaza and making sure that food is getting to the people in Gaza as immediately and effectively as possible, even if that means handing all of the food aid directly over to Hamas and letting them distribute (or shoulder the consequences of failing to distribute that food)  for themselves as they see fit. 

I think many supporters of the State of Israel will argue that Hamas will try to manipulate the distribution of aid, holding it back from many of the most vulnerable people in Gaza and then claim that it was the Israeli’s fault; that there wasn’t enough food, or it wasn’t coming in fast enough, or that they will try to use the distribution of that food to motivate fighters into increasingly desperate acts of violence. They will try to argue that this is what Hamas has done in the past and what they will continue to do until they are eliminated.

To which I say, “maybe so.” Maybe Hamas will let 14,000 of Palestinian children starve to death in an attempt to somehow “make Israel look worse”…but I don’t care if they actually have done anything remotely close to as bad as starving 14,000 children in the past before or if that is purely false rhetoric to justify endless war…because massive amounts of children are starving (some already to death) and allowing large quantities of children to die by starvation, even the children of my worst-of-the-worst-imaginable enemies, would be the complete surrender of my humanity to cruelty and destruction. 

Children are already dying and thousands of more might die within less than two days. That isn’t anyone who is reading this post’s fault, and political urgency always ends up being used as a weapon against the emotional and mental health of the people it is directed at. I accept that my alarmism around this might very well be an act of emotional violence against people I care about deeply, who don’t feel like know what to do or have the ability to do what they think might actually make the message clear that the mass killing of children will never be tolerated or forgiven. Calls to action always cary that potential consequence, and should weigh heavily on the hearts and minds of the people who make them. But silence has consequences too, and I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I wasn’t acknowledging that there are no political leaders that are supposed to represent me that are going to do anything to stop this, and thus it falls on all of us. 

600 trucks a day are going to be necessary to tackle the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza right now. Today 93 entered Gaza, but 0 have had their aid distributed (see the article I linked to at the beginning of this post). This is a crime against humanity. I hope, I pray, and I call myself in to have the courage and strength to do more myself tomorrow, but at least today I can at least refuse to be a silent observer to the murder of children.

This is a topic I have touched upon many other times in my writing, in these blogs and elsewheres on the internet, so much so that I would need to really do some digging to find specific examples, which I will happily do if anyone asks me about something specific, but otherwise, I will try to consolidate some of my ideas about why expectations about gender roles seem to matter so much and to whom, here, now. 

Whether it was actually a simmering issue in the minds of many US citizens who voted in the 2024 election or an issue manufactured by far-right/Patriarchal Misogynistic (PM) media saturation because those media personalities knows the center-right democrats don’t actually believe in youth voters enough give power to platform issues young folks care about, the topic of gender identity (who defines it and why) has really moved into the US political mainstream. Contrary to how many gender scholars and radicals probably imagined gender becoming an active political conversation, it has largely been the right that has been the most effective in generating the stories that define the conversation around gender identity, sensationalizing and exaggerating a very, very small handful of accounts (many of which have turned out to be false) about the threat of a trans people as sexual predators preying on children. On the one hand, this is the argument the right has been making for decades about trans people, queers and anyone that doesn’t conform to “traditional” (read: authoritarian and essentializing) definitions of gender and sexuality, so it isn’t really shocking that it continues to be the avenue of attack. At the same time, the actual, factual violence inspired by people’s ideas about gender and sexual essentialism is so massively lopsided against LGBTQIA2S+ folks, that it is fairly telling how thoroughly centrist democrats have decided to ignore the issue as toxic, rather than use it to strike back at rightwing paranoia and cultural authoritarianism. 

The reason why is pretty obvious. Democrats don’t believe that gender violence (violence directed at people based upon their gender identity and gender presentation) is a winning political issue. They don’t think the people whose votes they are trying to prioritize care about the harm being done, and worst of all, they have pretty much conceded that violence against women is something different than gender violence which has enabled the right to argue that women need protecting from trans people and not misogynistic men. 

I am not someone that most people would think of as being at risk of experiencing gender-based violence. I am a large white dude who (especially now as a boring old man) looks like a large white dude most of the time, and large white dudes who pass as straight experience gender-based violence much less frequently than anyone else. At the same time, over the course of my life, the scariest and most threatening violence I have ever experienced has always been directed at me for reasons related to my portrayals of masculinity and sexuality. Literally the only time I have ever had anyone but a police officer push me around or lay hands on me in anger have been accompanied by homophobic slurs, or when I was younger, people calling me a girl, a pussy, or other words questioning my ability or authenticity as a man.  I think there has been a tendency to write off the vast majority of this kind of violence as “boys being boys,” and even in my own thinking about the issue, I dismiss a lot of the violence I have experienced along these lines as “kids at play,” but even ignoring problematic examples of gender-based hazing and roughousing (much of which I am certainly guilty of, some of which I remember, and probably even more that I never even thought of that way),  when I am talking specifically about things like a group of young men chasing me around town in car and throwing rocks at me, for example, situations where I actually thought someone else might actually kill me, the violence was always tied into my gender presentation.I guess there was one time I had someone pull a knife on me, and another time where someone (who was not a cop) pulled a gun on me that should also qualify as experiences of violence, but the thing about both of those situations is that I knew that the threat of violence being made against me was for a case of mistaken identity or purpose that I was going to easily be able to talk my way out of. But the times people, well, men, have threatened or attacked me related to my presentation of gender or sexuality, I knew that there was going to be no talking my way out of those situations rhetorically. 

And this is where I think the Democrats have really dropped the ball by refusing to take up the cause of gender violence as a political issue. Pretending like it is an issue that only affects specific, marginalized communities (when it does horrifically, disproportionately affect marginalized communities), has made it an issue that they are afraid to touch. They have largely (deliberately) ignored the decades of feminist and queer theory writing that has drawn the connections between authoritarianism and gender-based violence, and thus left themselves in a position where they don’t know how to read the newspaper, see example after example of violence with direct ties to patriarchal, misogynystic, homophobic and transphobic views about gender, and say “This keeps happening because, as a society, we refuse to talk about the connection between gender identity, power and violence within society.”

Meanwhile, the right runs rampant getting to claim that leftist “gender ideology” is a real danger to people’s lives while their own vile and reductive gender ideologies are actually, literally killing people. 

My son is one and a half, well, 20 months if you want to be specific, and today was the first time when his response to me asking him if he wanted a hug was to shake his head yes. For a couple of weeks, he has been shaking his head no to everything, whether he wanted it or not, but today feels particularly special to me because it seems like he has entered a stage of development where he is able to clearly communicate “yes” and “no” based upon his understanding of words. And he does understand words. I asked him if he wanted an apple today, with no visual clues for what that meant, and then when I opened the refrigerator, he pointed immediately to the drawer with apples in it, and that was the food that he wanted to eat (incidentally, he has also been getting very picky again about what foods he wants to eat). 

So, if this just a father gloating about the developmental achievements of his son? Of course, but there is another aspect of it that leaves me with a lot to think about and not a lot of positive male examples of in my own past. To many, it might sound like hippy-dippy parenting, but I really do want to believe that, as a parent, teaching my son about consent, respecting the wishes of others with their bodies, and learning how to express his own wishes for his own body in a way that will be respected by others. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t grade myself higher than a C- on putting this goal into practice, at least thus far in my parenting a toddler experience. It is very difficult not to just physically restrain a child that is trying to climb onto a counter top full of glass dishes, or to just immediately take a way the kitchen knife the boy has gotten out of the dishwasher that he opened by himself. After all, his safety and wellbeing are my primary responsibility 24 hours a day, and exclusively mine for at least 8 hours of most days. Up to the point I start wrapping him in bubble wrap every time I leave the house, I don’t think anyone I know is going to chastise me for prioritizing his safety over allowing him to learn for himself what the consequences are for running with scissors, or trying to drink cleaning products. It is more likely that I will get chastised by people I know for doing stuff like letting him ride in the passenger seat of a golf cart being driven by a 10 year old, or chase chickens around in a coop, in other words, for not taking my obligations for his safety seriously enough. I think probably every parent struggles with this balance.

What makes this a topic worth it to me to write about in this blog is that I don’t think I had very good male role models for this in my developmental years where my sense of self was coming into its own, specifically the kinds who would have been present and involved on a daily basis with shaping my sense of boundaries for myself and for others. I doubt most people do have close memories of this time in their lives, but, knowing the potential male role models I could have had in my life from the ages of 3 to 8, I am actually kind of thankful that  it was mostly really amazing women—my mom, my first teachers, my aunts—that were most active in helping me develop these core memories and aspects of myself. I really don’t think a lot of men are very good at understanding or respecting boundaries, their own or others, and I think that was especially true in the early to mid 80s. 

This is just my experience, and I do have a lot of male friends who grew up at the same time who did have more active male role models in their lives as they were developing their sense of self, boundaries and consent, that I think have become men who are better at understanding these things than the men I am projecting my distrust on to. I am definitely not trying to speak universally, but there is almost nothing about my early childhood that I feel like I missed out on not having a present father figure or male role model for.* I am actually very thankful that I have never felt like I wanted to grow up to be one of my fathers, nor worried that I was suffering for a lack of their attention. 

* I do have other regrets about the kinds of behaviors and attitudes I have learned from men in my life that might partially overlap some of this time, but they are still much more about what these men did when they were being present in my life as opposed to anything I was denied by their absence. 

But now I am a father, of a son that is just beginning to take his first steps towards developing his sense of self, boundaries and consent as an individual person, and already I catch myself exerting the kind of inherent authority I have as a parent over my child in ways that are often about my own ideas and needs instead of his.  For example, nap times. I don’t really know if his life is inherently better when we stick to a fairly predictable schedule about when to start trying to take a nap in the day, but it certainly plays havoc on mine when I have to block out 4 potential hours of nap time every day when making plans, than when I can pretty reasonably narrow that down to 2 to the occasional 3. This is a very mild example that I think is probably easy to relate to. I could have chosen about 100 different ones, like about whether it is better to struggle through having him learn to walk along relatively busy city streets, even as he hates ever having to stop for lights or turn in different directions, or to just keep him in a stroller until we can get to parks or car-free pedestrian areas, or about food, or about interacting with our dog, etc. But it is hard to talk about everything all at once so let’s stick to nap time. 

It takes a lot of class privilege to even exist in space where my nuclear family can be hundreds of miles away from any kind of extended family support with childcare, and that I can be a stay-at-home parent without having to work a job or two that could go past paying the costs of childcare. It is really a rather decadent luxury that I can even be considering whether it is best to let my child just kind of play themselves out in the morning, how ever long that might take, and then nap when he is tired, rather than just being able to provide him with a brief window in which he can take a nap, and then having to keep him on the go the rest of the day whether he needs more sleep or not. This is true of almost all of the aspects of his life that are about giving him the freedom to make choices for himself and start to develop an identity around respecting the things he wants: food, clothes, play times, getting to go outside during the day and not just spending all of his time in one very small little world that is most convenient for me. Like of course kids develop their own sense of selves in all kinds of economic and socially restrictive situation and there is really only so much influence or power parents are ever capable of having on being the ones that create space for their children to develop their ideas about who they are, what their boundaries are and how to respect the boundaries of others, so I don’t want to over blow or under estimate any of class, race, gender, ability or parental preference on these processes, but it is important for me to recognize how all of them affect what behaviors and ideas I think are beneficial to help him develop and which ones will ultimately be harmful to him at some point in his life. Which kind of all swirls confusion around the initial question?

Am I teaching him authoritarian compilation when I establish a rigid “let’s start taking a nap now” time? Or if I never let him experience the frustrations of being held to artificial boundaries established by others  am I essentially just creating an entitled monster that will go around thinking that the whole world revolves around his whims? Am I just creating a justification for myself and my own desires to not have all of my time consumed by the needs of my child? Or is an interplay of my needs and his needs an essential development step in recognizing that survival and life are collective endeavors that require learning how to listen for and understand the needs of others? And does any of these theoretical ideas matter when it is approaching noon, and I am exhausted, and he is refusing to lay down by standing against the wall and slamming his head into the wall? 

In many ways, parenting within a capitalist society (where individual economic needs and expectations have vastly exceeded the capacity of culture or tradition to provide non-economic enrichment) embodies and exemplifies “crisis culture.” Where earning more money is the only way people can imagine getting through the everyday calamities caused by having to shoulder responsibilities that humans never evolved to handle alone. We do what we have to to get through each day, realizing that “more money” would almost always make these processes feel easier, without having realistic means of making “more money” without making even more massive sacrifices of our time and our connections to each other than we ever tend to recognize or acknowledge. Pair all of these capitalist dilemmas with racialized and gendered expectations for what is supposed to be a fulfilling use of our time and the most effective way we can contribute to our own success and the success of our families, and you have a pretty nasty recipe for getting people to concede their time and power over to any institution that offers easy solutions to these problems, even if those solutions usually just involve becoming more dependent on those institutions.

This is a blog post really going all over the place based upon ideas I have about being a parent that I rarely get to think out loud about or share with anyone other than my often exhausted and overworked partner. I am not the first person to think about these things, but it really is amazing how little having read and thought about these conditions before becoming a parent has prepared me for what it is like to live through the experience and have to make choices from a position of being my most exhausted and beaten down self imaginable. Like, yeah, someone providing my family a pizza and a stimulating hour of child engagement that doesn’t have to involve me investing twice as much energy into organizing as my child gets out of the experience is the kind of luxury I very well might sell a week, a month, maybe even a year of my life for, depending upon my desperation in the moment. So who really wants to question whether giving my child twice as much time as might be necessary to develop processes of living for themselves is as feasible as just relying on authoritarian structures that have the time and can make me a much less irritable figure? Especially when some of those structures are things like plopping the kid down in front of the TV or eating junk food, things that kids will choose to do on their own in a heart beat over other options that might require them to participate in the labor of living, or take away time we can otherwise spend together doing the activities that they want to do together…and then new routines and habits develop around those institutions/structures/short cuts that become even harder to question or break, even when we have the time and energy to question them.

I am left with far more questions than answers when I think about all of this, except for the one unquestionable truth that my mother was a super hero for having the strength to chose to navigate all of this alone because it was what was best for the both of us together and not because it would be easier or more convenient.

I wrote the first post for this blog series on February 27th. It is kind of wild how much the world and my life has changed in essentially less than 3 months, and I have to admit that, between the world and me, I have considered calling this project more than once, as it is really hard to squeeze writing time into the nooks and crannies of trying to be a full time stay at home parent and connect back into communities of resistance  in the city of Seattle. 20-30 minutes here, if nap time is going well and I am not so exhausted that I have to nap too. Maybe one consecutive hour late at night after attending a meeting or spending time with my partner after the babe has gone to sleep, which sometimes spills into too and often leaves me extra tired the next day. Writing is not the easiest project to fit into my day, and I am still not really sure about the medium of a blog as the best way to share ideas, but I do think making this time to organize my thoughts and record them is worth my time…so the real question comes down to, do I keep trying to frame my thoughts around the ideology of Patriarchal Misogyny? Or should I stop trying to pigeonhole everything I want to write about and change about the world into one particular framework? After all, I have a lot to say about racism and white supremacy, heteronormativity, capitalism and the concept of property, ableism and the need to “be productive,” why the Great Plains Anarchist Network fell apart and whether that was a model of organizing and networking that is worth trying to build with again…can’t I just write about all of that stuff and try to organize my thoughts? 

Well, I think the answer is probably yes, I can and should also be trying to write about all of those topics, when I can. However, I am not yet ready to abandon my belief that it is actually really important in this current political moment to absolutely hammer and attack the ways in which all of the current authoritarian movements around the world are really fixating on protecting a vision of masculinity that is undeniably patriarchal and misogynistic, and that this has been an incredibly successful tactic, but is also a flaw in their underlying structure that can cause the whole thing to collapse. As a nerd, I will use a Star Wars metaphor and say that Authoritarianism’s dependance on “winning” the battle to be the ones to define masculinity and to use that position as the foundation for their power is like spotting an Exhaust port on the Death Star that leads to its main reactor. From my subject position, Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) is a weak point that can be targeted and destroyed. 

Capitalism, Imperialism, white supremacy, Heterosexism, ableism, all of these might also be effect avenues of attack, and ones I am happy to discuss, think about and act to disrupt, especially in alliance with others who want to attack there. However, I just cannot see any version of Trumpism or this outgrowth of the Alt-Right continuing to exist past the point that people in the US realize that the vision of masculinity being sold through PM is pure exploitive con artistry. There is no actual substance to this central idea of their entire ideology. They have no living or historical example of a “real man” that is worth pointing to and saying, “this is the kind of patriarch who will enact the vision that we are selling with our movement.” The leaders of their movement are pathetic examples of masculinity, only successful in harnessing generational wealth to create cults of personality around themselves and attempting to intimidate and bully those around themselves when the carrot of being a part of their cult fails to draw people in. Few of them are capable of even enacting the kind of violence they want to project onto the world around them except in situations where they have premeditatedly moved to eliminate any potential resistance (like in the sexual assault allegations against Trump, Musk and Andrew Tate). The only possible exception might Vladimir Putin, but I think I will save my critique of him for another day, as he is not a US example, and I am probably not well versed enough on contemporary Russian History to talk about him.

Even their historical examples of authoritarian strong men within a modern global world are almost all pathetic losers as well (With, again, maybe Russian autocrats as potential counterpoints that I am not prepared to speak to).  Hitler was a pathetic loser. People knew it at the time. Too many world leaders humored him and tried to play his vanity for their own benefit, while thinking that his violent ideology could be down played with diplomacy, and so he was able to accomplish absolutely horrible and disgusting things…but his reign of terror was incredibly short and only really ended up creating long term benefit for the nations he went to war with. It is much the same with Mussolini, and the other European dictators. Dictators on other continents have faired slightly better overall (and lived for more than a decade from coming into full authoritarian power), but it has alway been within the context of essentially being a puppet of another nation pulling the strings and if that is not an obvious sign of being a pathetic loser, then I must really not understand what an “alpha male” is according to the dictates of PM ideology. 

All of this Nuevo-Facism today is about creating delusional fantasies about ancient figures who lived in much smaller worlds that they did not control through their own authority, but because too many people bought into and staked their entire selves upon collective identities that were much bigger than their leaders, like Greek city states and the Roman Empire. Incompetent authoritarian leaders are the ones who bring about the end of empires, not build them. And that is exactly what we have here in the United States. The more power and authority that Trump manages to secure for himself out of the US empire, the more of that global empire he will end up being responsible for seeing violently destroyed, as is the true legacy of authoritarian masculinity. PM masculinity will never accept anything less than holding power for itself, or seeing the sources of that power destroyed. Do the central figures supporting Trump’s authoritarian rise know this? I think they do. They see the unilateral but multicultural Neo-liberal empire that the United States has made for itself as something that they actively want to destroy. They want to carve off all of the concentrations of people power that have been accumulated within the US, from moments in history like the Civil Rights movement, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Feminism, and LGBTQIAA2S+ movement and till that power back into soil that can be sold off as new property under their control. They think that they are going to be able to hang on to the authoritarian power structures of the United States without the people power structures that they are intentionally undermining, because they really don’t believe in the power of people to overcome the power of the gun, and they never have. As an Anarchist, it does sometimes get tempting to want to see if all the authoritarian power structures of the US will  collapse along side the people power structures that have kept US citizens believing that they are doing more good than harm in the world, but world history doesn’t paint a pretty picture of what happens when authoritarian power structures collapse after belief in the people powered power structures of a nation or society collapse. After all, bullets and bombs tend to still exist long after networks of solidarity, mutual aid and compassion have been murdered and destroyed. 

So yes, perhaps foolishly, I believe that there are lies that Trump administration are telling that will end up mattering to their supporters, but they are the ones that supporters have been conditioned to tell about themselves and what they stand to gain from staying in line. Overwhelmingly, these feel like lies of identity, and that seems why attacking vulnerable groups like immigrants and trans folks seems to be so successful for the Patriarchal Misogynist right. Because their vision of masculinity needs boogymen that it can easily bully and push around without fear of retaliation. It is far too fragile to handle any kind of actual resistance, and that is why Trump has consistently back tracked out of any rhetoric that draws him too much heat. He, and his followers are trying to outlast sustained resistance by creating a circus of outrage that they think will burn itself out on dogwhistles and groups that are pushed so far to the margins of the population they are targeting with their rhetoric that they are essentially invisible to the average MAGA supporter. In other words, it is an administration of cowards that is particularly effective at harnessing fear to motivate people like them, because fear is the thing that keeps motivating them to stay one step ahead of the calamity they create behind them.  I really do believe that if we can get the larger US public to see and believe that this is the essential model of masculinity behind Trumpism and the PM right, that could be the trigger that leads to the collapse of their entire support network’s will to participate. Maybe next time I will refute this possibility, by talking about how it is possible that most of Trump’s supporters already know that fear-based masculinity is already the model that drives their Patriarchal Misogyny, but if I do, I will temper that critique with ideas about how to at least get that model on the process of destroying itself instead of just hiding itself with lies.