Donald Trump and Toxic Masculinity

While campaigning in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father, Donald Trump, in his inimical insensitivity and inappropriateness, referred to the golfer’s large schlong:

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said. “This is a guy that was all man. When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

While Trump believes that a big penis makes one “all man,” he has no idea that character counts, or should count, in how we respect and honor people.

So for those extremely rare individuals who are apparently born with three penises, called “triphallia,” are they more of a “man” than even Arnold Palmer?

What about those of us who were born with a penis who do not identify as male, and people who were not born with a penis who do identify as male?

I believe that a major tenet of liberation is having the freedom to self-identify!

Numerous commentators have written of the character, mental, and personality flaws of Donald Trump. We cannot understand the motivational factors directing Trump’s words and actions without adding into the equation an investigation of the socially constructed, defined and maintained characteristics of gender and the roles attached to each of its categories.

Even before an infant’s assigned sex is inscribed on the birth certificate, assumptions and social imperatives have already been made regarding that infant’s general life course, assumptions based on a highly sophisticated and complex network of gender-based roles assigned to the sexes. These assumptions reflect specific concepts of gender: social constructs regarding “masculinity” and “femininity.”

These gendered roles maintain the sexist structures of society, and heterosexism reinforces those roles, for example, by casting such epithets as “faggot,” “dyke,” and “homo” at anyone who steps outside their designated gendered roles regardless of their actual sexual identities.

Society flings these symbolic spears at the heart of anyone who violates established (socially constructed) norms of behavior, those which society often considers traitors to their sex.

All people in our society, no matter our assigned sex designation, are saddled with the heavy burden — yes, burden — on the “masculine / feminine” binary. Concepts of masculinity and femininity promote the domination of males over females and reinforce the identification of maleness with power.

Assigned males are encouraged to be independent, competitive, goal oriented, and unemotional, to value physical and mental courage and toughness. Assigned females, on the other hand, are taught to be nurturing, emotional, sensitive, and expressive, to be caretakers of others while disregarding their own needs.

Society mandates that males must be “in control.” They cannot get too close to their feelings, and if they do, they certainly cannot allow them to show. They must “keep it all together” and to “suck it up.” They cannot show vulnerability, awkwardness, or doubts. They must be “on top,” in bed and out.

Within the Male/Masculine conflation, society maintains a rigidly controlled hierarchy:

On top is found the so-called “Alpha Male,” characterized by:

• the leader(s)
• inflated confidence,
• mental and physical toughness,
• highly competitive with the goal of winning being more important than what is contested,
• seen as weaknesses: intellectualism, empathy, showing of strong emotions except anger and rage,
• having presence (take up the space they inhabit; being seen as physically dominant, virile),
• strong body language in how they talk, walk (exaggerated swagger), what they look at, where they place their hands, where they position themselves around others in what they consider as the most powerful position to take control: “I alone can do it.”
• take chances and move out of their comfort zone,
• surrounded by trophy girlfriends and/or wives who grab their arm, or are placed literally and figuratively by their side, behind, and beneath, and seldom talk,
• vocal and loud with solid voice,
• strong intense eye contact and hard firm handshakes,
• calm under pressure showing no signs of fear or trepidation,
• knows how to dress,
• stands out,
• has no problem saying “no,”
• persevere and doesn’t give up,
• projects any apparent weaknesses and shortcomings as the problems of others,
• blame others for these weaknesses, shortcomings, and losses.
• does not apologize, back down, or retreat, but “fights back ten times harder,”
• signs of tenderness or vulnerability only allowed for other team members in the arena of gladiators, when inebriated, and during the heat of sex.

The Beta Male, on the other hand, are seen by the Alphas as:

• the followers,
• unremarkable,
• lacking confidence,
• avoids taking risk and confrontation
• lacking physical presence and charisma
• emotional

Though ultimately unattainable for all males, the deceptive rabbit of masculinity circulates around their track of life on patriarchal wires that project the alluringly tasty rewards of control, security, and independence, but only if they perpetually compete in the race by sprinting after that elusive rabbit.

Some boys and men internalize this socially mandated illusion of masculinity to the extreme, to a self-destructive and toxic hyper-masculinity. As they run and run and run around the course, they invariably stumble hurting themselves and others along the way.

They build and accumulate frustration turning to resentment and then to anger and often rage because they can never truly reach, grasp, and consume the promised patriarchal bait.

For those men and boys who survive, the societal masters dispose of them as dog trainers dispose of the overworked greyhounds. They are stalked, controlled, used, wasted, and ultimately slaughtered.

Girls and women, who also grow up in a patriarchal system of domination, are certainly not immune to internalizing these messages and thereby, they often collude in pressuring males to join and remain in the race.

Compulsory masculinity, when it reaches the level of toxic hyper-masculinity and even beforehand, demands of all boys and men their surrendering of their critical reasoning by never challenging the system, along with losing their individuality, their moral and ethical compasses, their emotions, and their very integrity and humanity for some promise of security, support, and sense of camaraderie and the privileges that automatically accrue to followers of the patriarchal system of domination and control.

Taken to extremes, this often results in violence. On the international scale, it results in wars.

Fortunately, a new generation of assigned males, assigned females, and trans people is challenging the system by revolutionizing the former conceptualization of gender identity and expression. They are shaking up traditionally dichotomous binary notions of male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight.

They are courageously calling into question this social myth of gendernormativity, the boxes society places us into as it imposes upon us all our gender scripts. They have opened the boxes for all of us to ultimately obliterate the gender status quo of binary oppositions by demonstrating the visible ways, the options upon an enormous gender continuum, one that does not depend upon a sex assigned to us, a sex that is imposed and forced upon us by others.

Their stories and experiences have great potential to bring us into a future — a future in which anyone and everyone on the gender spectrum everywhere will live freely, unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender. It is a future in which the “feminine” and “masculine” — as well as all the qualities on the continuum in between — can live and prosper in us all.

But how many more people must die as a result of toxic tyrants showing off their bare chests atop enormous beasts like Putin and another like Trump who changes wives and mistresses faster than he flushes his golden toilet, both whose innumerable lies and insatiable hunger for praise and riches know no bounds?

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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