Via Right Wing Watch, James Dobson and Bill Bennett mourn the death of traditional male gender roles, thanks to those meddling gays and feminists. If only those roles were actually dead!
Dobson: You’re concerned about manhood today, aren’t you?
Bennett: Yes.
Dobson: Especially in the Western world, we’ve forgotten what it means to be a man. And we’re not teaching our boy’s to be men. Why?
Bennett: That’s exactly right, because… moral relativism, the notion that there’s no right and wrong, who’s to say? The dizzying array of signals, the gay culture, which has confused an awful lot of boys, the message is there.
Dobson: The feminist movement has just hammered away at what manhood means.
Bennett: The feminist movement, remember Gloria Steinem, ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ If you put on TV, if you go to the universities, if you check the popular culture, there is not a consistent message to boys about what it means to be a man, and as a result they’re confused.
Why exactly is it so hard for these people who are so anti-feminist to understand that there have been multiple waves of feminism, just as there has been multiple waves of the civil rights movement (including the fringe Black Panthers), and that not everyone in a movement believes as the fringe does? And that Gloria Steinem, with her criticisms of transsexualism and pornography and even of enjoying the company of men, by no means represents even a majority of feminists, much less all feminists in the movement? I mean, these are the same people who would throw violent right-wing Christian extremists under the bus for “not being true Christians” when they murder abortion doctors or gays. How is this difficult for them to comprehend, when they say the exact same thing when we talk about their violent fringe, and they demand that we not paint all believers with the same brush?
Forgetting what it means “to be a man” is not a bad thing. None of the things that these lackwits believe makes “a man” are intrinsic to maleness. I know too many women — heterosexual sex-enjoying women who wage constant war with this patriarchy we live in — who are more “man” by those standards than Dobson and Bennett. Likewise with gay men, who face oppression every single damned day just for enjoying cock regardless of what else makes up their personalities. Never mind that their other attributes are never in question, just their preference in genitalia.
I wish more people did realize there’s no “way to be a man” so TG people could be left the Hell alone and let to do what they want with their lives *huff-puff*
What Dobson, et al, are afraid of losing is not the toxic bigotted violent mess they mistakenly call “manhood”, but male privilege.
And Katherine nails it – if they could grow up beyond the “girls are icky” stage, perhaps every individual member of the human race wouldn’t have to try to fit in these useless “roles”.
So ‘being a man’ means being totally dependent on the behavior and opinions of other people for your sense of identity? It sort of makes them look pitiful doesn’t it?
A couple of misogynist homophobes are whining because not every male is a misogynist homophobe.
I’ve marveled my whole life at the common idea of “manliness.” Apparently, it doesn’t mean having strong character, it means being perceived as powerful and incessantly reminding others around you that you are powerful. You do it by belittling women, hating gays, shooting things, and displaying a broad insensitivity to the needs and feelings of those around you. Also, remember to stifle every emotion except for rage and…is “drunken whooping” an emotion?
“Why exactly is it so hard for these people who are so anti-feminist to understand […]”
“How is this difficult for them to comprehend […]”
Simple. You’re missing the point.* Understanding any of that would mean they’d have to acknowledge their shittery. They may well be capable of understanding it, (though given the first point would mean reading roughly three paragraphs on the history of feminism, that may be a stretch) but since it threatens their position, they don’t want to.
* I doubt you actually are, but rather assume that you’re more willing to ascribe it to incompetence. I’m not that indulgent of habitual shittery.
I was never confused!