I find myself confused over the macho factor when considering the $14-trillion national debt ceiling and the impending deadline for U.S. bankruptcy.
Let’s review:
- We have a president who was elected in part for being against the war in Iraq from the start. But then, once in office, he caught the Texas Tough Guy disease in the White House drinking water and doubled down in Afghanistan, a country where it’s far more difficult to “win” any kind of peace.
- The speaker of the House is a guy who cries at the drop of a hat.
- The Democrats want to tax the rich, while the Republicans demand spending cuts.
- The Democrats are the rich, and the Tea Party Republicans tend to be less affluent.
- The last Republican president, in part, created the most recent deficit problem by spending well over a trillion dollars on foreign wars.
- The Democratic president got his rear-end handed to him in the mid-term elections, so he’s sprinting towards the center, while the Republicans are attempting to keep him on their left flank using the tax issue as their anchor.
- The debt crisis is moving from southern Europe towards Italy, where the prime minister is implicated in not only sleeping with everything that moves but a girl who is under age.
For all the machismo around the table at these White House summits, I wonder if maybe it’s time to turn this problem over to the women? The guys haven’t gotten very far and sometimes women are better at getting shit done and building bridges.
Yes, Michele Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi are probably my two least favorite politicians on the planet.
But how about we let Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe take a shot? They have both proven an ability to find center ground in the past, when the boys have failed. If that doesn’t work, bring in the big guns, Hilary and Condi, to get something done.
A good man knows when its time to get the heck out of the way and let the women take over.
This is parody, right?
How does this type of simplistic stereotyping help anything?
The distorted, simplistic, reasoning of feminism is certainly no longer comical, it is astonishing. The infantile little bubble of unreality that people have been compelled to enter, as evidenced by this article and the subsequent comments, will furrow many a brow of future generations saddled with the task of dealing with the widespread chaos that will be the signature upon the world of the western women’s movement.
I think this is a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, I think the men in Washington are to concerned with the election pissing contest rather than actually doing what’s right for the American people :-/
I don’t think the current crisis is a problem of “men versus women” but of “party versus party.” Each party has taken the view that they, and only they, can solve all of the woes that are befalling America. Moreover, the party opposite the aisle from them not only can’t fix the problems, but is actively working to destroy America. In other words, they are The Saviors and the other folks are The Enemy. In a rational government, both sides would talk and compromise. They would find some ground in the middle that might not be ideal for each side… Read more »
“The goal of all of this? To gain an advantage over The Other Party in the next election cycle. Yes, both sides are more than willing to demolish us in a political game of chicken so long as they can say it was because The Other Side didn’t turn away in time.” Isn’t that the “macho” that Tom is suggesting needs to be eliminated as well? Yes, some women may behave in “macho” fashion, particularly when embedded in “macho” cultures, but one thing that happens as more women are in leadership in these discussions is that “macho” loses its value.… Read more »
Isn’t that the “macho” that Tom is suggesting needs to be eliminated as well? Yes but acting like the only way to fix this is to bring in more women just feeds into the idea that such things are inherently male. And considering that of the men in those high levels of power only represent a small portion of us I think that’s a pretty big leap. Yes, some women may behave in “macho” fashion, particularly when embedded in “macho” cultures, but one thing that happens as more women are in leadership in these discussions is that “macho” loses its… Read more »
It is true that Tom, today anyway, seems to be wanting to “get rid of the men” rather than “get ride of the macho.” It think he’s right that when men control the resources and the political economy (as I pointed out the fact is that less than 20% of the Senate is women, and, in the past it’s been all men), the macho – and related problems – are pretty much inevitable. Just having men who “don’t buy into that macho bull” is not enough. They have to be men who work well with women as equals. So, you… Read more »
It think he’s right that when men control the resources and the political economy (as I pointed out the fact is that less than 20% of the Senate is women, and, in the past it’s been all men), … And how does that come to represent us all as a gender? Just having men who “don’t buy into that macho bull” is not enough. I don’t recall saying it was. My problem is conflating the attitude that got this country messed up with men as a gender. And if you notice I did say that gender is not the only… Read more »
Again, it is Tom who suggested pulling men entirely out of the discussion, not I. I have to say that reading your posts is making me understand why he is suggesting that. You don’t have enough awareness of how the male dominance has distorted things and so structural reform cannot get discussed because you get defensive and block it. I suspect there are some men who are aware of how male dominance distorts things, but you’re not exhibiting this. Alan Johnson has a great book, “The Gender Knot” that does some of this deconstruction. “‘It think he’s right that when… Read more »
You don’t have enough awareness of how the male dominance has distorted things and so structural reform cannot get discussed because you get defensive and block it. I’d like to discuss it. I just don’t think its just a matter of gender. Why don’t you think about some of the ways in which men being the ones making the rules has distorted things? I’d very much like to do that but when I try to parse the fact that there are men perpetuating the problems and men who aren’t I’m told that I’m being defensive. The last thing we need… Read more »
“I’d like to discuss it. I just don’t think its just a matter of gender.”
That’s not discussing it. That’s blocking it. It is a matter of gender – or more precisely, one sex’s dominance, which has translated into gendering. You are denying both the factual reality that men have run the political economy and made the rules and doing the work of considering what that has meant in terms of distortion.
Again, read Alan Johnson’s book, “The Gender Knot.” Even men “who don’t think it’s a matter of gender” seem to like it.
No I have no problem with recognizing that some men have control of the political economy. Finding a problem with that is not denial no matter how many times you try to tell me it is. But I may check out your book despite you tone.
Which I firmly believe will result in more collegial ways to make working people take the big one where the sun don’t shine.
I don’t think that’s the solution at all. Power can corrupt, whether male or female. One’s sex has nothing to do with it. I can’t say for certain if women in power would this debt crisis still be around, but I can say for certain the debacle over the debt has nothing to do with the sex of the people. It just so happens to be men who who hold the most cards when it comes to political power, but that’s slowly changing and yet the debt crisis is still around.
woman have actually been found to have “better” or “more moral” reasons for getting into politics – i.e., they want to see something changed; don’t get into it for career advancement, etc, so, while I certainly don’t think we should rely on just women to make good decisions, it is possible that more women in government would make finding common ground easier, or, at the very least, make the atmosphere less “macho”.
I have read about these studies too, Rae. I think they are in part based on the fact that women sometimes don’t see their careers as being as important as men’s in terms of supporting a family. But this creates a distortion and of itself, as women end up getting patronized by the state, rather than the better solution I see, which is that women don’t get patronized by the state in the form of welfare mother benefits or widow’s benefits, but also that men have to do half the unpaid work of raising their children and other domestic work.… Read more »
Hold men accountable for what? Women initiate 2/3 of all divorce. Are you saying women’s former husbands owe them something?
Holding men accountable for doing half the unpaid work of the family, learning good parenting skills and executing on them. Yes, some women initiate divorce when this happens. But this is often pretty late in the game and the child has already suffered and the harm to the political economy and all of us as taxpayers (who end up supporting financially the divorced wives who can’t get jobs because they have no experience through welfare, Social Security spouse benefits, etc.) has already occurred. Because of the man’s greater physical size and because men have set up the political economy according… Read more »
It’s not really a woman’s job to hold the man accountable, of course, he should be holding himself accountable. The problem is that many men don’t even understand that they have these obligations, and the political economy even encourages them to believe they don’t (falsely, as their angry children will likely tell them when they are grown and safely away from such a non-responsible man’s economic control).
Sometimes, this putative collegiality leads to things like Dianne Feinstein’s evisceration of the Employee Free Choice Act.
Actually women hold the majority vote and are the single largest and most powerful voting demographic. Our leaders are whoever women vote them to be.
But women can’t be leaders if they don’t have support from men. If women are doing more than half the unpaid work of raising children, for example, they can’t get into the position of even running for leadership when there are a lot of men who do no or reduced amounts of unpaid working of parenting.
Which explains all those women on PTA boards.
An OK idea. My only concern is that I hate to see these women saddled with cleaning up messes not of their making (or at least not their direct making). A somewhat thankless job that might turn them into scapegoats. In the broader perspective, I do think we have reached a generational crossroads, where some of the assumptions in our political system (such as (a) lack of male responsibility for half the unpaid work of child care (including meeting abuse/neglect standards) and (b) the entitlement of women to welfare mother and widow’s benefits, may need to be reformed. I think… Read more »
That’s interesting Emily seeing that the U.S. DHHS finds that women commit the majority of child murder and abuse.
I can tell you right off the bat you won’t get half the parenting rights if you take that attitude of not holding men accountable as well for murder, abuse, and ALSO neglect.
Problems with paternal murder, abuse and neglect are as well-established with men as with women. Men who aren’t able to acknowledge this are seen as definitionally incapable of parenting by authorities, as are women who don’t acknowledge that women can murder, abuse, neglect.
Emily
Wow, threats and emotional blackmail with children. I’m glad feminists like you showcase the true violent nature of your movement so readily.
Its feminism that works to keep female abusers unaccountable. That’s why women in the research appear as societies most active abusers, but it society we think that its mainly men doing it – feminist spin.