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If one of the overt Democratic lines of attack against Republicans is that Republicans are conducting a war on women, one of the low-simmering, implicit lines of attack from Republicans is that Democrats are conducting a war on men, or at least traditional views of masculinity.
The idea of the effete, feminized liberals threatening to suffocate the last remaining expression of true manliness is rife in Republican rhetoric. They are selling the right wing as the last refuge of real men.
When the Chris Christie bridge scandal erupted, Brit Hume, the Fox senior political analyst, said in Christie’s defense: “ … men today have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like a kind of an old fashioned guy’s guy, you’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever.”
Guy’s guys are an aggrieved class in that world.
Portraying Republican men as manly and Democratic ones as effete has been a consistent line of attack against post-Bill Clinton Democratic presidential candidates. As Glenn Greenwald put it in 2007, “For some time now, it has been commonplace for Democratic candidates to be depicted as gender-confused freaks.”
The problem with having your message powered by machismo is that it reveals what undergirds such a stance: misogyny and chauvinism. The masculinity for which they yearn draws its meaning and its value from juxtaposition with a lesser, vulnerable, narrowly drawn femininity.
We have seen recent research suggesting that men with daughters are more likely to be Republican and a study finding that men with sisters are more likely to be Republican.
The study of men with sisters was conducted by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Loyola Marymount University. A report from Stanford about the study concluded, “Watching their sisters do the chores ‘teaches’ boys that housework is simply women’s work, and that leads to a traditional view of gender roles—a position linked to a predilection for Republican politics.”
And as Republican candidates oppose a full range of reproductive options for women as well as same-sex marriage, and publicly bemoan the notion that Democrats make women “believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar” around to “control their libido,” in the words of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and a possible Republican presidential contender, the Republican Party is, in fact, becoming a shrinking, male-dominated party.
Only one Democrat has won the male vote in presidential races since 1992—Barack Obama, in 2008, by 1 percentage point.
The Republican Party is in danger of becoming a man cave of cavemen and the women who can abide them.
The House speaker, John Boehner, has gone so far as to have sensitivity training for Republican members because, as he put it, “some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.”
And the masculinity shaming has not been confined to Republican men. Some Republican women have been equal-opportunity offenders.
At the height of the anthrax scare in 2001, Ann Coulter wrote a piece for the conservative site Townhall titled “The Eunuchs Are Whining,” in which she referenced liberals as “mincing pantywaists” and proclaimed that “women—and I don’t mean to limit that to the biological sense—always become hysterical at the first sign of trouble.”
This last-bastion-of-bare-chestedness is a politically ill-fated one in a country quickly evolving to value all of its citizens equally.•
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Blow is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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