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“Girlie Men” & the Worldview that has Warped History

 by Robert S. McElvaine

OpEdNews.com

            Arnold Schwarzenegger’s continuing references to Democrats as “girlie men” is part and parcel of the Republicans’ basic approach to politics.  From John Wayne and Ronald Reagan—their celluloid heroes who never set foot on a real battlefield—to  Vietnam-avoider George W. Bush in his flight suit and his “bring it on” bravado, Republicans have pretended that they are “real men” and their opponents are not.

 

Dick Cheney had “other priorities” during Vietnam, but he poses as a “real man” by using sexual vulgarity against a Democratic senator and proclaiming that he feels better (read: “more manly”) as a result.

 

What has not been generally understood is that this so far very effective Republican tactic is based on an underlying assumption and metaphors stemming from it that have been around since the dawn of recorded history—and that that assumption has misshaped most of that history.

 

The use of such sexual language to degrade other men, while obviously not at all in the same league with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, utilizes the same metaphor.  We need to consider why particular means of degradation (“sodomization” and putting on women’s underwear) were used against the prisoners, how the same symbolism relates to what Schwarzenegger and Cheney said (and most of the rest of us commonly say), why it is that such means are almost universally considered to be so degrading, and what the answers to those questions tell us about ourselves.

 

When a heterosexual man sexually attacks another man or uses sexual language to ridicule him, what he is actually doing is asserting dominance over the other man.  This amounts to “pseudosexing”: it enables one man to subordinate another by classifying the power relationship between them as analogous to the dominance men have—in the minds of most of those who engage in such practices—over women.

 

What was done by guards to prisoners at Abu Ghraib—or by Brooklyn police to Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997—is similar to a common type of interaction between males in many species.  When one male achieves dominance over another, it is symbolized by the victorious male mounting the subordinated male and simulating intercourse with him.  When a male bighorn sheep, for example, mounts another ram, he is acting out a metaphor.  He is, in effect, “saying”: “I am so dominant over you that it is as if you were a female.”

 

Human males frequently do the same thing.  A direct form of mounting of subordinated men by dominant men takes place in prisons.  In this male subculture, those who surrender are reclassified (as California ’s governor and other Republicans do with Democrats) as “girls” or “non-men.”  Through the act of mounting subordinated males, men in prison attempt to proclaim their superior “manhood.”

 

But if the actual physical mounting of one man by another is not a common sight in the wider world outside prison walls, that is because the capacity for language has given humans a much wider range of symbols than is available to other species.  Human males do not have to act out symbolic intercourse in order to pseudosex other men.  Humans can use words in place of actions to symbolize what the ceremonial mounting by a dominant male of a subordinate male does.

 

Metaphorical mounting is what is going on when one man makes a sexually-laden obscene gesture or utters its verbal counterpart to another.  Sometimes the sexual implications of the language of dominance are obvious.  Boxer Mike Tyson used to taunt an opponent before a bout by saying to him: “I’ll make you into my girlfriend.”  When one man refers to another as a “sissy” or “wimp”—or any of several vulgar terms referring to female genitalia—he is clearly asserting that the other man is “like a woman.”  In fact, almost every expression that men employ to “put down” other men amounts to “putting them down”—treating them as women.

 

The reason this metaphor is so powerful is that people around the world have for so long accepted that women are inferior to men.  Without that assumption, the insults lose their sting.  But the belief is deeply ingrained in us.  Leading thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas to Freud took it as axiomatic that women are vastly inferior to men.  Freud argued that all people wish to be male and he spoke approvingly of “the normal male contempt for women.”

.          

That contempt for women is what those who castigate their political opponents as unmasculine are expressing.  It is notable, though, that many of the men who are most adamant about classifying other men as unmanly do so because they are insecure in their own masculinity.  They define being a man as being “notawoman” and try to reassure themselves by ridiculing others.

 

It may well be that many of those politicians who assert their superiority by calling their opponents women actually harbor fears that they are no more “real men” than Wayne, Reagan, and the current President Bush were real war heroes.

 

Isn’t it finally time for us all to accept the truth that the sexes are different, but completely equal?  When we continue to use the sort of language that equates “female” with “inferior,” we show that we still have a long way to go on that front.

 

{ Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College in Jackson , Mississippi .  He is the author of nine books, including Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill), on which the arguments in this piece are based.  His writing appears frequently on the op ed pages of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and other papers.

 

He is currently completing his first novel and screenplay, which are based on his ideas about male views of women that he explored in Eve’s Seed.

 

More information is available at his web site: http://home.millsaps.edu/~mcelvrs/ and at www.evesseed.com. }