Egalitarian and hierarchical masculinities

Rebecca Traister notes that the competing presidential tickets present different models of masculinity:

On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.

The new Democratic man is embodied by Harris surrogates like Emhoff, whose first solo public appearance since his wife became the de facto nominee was at a Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine, and Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, the former National Guardsman and football coach whom the right has taken to calling “Tampon Tim” for passing a law in his home state of Minnesota requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in all school bathrooms.

This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.

That Trump is terrible toward and for women hardly needs repeating. But the Republican convention in July was nevertheless a startling window into just how wholly unconcerned the GOP is about its abysmal reputation. Speakers included Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler accused of domestic abuse, and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO who was once filmed engaging in a physical altercation with his wife. There were right-wing misogynists like Tucker Carlson, who lost his job at Fox News amid sexual-harassment allegations and has called women “extremely primitive and basic,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of having sex with a minor and has called reproductive-rights activists “odious on the inside and out.” Where Harris’s walk-out music is Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” both Trump and running mate J. D. Vance have been using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

J.D. Vance, while a terrible pick in terms of appealing to the median voter, was pretty much hand-tooled to appeal to postliberal Catholic reactionaries like Ross Douthat, who needless to say is not happy with Traister’s analysis:

Amid all the joy and positivity and the big, beautiful polling surges for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the word has gone out: This election isn’t going to be a referendum on inflation, immigration or foreign policy anymore. It’s going to be a referendum on masculinity in America.

Note two issues that are missing here, abortion rights and healthcare. I wonder why Douthat doesn’t want to revisit what the anti-abortion movement’s many critics had to say about what how Dobbs would change Republican healthcare policies. And Douthat scrupulously avoids discuss abortion rights for the rest of the column, ignoring a critical component of Traister’s column. “Republican men want to control the reproductive destinies of American women” is quite a telling thing to yadda-yadda in this context.

Douthat goes on to point out that liberal men can be scumbags who treat women badly, which is certainly true but again elides Traister’s point (there are indeed many liberal men who are domestic abusers; there are no people who have abused their partners on video being given prominent speaking roles at the Democratic National Convention, let alone people who have boasted about sexually assaulting people on live mics and found liable for sexual assault in court on the Democratic presidential ticket.) But the comedy comes when it’s time to defend the atavistic worldviews of J.D. “childless cat ladies” Vance and Josh Hawley:

Second, the thing that Beauchamp calls “neo-patriarchy” and that I would call “neo-traditionalism” — a strong, religiously motivated commitment to marriage and family — does not necessarily have the anti-feminist, back-to-the-kitchen effects that are supposedly inherent to the vision.

Beauchamp cites Vance and Josh Hawley as apostles of neo-patriarchy — but both men have extremely successful lawyer wives.

Frank Wilhoit to the courtesy phone. I mean, Phyllis Schlafly worked full time too! It’s not exactly news that prominent reactionaries don’t hold themselves to the same standards they advocate for others. To return to our earlier point, the issue here is what happens to the life prospects of women how have the requested kids — if some state coercion is involved, all the better, and let’s no ask about what losing control over the timing of having kids might mean for the educational career prospects of women — but don’t have the Federalist Society gravy train or a libertarian billionaire sugar daddy or the revenue from a shitty bestseller to pay third parties for the services that would allow them to live lives like Usha Vance [before her husband ran for president] or Erin Morrow Hawley. Asking that question would alas require us to look into what Republicans are proposing to expand services for pregnant women and parents, which would then require Douthat to concede that as long as he gets his abortion bans he can live with Ryanomics. And yes Vance theoretically supports and expanded child tax credit, but the history of Republicans like Vance on this issue is to favor some kind of support in the abstract but to walk away from any specific legislative proposal, especially one that would help poor or working-class families. The fact that Vance couldn’t be bothered to show up when Republicans once again voted en masse against the expanding the credit is a good illustration of his depth of commitment.

I’ll give Traister the last word here:

While the ideas that these men espouse have become common currency across the right, they remain somewhat foreign to the political mainstream. That’s why the discourse this summer was dominated by bewildered responses to unearthed remarks by Vance, who has described childless women as “deranged,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” and argued that parents should get extra votes. Republicans’ recent obsession with overturning no-fault-divorce laws is also informed by incel culture and online sexist outrage. Vance has bemoaned the fact that people can more easily leave marriages, even violent ones, “like they change their underwear.”

This is not about ensuring that more babies are born. If it were, Republicans would be supporting child tax credits, federal paid-leave legislation, affordable housing, subsidized day-care programs, and maternal-health-care bills. They would not be imperiling IVF treatments. It’s about the domination of women and the reinscription of patriarchal power.