The Cavalry is Not Coming and Other Moments of Clarity
There is a lot of talk about "owning your privilege." Allow me to make an attempt at owning mine.
One of the things about my life that I am increasingly aware is very unusual for a straight man of my age is that I have a handful of very close, very deep male friendships. There are three or four (depending on the circumstances) people that I have known for a very long time (20+ years) and with whom I feel comfortable sharing personal things--struggles, fears, losses, disappointments. And these people have shared similar things in their lives with me.
This has been an enormous blessing in my life, one of the top two or three blessings that I have received. But it has one notable downside, and has created a notable blindspot. Because I know these guys so well, and so intimately, they form the baseline for what I think men as a whole are like. Or, more accurately, they form a sample set from which I extrapolate my back-of-the-envelope estimates of what the male population is actually like in terms of behaviors and attitudes. These friends of mine are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect people. They have made mistakes, they have disappointed people, they have behaved carelessly toward others. And they have done all of those things in the context of women as well. But at no point have I ever seen any of them do something truly predatory, or deliberately demeaning, or intentionally controlling or manipulative.
It's not that I didn't believe that true monsters existed among the ranks of men. It's that I didn't believe they were all that common. They weren't around me, in my immediate circle, and so I saw them as marginal figures--horrible, but ultimately rather rare. And, correspondingly, I found some of the rhetoric around things like sexual assault and abuse and exploitation to be exaggerated. Yes, of course, these things do happen, and they are horrible and always wrong, but they are not as common as you are making them out to be, and they are not part of some sort of organized program. It's just a handful of bad actors. At least, that's what I thought.
If there is a single subjective experience that has defined for me the last 3 or so years, what I have been calling the "Age of Trump," it has been the repeated discovery that people who I once thought were alarmist or extremist or hyper-left partisan now seem to be offering the only rational analysis based on the observable facts. Without question, I have been radicalized by the Age of Trump--ideas and positions that once seemed outrageous now seem to be the right way to go.
Watching the Kavanaugh hearings yesterday was one of those moments of radicalization. Watching Kavanaugh, and juxtaposing him with Dr. Ford, revealed to me the unquestioned truth of three things that I had previously resisted. One is that my calibration of the number of abusive men who have nothing but total contempt for women was orders of magnitude too low. It dawned on me yesterday that the vast majority of women have to live with and find a way to navigate around these sorts of abusive men on a consistent, even daily, basis. This is the reality of their lives. It's not just fringe stories and unfortunate anecdotes, but the baseline experience. Women were telling me that, and I dismissed it as exaggeration, but it's not exaggeration.
But it goes deeper than that. Watching Kavanaugh and his supporters among the Senate Republicans revealed a second truth--the whole point of this exercise, politically and socially, is to create and sustain conditions under which this kind of thing is possible. What these people really want is a society in which women are available when they are useful to men and out-of-the-way and not making any demands when they are not. It was like that for a long, long time, and they want to keep it that way. And the lynch-pin of all of this, the engine that drives the project and serves as the field of battle, is control of women's sexuality. All of the "radical feminist" talk that abortion and birth control are the primary battlefields in the larger war to keep women in a reduced, ultimately somewhat sub-human, place, all of that was on full display yesterday in that hearing room. Nothing could ever prove that point more clearly than what we saw yesterday.
The final piece of that puzzle, the final place where the wool was finally pulled from my eyes about the purpose of all of this, was this morning when I saw that America Magazine, the Jesuit journal of high-brow progressive Catholic opinion, pulled its endorsement of Kavanaugh in light of yesterday hearings. I don't follow America closely, so I was dumbfounded to learn they had endorsed him in the first place. And why did they endorse him originally? Of course you know the answer--because they think he will overturn Roe v. Wade. All principles, all other moral guidance, none of that means a damn, even to a "progressive" publication like America. Hell, they even say that:
Why? Why is this so important, such that every other bit of Kavanaugh's record (which cannot be justified on the grounds of Catholic Social Teaching on any level) is cast to the side? No doubt Fr. Sawyer and the other folks at America will tell you that it is because of the moral and rhetorical arguments against abortion. And they, Fr. Sawyer and the rest of them (including many women, it should be said), may even believe that. But they are all, as the Soviets used to call them, "useful idiots," and they always have been so. The movement to which they have hitched their wagons is fundamentally and irreducibly about controlling and subordinating women, full stop. Indeed, America withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh not because they suddenly care more about misogyny, but because Kavanaugh lays the whole thing bare and cuts a little too close to the bone. He has, in professional wrestling parlance, "exposed the business."
Which leads to the final bit of clarity I had from yesterday. In the aftermath of yesterday, many, many women are very angry and very hurt by how this has played out, which is completely understandable. And while I have no desire to add to their burdens, it's worth saying something that most of them probably already know--if this is to be fixed, women are going to have to do it. Women who find themselves in institutions and structures (whether civil, commercial, religious, or what have you) that manifest the agenda of treating women as only quasi-people, especially those that do it via controlling and manipulating their sexuality, are either going to have to tear those institutions down, or leave them, or make their peace with them. But they should not expect to get bailed out. There are men who will help, but too many of them are either heavily invested in the system as it is, or otherwise too dumb and naive to be functionally useful (as I was, and probably still am).
Is that fair? Absolutely not. It's not fair at all. But it is what it is. You are going to have to take matters into your own hands, however that might be in any particular context. The cavalry is not coming.
One of the things about my life that I am increasingly aware is very unusual for a straight man of my age is that I have a handful of very close, very deep male friendships. There are three or four (depending on the circumstances) people that I have known for a very long time (20+ years) and with whom I feel comfortable sharing personal things--struggles, fears, losses, disappointments. And these people have shared similar things in their lives with me.
This has been an enormous blessing in my life, one of the top two or three blessings that I have received. But it has one notable downside, and has created a notable blindspot. Because I know these guys so well, and so intimately, they form the baseline for what I think men as a whole are like. Or, more accurately, they form a sample set from which I extrapolate my back-of-the-envelope estimates of what the male population is actually like in terms of behaviors and attitudes. These friends of mine are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect people. They have made mistakes, they have disappointed people, they have behaved carelessly toward others. And they have done all of those things in the context of women as well. But at no point have I ever seen any of them do something truly predatory, or deliberately demeaning, or intentionally controlling or manipulative.
It's not that I didn't believe that true monsters existed among the ranks of men. It's that I didn't believe they were all that common. They weren't around me, in my immediate circle, and so I saw them as marginal figures--horrible, but ultimately rather rare. And, correspondingly, I found some of the rhetoric around things like sexual assault and abuse and exploitation to be exaggerated. Yes, of course, these things do happen, and they are horrible and always wrong, but they are not as common as you are making them out to be, and they are not part of some sort of organized program. It's just a handful of bad actors. At least, that's what I thought.
If there is a single subjective experience that has defined for me the last 3 or so years, what I have been calling the "Age of Trump," it has been the repeated discovery that people who I once thought were alarmist or extremist or hyper-left partisan now seem to be offering the only rational analysis based on the observable facts. Without question, I have been radicalized by the Age of Trump--ideas and positions that once seemed outrageous now seem to be the right way to go.
Watching the Kavanaugh hearings yesterday was one of those moments of radicalization. Watching Kavanaugh, and juxtaposing him with Dr. Ford, revealed to me the unquestioned truth of three things that I had previously resisted. One is that my calibration of the number of abusive men who have nothing but total contempt for women was orders of magnitude too low. It dawned on me yesterday that the vast majority of women have to live with and find a way to navigate around these sorts of abusive men on a consistent, even daily, basis. This is the reality of their lives. It's not just fringe stories and unfortunate anecdotes, but the baseline experience. Women were telling me that, and I dismissed it as exaggeration, but it's not exaggeration.
But it goes deeper than that. Watching Kavanaugh and his supporters among the Senate Republicans revealed a second truth--the whole point of this exercise, politically and socially, is to create and sustain conditions under which this kind of thing is possible. What these people really want is a society in which women are available when they are useful to men and out-of-the-way and not making any demands when they are not. It was like that for a long, long time, and they want to keep it that way. And the lynch-pin of all of this, the engine that drives the project and serves as the field of battle, is control of women's sexuality. All of the "radical feminist" talk that abortion and birth control are the primary battlefields in the larger war to keep women in a reduced, ultimately somewhat sub-human, place, all of that was on full display yesterday in that hearing room. Nothing could ever prove that point more clearly than what we saw yesterday.
The final piece of that puzzle, the final place where the wool was finally pulled from my eyes about the purpose of all of this, was this morning when I saw that America Magazine, the Jesuit journal of high-brow progressive Catholic opinion, pulled its endorsement of Kavanaugh in light of yesterday hearings. I don't follow America closely, so I was dumbfounded to learn they had endorsed him in the first place. And why did they endorse him originally? Of course you know the answer--because they think he will overturn Roe v. Wade. All principles, all other moral guidance, none of that means a damn, even to a "progressive" publication like America. Hell, they even say that:
The first editorial explained the position we took at length, and we've been consistent about this. We want the reversal of Roe on both constitutional and moral grounds; we're not just cherry-picking. pic.twitter.com/GJXB2RuJ5o— Sam Sawyer, SJ (@SSawyerSJ) September 28, 2018
Why? Why is this so important, such that every other bit of Kavanaugh's record (which cannot be justified on the grounds of Catholic Social Teaching on any level) is cast to the side? No doubt Fr. Sawyer and the other folks at America will tell you that it is because of the moral and rhetorical arguments against abortion. And they, Fr. Sawyer and the rest of them (including many women, it should be said), may even believe that. But they are all, as the Soviets used to call them, "useful idiots," and they always have been so. The movement to which they have hitched their wagons is fundamentally and irreducibly about controlling and subordinating women, full stop. Indeed, America withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh not because they suddenly care more about misogyny, but because Kavanaugh lays the whole thing bare and cuts a little too close to the bone. He has, in professional wrestling parlance, "exposed the business."
Which leads to the final bit of clarity I had from yesterday. In the aftermath of yesterday, many, many women are very angry and very hurt by how this has played out, which is completely understandable. And while I have no desire to add to their burdens, it's worth saying something that most of them probably already know--if this is to be fixed, women are going to have to do it. Women who find themselves in institutions and structures (whether civil, commercial, religious, or what have you) that manifest the agenda of treating women as only quasi-people, especially those that do it via controlling and manipulating their sexuality, are either going to have to tear those institutions down, or leave them, or make their peace with them. But they should not expect to get bailed out. There are men who will help, but too many of them are either heavily invested in the system as it is, or otherwise too dumb and naive to be functionally useful (as I was, and probably still am).
Is that fair? Absolutely not. It's not fair at all. But it is what it is. You are going to have to take matters into your own hands, however that might be in any particular context. The cavalry is not coming.
Comments