The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote or Work, or Have Opinions, by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

Friends:

What once sounded “too extreme” to take seriously is increasingly entering mainstream political and cultural discourse. The growing masculinist movement documented in this recent piece is not just internet provocation or fringe performance. It reflects a broader backlash against feminism, gender equality, public education, diversity efforts, and democratic pluralism itself.

Readers should resist the temptation to dismiss these developments simply because they sound outlandish or “too far-fetched.” History teaches us that democratic erosion often begins with ideas first framed as jokes, provocations, or hypothetical thought experiments before becoming normalized through repetition, media amplification, and political power. When influential public figures openly discuss repealing women’s voting rights, restricting women’s participation in public life, or dismantling anti-discrimination protections, we should pay attention—not panic, but pay attention.

I do need to say something about Christian debater Andrew Wilson's allegation and twisted logic that women "‘covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies,’ and therefore that ‘all cancellations are feminine.’” 

This is not at all true. Some of the most devastating forms of censorship, silencing, and social ostracism in U.S. history were not carried out by women exercising “soft power,” but by institutions dominated by men: legislatures banning books, universities purging dissidents, states criminalizing Ethnic Studies, overwhelmingly patriarchal churches enforcing orthodoxy, employers blacklisting organizers, and governments surveilling activists. To describe ostracism as “feminine” erases histories of colonial violence, McCarthyism, segregation, patriarchy, and authoritarian governance.

Inasmuch as women are behind this, it would be status quo, patriarchal women behind this within a larger system of patriarchal power.

The question is not whether every extreme proposal will become law. The question is what happens to a democracy when such ideas increasingly shape the moral and political imagination of an increasingly less-fringe movement about which we should all be concerned. 

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote or Work, or Have Opinions, by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

The influential pastor Douglas Wilson has advo­cated for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Lindsey Wasson / AP.)

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’ ” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”

Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”

This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.

Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”

Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.

But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Wilson’s approach to public life clearly has an element of what professional wrestlers call kayfabe—the winking, performative trollishness that now characterizes the online right. He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process. But Wilson and a growing number of powerful allies are sincere in these beliefs, and would want to enact them if given the chance.

One of masculinism’s central claims is that no one is talking about men. So true! Men’s issues are not being discussed in Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. They aren’t being discussed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men. They aren’t being discussed in the panoply of Christian books available on Amazon with titles such as Man for the Job, Masculine Christianity, and It’s Good to Be a Man, or in their secular counterparts, such as Why Women Deserve Less. They aren’t being talked about on social-media feeds (which can be highly segregated by sex) or on some of America’s most popular independent podcasts, such as Modern Wisdom, Huberman Lab, and The Diary of a CEO.

For decades, each feminist advance in American public life has prompted an equally strong backlash. The first wave of women’s-rights activists won suffrage for women, against ferocious and sometimes violent opposition. After the second wave secured Title IX and other legal victories against sex discrimination, Phyllis Schlafly successfully fought back against the full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. By the identity-obsessed 2010s, the full weight of corporate America had swung behind glib slogans such as “The future is female.” This commercial blitzkrieg inevitably convinced some people that women’s advancement had come at men’s expense. A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.

On the internet, masculinism is presented as a rebellion—a transgressive middle finger to the liberal establishment, expressed in all the words a corporate HR department would order you not to say. In the past few years, leaked group chats have shown Young Republicans and college conservatives using sexism, infused with racism, as a bonding mechanism. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” read a message in a Telegram thread used by the leaders of Young Republican chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. (Several members of the chat were women.) Richard Hanania, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, calls this kind of in-group signaling “the Based Ritual,” a way for younger MAGA enthusiasts to prove their bona fides to one another.

Nick Fuentes has suggested that women be sent to “breeding gulags.” (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jacquelyn Martin / AP.)

Among Gen Zers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes, who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers. A self-professed Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin, Fuentes has built a fan base in part by deploying vividly misogynistic language. “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

What Charlottesville Illuminated: The Core Assumption at the Heart of the “You will not replace us” Chant is Disturbingly Widespread

Friends,

As educators, we know that history is not just about the past—it’s about how we understand the present and imagine the future. That’s why I want to highlight this important collection from Politico Magazine, published one year after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Taking place during the first year of the Trump administration, Charlottesville marked what many at the time understood as a turning point in America’s confrontation with racism, political extremism, and white nationalist ideology.

Today, we know more. What once seemed like a fringe movement has since revealed itself as a powerful political force, shaping everything from school policy to immigration law to the discourse around American identity. As such, it remains vital that we revisit where we were then—so we can better understand how we got here.

Among the 16 essays in this reflective series, the one by Heather McGhee stands out for its substantive focus on white replacement theory (WRT), a once-fringe conspiracy now openly trafficked in mainstream political discourse. McGhee’s piece is essential reading. She reminds us that the violence on display in Charlottesville—the torch-lit march, the deadly car attack—was not simply about hate, but about fear: specifically, the widespread belief among many white Americans that racial progress for others necessarily comes at their expense.

“You will not replace us” was more than a chant. It reflected a zero-sum worldview—a racialized anxiety reinforced by political messaging, media narratives, and anti-immigrant rhetoric. McGhee draws on research showing that when white Americans are reminded of the country’s shifting demographics, they often move toward more conservative policy positions, regardless of their prior affiliations.

But what McGhee so powerfully articulates is that these beliefs do not only live at the margins. They are sustained by what she calls “America’s myth of innocence”—our national tendency to celebrate our founding ideals while avoiding the hard truths about how white supremacy has long been baked into our systems, including those we teach and work within.

Her call to action is clear: we must craft a new national narrative—one grounded in truth, accountability, and a vision of shared prosperity. As educators, we are uniquely positioned to contribute to this effort. In our classrooms, our scholarship, and our institutional leadership, we must resist the normalization of white grievance politics and instead model what it means to build a multiracial democracy rooted in justice and inclusion.

Cultivating an open mind about what it truly means to live in a multi-ethnic, multiracial democracy—something we are rapidly moving toward—is not just important; it's essential. Research shows that so-called "traditional masculinity," especially as promoted by the alt-right and the manosphere, often sabotages the very relationships and family structures it claims to defend. These ideologies glorify hostility, entitlement, and emotional detachment—traits that ultimately undermine intimacy, stability, and long-term well-being. 

In fact, studies have found that men who engage in nurturing fatherhood experience significant biological changes, including lower testosterone levels, suggesting that emotional investment—not dominance—supports reproductive and relational success (e.g. Gettler et al., 2011). Put simply, it’s in men’s best interest to evolve as WRT doesn't contribute to biological-species reproduction and survival. Don't take it from me. Read the research for yourselves.

I do see this beginning to happen in my circles, but more must be done, beginning in our homes and families. I invite you to read McGhee’s piece closely. Let it affirm the urgency of our work—and the power of education to help shape an America that truly belongs to us all.

—Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Gettler LT, McDade TW, Feranil AB, Kuzawa CW. (2011). Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(39):16194–16199. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1105403108

What Charlottesville Changed, by POLITICO Magazine: 

We asked 16 of the most thoughtful people we know to describe the impact of the violence—and how we should think about it a year later





The core assumption at the heart of the “You will not replace us” chant is disturbingly widespread’
Heather McGhee is a distinguished senior fellow and former president of Demos and Demos Action.

The white supremacist violence in Charlottesville—the menacing, torchlit march to the Robert E. Lee statue and the armed and ultimately murderous rally the next day—was alarming for what it revealed not just about the torch-bearers, but about us. The neo-Nazis chanted “You will not replace us,” claiming a continuity between their white tribal allegiances and the monuments to Confederate icons threatened with removal. But while their violence may have marked them as fringe, the core assumption at the heart of their chant is disturbingly widespread.

A landmark study published in 2014 by psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found that white people’s anxiety about a changing America is politically determinative: “making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”

The pundit class assumed that when Trump revealed his sympathies for white supremacists and Nazis—groups which, he said, included some “very fine people”—it would mark a line past which accountability would soon follow. It hasn’t. And that’s in part because stoking racial division and a sense of white grievance has become the core political strategy of Trump’s Republican Party.

You see this acutely in the thousands of anti-immigrant campaign ads GOP candidates have paid for this election cycle—ads like one run by Troy Balderson, the Ohio Republican who won a special election last week, which promised to “stop illegals from taking our jobs.” It draws on the same logic of “you will not replace us”—a belief which researchers have found is widespread among white people (but not among black people): that we live in a zero-sum game of racial competition. When people of color progress, it necessarily comes at white people’s expense.

The people to whom this Trumpian message appeals don’t see themselves as hateful; they see themselves as law-abiding Americans looking out for their own. That’s nothing new: America has always had a material investment in the myth of our innocence, in championing our founding words and not our founding deeds.

There is no better example of this mythmaking than the flourishing of monuments to America’s traitors, who brought millions to war to defend a system that enriched a few at the expense and enslavement of many. In Charlottesville and 1,728 other places across the country, Confederate monuments teach not history but a subtle moral lesson that America will not just tolerate white supremacists, but find ways to justify their cause as one of noble self-preservation.

A year after Charlottesville, it’s time to replace the statues and tell the truth about America. The truth is, the South flourished economically after the civil rights movement unleashed the contributions of her black citizens. The truth is, new immigrants disproportionately create jobs and enrich communities. The truth is, America’s multiracial future is coming, and there don’t have to be two sides—we can make an America for all of us.

What’s the Matter with Men? by Idrees Kahloon, The New Yorker

I read every word of this piece that delves into the disparities that many of us are observing between men and women in U.S. society. Author, Idrees Kahloon, notes that 

"[M]any social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes." 

Kahloon cites interesting research that focuses on males, while also considering academic achievement and pay differentials between women and men, as well as physiological differences in maturational development that translate into increased chances of getting diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), higher rates of school suspension and dropping out relative to girls.

The answer to this malaise, Kahloon suggests, is not resorting to the kind of "vintage masculinity" that fosters an entitled sense of dominance and power over others. He cites a British scholar and sociologist, Richard V. Reeves who has studied this phenomenon who concludes "It's not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them."

"Prosocial masculinity" as a remedy derives from Kahloon's readings on the matter. He delves into race a bit, but insufficiently. He also doesn't provide any specific insights into our younger, Generation Z youth for whom observed significant differences on a range of political attitudes that serve as indicators of progressivism that markedly distinguish females and males (Twenge, 2023). I "see" Gen Z in his analysis but he pivots simplistically between younger and older males. In all fairness to Kahloon, his is a synopsis of the literature that is, by definition, abbreviated. Reeves (2023) is who people are reading right now. If you keyword him in Google you'll see that he's ignited the press and the blogosphere.

I still wonder of Kahloon's insufficient attention to the impact of the culture wars in reifying notions of traditional masculinity that tend to be at odds with more complex, fluid and non-binary notions of gender. A related factor is that this malaise is occurring simultaneously with a generation of youth that researchers maintain is the most queer generation in U.S. history (Twenge, 2023). What a combination!

Societally, what this means, among other things, is that many of us Baby Boomers did not pass on the stigmas held by our earlier generations and that's a good thing. 

In my parents'—and their parents' generation, they used such terms as "out-of-wedlock" to describe children born outside of the bounds of marriage. When was the last time you heard that expression? It used to be a matter of tremendous shame to get a divorce. And how shameful to be someone's "second husband" or "second wife." Forget being lesbian, gay, or transgendered. "Coming out of the closet" was a common expression in my younger years.

All of these stigmas—atop existing ones like race and class—were socially, emotionally, and psychologically costly, if not brutal, for earlier generations. The social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s were impactful and a clear departure from the past—to which today's culture wars tortuously, if impossibly, seek to reverse.

I completely agree that we have to be intentional in our caring for our young men and boys. We need to also remain focused on our girls, too, who to their credit, tend to be more prosocial than boys. Still mental health is a huge issue for Gen Z so we cannot be over-attentive to such matters. Much to consider and ponder.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Reeves, R. (2022). Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, why it Matters, and what to Do about it. Brookings Institution Press.

Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future. Simon and Schuster.

What’s the Matter with Men?

They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

By Idrees Kahloon

Jan. 23, 2023 | The New Yorker

First, there was Adam, whose creation takes center stage on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then, fashioned out of Adam’s spare rib, there was Eve, relegated to a smaller panel. In Michelangelo’s rendition, as in the Bible’s, the first man sleeps through the miraculous creation of his soul mate, the first woman and the eventual mother of humanity. Many of our foundational myths are, in this way, stories about men, related by men to other men. The notion of female equality is, historically, an innovation. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex,” published in 1949. “And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, that change has continued. By a variety of metrics, men are falling behind parity. Is the second sex becoming the better half?

Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. His latest book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” (Brookings), argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates. Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”

Oaxaca's Third Gender—"Las Muxes: El Tercer Género de Oaxaca" [YouTube Video]

As we think in our own country of trans and LGBTQ rights, "Las Muxes" [pronounced 'MOO-ches'] from the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico—and specifically from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—remind us that gender is not only fluid but an unquestioned, accepted part of life in different parts of the world. Moreover, this is hardly a phenomenon that derives from our ostensibly "woke" moment, but is Indigenous and centuries old, predating Columbus' invasion of the Americas. 

I am readily reminded of Two-Spirit peoples and ways of knowing and being in Native North America about which there is a growing scholarly literature (e.g., Robinson, 2020). In short, what is today considered by some to be divergent is actually native to this continent. How cool is that?

If you listen below to the YouTube video (in Spanish), you learn that las Muxes are born into male bodies, but do not identify as men. Nor do they identify as women. Nor are they transexuals, transvestites, or homosexuals. Instead, they are considered a "tercer género," or "third gender." Their dream is to marry heterosexual men which is not easily achieved.

They live dignified lives in the context of their own community and society. As expressed by one of them, their primary problem occurs with respect to Mexican government policies that disallow them to attend secondary schools and to otherwise get formally educated. 

This becomes salient at the secondary level because it is by the age of 12 or 13 when they come into an awareness of their gender and schools don't allow them to dress like girls or women. Consequently, they are forced to take up roles associated with the care of the home and assisting with community festivities. They get relegated to gendered occupational roles like seamstresses, weavers, cooks, hair stylists, and so on. Moreover, the state's reinforcement of rigid gender identities constructs a specific kind of gender identity that alienates and excludes them from educational opportunities and that further lead to discrimination. sexual violence, and exploitation.

A text I've not read about the Muxe but quickly found is this one, researched by a former professor of mine, Dr. Alfredo Mirandé, titled, Behind the Mask: Gender Hybridity in a Zapotec Community (2019). There is also this wonderful movie on Netflix that embraces the complexities of Muxe identity titled. The Secret of the River (El Secreto del Rio) that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Scholars like Maria Lugones urge us in the modern era to consider gender from the perspective of how people that have been colonized, struggled historically not solely with the rigidity of gender categories introduced by Western European colonizers, but also how the introduction of race in the 1500s erased not solely the complex, situated understandings of gender throughout the Americas, but women themselves. 

With echoes of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?," Indigenous notions of gender were subjected to a system of racial classification that justified slavery, conquest, and all manner or racial and sexual violence. We live today the vestiges of that horrible history to which patriarchy is obsessively invested.

Before we construe this as a battle between the sexes, let's understand that patriarchal violence is as harmful to men as it is to women, if not more so. Personally, I find this liberating and fully compatible with our most powerful religious and spiritual traditions that center notions of love and acceptance, particularly, of those deemed "other," in a shared quest for a world where all diversity is embraced simultaneously with the notion that all human beings—by virtue of being human—are intrinsically worthy of dignity and respect.

Do view the video. Thanks to Dr. Martha Lengeling for sharing.

Happy pride month!

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186-219.

Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742-759.

Mirandé, A. (2017). Behind the mask: Gender hybridity in a Zapotec community. University of Arizona Press.

Robinson, M. (2020) Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity, Journal of Homosexuality, 67:12, 1675-1690.

Truth, S. (1851). Speech at women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric (s), 144-146. [pdf]

America Is Still a Patriarchy by Philip Cohen

This 2012 Wall St. Journal piece that addresses the concept and relevance of patriarchy in U.S. society is encouraging mainly because it suggests that American patriarchy was weakened—long before the 2018 midterms that created the most diverse Congressional House of Representatives in our nation's history.  I hope we keep trending in this direction as a country toward gender-inclusive politics, policies, and values both across and within all racial/ethnic and economic groups.  

This requires intentionality and vigilance in terms of policies, practices, and priorities rather than something that we as a society "back up" into.  For this, we need pubic school curriculum this is critical together with pedagogical practices that are inclusive and equity-based.  This is what an Ethnic Studies curriculum should offer although it should be threaded throughout the curriculum.

The late Brazilian educator Paolo Freire stated that we should put learning at the service of social justice.  This should challenge us as educators and forever guide our teaching and curriculum as this an ethic that optimally rests at the heart of all educational endeavors.

-Angela Valenzuela

SEXES

America Is Still a Patriarchy

PHILIP COHEN

NOV 19, 2012 Wall st. journal

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Male dominance may be weakening, but it's not gone.

In this election, women were the majority of voters, and the majority of them voted for Obama. The weaker sex clearly was men, contributing less than half the vote, the majority of whom preferred the loser. This is not new. As with Obama, men and whites also failed to unseat Bill Clinton in his reelection after voting for him the first time.

This story tests my ability to think systematically about power and inequality. How is it possible to understand an unprecedented transformation in women's relative status while also acknowledging men's continued dominance? Must we just list data points, always just including an "on the other hand" caveat to our real narrative? 

I have been described as part of a "feminist academic establishment" that insists on taking the glass-half-empty view—as someone who likes to engage in "data wars" over the details of gender inequality. But what I actually try to do is keep the change in perspective.

In our academic research on gender inequality, my colleagues and I study variation and change. That means figuring out why women's employment increased so rapidly, why some labor markets have smaller gender gaps, why some workplaces are less segregated, why couples in some countries share housework more, why women in some ethnic groups have higher employment rates, and so on.

The patterns of variation and change help us understand how gender inequality works. Systemic inequality doesn't just happen. People (in the aggregate) get up in the morning and do it every day. To understand how it works, we need to see how it varies (for example, some people resist equality and some people dedicate their lives to it). Someone who studies inequality but doesn't care about change and variation is not a social scientist.

Patriarchy

"It's easy to find references to patriarchs, patriarchy or patriarchal attitudes in reporting on other countries," writes Nancy Folbre:

Yet these terms seem largely absent from discussions of current economic and political debates in the United States. Perhaps they are no longer applicable. Or perhaps we mistakenly assume their irrelevance.

In fact—my interpretation of the facts—the United States, like every society in the world, remains a patriarchy: they are ruled by men. That is not just because every country (except Rwanda) has a majority-male national parliament, and it is despite the handful of countries with women heads of state. It is a systemic characteristic that combines dynamics at the level of the family, the economy, the culture and the political arena.

Top political and economic leaders are the low-hanging fruit of patriarchy statistics. But they probably are in the end the most important—the telling pattern is that the higher you look, the maler it gets. If a society really had a stable, female-dominated power structure for an extended period of time even I would eventually question whether it was really still a patriarchy.

In my own area of research things are messier, because families and workplaces differ so much and power is usually jointly held. But I'm confident in describing American families as mostly patriarchal.

Maybe the most basic indicator is the apparently quaint custom of wives assuming their husbands' names. This hasn't generated much feminist controversy lately. But to an anthropologist from another planet, this patrilineality would be a major signal that American families are male-dominated.

Among U.S.-born married women, only 6 percent had a surname that differed from their husband's in 2004 (it was not until the 1970s that married women could even function legally using their "maiden" names). Among the youngest women the rate is higher, so there is a clear pattern of change—but no end to the tradition in sight.

Of course, the proportion of people getting married has fallen, and the number of children born to non-married parents has risen. Single parenthood—and the fact that this usually means single motherhood—reflects both women's growing independence and the burdens of care that fall on them (another piece of the patriarchal puzzle). This is one of many very important changes. But they don't add up to a non-patriarchal society.

Differences that matter

The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich—in a 1976 essay she might or might not like to be reminded of—urged feminists to acknowledge distinctions that matter rather than tar everything with the simplistic brush of "patriarchy." Using China as an example, she wrote:

There is a difference between a society in which sexism is expressed in the form of female infanticide and a society in which sexism takes the form of unequal representation on the Central Committee. And the difference is worth dying for.

China presents an extreme case, with an extremely harsh patriarchy that was fundamentally transformed—into a different sort of patriarchy. By the late 1970s female infanticide (as well as footbinding) had indeed been all but eradicated, which represented a tremendous improvement for women, saving millions of lives. Since the advent of the one-child policy in the 1980s, however, female infanticide has given way to sex-selective abortion (and female representation on the ruling committees has dropped), representing an important transformation. Calling China a "patriarchy" is true, but by itself doesn't much help explain the pattern of and prospects for change.

Like Ehrenreich, I think we need to look at the variations to understand the systemic features of our society. Men losing out to women in national elections is an important one. Given the choice between two male-dominated parties with platforms that don't differ fundamentally on the biggest economic issues despite wide differences in social policy, women voters (along with blacks, Latinos and the poor) bested men and got their way. I wouldn't minimize that (more than I just did), or ignore the scale and direction of change. The American patriarchy has weakened.

I expect some readers will go right to their favorite statistics or personal experiences in order to challenge my description of our society as patriarchal. In that tit-for-tat, men leading the vast majority of the most powerful institutions, and that American families usually follow the male line, become just another couple of data points. But they shouldn't be, because some facts are more important than others.

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PHILIP COHEN is a professor of sociology at the 

University of Maryland in College Park.