What could possibly be the common denominator between the
President, the cover-up culture of the Catholic hierarchy, and Molly Tibbets—a young
murder victim from Brooklyn, Iowa? Here is the answer . . . lean in close now .
. . the common denominator is . . . men. We are taught to devalue women almost
from birth. We are taught that to become a man we must detach from Mother
(woman). We are taught that we are entitled to sex. And we are taught that our phallocentrically-enculturated
desires, including the eroticization of power, is a “natural” male entitlement.
Now some will object that women in power will be as
predatory and abusive as men, but that is a liberal dodge. Liberal, because it
has no respect for the inevitable concreteness of history. It’s a little like
speculating about humans evolving with three arms instead of two, or saying
that DNA testing proves there is no such thing as race (therefore we have
solved racism). It substitutes abstraction and speculative hypothesis for what
actually happened, how it actually happened, and how that determines what is
happening right now.
In some parallel universe, where men and women were exactly
the same in every respect except procreative roles, women might match men in
sexual “entitlement,” sexual exploitation, and rape . . . not. It can’t be that way, because it was not that way, and in space-time
there are no do-overs. Time’s arrow travels in only one direction.
Men acquired progressively greater power over women,
especially after the dawn of mass agriculture and early urbanization (which corresponded
to war, where men’s entitlements were magnified alongside entrainment to
violence as male prerogative).
Men violently subjugated women as property; and rationalized
their power in two ways: the naturalization of male power and devaluation/hatred
of women. They sacralized their power, too. They are defending that power to
this day.
We congratulated ourselves during the so-called sexual
revolution on how liberated sex had become. Men could no longer trade women,
give away women, own women. But as women gradually made inroads into formerly “male
spheres,” the system of power that was gender shifted its focus from economics
and “family stability” and proof-texting to sexual practice. Back to the
default. There is an entitled dick at the center of the universe.
“As soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation,”
writes Van Badham, “patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men.”
But, of course, we know that men’s sexual entitlement goes beyond women. It
hits children, too. Entitlement is not determined by the object of desire, but
by the one who desires.
That’s why the sexual abuse scandal rocking the Roman
Catholic Church right now is comparable to Trump’s serial sexual predations,
his proud misogyny, and his infantile belligerence, as well as the male entitlement-rage
that led to the murder of a twenty-year-old woman in Iowa. Male culture is
still hegemonic, because male power is still hegemonic, and the Catholic
hierarchy is—just like my old units in the Army, where rape culture was
celebrated and misogyny the norm—an all-male institution.
So that sense of
entitlement (to whatever one desires) is amplified. A lot. And covered up,
because general knowledge of what was happening threatened to undermine the institutional
Church narrative about Nature and the inferiority/perversity of women upon which the all-male
hierarchy is founded. The irony is staggering.
Power and its abuses are historically male, and therefore
maleness—as historically constructed—is about abusive power. Women can never be
or become carbon copies of men, and power cannot be teased apart from gendered
power.
Gendered power is rape and rape culture. Gendered power is war.
Gendered power is politics. Gendered power is fascism. Gendered power is the
subversion of charity. Gendered power is the mass shooting. Gendered power is
sexual harassment. Gendered power is sex tourism. Gendered power is women and
children being prostituted. Gendered power is the Trump Cult. Gendered power is the church scandal. Gendered power is the murder of women. Gendered power is implicated in all forms of actual power. Everywhere we turn, there it is. Because gendered
power is MALE power, and with all forms of power comes a sense of entitlement,
an obligation really to assert that entitlement into existence, or we will be
forced to admit that what we are is a vast pool of potential sexual predators,
petty despots, and killers.
And until we acknowledge it, we will continue to sit inside
it and talk, talk, talk . . . about anything but the power men have as men, and
the ways that this power corrupts us and victimizes so many in so many ways.
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