It's increasingly said of American politics that everything is gender. That doesn't mean literally everything relates to it, but it seems like everything has some sort of symbolically gendered component. And when you listen to Republicans talk, this is getting more and more overt.

 

We used to be soy boys, now we're cucks, non-binary, trans, whatever it is, it's getting dialled up and up and up, and it's getting weirder and weirder. This idea that it's all gendered is something I've relied on a lot in my writing, but I haven't actually done a podcast on it. So joining me today to discuss this is one of Salon's leading writers, Amanda Marcotte.

 

Amanda, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

So let's start with a microcosm of this. What the heck is going on in Texas right now with their Senate race, because that seems to be kind of interesting.

 

Yeah, so the Republican nominee for the Senate is a man named Ken Paxton, and he comes into the race with a whole bunch of baggage. He's unbelievably corrupt.

 

He proclaims his Christian faith left and right, but also was caught up in a really egregious adultery scandal, and his wife said she was divorcing him on biblical grounds, whatever that means. But I think he was impeached by the Texas House, which is controlled by Republicans. That's how corrupt he is for bribery scandals.

 

And he was acquitted in the Senate kind of just barely. My understanding of Ken Paxton is that he's hated by many of his Republican colleagues, which says a lot. They have a lot of tolerance.

 

And he's going up against a local state representative from Austin named James Tallarico. Tallarico is a threat because he went to seminary school. He speaks about his Christian faith in very compelling terms, and I think that the fear for the Republicans and the hope on the Democratic side is that Tallarico, by reminding everybody what a true Christian is actually supposed to be like, is going to be able to pull at least some votes over.

 

There are a lot of people in Texas, I would say, especially women who have been kind of loyal Republican voters their whole life, who are starting to feel queasy about the conflict between their self-professed Christian faith and the overt ugliness and cruelty that is escalating from the Republican Party lately. And that is a legitimate concern. So there is a belief that Tallarico might be able to eke enough of those votes over to win this Senate race.

 

So just start with the Republican side of that. He, Paxton, beat an incumbent senator, right, which is actually kind of unusual.

 

Yes, and it's a sign of how radicalised the Texas Republican Party has gotten. So John Cornyn is the incumbent senator from Texas. He's been there since the early 2000s. And he's also very right-wing.

 

I was going to say, I know this name. He's come across occasionally. He's not so moderate or something. I don't know if there are moderates left in today's Republican Party. But even if there were, he's not one of them.

 

Yeah, no, he is not moderate. And in fact, you know, I'm originally from Texas. So I follow Texas politics very closely. And I followed John Cornyn pretty closely.

 

He is particularly rabid on anti-LGBTQ stuff. He spent a lot of the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Kataji Brown Jackson asking her a bunch of pointed questions that were clearly designed to lay the groundwork for repealing same-sex marriage rights in the United States. So that's where he is.

 

He's very right-wing. But he's a kind of mild-mannered man who seems to get the ick over some of the more rancid rhetoric in Republican politics these days. And I think Ken Paxton actually had an advantage over him even before Donald Trump endorsed Paxton because he comes across as this troll.

 

This, I think his criminality actually gave him a benefit because a lot of Republicans see criminal corrupt behaviour as a sign that you're willing to do whatever it takes to win. And that's so, you know, in a Republican primary, the worst person in the race has an advantage. And that just happened to be Ken Paxton.

 

This is, I mean, this is a very consistent pattern at this point into the Trump era, right? I guess it gets called vice signalling. But we do just seem to be in a space where the morally worst person usually winds up winning Republican primaries. And I mean, what does that say? There's a reticence, perhaps an understandable reticence, to not blame electorates. At what point does it just have to be said that something has gone badly, socially and morally wrong within the core Republican vote?

 

No, I think it really has. I wrote a whole book about this during the first Trump administration called Troll Nation, where I argued that what has happened on the right is that they've lost every argument on the merits, basically. They've lost the arguments over climate change, feminism, LGBTQ rights, education, tax rates, you name it.

 

They have lost the argument on the merits. And so all they have left is anger, trolling, and violent impulses. It is how you end up in a fascist situation, right? Which is they can't win the argument on facts or reason anymore.

 

So instead, they just want to pound your face into the ground. That's how they're going to win. And I think that that impulse is manifested in this affection for candidates that read as not just crude, but even criminal.

 

And that smash your face in is taking increasingly and increasingly gendered forms. One of the reasons the Texas race struck me was not just Paxman, but the whole Republican side has taken to describing our guy as effeminate, as potentially trans, as a vegan, perhaps most shockingly of all.

 

You can get perhaps stuck in the specifics and how silly and non-accurate they are, but the overall rhetorical thrust is to characterise him as effeminate or queer, I would say, right?

 

Yeah, I think a lot of people did get caught .And that's actually, I think, one reason that these attacks like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump called James Tallarico trans. Ken Paxton harped about him being a vegan, which he's not. A lot of the retorts were, but he's not.

 

And it's like, well, y'all remember, right? When you were kids on the playground and they would call you gay and you weren't. But it's just a variation of this. These words just mean in group, out group. And to your point, they very specifically are a way to emasculate men. I don't know. But I mean, they also do it to women.

 

Trans has become a kind of all-purpose way of labelling anybody that the right sees as gender non-conforming. And to be gender conforming by MAGA standards is pretty rigid. And it's getting more rigid all the time.

 

That's why we're seeing a lot of women in MAGA spaces get extensive plastic surgery, just cake makeup onto their faces, have their hair blown out crazy every day. Because just being able to perform femininity in the circles is like a four-hour process of just making yourself up and doing your hair. It's getting egregious.

 

Yeah, talk to me a bit more about the role of trans as kind of like an all-purpose slur. Because I've been spending a bit of time on trans rights in the UK recently, which we neednt to go into. But it does really become one of those things that once people start fixating on this, they almost invariably start becoming weird about it and start seeing it everywhere. And I think you're exactly right. It's a stand-in for any sort of non-traditional, non-hierarchical, non-stereotypical gender expression. But that's sort of what they're using it as.

 

Yeah, I get called trans constantly online. And I have for years now. And before this obsession...

 

I've started getting that too, now that I've started talking about it. 20 years ago, if you were a liberal guy, so you kind of insinuate you're a bit gay. Now it's you're trans somehow. You know, anyway, please go on.

 

No, no, no. I think that's exactly what has happened, is I think homosexuality has become mainstream and normalised in a lot of ways. And it's lost its power as an insult, like a catch-all insult.

 

And so trans has replaced it. I don't honestly think it's any deeper than that. And in both cases, the pleasure of labelling a person who is not that thing, that thing, is that it puts them in this situation where if they deny it, they're seen as agreeing that it's bad, right? And if they refuse to answer, they're conceding that they are the thing.

 

And it's very frustrating, you know. I do think that that's why a lot of people really grasped on to Lady Gaga's response when she was asked if she was trans. She said, would it matter if I were? Because that's the only way you can deal with the bigotry beneath such a... I even hate to use the word accusation, right? Because there is nothing wrong with it.

 

But it's also a real bummer to be told that you're something that you're not.

 

Sometimes it's not even an accusation. It's just a vague... He said God was gender neutral, which... I mean, one, when you think about it, presumably God is? At least beyond our concepts of gender? But it's just this vague linking together. This guy's something trans. It's not even logical or making sense. I'm just throwing those two things out in a sentence together, is I think. That's all that's going on there. Yeah, and I think it is... Yeah, it's just a way to say you aren't a real man.

 

Yeah, exactly. And what's so fascinating to me about that is it is a paradox on the right. Because on one hand, they argue that you can't be trans. That trans is an illegitimate identity because the gender you're assigned at birth is fixed and unchangeable, right? But then they also argue that a cisgender man can lose his manhood just by eating a potato and egg breakfast taco. So it's like, which is it?

 

Yeah, everyone is trans apart from actual trans people.

 

Exactly.

 

Sort of the logic. Yeah,

 

I mean, one thing... And this is a bit of a side point. I don't think anything really hangs on it. But one thing I do find interesting is they tend not to be very good at performing their own gender. And I don't know if that's really a point we want to make. But you see these tradwives videos and I'm like, I can cook better than that.

 

Or if I think about the sort of resist-lib commentators I know, if I think about the straight men within that cohort, none of them make a big deal about this. But they're all happily married or in long-term relationships with women who are intelligent and attractive and make good partners for them. They have the thing that Republicans claim to want and claim to like that if you follow our way of life, we'll get you.

 

And they don't. If I think about Republican commentators, they do not seem to have healthy or happy personal lives. And even when they are married, I'm thinking of like the Vance's here. They seem to fucking loathe each other. I do just think it's an interesting irony that even on their absolute test case, heterosexual marriage, they don't seem to be very good at it. I mean, I know that seems like a cheap aside, but they really don't.

 

No, this has been going on for a long time. And I think there is a bit of interesting, I mean, there's been sociological research, in fact, based on this question. I'm not super familiar with it, but I've seen it before.

 

Because it is true for decades now, red state America has higher divorce rates, higher abortion rates, et cetera, et cetera, than blue state America. And it's when you start to dig into the reasons, it's not really, it's very clear why. And I grew up working class in a working class community in Texas. And my family is a really good example of this. My mom has two sisters. And between them, they've been married nine times.

 

And it's tough. And there's just a lot of hard, miserable marriages that I saw growing up. But part of the reason is that all this pressure to get married causes people to rush into unsuitable matches.

 

And the gender roles, the rigid performance of gender roles within marriage makes those marriages unhappy. It's not fun to be married to a man who doesn't respect you. And eventually, even conservative women get sick of it.

 

And so there's just a lot of churn. There's a lot of divorce. Whereas I think the liberal lifestyle makes marriages a lot happier because A, you get married later. You're probably more sure of the partner that you're with. And B, men do more around the house. They have more respect for women. It's just a lot easier to be married to a liberal man.

 

I think there's a good case that our model of marriage is just more successful than theirs. And I think we're a bit reluctant to make that case because we see heterosexual marriage as one option among many, not like a default that everyone has to do.

 

But within that, within the people who do want to do that, like, yeah, it turns out not pathologically hating women is useful if you're going to spend the rest of your life exclusively with one. Like, I don't think it's that much deeper than that. I think the modern right trains men, it used to train men to think in perhaps a slightly patronising way about women, now it trains men to hate women. And yeah, that's like not useful if you're going to be married to a woman.

 

Yeah, I think that it is.

 

But it is part of the problem of, like, gender policing, right? Is that men's gender performance is so much for each other, not to get like a feminist academic sounding here.

 

No, no, I buy that.

 

Yeah, and so showing as women become more powerful and get more equality, the philosopher Kate Mann has written a lot of really good work on misogyny and how it functions.

 

And I really like her idea that sexism is the ideology and misogyny is basically the enforcement mechanism. So as long as women are conforming to sexist gender roles and they're submissive, they don't have equality, they don't have rights, it's a lot easier for men to like them. Just the way, like, it's easy to like your pet when they're behaving.

 

And it's a little bit harder for sexist men to like women when women are saying, actually, I'm equal. And I compare it a lot to, like, if your refrigerator decided that it wanted some human rights, you would be like, but you're my refrigerator, you're an object for my use. And I think that, you know, obviously the answer to that problem is for men to not think of women that way.

 

But for a lot of, we're seeing, I think, in the United States and across the globe in a lot of ways, we're seeing a lot of men have a really ugly, nasty reaction to changing gender roles.

 

I've lived in a few different countries ,from an international perspective, this, it has its variations in different countries, but this is global. Certainly global within advanced democracies, I can't speak to everywhere, but certainly UK, EU, the more developed East Asian states, you're definitely seeing this sort of gendered pulling apart as well.

 

I mean, yeah.

 

Do you buy the “it's all gender” politically argument, that it's not just that the right wing base is becoming more virulently misogynist, though it is, it's that the entire symbolic framing of how they talk about everything is gendered now?

 

Yeah, in the same way that you flagged earlier that like, there's something about like, the trans issues that cause people to lose their mind. I think that's part of it, is there's something about the gender binary that if you're attached to it, once you start to worry that it's threatened, it just becomes this all consuming obsession.

 

And I think we're just seeing that happen on a collective scale. But I mean, I would say you would have to care in the first place. And I think in my experience, a lot of people don't care or they don't care that much.

 

So we are kind of also separated into a binary in the United States, and I'm sure in many other countries where there's the people who this has just broken their brains. And then there's the rest of people who are adapting somewhat well. I mean, there's obviously a bell curve where some people are just like, really excellent about accepting these changing gender norms.

 

And some people have their anxieties about it, but haven't just gone into full brain break mode.

 

You do wonder the extent to which, we talk about a liberal echo chamber, there's obviously a conservative one too, where you wonder, I'm on mixed feelings about this. Because on the one hand, I do clearly think they've all got on their little Nazi internet forums and have their theories of masculinity and all of this. And they're sort of talking to each other and they do sound weird when normal people hear them. I think that's definitely a thing.

 

At the same time, they have some really loud media megaphones, so I don't think we can just rely on them to defeat themselves. Because I think even if people recognise that what they're saying is silly, if it keeps being said again and again and again, it does, it gets in the back of your head, I think. Like a lot of, if you are a guy on social media, you have to be pretty careful because once the algorithm clocks you as a straight guy, it will start putting some really heinous shit in your feed, you know.

 

I've heard this.

 

But like, I don't, I sort of see both sides of this one. Because on the one hand, I do think there is a sense where they are kind of defeating themselves and making themselves look weird in a way that a more normal centre-right party wouldn't. On the other, I think them being this weird is kind of like this corrosive force through all of society that's kind of just getting into men's heads everywhere.

 

And I do see it in other straight men who are, you know, not waving bigots, you know. I see them picking up stuff from it.

 

Yeah, I think that, you know, you're a man and I'm not. So, you know, you will probably understand this better than I do. But what I've heard from straight men in my life is that they, that men, the norms of masculinity, where men are just kind of constantly policing each other's gender performance, really get lodged into your head from a very young age. And it's very difficult to unlearn, to really internalise the idea that like guys just trashing you for stepping even a little outside of these narrow gender roles, you shouldn't care, right? That being dogged on constantly by other men just really gets into their heads.

 

And so I think that men are unfortunately trained from the cradle to be very susceptible to being told things like, oh, you're vegan, that means you're not a real man. And unfortunately, right-wing propaganda really does latch itself onto this thing that's sort of been trained into even men who know better, like very much know better. What I've heard from a lot of men in my life is that they feel this anxiety creeping up on them when they can tell that somebody's like dogging them in this way.

 

And they know that it's stupid, but it still hurts.

 

Men are kind of a bit loathe to put it in these terms, but it's a trauma response. I think there's enforcement mechanisms for the way women police women, but we shouldn't forget the way men police masculinity is violent.

 

Men kill other men who they feel aren't performing masculinity well enough. Unless you are unbelievably privileged, any straight guy, well, just any guy, in fact, going through like high school, young adulthood, you know, you are going to have had to navigate situations where there is a very real risk of physical violence if you get that wrong. And so, yeah, I don't think it's like a sign of moral failing amongst men that when someone does challenge you in that sense, you do have an anxiety about it.

 

I think that's really perceptive. And to call it a trauma response is, I think, so true.

 

And it is a little bit something I've seen a lot of discourse in the past couple of decades about how girls now get girl power messaging. And that is counter-programming from the old school policing, mandatory hyper femininity, right? Like now girls are actually told from a young age that rejecting certain gender norms is good, and they get rewarded for it socially. And again, they're a lot safer from that kind of violent enforcement, though it obviously does happen, though often at the hands of men, not women.

 

But like, I don't think, and I see a lot of people say, well, what are we doing for boys? But no one really wants to deal with the fact that the version of this that would be good for boys is saying it's okay to not be this very rigid, narrow idea of what a man is, that it's okay to be artistic, it's okay to cry, it's okay to like kitty cats or, you know, whatever, like little boy things.

 

I think a lot of people are saying that. It's just like that doesn't code as traditionally masculine, because what we are saying in some sense is “let go of it”. It's okay, you know? Like if you want to be traditionally masculine, fine, but if you don't, also fine, you know? And I think it's not the... It's often said that the left doesn't offer men role models in the way that the right does. I don't think that's true. I think there's plenty of good Barack Obama, right? Like as a model of manhood, right? Like there are plenty of people you could look to as role models.

 

There's plenty of ways we give advice. It's just not, it's not the thing. It's not the thing you were told in your early adolescence you had to be. And that's just a bit of a challenge. I don't have any brilliant solutions to making it easier.

 

No, it's genuinely tough.

 

I was talking to my partner the other day. He loves basketball. And he said, I don't remember the name of this player, because I do not love basketball.

 

That is where we're gendered. I mean, no, it's fine. But he said there's a player in the NBA who paints his nails.

 

And this is a cause of just nonstop consternation in the forums about the NBA, because a lot of men just can't with it. And these are often men that would otherwise be fairly liberal or chill. But like there's something about a straight man who paints his nails.

 

And it's sad, really, because it's like, well, but what if you want to paint your nails? It's fine.

 

Although we shouldn't at the same time, you know, be too sympathetic to men, I don't think. I think I'm very sympathetic to you feel a certain anxiety about being sort of gender challenged as you were. And then you get over it. Like, you know, I'm very sympathetic to that. But I think we should also be real that like what's happening on the other side is not a few dweebs who were bullied in high school that haven't properly processed that.

 

That is not what we're talking about here. There is something. We're talking tens of millions of people who have been radicalised into very stupid and very harmful beliefs.

 

Yeah, for sure. I'm not trying to.

 

No, I don't think you were.

 

And I'm not either. But I could see someone at that point listening being like, OK, well, let's not be too soft on men. And 100% agreed.

 

Yeah, there's there's a few things going on, I think. To my mind, I think one reason that I want to sort of interrogate this stuff is because it does affect people on a lizard brain level. And so we do need to sort of deal with that, that a lot of men are affected by this because they are not able to.

 

They haven't reasoned their way out of it. But yeah, we all have a responsibility to grow up. And I think that once you sort of pull out a little bit and you especially you see like a lot of the men that get incredibly involved in this, it is about power.

 

It is about material gain. It is about things that I think sometimes become uncomfortable on the left to talk about, because, for instance, you know, with women's growing equality, it's not just a response that men are having that is about like, again, lizard brain stuff. There's actual losses that men are experiencing as women gain.

 

And we should acknowledge that if you have to be equal with your wife, that means you have to do the dishes. And that is a loss. It's a stupid thing to cry about.

 

But it is a thing that is, I think, a lot of men. But, you know, pulling out even further, I think a lot of this is about status. And I think what a lot of men on the right understand is that the things that are bad about masculinity policing, the things that men don't enjoy about it, the fact that you have to dress very rigidly, you have to not have emotions, you need to your only allowable emotions are aggression and anger.

 

But that if you adhere to this, if you can kind of keep solidarity with other men in policing gender this way, it will keep the boot on women's neck. It will keep women as second class citizens. And then that means all these knock on benefits, which is all the jobs are reserved for men, all the good jobs.

 

Women in relationships have to be submissive to survive, and you see a lot of men on the right are really explicit about this. They explicitly say they want women shoved out of professions that pay well, that they want women to be financially dependent on men so that women lose their ability to say what they want and to have rights within relationships.

 

I think male solidarity is right. To take that a step further, what do you make of, if I look at the leadership of the Trump movement, either sort of politically pressed, there is an overwhelming concentration of accused and convicted rapists, harassers, and paedophiles that is just way beyond even assuming that the rates of these things are quite high in the population, way beyond what you'd expect as a sort of statistical sample. It's like almost all of them. That's male solidarity of a kind, too, right?

 

Yeah, I often joke that if only feminists could have the level of solidarity that misogynists have with each other, like imagine what we could get done, and Me Too was actually a moment in time where women started to really genuinely find solidarity with each other and male allies stood with them, and we saw the power that it has.

 

But what has happened is that men who either commit sexual violence or at least see that holding the threat of it over women's heads gives them power that they enjoy, stood shoulder to shoulder and they were immovable in terms of fighting back. They would give each other jobs, they would have each other's back, and that's what Trump is doing. The fact that you have accusations against you, credible accusations, means that he's going to give you a job because even in his, he's not the smartest man, but I think he understands how this sort of thing works.

 

He is at least canny about how power works and how these systems of power work, and if you want to send a message to women that there will be no benefit to speaking out, one way to do it is just get in their face over and over again, this guy was accused of rape, this guy was accused of rape, and he got a job because of it. That's how little anyone cares about what happened to you. And it's very effective, and it's why he's going after E. Jean Carroll, who won two lawsuits against Trump in New York, two civil juries found that she spoke the truth when she said that Trump sexually assaulted her, and he won't just leave her alone, he sent the Justice Department after her.

 

And I think part of that is sending this message that not only will he go after you if you speak out against him, but like institutional power stands by sexual abusers and against victims.

 

Yeah, I mean, we forget this, right, Trump has, it's not accused of, and enough women have accused of, it's convicted of in Trump's case.

 

Not a criminal conviction, so they get a little wiggle room there.

 

So then the state of New York passed a law saying that if you had been sexually assaulted by somebody, you could sue them in court, and a civil jury would hear that case. So he was found liable for sexual assault, and then he was also found liable twice for defaming her by saying that she lied about it. So what we have is three separate jury judgments, one saying that he did sexually assault her, but is civil jury, and then two civil juries that said that he lied about it after the fact.

 

Still a jury has said that.

 

Yeah, no, I think that that's pretty good, especially since a lot of men on the jury initially were sceptical of women who speak out about rape.

 

Yeah, getting any sort of jury sign off on this is hard, because it often just comes down to two different stories, you know, and that does signal that they found hers credible and they did not find his credible.

 

Yeah, I think it's really important to understand that despite all the hysteria about Me Too and about sexual assault allegations, something like only like 4% of police reports of rape end up in a conviction. I mean, it's something really low and ridiculous. And I can say, like, you know, I was sexually assaulted in college, I filed a police report.

 

And even in my case, he pled guilty, but to a lesser charge to evade the actual, like, jail time. And that was kind of the best possible outcome in most of these circumstances.

 

I found that what's been interesting about having half of our political system led by rapists and paedophiles, to just put it bluntly, in a way, like I said, that is an unusually high concentration and has no analogue on the other side.

 

There's like, individual Democrats, of course, we had someone recently, right, but not this, is we've actually started, even like centrists and moderates and people on our side have started talking about and defending the Trump movement, even in the abstract, in the same sort of language that we use to justify male abusers. It's sort of asked, what did you do to set them off? What did you do to provoke this? Aren't you being a bit hysterical in how concerned about Trump you are? I find that there's kind of almost like this metagendered thing to all of it, where we kind of brush away the bad deeds of the male coded entity and say to the female coded entity, i.e. liberalism or the Democratic Party or social justice, what did you do to provoke that? What did you do to set them off?

 

That's very insightful, because this is, when it comes to like actual men and women and gender roles, a lot of feminists, theorists have pointed out for a long time that they're structured along, men have all the power, but none of the responsibility and vice versa. And so despite being the disempowered party in a lot of kind of traditional heterosexual relationships, women are blamed for everything that goes wrong in the relationship.

 

Does he cheat? Well, he actually made the choice to cheat. But what did you do to like get him to cheat? Did he hit you? Well, he's the one who made the choice to hit you, but somehow it's her fault. What did she do to provoke him? And you see this very explicitly, especially on the evangelical right in the United States.

 

But it is so imbued in how we think of men and women's relationships that I'm not surprised, and you're right, that it just sort of, the metaphor kind of extends to things that we've gendered, such as the Democrats are female and the Republicans are male, therefore, only the Democrats have agency. And yet... Yeah, and it's like, but that's, I mean, it's an inescapable paradox for the person who's being assigned all the agency, because they don't have any of the power. And I mean, I think that's obviously on purpose.

 

I was having a conversation with a centrist on Blue Sky, just today, in fact, who was sort of saying, and this is in the context of trans rights in the UK, but I think it's the same mechanic of like, look, I agree with you, we shouldn't do this bathroom ban, but you have to understand trans people overreached, they were alienating ordinary people, the social justice language was too much, you were trying to say there was no such thing as biological sex (which I don't think anyone ever really said, but that was the allegation.) But this idea of like, okay, I agree that this is bad. But what did you do to provoke it? I just see that move all the time, again and again and again.

 

My basic, my sort of like meta thesis for like all of politics is that move is a move that we make for men, it's specifically gendered. That like, that's how we excuse male abusers. And now that we kind of have this political party that was just very overt wrapped itself in the shroud of masculinity, we make that same move for them in almost like the abstract sense.

 

That's like Toby's, here's what Toby's big theory of politics, essentially.

 

 Yeah, and I think it's hard to get out of that mentality for people, because the way that I think we understand the motivations of the different actors in these situations informs it, which is the person with all the power, well, of course, they're not gonna do anything. Like, of course, they they're not going to do anything to give up power, right? So we just, we just sort of assume that they're going to be the worst, and that their motivations are going to always be bad, in a sense, right? And therefore, the only person who we can actually ask to behave better is the person with less power, because they actually have a self interest in this.

 

And I see this a lot. You know, I write about these issues a lot. And I have found over the years that people, readers tend to be a lot more interested in in thinking about asking about and enquire, like really interrogating the motives of Republican women than Republican men, for instance, because...

 

That's interesting.

 

Yeah, like Republican men, they're like, well, of course, they want to be able to rape and abuse and control women, you know, who wouldn't apparently? I mean, it's, I think we should maybe think about that a little bit more. But they're like, why do these women go along with it when they're the ones being treated like second class citizens? And it's like, well, I mean, you know, it's an interesting question to answer. But I am a little sad that we don't ever interrogate the motives of the person that's being, that's in power, that we are just absolving of all responsibility, because and maybe it is just as simple as once power corrupts, absolutely.

 

But like, we still need to have a moral weight to that. We still need to say that's wrong. We still need to hold them accountable.

 

And we don't. Yeah. And I think, like, in principle, this is like a framing we can win within.

 

But, you know, we talked about male insecurity, too, just like I think there's this deferral of responsibility from the powerful male coded side. We on our side, I think there's a lot of liberal men who are uncomfortable with being on the feminised side. And that's kind of a lot of the internal debates we have a kind of a proxy for that.

 

Like, you know, I think if you look at someone like Planter in Maine or this kind of like, we need a Joe Rogan of the left that we saw a few rounds of discourse on. It's kind of like what's actually being debated there is do we stick to our guns as the party that's coded as the female queer coded party of chill man? Or do we try and reclaim the label of machismo somehow? I think a lot of internal debates on our side are kind of proxy walls for that.

 

***

 So to bring it back to the James Tallarico vegan thing.

 

Um, you know, I'm a vegetarian, and a lot of my relatives in Texas just will treat that as like inherently an indictment of them. Doesn't say I never say anything. I'm never mean about meeting me. I've never said a word. And yet they are so defensive about it. And it's so frustrating because I think it is kind of human nature.

 

We see difference as somehow a challenge to ourselves. And I don't know what the answer is to get past that. And it always gets kind of did somebody say it? Because sometimes they did.

 

And did somebody just imply it by looking different? That gets in there too. And I, I hate to hate to leave. I hate to be like, I don't know. I don't know. But that's kind of where I am. I'm still trying to figure these things out.

 

Yeah. Although the sort of everything is symbolically gendered, this too is gender, is it not? What's actually being said when we say, well, he's a vegan? If real men eat meat, real men have their steaks bloody raw, and they grill and they have black coffee. And this obsession with non-dairy alternatives of like soy boys and whatever, it's because we've somehow decided that they're feminine, right? Like, that's what sort of, I mean, I would almost say like the, and also I would say almost like there's some meta thing about like the natural hierarchy and man at the top of it.

 

And like, men, men in caveman days hunt the mammoth and the women stay home and grow the grains. It's, and that's dumb as hell. But there's even in that as something as silly as why is being a vegan, it's gender, right?

 

100%.

 

I saw an interview with RFK Jr. Where he was asked about what, like he and his wife would eat at a dinner. I think it was on the Katie Miller podcast. And he just straight up said, I eat meat and she eats vegetables.

 

And I was like, um, you should eat some vegetables, my dude, that's really unhealthy. But he implied that his diet is solely like steak with maybe some sauerkraut is the only green that gets in there. But this is, this is, this is, this is it, isn't it? It's like anything feminine can't be near me.

 

Like anything feminising and it's, it's, you know, I mean, in JFK's case, literally rotting his brain, but it is metaphorically rotten all of their brains too. Like almost a pathological fear that you would ever be feminised. Yeah.

 

And again, I think it goes back. One of the reasons I think that that rots your brain is the cognitive dissonance must be so painful because on one hand, one of the most masculine, like traits that we have, one of the most stereotypically masculine traits isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't it supposed to be strength? Isn't it supposed to be courage? And yet they live their lives in total and utter fear of femininity, like in this way that is pathological. And I'm like, man up about, I don't know what else to tell you, but like, could you just be a little stronger? You know, not one of these dudes has the strength of a drag queen, not one.

 

Yeah. Or if you want to go to that at the societal level, because this isn't just about them being jackasses. I think this makes them make worse political decisions.

 

Look at how that interplays with war. Every dictator in the world seems to have this view that having your troops be really buff and macho is what wins wars. And yet you see it with Hexess, right? And reliably, it turns out that fucking boring female coded shit like feeding the troops and logistics is actually pretty important too.

 

And it reliably makes them worse, even at this very male coded domain of killing people in war. This goes back, one of my favourite historical anecdotes, all the way to the ancient Spartans who were, you know, manly machismo men. And when they invented close order drill of like, make your soldiers march in time the Spartans were like, well, this is some female stuff and we're not doing that. And then get curb stomped at the Battle of Luctra and just never come back. And throughout history, men have been losing wars over this.

 

And you'd think we'd learn, but we don't. Yet it turns out that the idea of masculinity is kind of weirdly more important than the factuality of it, I guess. Or else I don't know how you would put that, but it is kind of funny in that way.

 

That's an amazing story, by the way.

 

Yeah, people think the Spartans always won at war, but when they invented like marching in time, they were like, yeah, that's namby-pamby stuff. We're not doing it. And they just lose.

 

It's always wild to, when you look through all history, like what gets coded as feminine and masculine can be pretty arbitrary because I don't think any modern people would think marching in time is a feminine behaviour.

 

Yeah.

 

Although like, you know, you do see it without like any sort of thinking strategically or like planning in advance, even. Or like, because the Iran thing was just like, we're going to do violence because we think violence is fun. And yeah, then it turns out you're not even very good at it without some of that other stuff, you know?

 

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've read Umberto Eco's Our Fascism essay, but he gets deeply into how, yeah, you take it far enough, this kind of masculinity obsession, and it turns into any kind of thinking, any intellectualism is inherently feminine and therefore to be askewed, which is always baffling to feminists because we're like, so then why were we shut out of academia for centuries? But that's a good point to end on, that is the Trump movement in a nutshell, right? Like once any sort of like thinking about shit is for women, and therefore we won't do it. Yeah, and it's like, but again, women are allowed to think about shit, but they're not allowed to have any power doing that in the world. And yeah, the problem, this is why God is non-binary, these loopholes. If I believed in God, but I don't, but if I did, he would definitely be non-binary, because that's the only way it would work. They would be non-binary. Yeah.

 

They, them, and God. All right, Amanda, real pleasure talking to you. Where, you're on Blue Sky, you write for Salon, where would you, anywhere else you'd like to direct listeners to go if they want to hear more from you?

 

Yeah, I have a YouTube show too called Standing Room with Amanda, which is a really good show, it's still on TV. We have a good time over there, and a lot of it is about gender and politics.

 

 Cool. Thanks so much for your time today.

 

Thanks for having me.