Hear me Roar! A Men’s Rights MAN-ifesto, by BigDirk069
Excerpt from Pg 1 of 72, posted February 14th, 2004 to Manliness.org/messageboards/inn/cell/discussion
I am MAN, hear me ROAR!!!
For too long the Unfair Sex has abused its inherent power. For too long they’ve been allowed to use their sex as a weapon against us! For too long the ball-busting bitches of Hollywood and Washington have tried to castrate and emasculate us.
NO MORE!!!!
From neutering James Bond to pushing Princesses on boys, this OVERT ATTACK ON MASCULINITY SHALL NOT BE ACCEPTED!!!!!
Men of America and the World, stand up with me against this overt attack!! Reject the poisonous lies of “political correctness”. Heed the call of the
Manly Times and other responsible, Y-run news sources! Reject the chains of the Matriarchy! Toss aside the Kneutering Knife! Stand when you piss and leave the seat up without regret!!!
In other words, GROW A SET!!!
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New Millennium, Old Values: The Conservative Pushback of the 2000s
Article in J Street Review by Harlan H. Hughes, October 2012 Edition
In a healthy democracy power tends to swing between two or even more poles as majorities and minorities and independents wrangle with the issues and their visions for the nation. Cultures also tend to swing with the times as progressive pushes receive a conservative counter-push and then back again. Sometimes these swings can be huge as one side takes things too far for the middle, and other times a motivated minority can have a disproportionate impact due to tenacity and energy, particularly when tactics like gerrymandering are in place.
All of these factors were at play in the 2000s, a decade where pushback against the progressive gains, both real and imagined, spurred an equal and opposite reaction from “marginalized” conservatives. And as America prepares to decide between continuing the Republican reign in the White House by electing Vice President Jeb Bush or swinging back to the left by electing Kansas Representative Kathleen Sebelius, it’s worth remembering the swing in social politics that helped elevate President Heinz to the White House in 2004 and kept him there in 2008.
Now, it’s worth noting that politically, the 1990s were fairly moderate in the US, with both progressives and conservatives gaining small wins. The largest “progressive” bills, such as the Green Growth Act and Health Care Act, made heavy use of private companies and followed blueprints developed by Republicans in many cases. Similarly, the Crime Bill and Social Security Act were notably more conservative in their approach, and many progressive social issues like LGBTQ rights were largely sidelined or watered down. Political populism in the form of Ross Perot’s Reform Party ultimately led to the rise of “Stripeback” politicians as a middle-ground option for moderates of both major political parties, helping stem a “race to the edges” by both as litmus test politics gained ground. As such, one might imagine that cooler heads would have prevailed, that this would have been a period of relative moderation in political thought and a “coming together” moment for Americans.
Instead, the opposite happened. The 1990s saw a wave of political violence from the far right, in particular the DC Bombing and the decade saw a rise in hate crimes. Nativist candidates like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich predominated. The fledgling internet became a haven for radical and reactionary politics that only skyrocketed as social media spread, accelerating further with the advent of the Intelephone or “Inpho”, a nickname that led naturally to the dismissive term “Miss Inpho” for the person, most stereotypically a suburban housewife, spreading political or medical misinformation on social media.
So, if the politics of the Gore and Gephardt administrations were so relatively moderate, why was there such a big conservative backlash? Well, talk radio and other conservative news outlets such as the Patriot News Network exaggerating the issues was certainly a major factor (there appears no end to what can be considered “Socialism” or “treason” if a Democrat does it), but it is my personal belief that pop culture is largely to blame, specifically the rise in progressive social politics and inclusion on the big and small screen, which gave the impression that things were swinging farther left socially than they really were.
(Image source Risk Management Magazine)
One of the largest hallmarks of the 2000s was the “Men’s Rights” movement, a rise in sexist and misogynistic rhetoric and politics that started in comedy clubs and burned across the internet. This was overtly in response to the pop culture of the 1990s. The 1990s had seen the rise of Third Wave Feminism and the Girl (or Grrl) Power movement. While some of this manifested in ways that can be seen as subtly sexist or reductive today (such as the “Action Girl” trope), at the time people like Buffy Summers of the
Final Girl film and series, the
Whoopass Girls, or the more action-oriented Disney Princesses, culminating in
Damsel’s Rebekah, were considered revolutionary, spawning whole new areas of feminist research and discussion. The “Season of the Witch” and rise of the witch archetype as a stand-in for female empowerment built off of this. Both tropes represented tough women who could overpower the manliest of men, which undoubtedly grated on insecure young men in particular, and the implicit threat to male privilege and traditional gender roles made the trope a particular target of conservative and right-evangelical commentators and influencers, the latter of which literally saw Satan in the Season of the Witch.
Similarly, male characters, particularly side characters, were often less traditionally masculine. Much like the “sensitive man” of the 1970s, male characters were increasingly likely to adopt less-macho traits, be more willing to show emotion, even if only in small ways (the “lone manly tear”), and be more likely to be seen cooking, cleaning, or raising children. Similarly, “Gay Best Friend” archetypes and the appearance of gay and gay-coded characters further blurred the line between the masculine and feminine. The “Gayening of America”, as it was dubbed, further enraged those who insisted on maintaining the strict dichotomy of masculine/feminine, and further appalled right-evangelicals, who again saw Satan in every lisping queen.
The internet and social media, in particular the rise of “Incel” culture, allowed this increasingly overtly misogynistic line of thought to spread like a virus in the 2000s, infecting vulnerable young men with Capital-M Manly dreams of a life where he’s the King of his Castle served and serviced by a harem of docile, submissive women. Soon open talk of “putting women back in their place” spread across the forums, merging and forging alliances with far-right politics, which was experiencing a renaissance in the later 2000s and remains a growing threat today, with fears of a return of Sword of Liberty or similar Militant White Nationalist Organizations entirely well founded.
And it all began as a joke. A “Macho Men’s Support Group” skit on Saturday Night Live. A trolling comedy routine by Jimmy Kimmel. The satirical and irony-laced Dark Horse comic
Alpha Man. The ironic song “Manly” by NuPunk band Black Hearted Bastards. Some naturally took the jokes a bit too seriously. Soon overtly sexist comedy acts followed and SITCOMs began slipping in more and more subtle or not-so-subtle misogyny in their humor. Movies like
The Bro Code and
Dicks featured endearing sexist jerks and objectifying humor, even if they maintained a tongue-in-cheek sense of irony. The
Agent X movie series, in a deliberate pushback against the perceived “pussification” of the “New Old Bond”, despite the New Old Bond being more accurate to Fleming’s original novels, unironically reconstructed the 1960s film version of James Bond as epitomized by Sean Connery, with women as shallow objects to be used and discarded and villains, male and female, inevitably queer-coded if not outright queer and frequently dark skinned.
The decade saw the return of large, powerful, masculine heroes and moved away from the “everyman” heroes of the 1990s, whether they were old faces like Stallone and Schwarzenegger or new ones like Momoa, Schreiber, McCallister, and Diesel. While not all of these movies were subtly sexist or queerphobic, and other action films like the
Red Sails franchise with its queer-coded pirate Jack Swallow (Hank Azaria) carved out a large box office share, enough of them were. Similarly other films and TV series directly took on the perceived emasculation of the American Man and defeminizing of the American Woman, or featured characters motivated by such beliefs, such as
Hacked.
Things spiraled even further on the fringes of pop culture entertainment. Unironic comics with Manly Man superheroes followed in
Alpha Man’s footsteps (much to its creator’s dismay). A hyper-masculine spinoff of NuPunk joined Hip Hop as musical havens of overt misogyny. Video games featured opportunities to rape, assault, and murder prostitutes. Entire “cults of manliness” grew up around the country, many of them influenced by a fundamental misunderstanding of the works of Chuck Palahniuk, where men could “rediscover” their inherent manliness, often in pseudo-ancient rituals that bordered at times on Native American cultural appropriation.
Similar pushback on racial and ethnic and religious grounds followed. Changing demographics in the US due to immigration and population growth, and increasing acceptance and normalization of interracial marriage and mixed-race identities, revived racist “replacement” narratives. The Bismarck bombing and other acts of Salafist terrorism spurred a rise in Islamophobia which bled over into antisemitism and further fueled Christian Nationalism, which in turn overlapped heavily with White Nationalism. Anti-immigrant bias, particularly against Hispanics and Middle Easterners and South Asians (three groups that are frequently conflated in the bigot’s mind), spread and grew, and occasionally manifested in racist words and actions. Traumatized Congo War veterans externalized their PTSD against African Americans and African immigrants and refugees in particular, much as the trauma of Vietnam fed a rise in anti-Asian bias in the 1970s and 1980s. Pushback against progressive calls for police reform has further fed this anti-Black and -Brown bias. While overt acts of violence in the decade were few compared to the MWNO terrorism of the early 1990s, attitudes and rhetoric made Archie Bunker attitudes of race and gender much more publicly visible than they had been in decades.
Much of this neo-racism has been shielded under the fig leaf of opposing “political correctness”, an unfortunate top-down attempt by collegiate progressives in the early 1990s to reframe the narrative on race, gender, ethnicity, and ability. It was ultimately an Astroturf movement that quickly devolved into self-parody, with even progressive comedians and commentators butchering its awkward euphemisms like “differently abled”. Making fun of progressive overreach on political correctness soon evolved into actual racism and sexism. “I’m just being politically incorrect” became the go-to defense for overt racist, misogynistic, and queer-phobic hate speech, and for more subtly racist and sexist portrayals of characters in fiction. The number of non-white villains killed by Agent X, for example, is in notable disproportion to the number of heroic people of color in the franchise; you could call these latter “the good ones”, I guess. Similar issues plague the
Detective Kilian series, which reconstructs the Cowboy Cop tropes of the 1970s without any of the original social commentary. While neither drops “N-bombs” and both featured the occasional MWNO villains, their clear throwback to more denigrating portrayals of marginalized groups speaks to a greater public acceptance of such views.
Similarly, backlash against “Disney Diversity” and other acts of inclusion played a part, with many attacking the Mouse and Chairwoman Lisa Henson in particular over the proliferation of non-white and rebellious princesses, even though most of these films had been greenlit under her father, himself a frequent subject of right-wing attacks and occasional slander. Other studios from Universal to WB faced similar backlash, in particular Universal’s
John Carter adaption, which changed the original novels’ white ex Confederate hero to a Black Union veteran.
Turok’s use of a Native American hero with a Confederate villain likewise raised ire, though the low budget, modestly popular animated film flew under the radar compared to the popular
Princess of Mars.
Another factor in the rightward turn, and one that has fed radicalization on the fringes, has ironically been the very thing that protected many of the small-p progressive gains of the 1990s: the Senate incumbency advantage and blatant House gerrymandering, particularly in the otherwise solid-red Texas, that have kept the Democrats largely in control of congress. This has stymied many of President Heinz’s more Red Meat agenda items, which he promised on the primary campaign trail before running to the middle against Gephardt. While Progressives could shift much of the blame for a failure to make greater progressive gains in the 1990s to the Moderate Democrats, chiefly Presidents Gore and Gephardt, Conservatives could focus all of their ire on the Democrats for such offenses as watering down President Heinz’s major tax cuts and preventing some of the more arch-conservative judicial nominees from being approved.
As such, Heinz and Bush, though nominally center-right moderates not that far removed from Gore on most non-wedge issues, mostly escaped the conservative backlash. In a sort of ironic counterpoint to the 1990s, the pop culture of the 2000s makes things look far more conservative than the political record would indicate. Heinz tended to work with the Democratic congress to pass budgets on time, and even achieved balanced budgets on more than one occasion without drastic cuts to spending programs, undoubtedly helped in this by the Gore-era compromises on entitlement spending. Economists tend to see the Heinz years as a continuation of the Gore years in many respects, with a center-right economic push and a “compassionate conservatism” social one which took a softer stance on social wedge issues. Bush’s compromises on immigration reform opened further avenues for legal immigration and seasonal work in direct contrast to his occasionally fiery speeches on border security. One suspects that Heinz and Bush’s more overtly conservative statements were intended for a right-shifting populist base, and didn’t necessarily reflect their actual politics.
And in this vein, it’s worth remembering that most US conservatives have not bought into the overtly white nationalist or openly misogynistic narratives. Most remain de jura supportive of equal rights and claim not to be racist or sexist (they may be more willing to state discomfort for Muslims or LGBTQ people). Many would call themselves accepting and rationalize away any unconscious bias. So for those hoping to win these folks over to more accepting ideas, lumping them in with the Incels and MWNOs is a counterproductive strategy. Education about privilege and unconscious and systemic bias is a better strategy than accusations or finger pointing. That said, fearmongering to these more moderate conservatives has been an effective tactic for the far right, conflating race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality with crime and violence to scare this moderate conservative plurality into supporting politicians that they otherwise might not. And a real danger remains that a charismatic populist demagogue of the Buchanan vein might be able to scare just enough of this fearful demographic to seize power.
But pendulums tend to swing back the other way as well. Slowly but surely moderate conservatives are sliding into more accepting or at least more tolerant views on social issues and becoming more de facto supportive or equality and diversity. The rising Millennium Generation of voters has already shown a leftward shift, particularly on issues such as climate change, police reform, income inequality, and LGBTQ Rights. Backlash against the excesses of
Agent X and
Detective Kilian and the increasingly hateful rhetoric from comedians and politicians have led to a much more politically active youth, who increasingly support diversity and tolerance and fight back on social media. Growing grassroots activism via social media are allowing new voices to be heard, and already we are seeing many corporations and brands leaning in to this new progressivism. Even Evangelical Christianity has seen a split, most notably the exodus of many conservative white Baptist churches from the Southern Baptist Convention following the election of Fred Luter Jr. as its new President in 2009, with growing awareness of social justice issues and “good steward” environmentalism by the younger members at the heart of the split.
Polls in the upcoming presidential race are neck-and-neck, and the energy surrounding Sebelius stands out against the “he’ll do” attitude behind the relatively uninspiring Jeb Bush, making the election of America’s first female President seem fully possible. In fact, the right-wing media and social media attacks on Sebelius following her stalwart defense of murdered Kansas abortion provider and personal friend Dr. George Tiller only managed to skyrocket the little-known Kansas Representative into the national spotlight, and may be what earned her the Democratic nomination to begin with. A character obviously based on Sebelius even appeared as a villain on
Detective Killian, further adding to the buzz surrounding her, another example of where pop culture and social media have driven real world events.
So, with a leftwards counter-counter push starting is this the beginning of the end for the Conservative Millennium? Will the trend shift back to the left in the 2010s? Only time will tell. But for those in the Progressive movement, there’s much to be learned and remembered in the rise and proliferation of conservatism of the 2000s for their fight ahead, and much for the conservatives to keep in mind as they inevitably push back.