(07-17-2019, 04:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(07-13-2019, 09:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump does not live like the ideal of the devout, humble Christian fundamentalist stereotype. Trump is practically a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat. His economic ideals come from Ayn Rand and his sexual practice comes from the Playboy Philosophy. Note well that both Trump and Pence are both grossly anti-feminist. They do not disagree; they harmonize well even if they seem hypocritically diametric in style.
He is also a radical feminist stereotype of a man. He lurks in changing rooms during the Miss World pageant to see the participants' genitals (despite being married and able to pay for most expensive prostitutes if his wife wasn't enough). His manner of behaving is always confrontational and he brags about the size of his "nuclear button". He makes stupid remarks about a journalist menstruating. He is an essence of neoreactionary masculinity, but this kind of masculinity reflects a stereotype created by man-haters. It's sad to see men actually adopting this stereotype.
...in that Trump is even more odious than Hefner, whose achievement in media was to offer pornography about which users could enjoy without feeling guilty. Maybe we recognize that the women whom Hefner exposed in bare beauty got promises that he would give them faster entries into the lucrative mainstream media of entertainment. Playmates of the Month seem to have made their deals for jump-starting their careers. They got publicity in return for literal exposure of their cleavage.
I do not have a daughter, but if I did I would want her to stay clear of any semblance of pornography even of the more genteel sort that Hugh Hefner or even Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions offer. But this said, I would rather have a daughter involved in a beauty contest sponsored by the media exploiter Hugh Hefner than by the perv Donald Trump. Hefner's nudes are on roughly the same plane as the voluptuous nudes of the painter William Bouguereau, differing largely in that Bouguereau's neoclassical nudes more closely fit the obsolete taste of the boudoir of the nineteenth century.
I am familiar with the worst male-chauvinist types from teenage years. The traditional male chauvinist who possesses and protects a subordinate wife at least agrees with me that rape is an abomination. That sort at the least recognizes that I will never move in on his wife or daughters for exploitative sexuality. I may see women as more equal in the economic sphere, but I also recognize that sexual freedom includes the right to say no to an advance. So what is the worst? I remember one of my classmates playing a jumbled-word game -- make a word out of a set of letters. I thought of three words that I could make out of one such combination of four letters: pear, pare, and reap. He shocked me by bringing up another word composed of the same letters. He later accused me of not being a 'real man'. I could only think that he had the insecurity and I didn't. I find that that classmate was eventually convicted of a crime relating to an alternative in arranging a set of four letters, and that arrangement did not come out as pear, pare, or reap.
Real men hate rape. The victims are their wives, sisters, girlfriends, daughters, granddaughters, mothers, and grandmothers. If the traditional male chauvinist sees rape as a violation of his interests, a more feminist man like I see rape as a gross violation of a female who has the right (that I assume that she would take) to avoid a violent exploitation. The difference between the traditional male chauvinist and me is on who is the chief victim.
The secret hidden camera in a dressing room or a toilet stall is an abomination, a sort of virtual rape. So is lurking about in a female dressing if one is a male perv.
I have yet to see any accusation that Mike Pence abuses women as Trump has in the past... if I am to guess anything, he is closer to being a traditional male chauvinist who fully possesses a wife. Such fits his religion of choice, which is Protestant fundamentalism (Mike Pence is a lapsed Catholic, as if that matters). The alliance between an amoral, rapacious plutocrat with the self-righteous Religious Right makes no sense to me, but it exists, so it is something that we must recognize as a current reality. A man like Trump makes the offer that in return for making a plutocrat like me even more filthy rich he will smash feminism, homosexuality, abortion, and 'intellectualism'? I see that as a marriage in Hell -- and for me, one that will make my life into a Hell of emotional amd economic poverty.
I well recognize a concern that many men have, a concern for which they often find blatant over-compensation. The size of a nuclear button matters little, and the obsession with the big damage that a nuclear arsenal offers is one surrogate for the size of something exclusively masculine. In some places, men buy gigantic pickups even if those are simply their means of commuting. So what! I am not impressed. I may be enough of a sissy to be proud of fights that I evaded even if by running from them; then again, what does a bar-room brawl prove?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.