The Bush Administration as Scared Little Men With Castration Anxiety

Check out this Buzzflash interview with Stephen J. Ducat (great name), author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.

I think he's on to something here; something that explains a lot, from the right's rabid hatred of Hillary Clinton for reasons OTHER than that she's perfectly willing to sell Americans down the river for political expediency; to why the White House embraces gay men like Gannonguckert at the same time as want to crush others into oblivion.

Excerpts:

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. Real men, you know, don’t worry about the losers in the new global Darwinian economy.

[snip]

BuzzFlash: To cooperate, then, is to give up one’s masculine prerogative to assert oneself as a male leader?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. In the world they live in, you’re either a top or a bottom. Mutuality, democracy, equality--that makes no sense to them.

BuzzFlash: Well, as Jon Stewart said recently in the context of the John Gannon/Jeff Guckert scandal in Washington, if you’re on top, you’re not gay. That may explain the inner circle acceptance of gays within the Republican Party, in spite of the gay-bashing national political line they give to their followers.

Stephen J. Ducat: The Republican homosexuals are not only honorary heterosexuals; they become honorary homophobes, as the most recent scandal illustrated.

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.

BuzzFlash: He’s not penetrated; he penetrates.

Stephen J. Ducat: That’s right. Militarystud.com.

[snip]

Stephen J. Ducat: ...Hillary Clinton has been seen alternately as a castrating woman, the engulfing mother, or a phallic, penetrating woman. Some people may feel I'm kind of going over the top with Freudian metaphors, but I’m not making it up. One of the covers of Spy Magazine actually put a penis on her.

This is why political campaigns work so hard at presenting their male candidates as phallic. But the interesting thing about the phallus as a symbol is that it moves around, unlike the penis, it isn’t really attached. This is something I document in the representations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. For a while, Hillary was literally portrayed as having the phallus. There were cartoons of her using a men’s urinal, and cartoons of her dressed as a man. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was an interesting development precisely because it shifted the phallus from Hillary to Bill. In fact, the popularity of both Bill and Hillary Clinton went up dramatically as a result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which may seem kind of paradoxical for some.

I don't sleep any better knowing that this country is being run by men who have this level of castration anxiety. There are therapists who can help with this sort of thing.