Sex, Republican perverts and the MSM
8 August 2007 by Naomi
Sara, at Orcinus blog, may have found the one answer that connects those three. It’s a long post, so I’ve excerpted enough to, hopefully, entice you to read it all. I think you’re mature enough to handle the truth, unlike the crippled-by-authoritarianism-Neocons. Frankly, I think it’s brilliant!
As Dave discusses
in a post below, Digby thinks the conservatives are a bunch of whining babies who can’t take a loss. Dave responds with the observation they’re leering old men who can’t get it up any more. Both views suggest that our national corps of conservative talking heads, taken as a group, has a very warped relationship with masculinity. But I’ve got a third take on it, which sort of takes in both their arguments and then goes a little deeper.Over the years, my online ex-fundie community has spent a lot of time puzzling over the ways in which fundamentalism arrests the moral, social, emotional, intellectual, and sexual development of anyone who embraces it. (And I could argue that, inasmuch as fundamentalism is authoritarian religion, this observation may well hold true for political and social authoritarians as well.) Specifically, we’ve come to a consensus that the belief system traps people somewhere around the age of five or six — and keeps them there for as long as they continue to believe.
In fact, that naivete — deceptively packaged as purity and innocence — is one of the main things people are seeking when they’re drawn into authoritarian systems. They join up because they feel overwhelmed by the complexity and nuance in the world. There’s just too much to keep up with, too much responsibility, too much chaos. Often, they’ve been caught in the gears of the machinery of modernity, and have had large parts of their lives chewed up by the works. It all feels out of control. (Chris Hedges, in his new book American Fascism, describes how Christianist proselytizers are taught to seek out people going through hard times– they’re the hottest conversion prospects.)
Unfortunately, seeking this regression means giving up on quite a few of the most important attributes of adulthood. First, there’s the intellectual sacrifice. There’s a huge cognitive leap that occurs around the age of seven (it usually comes in right alongside reading fluency) that enables a far greater level of abstraction — typically, at the expense of magical thinking, which drops off dramatically once kids learn to read. At this age, kids give up fantasy play and Santa Claus in favor of a more empirical approach to life, and more serious pursuits leading to the mastery of adult-world skills. Developmental psychologists call this leap “the age of reason.”
[...]
The howling conservative and MSM men we’re seeing on the air these [days?] seem to be stuck in some early sexual stage — a stage where manliness and sexuality are scary adult mysteries, the obsessive stuff of wild curiosity, rampant misunderstandings, crude jokes, dress-up play-acting, and bizarre fetishes. For all their media power, these guys have sexually scarcely moved beyond playing doctor– and, at this late stage, probably never will. Scratch any leering old man, and you’ll expose a scared kid who, fifty years on, still hasn’t come to terms with his own uncontrollable wet dreams, let alone the challenge of engaging productively with his own adult sexuality and that of the real-life adult women he shares the world with.
My first husband — who as a Latino, a clinical psychologist, and the son of a Marine Corps drill instructor, knew a thing or two about the anatomy of macho — used to say that the first rule of real macho was that those who possess it never need to prove it to anyone. If you have to prove it or put it out on display, you don’t have it in the first place. And if you are intimidated by seeing it in others, you aren’t even in the ballpark. The truth of that should come home to all of us every time we hear an MSM or conservative talking head going on in breathless awe about some public figure’s “manhood,” or asking leering, creepy questions about other people’s sex lives.
In a time when we need thought leaders who can help us sort out the issues and navigate the national crisis, we’ve got a media staffed by sniggering, leering first-graders who exhibit every regressive intellectual, moral, emotional, and sexual characteristic of right-wing authoritarian followers. It’s time to clean house — and to demand new media voices who aren’t in business to make fun of the grownups, or shamed by people who show the attributes of true maturity and power. It’s time to send the scared little boys home, and put some authentic adults in charge.
Think back to our childhoods. What one thing set yesteryear’s newscasters apart from today’s? Maturity. Whether or not they were telling us the truth (and I think they did, for the most part), we believed them. They were calm, rational-sounding and trustworthy.
Today, it’s “all gossip, all the time”! They seem obsessed with young women, whether missing or just “gone wild”. They love to “dig in the dirt” of the political sandbox the GOP built. The GOP provides the mud and the MSM is challenged to make it into a pie. And they’re happy to do it! And don’t get me started on the “glamor-pusses” who pander to the male viewer…
Pass this along (although, I would hesitate to send it to, say, a fundie brother-in-law who you suspect is beating your sister). But let’s be sure that this reaches as many people as possible, as soon as possible. November 2008 is just around the corner.
It’s a powerful meme! And how can a Neocon fight this indictment, except by getting angry and acting in just the manner that does him the most harm with independent voters. To try to reason it away or to change his campaign strategy to deflect this won’t help him – not even ignoring it will make it go away. He is/was/will always be a child pretending to be a man.
Let’s elect adults next year.
8 August 2007, on 2:10 pm
I don’t think any adults are running…
8 August 2007, on 8:19 pm
Especially the ones that have a chance….
. I do not want to think about having another 4 years of damnation.
8 August 2007, on 9:42 pm
“Think back to our childhoods. What one thing set yesteryear’s newscasters apart from today’s? Maturity…They were calm, rational-sounding and trustworthy.
Today, it’s “all gossip, all the time”!…And they’re happy to do it! And don’t get me started on the “glamor-pusses” who pander to the male viewer…”
This is so true. We’ve trudge alone way from Edward R. Murrow. Sean Hannity? Bill O’Reiley? Don’t even get me started on that Oxycontin fueled windbag piece of work Ugh, what sanctamonius “mimbos.”
And yes the one adult in the whole lot of Presidential hopefuls, Kucinich, does’t stand a fundies chance at a Mapplethorpe exhibit.
A question for the Gifsters to consider: Are fundamentalists stunted intellectually because of their religious belief, as this post claims, or is it the reverse? Does this kind of philosophy tend to be attractive to those stuck in the concrete operational stage of thought? Maybe there’s some of both?
8 August 2007, on 10:10 pm
…. That is a hard question. But, I am going to go with the intellectual stunted by religious beliefs. Who knows might be a bit of both. I know of a person that says “We think with our hearts not with out minds”. And this person just graduated from college this year.
8 August 2007, on 11:01 pm
Orcinus is a really good blog and is one I frequent regularly.
8 August 2007, on 11:25 pm
“Are fundamentalists stunted intellectually because of their religious belief, as this post claims, or is it the reverse? Does this kind of philosophy tend to be attractive to those stuck in the concrete operational stage of thought? Maybe there’s some of both?” – Fritzy
Shorter version; which came first, the Chicken Hawk or the egg?
An added factor in this stunted evolutionary branch of our species is the natural fear response to change of any sort. Taken to an extreme, this manifests as an unhealthy obsession with the way things were- and a false memory/delusion of some ideological utopia that never actually existed(the not so halcyon ’50’s, for instance). Never mind that there weren’t as many people back then, that what crime did occur all across the nation wasn’t broadcast on 24 hour news channels, that a whole class of people was still legally oppressed, and that any deviation from the uberpatriotic norm resulted in accusations of- and sometimes reprisal for- communism. Good old days, yup.
When everything was, whether real or imagined, black and white, good and evil, little was required from the muscle between our ears. And I think that part of the problem for those to whom this post refers is sheer intellectual laziness. Repression+Emasculation+Power= ???
8 August 2007, on 11:47 pm
This would certainly explain what my cousin likes to call Shrub and his cronies’ war. She says it’s like boys playing with their G.I. Joes.
9 August 2007, on 2:47 am
I recently read a study that showed part of the reason that conservatism and fundamentalism go like a hand in a glove are because people who follow these lines of thought are most comfortable in an authoritarian environment. Critical thinking and questioning authority are signs of either “disloyalty” or “sin”. Their rewards are given for, instead, blindly following.
Perhaps (and I’m being entirely speculative here) this is a genetic throwback to a “Pack” mentality; where the “Alpha” gets all the authority, first pick of the food, and all the sex, and all other males are content with their subservient positions, simply because they aren’t “worthy” of Alpha-status.
9 August 2007, on 8:42 am
Oh, yes, the good ol’ ’50s. And, Terra, you have it exactly right in that analogy. I don’t know what’s worse, now or then. But, back during the Kennedy years in Santo Domingo and the early stages of Viet Nam some lieutenant or sergeant on a patrol might hear his radio break squelch and a voice say, “This is the white house. Take your men and…” and even better than GI Joe toys, you can rattle their bones if they die to get more of what you want.
Maybe the academic community would say that this is “anecdotal”, evidence, but I met enough people who actually experienced it to figure it was so. {Aside: a person who is a professor of history once told me that no Viet Nam returnee had ever been spat on when they returned home. I told him about having a coke thrown on me while waiting for a plane home in the SFX terminal. He smiled indulgently, and explained that this, too, was ‘anecdotal’. Apparently, no event is ‘valid’ unless observed, recorded, or researched by a credentialed academic with a grant. I asked why didn’t they start wearing arm bands or something so we could summon them and our experience would thus be rendered ‘real’. He waxed impatient with my unseemliness.}
But, the fundie question. Just take a look: ‘God bless America!” Translation, “Me, Daddy, me! I’m best, you love me best! Right Daddy?” Plus they need certainty and rules. They always seem to be scared. My reverend cuz-in-law has always been leary of these folks. She says they are terrified of responsibility, they are terrified of what THEY might do if there was no external control on them, see others as theyu see themselves, and need others to knuckle under so they can feel safe and sure. People walking around without this “brake” make them doubt themselves more.
There was a Jewish couple in town, I may have mentioned them, he was a lawyer, his wife was a doctor. Very urbane, kind, good people. They used to hire me to play for parties and such. Beautiful woman, immensly kind and caring doctor. They left town and joined some very fundie, excluding, restrictive Jewish sect. Some time back I ran across her when they were in town for something, and I hardly recognised her. We talked, and she told me about the ’security’ she felt now. There was good and bad, right and wrong in everything she did. Her dress was codified, their diet was codified, no deviations. Plus, she said that she wasn’t being hit on by men all the time. I was the only male not in a hospital bed that she’d known who hadn’t attempted some seduction. She felt relief.
Scary.
9 August 2007, on 2:24 pm
Yeah…”Round and round ’she’ goes, and…”
The same human made up bullshit and squabbling…over and over, ad infinitum.
Hmmm…Nietzsche often comes to my mind…ala “Existence is absurd!”.
Or…in more mundane lingo: “What’s the point?”
Hey wait!…that’s ‘way’ depressing; we just GOTTA make up something…ANYTHING…to rationalize our existence.
Erm…How ’bout there’s a Flying Spaghetti Monster who…just now…through a ‘voice of revelation’…told (humble) ME that I should do this and that; and to tell others about His existence…and that there’ll be an eternal. big banquet…but only for true believers…when we’re all digested by those nasty maggots.
For unbelievers…there’ll be…erm…Eternal acid indigestion?
Wow…I guess maybe I’m a Prophet, or something!
I heard that, you doubters!…Nutcase indeed!
I know what I know….
Yeah…I just have to ‘Pasta on’ the truth.
Foist: I hoid…”I am the Lard thy Gord…and Remember to keep Holy the “Slab Hut” (erm…Restaurant?) with the most holy ritual commandment…I think the ‘voice’ said something like…
“Thou shalt sprinkle Parmesan on one another as ye pass through thy travails!”
What’s that, GifSters?…
“But it’s Cheese!”…?
Oh ye of little faith!
Or maybe…as infidels…we should all do like the leaves in this little Python clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp1HVg_J7QA
9 August 2007, on 8:58 pm
“It’s time to send the scared little boys home, and put some authentic adults in charge.”
“Never insult a small man. He’ll kill you for it” – Robert A. Heinlein
There is a reason that no one has yet been able to bell these cats, and why the inmates continue to run the asylum. Those with the illegitimate and underhanded routes to power will not give them up without a fight. Scruples are for the sheeple, not the corrupt puppet masters.
9 August 2007, on 10:53 pm
I can always count on Raindogzilla for a laugh.
Good insights from everyone that posted in response to my question. I also read about that study of which Sargoth speaks. I believe the percentage of the general population that falls into this group, according to this study, is about 30% (hmm…also Bush’s approval rating for the past two years–at least he can rest assured in the fact that his approval will never drop below this, even if he listens in on people’s international phone calls. 30% is probably adequate to make a C- student happy.)
When it comes to Fundamentalism in all it’s forms, I’m leaning towards the intellectually lazy theory–(which fits in with the authoritarian study well.) It helps explain why I know otherwise intelligent people that believe burning foliage can talk and that mumbling “I wish, I wish I wish” to yourself enough can actually make things come true.
10 August 2007, on 4:19 am
Perhaps they just have small dicks?
21 August 2007, on 7:33 pm
“Are fundamentalists stunted intellectually because of their religious belief, as this post claims, or is it the reverse?”
Well, since most of us were brought up in a religious setting but managed to break free, I’d have to say that those who join religion in the first place are intellectually stunted first, while those who are brought into religion when young may BECOME intellectually stunted, and keep them from leaving again. We were just the lucky ones who seemed to escape without any permanent damage.