Y'all should read, if you haven't already, Stephen J Ducat's
fascinating interview with Buzzflash in which he discusses his new book, "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, & the Politics of Anxious Masculinity". Bottom line: Republicans are deathly, pathologically afraid of being perceived as feminine. Everything they do stems from their need to dominate because of an uncontrollable fear of women.
Stephen J. Ducat: It's a culture based on male domination and a culture in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied. In such a culture, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal care taking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy... Also, this femiphobia constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism.
Not only that, it explains why Gannongate is being swept under the carpet...
BuzzFlash: Well, you know, Matt Drudge is gay and yet engages in homophobia. Ken Mehlman, who is the head of the RNC, is reportedly gay and was a leader of the homophobic charge. There are numerous Congressman who have been outed and Senators who are known as gay, and yet who stick to the homophobic line. It's a strange permutation of anxious masculinity, but maybe, as Jon Stewart said, if you're on top, you're not gay.
Stephen J. Ducat: He has intuited something that is actually pervasive across cultures and across historical time--that in male-dominant cultures, homosexuality is only taboo when it's perceived as feminizing. This has its foundation in ancient Greece, where it didn't really matter who you had sex with. What mattered was what position you occupied in the relationship of domination. If you were a penetrator, you were an unambiguous guy. If you were penetrated, you were virtually a woman. That dynamic operates in American prisons, and it operates in Middle Eastern cultures. It's really a question of domination.
BuzzFlash: So with Gannon, who said on his web sites, you know, that he was a military guy, a Marine, and always on top, he's acceptable because he's a man's man?
Stephen J. Ducat: Yeah.
If Gannongate were to break wide open, it would destroy the illusion of masculinity perpetrated by this White House. I mean, if Jeff/James was the top, then Rove was the bottom, right? Heaven forefend! Please go read the rest of this, I think Ducat captures the mindset of these clowns absolutely perfectly...
I also saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman. That's what they wanted to do. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the "Breck girl." And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, "economic girlie-men." The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips.
This, from the neocon crowd who started favoring pink "power ties" the minute Bush took office. Read the rest, it's amazing. And remember to remind all your Republican friends:
"Bush wears a pink tie."