8 Ways to Cope When the Jerks Win

Speaking of micro and macro, recently I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s controversial theory of “hegemonic masculinity” which she (I think) presents as the core of overall hegemony though this is propped up by something she calls the “linchpin of legitimation” which is in turn supported by various categories of “femininities”– in short, the patriarchal pickme-dancers.
I’m on my second pot of coffee and a dose of Advil and I still don’t quite get what Connell means by “legitimation” (propagandistic cultural lore?). I find Connell’s idea of a hierarchy of different types of “masculinities” within gender-unequal hegemonic systems very interesting– the idea that there are only a few top dog dude slots while the rest of men are eating varying grades of shit sandwiches below whether they recognize it or not (or just blame minorities and immigrants for it as they’re directed to do). She also makes a hopeful argument that there are different types of “femininities,” which, like alternative types of masculinities, can sometimes rebel and work against hegemony and represent a kind of resistance.
I’m not sure I agree with Connell that “hegemonic masculinity” is entirely an artificial social construct even if it’s sometimes artificially propped up since these hierarchies so closely match ape patriarchy. Instead I lean more towards primatologist Richard Wrangham’s overall view that there’s a cultural war between factions, with one side preferring humanity stay mired in rapey ape patriarchy and another that recognizes this “path of least resistance”– i.e., wallowing in our primal nature on the grounds that it’s nAtUrAl– is suicidal and that we’ll have to consciously resist this primal trajectory in certain ways if we (or the planet) are going to survive.
Back to the main trunk, slogging through this is making me more convinced that the reason the “cheating as abuse” concept is getting such heavy flak is that it the idea threatens to root out a particularly insidious macro tumor that arguably impacts US (not to mention global) politics if you view the current “red wave” as partly fueled by a giant pick-me dance by women voters within the old rapey ape protection racket. Something about cheating seems to be weirdly important to “hegemonic power.”

As a side-note I also think part of the protection racket is the fact that the Democratic party in the US has heavily sold out, leaving women the depressing choice between a shit sandwich in egalitarian drag or a straight-up shit sandwich in many ways. But watching women participate in electing a known rapist spewing blatantly fascist ideology has been super trippy. I can’t get it out of my head that part of what may be fueling this is the lie that a more conservative Christian society would mean… less cheating.

I also suspect that part of this relates to what Trump buddy Jesse Watters signaled when he publicly put a kind of fatwa on women who don’t vote as their male partners do by saying this was as bad as adultery. Watters personal FWittery aside, no one should forget that, in the most extreme forms of patriarchy, female adultery is typically a killable offense and what Trump represents most of all is a trajectory towards that extreme. So I’m betting no one heard Watter’s dog whistle signal louder than women entrapped in abusive relationships with Fox News fans. That’s not to say that douchebags who vote Dem might not also coerce partners to vote as they do but let’s be honest: Democratic pundits– no matter how hypocritical– generally aren’t going to issue such a balls-out fatwa to the extent that Democrats are currently slightly more constrained by egalitarian drag.

Anyway, I’m still trying to sort all the above out but generally the way I see it, all forms of domestic coercive control make up part of the secret sauce that weakens women as a political force. I liken it to an argument I read about how the effort of women to remain thin and conform to conventional beauty standards is so physically taxing and brain-starving that, collectively, women lose the intellectual and emotional energy to politically mobilize. But I think part of the reason women disempower themselves in this and many other ways isn’t only the marginally valuable and heavily taxed “carrot” of gaining advantage within a patriarchal system but also to avoid the “stick” which Watters so clearly waved around when he issued the fatwa on air.

If you think about it, cheating is one of the few tools of domestic abuse and control that’s not only legal but also pretty much unlegislatable in democracy, meaning it likely can’t be directly outlawed without seriously undermining democracy (which wouldn’t be a problem for Watters ilk who would probably love to outlaw it only for women which was always standard in 20th century fascist societies). The other insidious tool of abusers is waging weaponized custody battles because this also aims at hard-wired human attachment. Financial abuse is a close second since this can be often life-threatening and also threaten family bonds.

But really nothing is currently as shrouded in romanticized bs alibis as cheating. And it’s starting to dawn on me that, in a political sense, the issues which are most shrouded in romanticized bs tend to be the linchpins for everything related, meaning that, if you pull that pin, the whole machine falls apart. In trying to reconcile that idea with Connel’s theories, I guess you could call infidelity the “linchpin of the linchpin” of hegemony or maybe of this thing she calls “legitimation” (whatever that is).

That’s where I’m at with this so far. Still reading.

But with all this talk about patriarchy I don’t want to leave out the fact that, as Connell argues, men are also getting screwed over (sometimes in a literal sense by partners) in the bargain. I don’t think it’s a contradiction to Connell’s concept of hegemonic hierarchies since, according to a similar theory about how women who internalize a “hyperfeminine” counterpart to “toxic masculinity” may be more prone to act in sexually coercive ways, those women who draw their sense of self worth from “pride of place” within the hegemonic system might tend to assert their conformity by showing less respect and more contempt towards men who represent certain “alternative masculinities” because, within hegemony, “good guys” are generally viewed as “finishing last” even if, in a different system, this would not be the case.

I think the latter has even been strongly demonstrated in countries like Sweden which, at least before the big privatization shitstorm in that country, had achieved more gender equality in government, business and academia than any other country in history. All of those structures were still hierarchical but one of the things that was observed is that the types of men who naturally “rise” within more gender-equal organizations tend to be less gratuitously aggressive, more intuitive, more team-oriented and generally groovier than the stock dominating “shark-narc” profile of men who thrive in less egalitarian structures. In other words, in some social organizations, good guys finish first. There was also reportedly a difference in the kinds of women leaders who ascended within more egalitarian structures: they tended to be more cooperative and coalitionary with other women in contrast to the typical “token” female power figures who rise– albeit less frequently– in patriarchal systems by sort of outdoing male aggression and often throwing other women (and, we might assume, men who are “insufficiently” knuckle-dragging) under the bus.

Ahem, end of spiel. To sum it up, LACGAL could arguably have “macro” impact!