This bit of Word Salad from Excitable Jess Zimmerman is as interesting as to how she puts Democrats into a gender role as it is for her calling for them to Get Angry
Why Can’t Democrats Get Angry?
I think it’s because our misogynistic society has pushed them into the same corner women have been forced into. But there’s a way out.
The salient feature of now-seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony during the hearing that was intended to assess whether he had committed sexual assault in his youth was, as many have noted, his anger. It was anger that made him lash out inappropriately, anger that contorted his face in a way that made many viewers feel sick. He thought this anger would substitute for integrity, and he was right, or right enough anyway; he didn’t fool everyone, but he did at least shout them down. Meanwhile, the salient feature of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was her calm, measured, deferential demeanor, complete with tension-defusing apologies and jokes. I am not the first person to point out how heartbreaking this was to witness: that even while talking about an experience that traumatized her for decades, she obeyed the unwritten cultural injunction that women must manage not only their own feelings but the feelings of everyone around them. This has been laid bare in the past few weeks in America, even as it’s a reply of something we’ve all seen before.
What I haven’t seen discussed, though, is the way these same restrictions have constrained the entire Democratic Party. The left—even the moderate left—is feminized in this country to a degree that I have come to believe actually restricts its avenues for acceptable self-expression.
If they’re feminized, it’s their own fault. And isn’t it a horrible inappropriate gender construct to say something has been feminized? I wouldn’t be surprised if SJWs were assailing Jess for daring to write this
Our weird cultural commitment to the gender binary goes way beyond actual living men and women—if it didn’t, people wouldn’t freak out so badly when someone declines to choose. Masculinity and femininity are concepts we layer on top of everything from people to pens to political parties. Sometimes there’s a middle ground, but often we seem lost without our familiar patterns; it’s the confused hetero doofus asking a gay couple “which one’s the woman,†except for the entire world. Take any opposed things—Democrats and Republicans, cats and dogs, even the sun and the moon—and you’ll find one of them associated with physical strength, action, and domineering behavior, and the other associated with emotion, reticence, and calm. That’s not just descriptive; it’s prescriptive, and proscriptive too. If we could judge the moon for yelling, we would.
So, Democrats are all just pajama boys, even the women?
The feminization of the party also restricts how much anger, outrage, and general disgruntlement Democrats are “allowed†to express; they are the party that has to be fair, that has to maintain its commitment to the principles of equality and reasonableness. Somehow, at the same time, every trivial emotion of the right is valorized….
It hasn’t been the Republicans out in the streets getting angry and violent.
The problem with misogyny in this country goes beyond the oppression of women—although that alone should be a reason to shatter the patriarchy where it stands. It’s also the oppression of anything seen as feminine: those who show “weakness,†which is defined in our patriarchal system as anything outside the two acceptable masculine modes of brutish violence and cold indifference. Even cisgender men suffer when they are not able to convincingly perform this twisted vision of manliness.
Seee? Misogyny also applies to whatever they want it to apply to, including the gamma-male Dem voters. The rest is just as nutty as the above. It would normally be hard to take seriously, but, these people are violently serious.
