Cheney, manly? Bush, girlie?
I've emerged from my cave.This is from last week's Time with my bold added:
Bushland is by instinct more reformist, more political, more female and, in places, deeply devout. Cheneyland is more Establishment, more male, more button-down, more secretive.
Huh? Maybe my antenna is a little more tuned to this because we've been discussing gender construction in my grad class, but this just struck me as odd.
If being "more male" means lying to people, keeping secrets from the people who need the information, not being held accountable for your actions, and shooting a friend in the face and then ducking the 5-0 for 16 hours, give me a skirt and call me a girlie man. Whatever is Dick Cheney's definition of masculinity, I will run as far away from it as possible.
posted by Kinder Gentler Little Man @ 2:45 PM
2 Comments:
It's not that I don't think you'd look good in a skirt...but before you put one on consider the following:
Manliness
That's our theme for today, since it seems to be on the minds of so many conservative writers these days.
1. We'll first hear from Pastor Doug Giles, who will give us some advice on "Raising Boys That Feminists Will Hate." (You know, boys who grow up to be wife-beaters, control-freaks, serial killers, etc.)
Parent, if you have a young son and you want him to grow up to be a man, then you need to keep him away from pop culture, public school and a lot of Nancy Boy churches. If metrosexual pop culture, feminized public schools and the effeminate branches of evanjellycalism lay their sissy hands on him, you can kiss his masculinity good-bye—because they will morph him into a dandy,
Got that, parent? If you want to raise a manly son, then you must homeschool him, homechurch him, and keep him away from TV, movies, popular music, newspapers, etc. That way, you can keep society from stealing his nuts. (Sure, he'll grow up to be a freakish misfit, but at least he'll be a MANLY freakish misfit instead of one of those dreadful dandies.)
Here's another tip from Doug. It's taken from the story of the Garden of Eden, which was apparently a hell-hole that God created in order to teach Adam to be a MAN. But then Eve ruined everything by gaining knowledge of good and evil (and apparently then decided that the "thorny, critter-laden and butt-kicking badland" wasn't actually much of a garden -- and so got Adam banished into a horrible world of poodles, bike helmets, and modern sanitation.
I don’t have boys, but I make certain that my two alpha teen-aged females, along with my wife and I, get a regular dose of the irregular wild. Our lives consist of large quantities of surfing in shark infested waters, biking in the backwoods, workouts on the beach, hunting in the sweltering swamps of the everglades for wild boar, fishing the brimming waters of South Florida and treks into the African bush.
So, if you want to raise manly men, treat them like girls.
Oh, and if you are the parent of a son whom you want to keep uncivilized, as God intended (and you think it's too late to turn the kid over to be raised by wolves), you'll be happy to learn that Doug is going to write a whole series on this topic. (I guess it's harder than one might think to raise boys whom feminists will hate.) So, be sure to check back next week for even more boy-raising tips from Doug, the father of girls.
P.S. TBogg has more about the manly Doug. (And I have to say, God really blew it by not calling the Garden of Eden "Yipee Land" like Doug suggests.)
2. Next, Harvey Mansfield, "a 73-year-old government professor and conservative elder statesman of [Harvard] university" will say a few words on the topic of manliness (about which he has written a whole book). His sage words come to us courtesy of the WSJ's OpinionJournal:
Mr. Mansfield cites surveys that show that despite their now equal capacity to be hired for jobs outside the home, American women still do two-thirds of the housework. He argues that this is not simply a hangover from our former oppressive patriarchy. Rather, he writes, it is evidence of manliness. "Men look down on women's work . . . not because they think it is dirty or boring or insignificant, which is often true of men's work; they look down on it because it is women's work."
And while some men's work may be boring, dirty, or insignificant, it must be more important than women's work (AKA housework), because men get paid for what they do.
Anyway, men look down on women's work because it's done by women, which isn't simply "a hangover from our former oppressive patriarchy," but the way God intended things to be. And really, letting the womenfolk keep their selves busy with a few hours of household chores after they get home from their full-time jobs is actually doing them a favor, because housework can be really fulfilling, if you will just look at it in the right way.
When it comes to the subject of housework, Mr. Mansfield has a decidedly different take from that of the late Betty Friedan. He accepts her point that keeping house in the modern era need not be a full-time job, and that boredom, or "the problem that has no name," is a natural byproduct of forcing educated women to remain in the home, even when there is not enough to keep them occupied mentally or physically. But he disapproves of her "demeaning of household work to . . . a necessary thing that you can't take any pride in."
Sure, housework is boring, but educated women can still find fulfillment from dedicating their lives to doing it, if they will just take pride in how their laundry is whiter than their neighbor's, or how their toilets are the sparkliest on the block! Now doesn't that sound like a much more meaningful way to pass one's time than, say, being a tenured mathematics professor at Harvard?
And anyway, even if housework is tedious, you shouldn't make your husband help with it, because it's your job to respect his manliness (and respecting manliness apparently means never making him take his turn at floor mopping, although, as we learned from Janice Shaw Crouse, you don't necessarily have to use the kind of mop he prefers). Take a lesson from that fictional lady cop in Fargo, who never made her husband help with the cleaning. See, she respected his manliness -- and, as you'll recall, never ended up in a wood chipper. Let her be your model, ladies.
Such women might well wonder, as I did, what we have to gain from encouraging men to do less of the housework. But Mr. Mansfield believes that women do instinctually realize the value of respecting manliness. He offers the example of the police detective in the movie "Fargo." She performs her job "wonderfully," says Mr. Mansfield, but "she's careful to maintain the sensibilities of her husband . . ., an artist, who at the end of the movie succeeds in getting his drawing accepted for a two-cent postage stamp." "This is pitiful," he laughs, "but she makes a big thing of it."
Women, respect your husband's life's work, even if it's some pitiful artistic crap, because otherwise you might never get a husband -- and then who would you do all that extra housework for?
Of course, Mr. Mansfield doesn't need to go to the movies to see how men and women behave today. He has the classroom for that. Though he thinks that his female students have become "more assertive than they used to be," he observes that "the very same women will be careful of the sensibilities of the men they wish to attract and not try to compete with them except in fun or ironically." "If not," his brow rises slightly, "I think they would have trouble getting married."
Maybe these women could marry Doug Giles' alpha females -- they sound quite competitive and assertive, and therefore pretty darned manly.
3. Lastly, here's Brent Bozell, who has the manly job of watching cartoons and pointing out all the bad stuff in programs like "SpongeBob SquarePants."
Euphemisms for obscene language are also prevalent. In the cosmic order of things, most are mild to be sure -- but not all. One episode of "SpongeBob SquarePants" deals with the discovery of dirty words, with the childlike characters SpongeBob and Patrick trading sound-effect-covered cuss words, and you can only imagine the obscenity of the sailor talk they're exchanging.
So, Brent, it's the cartoon's fault that you imagined really foul, perverse, disgusting obscenities?
Oh, and Brent was also shocked and appalled by all the talk of mucus and soiled diapers in the preview for the Rugrats movie. So, maybe Doug had a point about how exposing boys to pop culture turns them into prancing, sissified little whingers whom nobody respects.
I actually feel guilty when the house becomes a wreck.
Housework doesn't have to be tedious, though. It can be a wonderful opportunity for mindfulness. Other than sitting on cushions, chores are the only thing that Zen monks do all day.
And my wife is the bread-winner in our house. By far.
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