Men's Liberation

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/42164737

There’s a sexual ideology that holds all of these concepts together in a single place: the idea that you can celebrate Hawk Tuah girl and use her catchphrase to degrade a female politician; the idea that a starlet in a low-cut dress is yours to objectify, while contraception and sexual education are dangerous and probably immoral and should be restricted.

It harks back to the idea that was dominant in the Bush era, a moment when our culture was capable of prizing Girls Gone Wild and purity balls in equal measure, when pop stars like Britney Spears were expected to serve their audiences sex on a platter while avowing their virginity at the same time. It’s the ideology that unites Republican raunch and purity culture, that makes them two sides of the same coin: one based on the idea that women’s sexuality should exist in the service of men. The right once again championing this brand of bawdiness while working relentlessly to restrict women’s autonomy and denigrating the women they don’t like isn’t a departure. It’s a return to form.

The choice is clear. On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’s vice-presidential pick and her husband, Doug Emhoff. These are the good progressive dads, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine writes, the “nice men of the left” who do guy things like coach football but also manifest liberal and feminist virtues — like being “happily deferential” and “unapologetically supportive of women’s rights” and “committed to partnership” in marriage and politics alike. Walz especially is being held up all over as a paragon of liberal dadhood: “A regular guy,” Mona Charen of The Bulwark writes, “at a time when the country needs reminding that being a regular guy is actually pretty great.”

Then there is the other model, the dark side of the Y chromosome: the toxic masculinity of Donald Trump, the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance, all of them wrapped together in a package that Zack Beauchamp of Vox describes as “neo-patriarchy.” This is a worldview, he writes, that may claim to allow for more female agency than the older patriarchy but really just wants a “reversal of the feminist revolution,” in which men finally get to be he-men again while their wives stay home and rear four to seven kids.

Hope you enjoy this video I made.

This is the first video in what will be a series of essays about sex. Although this video deals with issues of masculinity less so than others in the series will, I still thought it might be nice to post it here.

One takeaway from this TED Talk is that Title IX, rather than balancing the playing field for women, tilted it against men. Are there any clear solutions?