President Obama poses a deep threat to patriarchy

[sheshe2]

I found it fascinating that yesterday Russia's Deputy Prime Minister tweeted this:

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Dmitry Rogozin @DRogozin
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We have different values and allies
3:13 PM - 31 Jul 2014


This is the same message the Republicans send when they call our President weak on foreign policy and lefty purists used when they caricatured his dealings with Congress ( for example, remember when Michael Moore said that President Obama should take off his tutu and put on his boxing gloves?)

Here's how Adam Gopnik summarized the messages we've been hearing for years now:www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/mr-tough-guy

Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him. He’s a wimp, a weak sister; he won’t stand up for himself or his country. Vladimir Putin, a true tough guy, blows planes out of the air, won’t apologize, walks around half-naked. Life, it seems, is like a prison yard, and Obama cowers in a corner. “It would be a hellish thing to live with such timidity. … He’s scared of Vladimir Putin,” one Fox News contributor said about the President. But this kind of thing is not confined to the weirder fringes: Maureen Dowd pointed out a while ago that former fans of Obama “now make derogatory remarks about your manhood,” while the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page runs a kind of compendium of “weak sister” pieces every morning, urging the President, at one point, to make more “unambiguous threats”—making unambiguous threats evidently being the real man’s method of getting his way.

“Barack Obama is the first female president,” The Daily Caller, a Web site co-founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney, blared, without a trace of irony or consciousness that female might not be such a bad thing for a President to be. The Daily Caller lists seven basic “manly” traits—courage, industry, resolution, self-reliance, discipline, honor, and manliness, that last one bafflingly redundant but, hey, that’s the way men are—and shows how Obama fails in regard to each. (He’s terrified of his wife, apparently, though one would think that this is actually a classic Jimmy Stewart-style American sign of husbandliness.) Toni Morrison wrote memorably, in these pages, that Bill Clinton had become, in a symbolic sense, “our first black President”—meaning that Clinton’s perceived faults were flaws of appetite, of a kind that a racist imagination traditionally ascribed to black men. “His unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution,” Morrison wrote. Obama’s perceived flaws are the ancient effeminate ones, of the kind that a bigoted tradition ascribed to women; above all, the criticism reflects the President’s unapologetic distaste for violent confrontation and for making loud threats, no matter how empty those threats may obviously be. (The joke, of course, is that, with Clinton as with Obama, the symbolic substitute may well precede the real thing.)

snip

Its important to note the way this framing is tied to gender. Men are strong and women are weak. The worst insult to a man is to compare him to a woman. Some of you may have assumed that we'd gotten beyond all that in the 21st century. But we haven't. I'm here to say that the reason it persists is that, for too many of us, the cause of feminism has been reduced to reproductive freedom and equal pay. As important as those things are, we've lost sight of the big picture.


snip

Until we can unpack those things, we'll remain trapped in a patriarchal system that devalues women and demands that men prove their manliness via their ability to dominate.

Just as President Obama threatens the system of white supremacy, he is also challenging the notions we have absorbed from patriarchy. I have often written about how his power (or strength) is not based on dominance - but partnership, and he regularly talks about the importance of empathy (another way of expressing nuturance). Those are just a couple of examples of how he scrambles all those notions about masculinity and femininity from within the body of a man. That confuses a lot of people and triggers some deep fears about a challenge to the way we've come to expect the world to be ordered. In other words, he's dealing a death blow to the old patriarchal system.

Read More: http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2014/08/president-obama-poses-deep-threat-to.html

Well done.

[sheshe2]

1. Kick!

[Mr.Bill]

2. But...But...

I thought he was an evil lawless tyrant that was purposely destroying the most powerful country in the world.

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Isn't that the insult dog from Conan fame in the lower right corner?

SMH.

[sheshe2]

4. Me, I have no clue...

Never saw it before.

I just know that Putin is evil and that anyone of the GOP that fawned over him is just plain sick. That goes for anyone here.

hugs, lmsp

[BainsBane]

5. We had a similar thread here

calling him "spineless." While I think the claim that he is a threat to patriarchy is an overstatement, that they see him as less than masculine, like a woman, helps explain why so many hostile to feminists likewise despise Obama. Great blog entry!

[sheshe2]

6. Oh, you are so very right, BainsBane.

HOF and BOG seem to be entwined here. Then just add AA into the equation and we are complete. The three most hated groups on a Democratic board. Yes, that is telling.

Who's standards do we want to follow for the kind of man do we want here as President? I for one want this President that has Compassion Grace Humility and Humanity. That is not spineless that is strength.

Our Feminist President? I see that as a Compliment and one hell of a plus.

[BainsBane]

7. BOG has become code for African American

How else can you explain an association between the BOG group and a "radical fringe"--a charge often made on Discussionist. They say HOF and BOG represent a "radical fringe." I think what they mean about radical is being confronted with issues of race and gender. I can see no ideology in which support for a President equates to radical.

[flamingdem]

8. yes

[napkinz]

9. ...

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Maureen Dowd, WSJ editorial, and Daily Caller? I don't see how we moved from "the weirder fringes"

It seems to me those fools are firmly inside the 'weirder fringes'. Dowd has been making disparaging remarks that show her weird outlook on gender for at least 15 years (and the NYT still pays her for it! It's a bizarre business decision by them), the WSJ editors are a bunch of greedy amoral arseholes who will say anything to support a Republican, and the Daily Caller is the garbage bin of Republican commentators.