Author: Benjamin

In part 2 of 100 I defined patriarchal misogyny as something different than just patriarchy or misogyny because it is an intentional political and social strategy used to advance an authoritarian agenda, and I am directly calling it out as a fundamental tenant of Trumpism. I believe this is true, but seeing that Andrew Cuomo is running a campaign for mayor of NYC that is likely to get a lot of traction in the process of the primary, I want to be clear that I do not think Trumpism is (nor Republicans are) alone to blame for the rise of weaponizing patriarchal misogyny. I think many Democrats will vehemently deny that their party utilizes patriarchal misogyny for political ends, and I think there are folks in the Democratic Party much more willing to stand up to it and its politicization than there are in the Republican Party, but there is no doubt that individual Democratic politicians, including too many rather popular ones, over many decades have at least embraced the privileges afforded by patriarchal misogyny, if they have not directly used it for political ends.

Andrew Cuomo is an example of one of these kind of Democrats, as he was eating up being called the “Sexy Governor” during the first year of the Covid pandemic, putting himself forward as this confident, tough guy, who could stand up to Trump 1.0 for what was right, while simultaneously sexually harassing at least 11 women. Cuomo is largely considered to be a front runner in this campaign for mayor and will heavily lean into the image of a “tough guy from New York” who has stood up to Trump in the past, and use that to contrast himself against current NYC mayor Eric Adams. I find this grotesque, but also pretty ironic, because I am fairly confident that had/if any sexual harassment accusations against Cuomo proceed to point of facing criminal conviction, I think Cuomo would be quick to accept a pardon from Trump/capitulate with Trump’s Department of Justice to make sure that none of those accusations even get prosecuted. The fact that Trump is so readily willing to “save” men accused of sexual violence and manipulation, as well as general corruption and fraud accusations, regardless of past political affiliations is one of the things that makes Trumpism so particularly frightening and dangerous.

Trump’s weaponization of patriarchal misogyny is very much about establishing, or maybe just expanding the class of men in power who are above the law and who will be able to “reap the benefits” of power in disturbing and disgusting ways. This is not actually a new thing, and there are probably even more presidents than we know of who abused the power of their office to gain access to and control over women’s bodies and lives, but Trump’s efforts to return the US to that kind of protection for the President and his cronies is an intensely reactionary move against decades of feminist action. There is a very real danger of Trump succeeding in re-entrenching patriarchal misogyny in US political and social thought that will spill over well beyond Trumpism, rebuilding walls that protect terrible and abusive men, that had only just begun to crack.   

The fact that Trump was probably drawn to the idea of running for president based upon his insider perspective of the ways in which Bill Clinton abused the power of his office should not be lost on anyone, nor should the fact that so many men with a history of abusing power have been similarly drawn into the Trumpist camp.

It is going to take more than traditional US leftist politics and campaigning to undo the damage that Trumpism is causing, even as the success of Trumpism is largely a result of the failure of Leftist campaigning and politics. The massive turnover of federal employees and a desire to hire new, loyal Trumpists into every federal office is going to make sure that it is harder than ever for anyone to whistle blow. It might not even take official laws or executive orders to accomplish things like running women and LGBTQIAA+ folks out of the military or federal law enforcement as abuse and harassment will be largely ignored as long as they appear in service of the political vision. Even if Trump leaves office at the end of his second term, and a Kamala Harris wins the presidency back with a full house and senate majority, there is almost 0 percent chance that any Democratic president is going to commit to clearing house in the same way, and it will take decades of organizational restructuring around principles of inclusivity and justice to uproot the ground work of patriarchal misogyny that Trumpism is doing everything he can to embed into the Federal government. Attacking this problem from the top down, and waiting for leaders who we trust to be able to enact these changes to navigate a system that will be incredibly hostile to change is delusional fantasy at this point, but there is great potential for youth movements to rise up in resistance and revolt as the futility of traditional political means becomes more apparent.  But only if we can make sure to counter the vision of “every (white/rich) man a king of his own kingdom” that Trump is employing patriarchal misogyny to sell to young men, especially young white men. 

Brainstorming and envisioning a masculine identity not rooted in “the ability to control and rule the people around me as property” is our path  forward away from both Trumpism and the overt weaponization of patriarchal misogyny that Trumpism is force feeding back into US politics. Hopefully, it will also be something I can continue to contribute to and focus on with the rest of these blog posts.

In thinking about what to talk about next, the phrase “Patriarchal Misogyny” leapt out at me as something that I think I use very intentionally to mean something specific, but that many readers might see as just “woke buzzwords” or an attempt to make myself sound more like a fancy academic cultural critic when I could have just said something like “a hatred for women,” if I was trying to communicate more direct.

I mean isn’t all misogyny patriarchal?

Well, for the sake of my critique of Donald Trump, I think it is important to talk about a type of misogyny that is deliberately performed socially/politically for the sake of reinforcing some of the most authoritarian patriarchal structures, and the kind of misogyny that stems internally from a hatred of women, even if both types eventually serve patriarchal ends.

For example, when a young male mass shooter targets women indiscriminately, based largely on personal rejections and a sense of lost personal authority rooted exclusively in his masculinity, that kind of violence does inevitably serve patriarchal social, political and domestic structures (which I will get to in a second). However, even when the intention of the shooter is to become some kind of hero for incels and men’s right advocates everywhere, the reality is that these kinds of hyper violent misogynistic acts only really serve to create a literal bogeyman of “why woman should be thankful that the good men in their lives will protect them from these kind of monsters.” This kind of violence absolutely is providing a service to patriarchies everywhere, but it is coming from either a position of zealous devotion to a patriarchal value system, or even a sense of despair at feeling rejected from the promises of one of those value systems.

Patriarchal Misogyny is different in that its perpetrators are not the rank and file followers of patriarchal or misogynistic systems, they are the ones intentionally designing and shaping those systems, even if their reasons for doing so are more personal than actually political commitment to those systems. This is why Donald Trump in particular needs to be called out for his patriarchal misogyny, even if he is often capable of deflecting general accusations of misogyny by pointing out that he is neither the most overtly patriarchal politician, nor misogynistic. Like, Mike Pence is pretty clearly a politician more dedicated to rigid patriarchal domestic and political systems than Trump ever was, but he was also far more cautious and afraid to adopt the kind of overtly misogynistic rhetoric that Trump was in service of those patriarchal systems. Pence would have been an awful president who worked tirelessly to assert his own vision of patriarchy deeper into US politics, but he was never going to be willing to risk completely upending the US political system to assert control over a movement of men willing to weaponize patriarchal misogyny for his own political purposes. 

This is why I am directing these blog posts specifically at patriarchal misogyny, and especially the radicalized and weaponized version of it that Trump has fully embraced as both a political tool and as one of the centralized underpinnings of Trumpism 2.0.  Because even if it is largely self-serving, and a way for him to deflect legal accountability for acts of sexual violence in his past, his efforts to give it such a powerful and explicit platform (including surrounding himself with other men who have committed similar acts of violence) are either going to be a weak point in his overall drive towards authoritarianism that we must attack…or his platforming of patriarchal misogyny is going to be radical root of his most dedicated and zealous foot soldiers, who will put no persons or legal systems ahead of their messianic patriarch. 

Maybe I am way off on this, and you have your own ideas about patriarchy and misogyny you want to share back with me? In future blog posts I intend to dig deeper into how we resist patriarchal misogyny as a weapon of authoritarianism as well as why it is actually a really terrible and unhealthy ideology for anyone to internalize, and how helping young men overcome its appeals will be essential for everyone’s future, but that will all be for next time. 

Ok, so I am going to “start somewhere,” and try to start a blog where I make 100 posts in the year 2025 about sex, consent, and self worth as a pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, cisgendered dude who has had fulfilling sexual relationships with women-identifying folks in a political and social environment that feels like it is giving itself over entirely to patriarchal misogyny. This very first one is just going to be pretty stream of conscious brain storming about topics I want to cover in these 100 blog posts, and why I am doing this, but probably in reverse order, and with no promises of covering every thing.

The elevator pitch for “why am I doing this?” is that I think the one place Donald Trump has really managed to succeed beyond what conservatives previously thought possible for themselves was to make blatantly self-serving, amoral, patriarchal misogyny a personal brand and unapologetically sell it to a generation of young men that were possibly on the cusp of questioning whether patriarchy still had anything to offer them at all anymore. I personally want to live in a world without patriarchy or misogyny, so I think it sucks to see so many young men repeating ideas that I thought we had maybe crushed by the early 2010s, but clearly I was wrong, and the reactionary surge of “Men’s Rights” bullshit and sexual predators knowingly being welcome back everywhere into positions of power and prestige in society is starting to feel like a giant, personal “fuck you” to the decades of work I did trying to address gender-based violence professionally and as a community organizer…as well, of course, as being really bad for the world as a whole. I think I will have to get into a lot more of that personal history in later blogs, but it is becoming abundantly clear that there has been a safe space of misogynistic ideas about gender and sexuality that has been cultivated on parts of the internet and social media that a lot of folks on the left wrote off as fringe and out of touch, and it has cost us dearly.

I think there are a lot of male-identified folks out there who wanted to discuss and explore sexual desire, especially their own developing sexual desire for women, and the only place where they were able to find those conversations happening in ways that felt authentic to their own experiences (and freely accessible) were in places on the internet dedicated to the manipulation and economic exploitation of insecure men craving access to what they identify as desirable female bodies. I am talking about the entire world of mainstream pornography (a massive, opaque economy built explicitly for the purpose of this kind of economic exploitation), but also a lot of “Men’s health industrial complex” type internet and social media stuff too, some of the worst of “gamergate” gamer culture, as well as grotesquely hypocritical patriarchal religious organizations and men’s social organizations as well. That is a big net, and it isn’t comprehensive. This also isn’t an attempt to cast blame on any one person or small group of people who participate in any one of these groups, or to pretend like the internet originated these places or even made them any worse than they were before the internet, but to acknowledge that Trumpist right-wing politics have massively benefited from targeting men through these internet platforms, and the left’s efforts to counter them or offer alternatives failed miserably, and without the left realizing how devastating this failure was going to be.

Like, I think a lot of leftists were like, “look! We are winning (changing ideas about what male identity and sexuality can be) in certain institutions like college campuses and some mainstream entertainment industries, so maybe we are winning with the youth overall?!” But the reality was that young men with questions about their own developing heterosexuality were not turning to college classrooms or mainstream entertainment industry giants like Disney to answer these questions. They were turning to free porn on the internet and community spaces where they felt like could talk to other people in similar situations about the kinds of sex (and the development of identities built upon that kind of sex) that were happening in that porn. And this isn’t even a trend unique to male centric conversations about heterosexual sex. The whole “what media appears free to the end user, and what media seems price prohibitive to the end user (especially when the end user is a minor with limited economic freedom)?” is problematic in everything from news media to even academic research media literacy. Ivory Towers of knowledge and wisdom are getting torn down across the world because there is easy money and power in doing it, and “Anti-Woke” misogynistic gender ideology is only one of these easy paths to money and control over a population of people with a lot of political power and capacity for extremist violence.

But it is the one that I think I have spent a lot of time learning about and trying to respond to in the past, and so I want to write a ton of blogs (like 100 in 1 year) that adress the kinds of questions that patriarchal misogyny has created a monopoly on answering for many young men. Maybe in the process of sharing these writings with you all as an audience, and possibly inspiring some of y’all to respond back or start conversations about these topics within communities you are more comfortable communicating within, we can start building a more effective response than we’ve done in the past.

So why am I doing this? Because I think the left (and specifically folks who identify as men on the left, because this isn’t another job we need to push off on women or nonbinary folks, expecting them to do this labor for free) needs to talk about how we talk about sex and with whom we have been including and excluding from those conversations. This is an ambitious project, and I have struggled to do any writing of any significance in the year and a half since my son was born, but by putting the goal out here in cyber space, maybe it will push me to be more accountable to myself, and to this project. Feel free to reach out with questions, suggestions, or encouragements to keep going on this project!