October 15, 2018--Male Privilege

"What was that all about?" We had just had a half dozen homemade donuts and coffee at our favorite local general store.

"I also was a little confused," Rona said, "He seemed to be talking about an incident that he probably heard about on Fox News where some guy stoped a bus and threatened the passengers."

"My hearing isn't good today," I said, "But that's what I think I heard. And then did he say they should have taken him out and shot him?"

'That's what I heard."

"Unbelievable."

"How he's a terrorist and that's how terrorists should be treated."

"That they should be taken out and shot?" Rona shrugged her shoulders and nodded.

This from an otherwise peaceful-feeling 70-year-old who sat next to us, eating his bacon and eggs at the counter.

"He said he's lived here for more than 30 years. That he grew up in upstate New York and moved when things there began to change in ways that upset him."

"Yes," Rona said, "He talked about how the thing he likes most about Maine is that very little changes. That he hates change. Including the smallest things. Like when a new owner bought the store, though he was quick to mention he liked that they kept making donuts every morning."

"I like that too," I said, wanting to move on to lighter subjects.

"He seems to live a version of the good life here and I don't understand why he's so angry about what's going on around him. And from the looks of him, including how he was dressed, he seemed to be OK financially. So I don't think it's that."

"We've been talking recently about why so many middle-aged white guys are so angry and how that's affecting our politics."

"Yes," Rona said, "I've been thinking a lot about how it's not primarily about race, but how these men feel threatened by demographics and the resulting browning of America. With their anti-immigrant views underscoring that. That is a big component of their anger, but the more I think about it the more I am concluding most of the problems these men have comes from gender issues. Their relations with women. How they used to feel empowered just because of their maleness, but in recent decades how that sense of privilege has been eroding."

"We have been talking about that and agree that a lot of the things men depended upon to feel powerful no longer operate so automatically."

"There are many things in the larger culture," Rona said, "that have been delivering the same message--that their days of dominance are over. We've been making a list of some of the things that are undermining men's sense of their place in the world. How losing the war in Vietnam, for example, was a huge blow to men who felt that just being an American, American exceptionalism assured their invulnerability. How up to then we had won every war we entered and then we were defeated by little Asians wearing sandals and black pajamas!"

"These are the guys who are prone to chant 'USA, USA' at Trump rallies. As if that restores their sense of self worth."

"The women's movement didn't help. Calls for equity in the workplace--equal pay for equal work--in family life and the bedroom (there was the pill) deeply threatened so many men."

"How many people do we know, how many men do we know, including some in our families who found themselves with women supervisors and how they hated that. How some even quit their jobs to get away from female bosses. And how in a couple of instances doing so ruined their careers."

"Affirmative action also contributed, especially as many men believed it primarily benefitting women. Again in the workplace they saw women they felt to be less credentialed and less experienced getting promoted to positions they felt entitled to."

"And when the Great Recession hit in 2008," I said, "men became aware that women were able to ride it out better than they were. Ironically, partly because women were still not receiving equal pay for equal work they were more likely than their husbands or partners not to be laid off."

Rona said, "This came decades after tens of millions of women who had been housewives entered the work force, often not just in search of career opportunities but because their husbands' incomes were not enough to sustain the household. We know, again from our own families, that a lot of men felt inadequate because on their own they couldn't make enough money for the families' expenses. My father, your father had to send our mothers to work in order to maintain their lifestyles. Or just pay the bills. How did that make them feel?"

"Not good. Diminished," I said, "In quite a few cases the women wound up making more that their husbands and this alone disrupted the emotional balance within many marriages. And now there is the MeToo movement, which has some men thinking that their or their sons' lives can be destroyed by a false accusation of sexual misconduct."

"And so, here we are," Rona said, "Even in this peaceful place there are men so angry that they want to kill people who they consider to be terrorists."

"All that seems so far away from here and yet . . ."

February 22, 2016--De-Gendered

Do you recall the year 2000 Senate race in New York State? Hillary Clinton verses her Republican opponent, Congressman Rick Lazio?

She was elected by a wide margin, but what is most remembered about that contest by political junkies is their infamous debate in Buffalo in September.

Ensconced behind two lecterns about ten feet apart, everything was proceeding more or less normally until Lazio extracted some papers from his jacket pocket, a pledge form, he said, that he had signed not to use so-called "soft money."

He challenged Clinton to sign it. Even at that time 16 years ago, Hillary, wife of still President Bill Clinton, was way ahead in the race to attract big-donor money. In fact, that Senate race shattered all previous records by turning out to be the most expensive in history.

It was clear that she was not willing to do that and so, to make his challenge more dramatic and presumably to show his toughness, Lazio stepped from behind his lectern and walked toward Hillary with the pledged form thirst at her. As if fearing a physical attack, Clinton took a half step back then stood her ground. The audience gasped audibly.

After all was said and done, with Hillary Clinton elected to the Senate, political analysts and gender-sensitive reporters, looking back at the race, said that Lazio lost any chance of winning that night because of the physical confrontation.

It, many claimed, was an inappropriate way for a man to challenge a woman. By "violating her private space."

One good thing emerging from the current, increasingly nasty race is (1) that no one--not even Donald TRUMP--would think to do this now and (2), much more significant, no one, no male candidate, would hold back in challenging Clinton forcefully and directly. This is the result of the cultural shifting since that time and very much because of Hillary Clinton's preparedness, relentlessness, unapologetic ambition, and smarts.

As a result, one thing her candidacy has accomplished is to de-gender, at least for this campaign, the debates, political ads, and how the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates are treated in the media.

She and the others are treated mainly as equals. No deference is shown to her because she is a woman. More than anything this shows how much progress has occurred since 2000. Things are far from perfect, but they are much better than when she and other women politicians were thought of primarily as female candidates.

The less gendered playing field makes it possible for opponents to exchange comments and attacks even about sexism.

For example, we have seen debates about who is the most sexist--Donald TRUMP for his misogyny or Hillary Clinton for putting up with and thereby enabling Bill Clinton's sexual malfeasance.

As ugly as things can get, in the current race even the mud-slinging is being spread around more equally. In fact it is progress.

February 9, 2016--The "Establishment"

During last Thursday's debate, Bernie Sanders accused Hillary Clinton of being part of the Establishment.

He said--

"Secretary Clinton does represent the Establishment. I represent, I hope, ordinary Americans, and by the way--who are not all that enamored with the Establishment."

In response, Hillary Clinton said--

"Well look, I've got to jump in here because, honestly, Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the Establishment. And I've got to tell you that it is really quite amusing to me."

It may be amusing to her, but if Hillary Clinton isn't a part of the Establishment, I don't know who is.

Let me count the ways--

Wife of the former governor of Arkansas, former First Lady of the United States, former U.S. senator from New York, presidential candidate finalist in 2008, Secretary of State and then as a former Secretary able to command $250,000-a-pop speaker fees from the likes of Goldman Sachs, someone who with her husband has accumulated assets of more than $200 million after being "broke" when they left the White House, someone who received advances for books in excess of $5.0 million each, a principal in the Clinton Global Initiative, mother of a daughter-of-little-accomplishment who is able to garner highly-paid no-show jobs at McKinsey and Company and NBC ($600,000 a year!), and mother of a daughter who on her own commands speaker fees of $65,000.

(As and aside, someone needs to explain Chelsea's career to me, including that $65K.)

Hillary Clinton is not a member of the Establishment?

Not a member, she claimed the other night, ignoring all of this, because by definition she is not part of the Establishment because she is a woman. A woman running, audaciously I assume she would say, to become the first "woman president."

It appears this is working less and less well.

A female college student interviewed by MSNBC right after the debate visibly cringed when asked if Clinton's claim resonated with her.

She said, "That's irrelevant to me. What I care about is if she or anyone else would make a good president. In that regard, her being a woman doesn't mean much to me." She paused, took a visible deep breath and added, "Her feminism doesn't represent my feminism."

Nor apparently did it mean much to young voters in Iowa where Sanders led Clinton by 85 to 15 percent among people between the ages of 17 and 24. Fully half of them young women. We'll see what happens later today in NH.

Hillary Clinton's default position whenever challenged or feeling threatened is to blame, as she did in the past, the "right-wing conspiracy" or, more commonly now, that this is because she is a woman.

Not to be outdone, husband, white knight Bill has been all over New Hampshire this week coming to his wife's rescue, including to claim that Sanders' alleged attacks on Hillary are sexist. Talk about chutzpa. Bill Clinton in the Oval Office wrote the book on that.

In addition, Bernie Sanders himself is a comfortable member of the Establishment.

He is almost as much a career politician as Marco Rubio. By the numbers more so. His political career stretches back 35 years when in 1981, at age 39, he was elected mayor of Burlington. After being reelected three times, in 1990, he ran successfully for the House of Representatives, and then, in 2006, was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Sanders has been comfortably ensconced in Congress for 26 years. Including, during the past year, when he has been as much a no-show at his day job as Rubio and Ted Cruz.

That to me feels very Establishment.

Though I am more and more liking what he has to say about the "rigged" economy and am inclining to vote for him, let's not forget who he really is and how he has, at taxpayer expense, made his way in the world.

December 29, 2015--The "Woman's Card"

Though it is still 2015 and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have selected their nominees, from the political salvoes exchanged over the past few days between Hillary Clinton and Donald TRUMP you could have fooled me--it sounds as if they have declared themselves nominated and already launched the general election campaign.

The initial focus is on sexism.

Both are deeply experienced in that arena, but not as always assumed.

The eruption broke out last week when TRUMP said that back in 2008 Barack Obama had "schlonged" Hillary.

He probably meant that Obama defeated her handily (the connotative meaning of schlonged); she that since schlong is a Yiddish slang term for penis, he was being not just a bully but sexist.

Would he, she probably wondered, have said the same thing about Joe Biden who Obama also schlonged? In my and TRUMP's old neighborhoods, the answer is for sure.

Rising to the bait and seeing an opportunity to get under Clinton's skin (as The Donald has so successful done to Jeb Bush and John Kasich among other opponents) he in effect warned her not to play the sexism card, implying that if she did he would retaliate in kind.

Predictably, thus challenged, to show that he couldn't intimidate her as well as to raise higher the ire of the women who despise TRUMP, Hillary doubled down and continued to accuse him as having "a penchant for sexism."

At the same time she was defending her own honor, Hillary Clinton's people announced that they were about to unleash husband Bill and that he would next week take to the campaign trail in New Hampshire. There is some worry in the Clinton camp that Bernie Sanders may steal that primary and who knows where that might lead.

Seeing the unshackling of Bill Clinton to be an opportunity, TRUMP seized it. First he quoted Hillary back to herself, claiming on Twitter, all in caps, that she "HAS A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM."

And, less playful but potentially more potent, TRUMP began an assault on Bill Clinton, tweeting that he "has a terrible record of women abuse [sic]" and that by using her husband in her campaign, she is "playing the woman's card [sic again]."

This requires a little unpacking--

How does turning "women abuser" Bill loose on the campaign trail constitute playing the "woman's card"? They seem mutually exclusive, minimally contradictory.

This then brings us to Hillary Clinton's problem with young women.

When it comes to middle-age women, head-to-head in the polls against TRUMP, she gets over 80 percent of the vote, but she languishes when it comes to young women--young women who do not reflexively see sexism so commonly on ugly display.

For the younger generation of women getting schlonged, for example, is not as hurtful as it might be for their mothers' generation who needed to fight every step for their liberation. Taking feminism and liberation as a given, younger women tend to see TRUMP's utterances as only stupid while Hillary feels the need to remind them, motivate them, to think of themselves as women first, as vulnerable women, and everything else as secondary.

What she thus may be failing to notice is how these younger women, whose allegiance and votes she covets, are not that enthusiastic about seeing Bill Clinton coming to the aid (or rescue) of his unfairly put-upon wife. Ironically a wife, for whom sexism is her default mode, being shielded by someone who, in his sexual escapades while in the White House--exerting sexual power as president over a 19 year-old intern--had, as TRUMP rightly claims, that "terrible record of women abuse."

#  #  #

While on this subject, remember that less-than-felicitous phrase, "bimbo eruption," that was bantered about during Bill Clinton's first campaign and then later during his years in the Oval Office, a phrase for what his staff and advisors most worried about--that there were more Paula Joneses and Gennifer Flowers rattling around who might at any moment pop up on the front page of the National Inquirer, accusing Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. And then sure enough, up popped Monica Lewinsky.

Where are the TRUMP equivalents? There are big bucks and Gloria Allred waiting to bring their stories to the public. If there were such women wouldn't we by now have heard from them?

And wouldn't we also have heard about all the illegal Mexican immigrants mowing the fairways and greens of TRUMP's numerous golf courses? We learned about poor Mitt Romney's gardeners so, if there are any working for TRUMP, they should by now have been outed. Many mainstream reporters hate him and would love to win Pulitzer Prizes by exposing his hypocrisy.

In the meantime, I can't wait to see what mayhem Bill Clinton will soon be perpetrating. Remember South Carolina back in '08?

#  #  #

Breaking News--with a margin of error of 3 percent, the latest Rasmussen Poll has Clinton and TRUMP in a statistical deadbeat with Hillary at 37 percent and Donald at 36.

Stay tuned.

"I did not have sexual relations . . ."

December 24, 2014--Fem-Phobia

It's not as if we don't have enough on our plates in New York City.

You know the list--the racial divide seems to be widening (or at the minimum is more starkly visible); the mayor and the police are barely talking to each other and when they do talk it's angry; the middle class is being squeezed out of the real estate market where every day there's a story about one billionaire or another buying, sight unseen, yet another $50 million condo; there are demonstrations in the streets nearly every night organized by the Occupy Wall Street folks or various coalitions of city dwellers who feel justice is not being dispensed equally.

I could go on.

But in the midst of this, there is another campaign underway that is also generating a lot of heat--the movement to get men seated on subways to be more discreet. Discreet and subways may be an oxymoron but nonetheless there does appear to be a growing awareness and disdain for guys who sit spread-eagled in a V-shaped slouch, in effect letting it all hang out, especially when there is an attractive women seated nearby or, better, across the aisle.

Things have gotten so out of hand, some claim, that there are organized groups mobilizing various forms of persuasion and humiliation in an attempt to raise men's consciousness (another oxymoron) so that they will sit more discreetly, even making room for weary straphangers.

As the newspaper of record, covering all the news that's fit to print, the New York Times on Sunday reported about this on the front page in an article with a wordplay tittle, "Dude, Close your Legs: M.T.A. Fights a Spreading Scourge."

The Times quotes one V-shaped sloucher who insists on sitting this way as saying, "I'm not going to cross my legs like ladies do. I'm going to sit the way I want to sit."

So there you have it--it's not so much sexual aggression but fem-phobia. Real guys don't want to be mistaken for women.

Making this a personal crusade, Brooklyn-based actress Kelley Rae O'Donnell confronts men sitting this way, also taking their pictures and Tweeting them in an effort to embarrass offenders. This far to not much effect, though she did get the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the New York Times to join her in paying attention to this growing phenomenon, including persuading the M.T.A. to plaster subway cars with posters calling on spreaders to man up. (See below.)

Some men have counter-argued that they need to sit that way for procreative reasons--if they cross their legs, they insist, this will so warm up their sperm as to render them infertile. I am not making this up.

But since this has become a public issue, let me assure these metro-sexual men who long to be fathers that there is no corroborating scientistic evidence that this is true. Dr. Marc Goldstien, director of reproductive medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, says that though testicular temperate may in fact be raised a degree or two if legs are kept crossed during a half-hour train ride, it would not be high enough to render sperm less frisky.

So there you have it--what we're fighting about these days in the Big Apple.

Be merry.

July 24, 2014--Groves of Academe

I came to Francine Prose late in life. I have been aware of her but mainly through her essays and book reviews. After hearing her at the recent PEN conference in New York, I thought it was time to take a look at her novels.

From her other writing, I was anticipating that they might be a bit thick and too politically correct for my taste, but the two I've read thus far are anything but. I am only sad I did not begin reading her sooner, but it is exciting to know that there are about a dozen novels altogether and thus I have many months of pleasurable reading awaiting.

Her A Changed Man is about identity and the possibility of self-transformation, even if one has been a neo-Nazi; while Blue Angel is an acerbic satire set on a backwater New England campus where the frustrations of long-term faculty and the self-involvment of their students erupt into a full-scale witch hunt to root out and punish political incorrectness.

While gobbling up Blue Angel I wondered why so many significant authors have set one of more of their novels on college campuses and why most of them are wicked satires, often descending into sarcasm.

The ones I remember from years ago are Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe and John William's Stoner. Later, I enjoyed Bernard Malamud's New Life, Philip Roth's Human Stain, and Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates, also Richard Russo's Straight Man and, among the initiators of the genre, Randall Jarrell's 1954 Pictures from an Institution. Biting jeremiads all.

Most of these authors, and many of the dozens of others who have set novels on campuses (David Lodge, Donna Tartt, Jane Smiley), have taught literature and creative writing and, it would seem, for the most part, had miserable experiences among, what to them must have seemed, insecure, petty hypocritical colleagues. Often in settings where male professors pray on the erotic vulnerability of worshipful, cum vindictive, coeds, usually finding themselves hauled before campus vigilante committees seeking to stamp out all signs of transgressive and sexist (and even, often, by distinction, sexual) behavior.

The typical protagonist is a middle-age tenured professor well aware of his declining powers--physical and creative, saddled with debt, culturally isolated, stuck in an unfulfilling marriage, and almost always estranged from his children, children who nearly always include a 20-something daughter just about the age of the students he seduces or allows to seduce him. These obsessive relationships are often presented in parallax perspective--first from the Humbert-Humbert side or, in other cases, Blue Angel among them, with the relationship also viewed by the Lolita-like seductress.

In virtually all the novels, the transgressor has a hard, life-altering fall that is both deserved and, to the transgressor, welcomed since, no matter the public disgrace--often because of it--it is liberating. He shakes off or abandons the comforts that have defined and confined him and this allows him to remake his life, no matter how mean it may seem. In some instances the meaner the better as there is a strong element of expiation required, a fierce price to pay for this liberation.

Again, thinking about why so many meaningful novels are set on college campuses, beyond the obvious--from experiences with which novelists are intimately familiar--they are metaphor-rich environments in which youth and age coexist and clash, where decline is starkly measurable, where things are widely sexualized, where cultural collisions play out naturally and often viscously, and where human nature across its full range is on full flagrant display.

Thus these places are perfect venues to find things to satirize and titilate. All of which writers are incapable of resisting.