I saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman.... They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the "Breck girl." And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, "economic girlie-men." The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips.
Like a jilted lover out to prove his masculinity with a series of new conquests, our Bush regime today seem always out to prove something. They will fight any war (with or without allies). They will ram through legislation (with or without the democrats on board). They will eliminate supportive social programs (since only wimps need "safety nets"). In other words, their America is a John Wayne/Rambo/Terminator figure. But why? Recently Stephen J. Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor, talked with BuzzFlash about where this delusional and destructive mindset comes from, and how it manifests itself in our country's domestic and foreign policies. When you think about it, the right wingers have played our fears and fantasies darned well, exploiting fear on the one hand and our hopes and dreams on the other. Perhaps "anxious masculinity" played out on the world stage does help explain the right wing's virulent attitude towards Hillary Clinton, and their determination to slur Vietnam war hero John Kerry as "French." As George Lakoff has commented, "It is crucial to notice and understand the central role of a certain version of masculinity in American politics. Ducat's book helps enormously."
Stephen J. Ducat is a clinical psychologist in private practice and a professor at the New College of California. He is a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.
BuzzFlash: In your book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, & the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, you argue that the current positions and attitudes of the Republican Party and Bush Administration can best be viewed through a certain lens that we traditionally associate with the he-man, the virile figure--you call it the phallus. Briefly, how would you define "anxious masculinity?"
Stephen J. Ducat: In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one's opponent especially important. This femiphobia--this male fear of being feminine--operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism.
BuzzFlash: You're drawing a parallel between the extreme right wing in the United States and the Islamic fundamentalists, in that they are both highly fearful of overbearing feminine influence?
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Femininity, for male fundamentalists, is seen as a contaminant, and there is an attempt to repudiate those aspects of one's self that seem feminine. This is something that fundamentalists around the world share. As I argue in the last chapter of my book, there is a surprising affinity between Christian fundamentalists in this country and the extreme Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere, when it comes to this kind of devaluation, repudiation and fear of the feminine.
BuzzFlash: You discuss "anxious masculinity" as exhibited by right wing America, the Bush Administration, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush. Why "anxious?" Is it that their masculinity has got to be constantly reproven?
Stephen J. Ducat: Yes. In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It's a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it's so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It's quite Sisyphean--you know, you can never quite get there. You're always having to prove it.
Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination--either in a personal or a global context--can never be a permanent condition. It's a relational state. It's dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you're not going to be manly tomorrow unless you've got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.
BuzzFlash: Then peace is a threat to anxious masculinity?
Stephen J. Ducat: It's a threat because of its link to the feminine. In fact, I have a chapter on the 19th Century, when there was enormous debate about whether the U.S. should embark on the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. In a number of editorial cartoons, peace itself was personified as female.
BuzzFlash: You cite examples in your book of how your psychoanalytical approach applies to the political world in a very specific way. First of all, let's take the efforts by the Bush Administration to portray Kerry as "French." Should we assume that this was a way of saying he's feminine?
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. It's a rather transparent code word for being feminized. I also saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman. That's what they wanted to do. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the "Breck girl." And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, "economic girlie-men." The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips. Real men, you know, don't worry about the losers in the new global Darwinian economy.
This theme was echoed by a number of people, including Zell Miller, who said that not only was Kerry suspiciously French, but he would even let Paris decide when America needs defending. There was the implication that, if Kerry were ever to run the White House, he would imperil the masculinity of all men by turning the U.S. into a kind of submissive bottom in the global contest for supremacy, the deferential housewife in the family of nations.
Cheney basically echoed the same themes, referring to Kerry as sensitive, faint-hearted, weak, wobbly, soft. Since the reign of Bush, even the notion of negotiation or diplomacy, or international cooperation became very suspect. For many Republicans, collaboration raises enormous femiphobic anxieties, even if they're collaborating--and perhaps especially if they're collaborating--with Democrats. GOP strategist Grover Norquist once said that bipartisanship is another name for date rape. So that tells you about his anxiety, I think.
BuzzFlash: To cooperate, then, is to give up one's masculine prerogative to assert oneself as a male leader?
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. In the world they live in, you're either a top or a bottom. Mutuality, democracy, equality--that makes no sense to them.
BuzzFlash: Well, as Jon Stewart said recently in the context of the John Gannon/Jeff Guckert scandal in Washington, if you're on top, you're not gay. That may explain the inner circle acceptance of gays within the Republican Party, in spite of the gay-bashing national political line they give to their followers.
Stephen J. Ducat: The Republican homosexuals, especially if closeted, are not only treated as honorary heterosexuals; they become honorary homophobes, as the most recent scandal illustrated.
BuzzFlash: Well, you know, Matt Drudge is gay and yet engages in homophobia. Ken Mehlman, who is the head of the RNC, is reportedly gay and was a leader of the homophobic charge. There are numerous Congressman who have been outed and Senators who are known as gay, and yet who stick to the homophobic line. It's a strange permutation of anxious masculinity, but maybe, as Jon Stewart said, if you're on top, you're not gay.
Stephen J. Ducat: He has intuited something that is actually pervasive across cultures and across historical time--that in male-dominant cultures, homosexuality is only taboo when it's perceived as feminizing. This has its foundation in ancient Greece, where it didn't really matter with whom you had sex. What mattered was what position you occupied in the relationship of domination. If you were a penetrator, you were an unambiguous guy. If you were penetrated, you were virtually a woman. That dynamic operates in American prisons, and you can see it in some Middle Eastern cultures. It's really a question of domination.
BuzzFlash: So with Gannon, who said on his web sites, you know, that he was a military guy, a Marine, and always on top, he's acceptable because he's a man's man?
Stephen J. Ducat: Yes.
BuzzFlash: He's not penetrated; he penetrates.
Stephen J. Ducat: That's right. Militarystud.com.
BuzzFlash: Let's turn to a second real-world example of your theory, and someone you talk quite a bit about. I'm referring to Hillary Clinton. In The Wimp Factor, you include a cover from the infamous American Spectator. It's got a rather unflattering drawing of Hillary Clinton, and it's titled "Boy Clinton's Big Mama."
Stephen J. Ducat: That's right.
BuzzFlash: You also have a chapter called "Vaginas With Teeth and Castrating First Ladies — Fantasies of Feminine Danger From Eve to Hillary Clinton." Clearly, she evokes something in the right that was on an atomic scale in terms of negative reaction. Is it that she represents the embracing and smothering mother, the woman who overpowers the man, who is not submissive to the man, but thinks for herself, thinks about her own future, is self-sufficient to a great degree? Do these characteristics threaten anxious masculinity to such an extent that she was like the nuclear bomb to them psychologically?
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Her being perceived as a powerful and, most troubling, a self-authorizing woman, was regarded as profoundly threatening and evoked a kind of misogynist dread and revulsion exceeding even that generated by Eleanor Roosevelt. What's interesting about this, and what makes it an example of political irrationality, is that she's not that liberal. I mean, she's pretty much a centrist, as was her husband.
BuzzFlash: They are considered, both of them, aligned with the DLC, or the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. But Hillary Clinton has been seen alternately as a castrating woman, the engulfing mother, or a phallic, penetrating woman. Some people may feel I'm kind of going over the top with Freudian metaphors, but I'm not making it up. One of the covers of Spy Magazine actually put a penis on her.
BuzzFlash: You also have that cover in the book. You draw a distinction between the terms "penis" and "phallus." Whereas penis refers to a part of the male anatomy, the phallus is a mythical concept of maleness, which can never really be attained by a human male, but nonetheless it is the motivation behind much of the Bush Administration and the right wing perspective.
Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Of course, a phallus is mythic, a permanently erect monolith of manly power and omnipotence. It's a signifier of untrammeled growth, invulnerability, and freedom from dependency. Someone basking in the aura of the phallus is then seen as someone who has it all, who's lacking nothing, who doesn't need anyone. The penis, on the other hand, of course, is a fragile, vulnerable organ and it's only momentarily hard.
This is why political campaigns work so hard at presenting their male candidates as phallic. But the interesting thing about the phallus as a symbol is that it moves around, unlike the penis, it isn't really attached. This is something I document in the representations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. For a while, Hillary was literally portrayed as having the phallus. There were cartoons of her using a men's urinal, and cartoons of her dressed as a man. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was an interesting development precisely because it shifted the phallus from Hillary to Bill. In fact, the popularity of both Bill and Hillary Clinton went up dramatically as a result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which may seem kind of paradoxical for some.
BuzzFlash: That's one of the most fascinating analyses of your book, the theory that, in essence, the Republicans really backfire. The whole impeachment effort was an impeachment in search of a reason to impeach. And Whitewater didn't work. Travelgate didn't work. So they finally tried to create perjury and all sorts of major crimes out of a sex act. In an ironic way, you point out, it really blew back in that we had wimpy Ken Starr and his staff prosecuting a President who had been seen by many on the right as very subservient to his wife. But suddenly, like the Olympic torch, the phallus had been passed to him--he suddenly was a man's man.
Stephen J. Ducat: Some of the same right-wing publications that had portrayed him as castrated, as feminized, later portrayed him as this lusty philanderer, a ravenous stud muffin, thinking that would make him look bad. But in spite of all the criticism he got, his popularity actually went up as a result of it. And of course, Hillary could now be viewed as the wounded woman standing behind her man.
BuzzFlash: So it almost transformed them into a traditional couple, ironically.
Stephen J. Ducat: Right.
BuzzFlash: Suddenly, as you say, Hillary was the forgiving wife of the husband who had strayed.
Stephen J. Ducat: And Ken Starr, the voyeuristic prig, looked very much the pervert in this.
BuzzFlash: Now let me ask you to comment on another curious anomaly--these right-wing women and what you call the Phyllis Schlafly syndrome. These are highly powerful women who never really are with their families, but they preach subservience to their husbands and being home with their families all the time. I recall that in the book, What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank talked to someone who was very active in the Kansas legislature, who said she totally believed in submission to the husband and staying at home. But meanwhile, she was off in the legislature all year. What's going on with that?
Stephen J. Ducat: Well, you know, there are a lot of different kinds of right-wing women. There are under and middle class Christian fundamentalist housewives who seek desperately to be the compliant good wife, to stay at home, who have embraced their position of subordination as a virtuous condition. And there are those who I think are more hypocritical, the highly educated, upper class women like Ann Coulter who advocate a life of domestic docility for the under class sisters. Meanwhile, they're in the public eye and are as powerful and self-authorizing as any male politician. And by being part of the economic elite, they can buy their way out of certain difficulties by virtue of their class position, whether it's having wealthy husbands or enough money in their own right to get the health care they need, to get the reproductive care they need and so on.
BuzzFlash: I think you imply at one point that they're like the gay men on top. They're the females with phalluses in a lot of ways.
Stephen J. Ducat: Well, I think in some ways they are. This is something that is in the cultural imagination. In one of Bill Maher's shows, he joked that "this has been a tough week for conservatives since Ann Coulter admitted she had a penis." And everybody laughed, it was a joke that made sense to people because they already understood intuitively there's something phallic about her, about her repudiation of weakness and dependency, her disgust for anybody that needs help of any kind.
BuzzFlash: How does the logic of your theory extend to the welfare state? Grover Norquist has publicly stated that he would like to see the social service state starved and then drowned in a bathtub. The social service state that provides education, medicine for everybody, care for seniors, that's very feminine or very maternal.
Stephen J. Ducat: There's nothing essentially feminine about it, but it is perceived and constructed that way in the femiphobic mind. Republicans call it the nanny state. That's because care taking in this kind of universe is regarded as something feminine. Obviously there's nothing essentially feminine about care taking, but that's how it gets gendered in public discourse. A government that takes care of people is portrayed as maternal. And men anxious about their masculinity tend to be aversive of being taken care of by anything maternal. They repudiate that. In my book, I cite multiple examples of what can only be called a kind of transference to government--treating the government as if it were one's own engulfing mommy. There's a right-wing men's movement book called Surviving the Feminization of America, and the cover of the book is a picture of the Capitol dome, and a man is looking aghast at the dome because the top of it is replaced by a giant breast. So, we see quite concretely and dramatically in this image, the femiphobic terror of the "mommy state." I think this has a lot to do with the drive to undo the New Deal — not only to undo the New Deal, but undo Theodore Roosevelt's progressive area.
BuzzFlash: This is almost pre-Enlightenment when you combine it with fundamentalist faith.
Stephen J. Ducat: Yes.
BuzzFlash: Why is this happening now? We seem to have the revenge of the barbarians. Rumsfeld, and the neo-cons said in their Project for a New American Century documents of the late nineties, that we should take over the world because we can.
Stephen J. Ducat: The only way you could take this stance is if you feel no connection to others. Other people exist in the world to be conquered and used and exploited. But I try to not be a psychological reductionist in my assessment. I think psychological factors are very important, but they're not the whole story. It's just that nobody has talked about them, so I wrote this book. But there are other factors that I think are really important to take into account. The right wing has been organizing 24 hours a day since the late seventies. Unlike the left, unfortunately, they have not leapt from crisis to crisis, or election to election. They have organized on local levels. They have elected school boards. They've formed enormous alliances. They've done fundraising. This organizing, the multiplicity of think tanks, the placement of pundits in key positions in the media, is paying off in terms of being able to seize the language and spin issues their way. That's something the people on the left really have to appreciate and replicate in their own way, creating an ongoing movement. We need to be unrelenting.
BuzzFlash: The Bush Administration has manipulated the fear factor, on the one hand, and offered images of unfettered masculinity on the other. Many women in the last election who might have felt more comfortable with an embracing, supportive national government nonetheless voted for the perceived masculine leader — and I emphasize perceived, because there's a lot of smoke and mirrors here — but the perceived national leader, the top gun, GI Joe which you have on the cover of your book.
Stephen J. Ducat: What you said about their ability to generate and play on people's fear is extremely important, and very much connected to what I talked about in my book. There were psychology experiments done where they generated fear, in experimental subjects, who then were actually more likely to support Bush. So, obviously, with the manipulation of terror alerts and so on they played Americans' anxieties like a fiddle. What I talked about in my book is a specific anxiety that is being played, which is men's terror of the feminine. Republican males have been motivated by this fear and have successfully exploited it in others.
BuzzFlash: On the back of your book is a graphic of the Homeland Security threat levels. There's low, then guarded, then elevated, high, and severe. Finally, the highest level is "feminine," with sparks coming out of it.
Stephen J. Ducat: Right.
BuzzFlash: This really reveals so much and connects so many dots by going a couple levels deeper and trying to figure out what's going on beneath the surface. This construct of anxious masculinity triumphing over threats from feminine forces, from dominant, smothering mothers or uppity wives, seems to explain so much about what's going on with the Republican Party. But then what do you make of someone like Condoleezza Rice in positions of power?
Stephen J. Ducat: He put a woman in a position of power to implement his policies and cushion him from information that he doesn't want to know about. And you have to keep in mind, as highly placed as Condoleezza Rice is, she is his underling. She does the bidding of the core group of neo-cons.
BuzzFlash: If you're a woman, we'll let you in the club as long as you act like the guy on top?
Stephen J. Ducat: As long as you support and act like the guy on top. Of course, having Condoleezza Rice in her position doesn't translate into anything meaningful for other women. I think Condoleezza Rice's advancement to her current position is evidence of how failure is no impediment to promotion in the Bush regime.
BuzzFlash: Loyalty to the hierarchy is what counts.
Stephen J. Ducat: It trumps absolutely everything. Her loyalty to the men in charge is really what matters.
BuzzFlash: Is this merely a stage we're going through? Hasn't anxious masculinity been with us since the beginning of personhood? Is this due to the thirty or forty year strategy of the right wing?
Stephen J. Ducat: I think a complex combination of factors determines this. Not all cultures and all historical periods evidence this kind of femiphobia. But we're seeing a number of factors, not the least of which is a kind of backlash against feminism and the ability of the Republicans to really define the words we use. There is no greater power than the power to define. If you can determine how people use language, you really are able to determine how they think. If you can fill the word liberal with the meaning that you want it to have, which nowadays is weak, feminine, cowardly, so much so that even liberals want to run away from it, then you've won an enormous battle for control. That sort of framing, as George Lakoff calls it, the kind of linguistic hegemony achieved by the right, has accomplished a lot. Femiphobia has always been a feature of most patriarchal societies, but certain historical events have brought them into the foreground. I think the defeat of the United States in Vietnam played a major factor. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "Vietnam syndrome." I think one way of reading this malady is as a condition of wounded masculinity.
BuzzFlash: We should point out Cheney and Rumsfeld were on watch at the White House at the time that the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.
Stephen J. Ducat: Yes. And George Bush the first, for whom the term "the wimp factor" was first coined, declared at the end of the Persian Gulf war in the nineties that this military adventure was the final cure for the Vietnam syndrome. What's interesting is that Republican regimes keep declaring this, so it obviously continues to haunt them. At the end of the Vietnam war, you had this giant imperial monster running away from these little guys in black pajamas. This, I think, constituted an enormous humiliation for those men in the American society that identified with a militarized nation-state. In the years thereafter, we saw a whole spate of revisionist Vietnam war films--you know, the Rambo movies, Chuck Norris movies, and so on. The plots were all virtually the same. You had these hyper-masculine, uber-menschen who weren't going to let the pencil-neck bureaucrats in Washington keep them from kicking Vietnamese ass. All the movies ignore the fact that the war itself was lost. This was an attempt on the part of the culture to try to compensate for the actual defeat. I think the lingering symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome were not a trivial factor in getting us into the current war in Iraq.
BuzzFlash: Stephen. Thank you so much for your time.
Stephen J. Ducat: It's been great talking to you.