Gender In America

Newsweek recently pissed me off by publishing pages of dreck exhorting men to redefine masculinity, as if masculinity could be put into some kind of weird, little pre-determined box that everyone has to check all the boxes in to get issued their 'Man Card' on a yearly basis. The article in question seemed to call for more of a partnership with women and a heightened emphasis on men co-parenting. All of which took me by surprise, because my approach to my marriage is to view it as a partnership, not a dictatorship and I fully intend on co-parenting my children.

In general, it really pissed me off. Thirty years of feminist psycho-babble and now it's being turned against men. An attempt to convince men they are oppressed? Intercine war between feminists and meninists? The language of feminism seemed to have been turned into the tools of the patriarchal oppression that impacts both genders, whether they know it or not. Now, Newsweek is pushing more dreck: do we need Men's Studies? After all, poor, poor men are becoming a minority on college campuses so don't they need their own major?

Hell no. Good God, leave it alone already. Men don't need to be studied, men need to step up. Men need to be better fathers, better husbands, better all over! It's a simple little formula with easy policy solutions all around. Teach all the kids, not just the girls. Get paid family leave put into law, so men can actually take the time to be Fathers. Easy solutions that can pay dividends. Three more decades of psycho-babble academic bullshit discourses about gender will do nothing!

Then, I stumbled across Susan Faludi's front page article for Harper's Magazine and managed to read a goodly chunk of it before my lack of a subscription to Harper's prevented me from devouring the whole thing. Did it contain a discussion of the state of modern feminism and a prescription for its future? Nope. Instead, Faludi launched into the tiresome, tiresome dissection of the void between Generation Steinem and the Third Wave Net Saavy Feminist Brigades of the Modern Day. No discussion of what's left to do. No discussion of what's to be accomplished, just a tiresome old story about the generational civil war in contemporary feminism. Once again, aiming, firing and completely missing the target.

While Faludi is busy dissecting NOW elections, a bomb is going off in feminism's backyard and how the modern feminist movement deals with that is going to be the real test of the movement. I'll risk the wrath of Women's Studies majors everywhere by saying it, but Sarah Palin is coming to a theater near Gloria Steinem and Company, so get ready! Quick: name another woman that's done more to find and promote female candidates in the past ten years? You can't. She's a master, nay mistress of social media and is quietly constructing a brand for herself that will be very intriguing should it be put in front of the electorate. She appeared on 'Dancing With The Stars' and got a healthy round of applause, looking like Super Mom cheering on her kid as she did so. The appearance stuck with me and as I rolled it around and around in my head, I came to a surprising conclusion: Sarah Palin gets it. She's changing the rules for women in politics in a way that Hillary Clinton should have, but didn't. Women can be caring and nurturing and still win elections. They can be good mothers and strong leaders. They don't have to fit into any mould constructed by the media.

Will she run for President? I don't know. I think right now, she can get the Republican Nomination easily, but there's a gap she has to close with independents and moderates before she can seriously compete for an election. She needs to reach as many people as possible as directly as possible and if she can introduce herself directly to the electorate and show she has serious ideas and serious solutions for the serious problems facing the country, she might just win. But quietly and in a way that feminism has yet to discuss on any meaningful level, Sarah Palin is re-writing the rules for women in politics. And what that might mean will impact gender in America for more directly than any psycho-babble the media or academia can come up with...