Tough as a marshmallow
Now wait just a damn minute.
FiveThirtyEight has campaign advice, which is one of my least favorite genres of post or article or book or any other item of communication. But in addition to that…whaaaaaaaat?
Some voters are plainly worried about whether a woman can defeat President Trump in 2020. But maybe they shouldn’t be.
This might seem like a strange argument to make — after all, I recently wrote an article outlining the many challenges that women face when they run for office. But the thing is, men can also be hurt by some of those same stereotypes, and while the bar is higher for women, men also need to convince voters that they’re strong, decisive and assertive enough for the job. What’s more, gender is likely to be a defining issue in the 2020 race even if the Democrats don’t put a woman at the top of the ticket, in part because tough-guy masculinity is so central to how Trump campaigns and how he governs.
Excuse me? Bozo the Clown projects “tough-guy masculinity”? Are they serious? The ridiculous goldy hair that flaps in the breeze? The baggy suit on the puffy lazy body? The brazen, copious cheating at golf? The tiny boneless hands making their two pathetic meaningless gestures? The fake tan? The whiny tweets? The compulsive talk talk talking? The ignorance, the clumsiness, the vulgarity, the general absurdity and grotesquery of him? That projects tough-guy masculinity? I don’t think so. Bullying, yes, noise, yes, bad manners, yes, but do those really add up to tough-guy masculinity?
I say no.
Not Donald Trump
There are lots of people who seem to think that’s what maculinityis. But then there are people confused about a lot of things. Many confuse his stream-of-idiocy unloading of everything that passes through his tiny mind with honest forthrightness, that he’s “telling it like it is.” His boorishness and ignorance make him “a man of the people” and somehow negate the wealth and privilege that elevate him above the little people who are nothing but bit players in the story of Trump. His posturing and his verbal incontinence make him the stupid person’s idea of a tough guy.
Whether Trump is tough or not is not really the issue. Telling people that he’s tough is. What Trump does is capitalize on the fact that many people can’t/don’t distinguish between being tough and being an asshole.
But remember, masculinity is imaginary. There is no “essential male nature,” just various behaviors and character traits that are more or less approved of by others. Masculinity is entirely an invention of culture, and its attributes change from one era or culture to another, even from one subculture to another. The traditional patriarchal view of masculinity — to speak of one particular cultural invention popular among political and religious authoritarians* — is in fact largely indistinguishable from being a pushy, entitled, bullying, egotistical, sexually predatory asshole. By that measure, Trump is very masculine indeed.
*I’ve decided that it’s an abuse of the word to label them “conservatives,” really, because there is nothing they ever seek to conserve except their own power. Just look at Republican attitudes towards environmentalism for the past 40-50 years as the party has grown increasingly “conservative.”
Perhaps you have forgotten what country we live in:
United States of Assholes.
Well I know “masculinity” is bullshit, just as “femininity” is. I take that so for granted that I didn’t think to spell it out. I’m not a fan of the “tough-guy masculinity” image, I’m just saying it’s not an image that Trump fits. His image is more “weak-guy yammering cheating chickenshit balloon of hot air.”
A lot of people do think he’s tough and ‘masculine’. It’s incomprehensible to me, but they do.
There’s a quote that’s been circulating for these last few years, I have no idea where to attribute it: “Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a weak man’s idea of a tough man, and a stupid man’s idea of a smart man.”
That’s a more succinct way of putting it than I managed.
And to Godwin myself, Hitler wasn’t really much of an exemplar of the Aryan ideal, either.
He likes to think he does.
It is utterly bizarre that people buy it. (And, I know they do. We’ve all seen them doing it.) I would have thought if there’s anything all fans of tough guys are agreed on it’s that a real tough guy is MORE THAN TALK.
Trump is absolutely nothing but talk. There is no other there there.
How often is someone’s toughness actually put to the test in a publicly visible way? Most of the time, we have to make do with signals that typically accompany toughness. (Or at least those that people think do.)
Yeah, what he does isn’t toughness… toughness is taking a blow to the face without blinking or moving an inch; it’s catching a punch in one hand and squeezing until the fist breaks.
It is not flailing wildly and yelling… and really I can’t describe their kind of “toughness” without resorting to misogynist slurs…
BKiSA,
How about this? Toughness is walking down the street on day 1001, after 1000 days of leers and whistles and catcalls. Toughness is going to a meeting and presenting your 21st great idea after your colleagues stole your first 20. Toughness is going to HR and lodging a complaint against your abusive boss, knowing that it’s likely to cost you your job.
etc.
@What a Maroon:
Well there certainly is that… I was more going for (what I perceive) as the ideal of “manly” toughness.
I’m in fits. Can’t even read farther.
What a Maroon, you nailed it.
That’s one reason I admire Hillary Clinton. Now she’s tough. She has been engulfed in abuse since 1992, when Bill first ran for president. I’m guessing she wakes up to it every morning. But she still wakes up. She still gets out of bed, gets dressed, and keeps doing what she is doing. Running for president? Shit, I would have been curled up in a corner whimpering by then, but she got out there and suffered more and more and more abuse. That’s tough.
And…she didn’t shout “Fake News!” or whimper about how unkind people were being to her every single morning. She knew she was a public figure and would be subjected to the scrutiny, not all of it kind, that being a public figure brings. She didn’t tweet pictures of herself beating up FoxNews or suggest, subtly or otherwise, that someone needed to do something about the news agencies that didn’t treat her with deference. Because she is tough. As nails.
Trump? He’s the biggest sissy on the playground, and that is why he is a bully.
Yes that’s what I was thinking – that the word doesn’t necessarily mean violent or even good in a fight, but can mean stoicism, steady nerves, persistence, and the like. Unfortunately because it’s often linked to “masculinity” that can quickly shade into emotionless, callous, cold…But it doesn’t actually have to.
Josh – snerk
And he’s crap at even that.