Macho Man vs. the Pussy

Among his achievements Donald Trump has now instigated a national conversation about pussy. Before Trump no one would ever have dared utter the word in polite company. Now everyone is talking about it.

Ignore the fact that Trump claims merely to have been echoing a phrase intoned repeatedly by one of his supporters, namely that Ted Cruz was a pussy. Why did the Trumpette say such a thing? Well, she was saying that Cruz was apparently not sufficiently vigorous in his support of waterboarding.

Since Cruz did support waterboarding as a means of enhanced interrogation, Trump’s supporters were accusing Cruz of being weak for not embracing torture.

It feels like a distinction without a difference. And, since Cruz has spent much of his time in the United States Senate as an army of one leading a war against the Washington establishment, it makes very little sense to call him a “pussy” unless you want to explain why you were not on the front lines or even on the back lines in the struggle.

Of course, Trump was striking a blow against political correctness. As long as that disease infects American culture, and as long as people are at their wits' end trying to figure out how to put an end to it they turn to Trump. How better to destroy political correctness than to be scrupulously and repulsively politically incorrect.

Better yet, since most sentient Americans understand that the country is becoming increasingly feminized—of women, by women, for women and for Muslim refugees—what better antidote could there be but a man who is not ashamed and apologetic about being a male, about being a white male, about having earned certain privileges, and even being especially crude. After all, Trump is the family breadwinner. In the Cruz family, the role falls to his wife, the Goldman Sachs managing director.

For his followers, Trump represents manliness on steroids. You can be sure that no one ever called Donald Trump a pussy. That must be the reason why his followers love him. They are convinced that in a Trumpified world they will not be harassed into saying that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and will not have to fight to ensure that their teenage daughters do not have to share the shower room with a biologically male being. In a Trumpified world they will retain the right to believe that there was a reason why traditional marriage was always the norm in human societies.

In a time when the night riders of the thought police are terrorizing classrooms all over America, and where children are being forced to call their teachers things like Mx Jones, Trump represents righteous rebellion against imbecilities are being force fed to children.

As for the conversation about pussy, or really about what it means for a man to be called a pussy, one turns to the estimable Lizzie Crocker, who has researched the question. Obviously, calling a man a pussy sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger calling some men “girlie men.”

Crocker sheds some light on the issue:

“Pussy” as an epithet is derived from the pejorative connotation of “girly,” as in a domesticated pussycat, but some experts say it is largely devoid of misogyny when delivered as a crude insult.

“I think that for most people, you can use ‘pussy’ pretty safely without having it be interpreted as a direct reference to a woman or a woman’s body part,” Michael Adams, a lexicographer and professor of English at Indiana University, told The Daily Beast.

As for the etymology of the word—point which intrigues us all-- Crocker has done the relevant research:

A Slate podcast on the “etymological quirkiness of the word ‘pussy’” explains that the earliest documented examples of “pussy” in the English language were in the late 1500s, when it was used to describe a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat.

It was first evoked by the moralizing English pamphleteer Philip Stubbs in his famous Anatomy of Abuses, a rant about the debauched nature of theater, gambling, alcohol, and marrying at a young age. He argued that young husbands and wives could not afford to raise children, and that young men were seeking wives for no reason but to “have a pretty pussy to huggle.”

Linguists have said that Stubbs’ use of “pussy” here is simply a euphemism for “woman,” not her private parts.

She continues:

It wasn’t until the late 1600s that “pussy” became associated with a woman’s vagina, in a song by an Englishman named Thomas Murphy. Murphy’s “pussy” is a double entendre referring to both a woman’s cat and her vagina.

Not until the early 1900s did “pussy” refer to a cowardly man--as in a “wuss” or a “sissy.” Soon after, pussy made its first overtly sexual debut in a 1937 novel about the garment district in New York City, in which a character says of a union brawl, “I wouldn’t miss a second of this for all the pussy in Paris.”

Calling a man a pussy is something like calling him low energy. It suggests that he is less than a man, that he is too weak to be called a real man.

After Crocker, we also take a glance at Jill Filipovic, who has written a column about pussy for Time Magazine. As you will see Filipovic is a feminist zealot, thus a woman whose thought is clouded and confused by ideology.

She raises this issue:

It’s ludicrous, of course, that this word remains an insult lobbed between straight men, who presumably like the things well enough. It’s also an inaccurate synonym for “weak,” given that vaginas themselves are pretty sturdy and resilient, as far as human orifices go. But we know Trump, or the swarms of people who regularly use the word as an insult, aren’t talking about vaginas. They are talking about the people who have them: women. And they have a lot of contempt for women.

Vaginas may be sturdy orifices, but try explaining that to the activists who want to defend women from rape culture. Vaginas may be sturdy orifices, but they also seem to be especially vulnerable.

Naturally, like the good feminist she is, Filipovic believes that most men hold women in contempt. Thus, she believes that when a man calls another man a pussy he is asserting that he is a Real Man. And then she makes the salient point that feminists have overthrown men, especially white men, and that men are pissed off:

They like men, though. Real Men. The kind who made America great back when America was great — the kind of man Trump is running as. The secret to Trump’s success with Republican voters isn’t that he’s un-PC or that he says what he thinks or that voters agree with his outlandish policy proposals. It’s that Trump is a symbol of a kind of unalloyed white-male entitlement slowly on the decline. His supporters miss it, and they want it back.

White men want to feel special again. They want an identity too. And for a long time, what defined them was power and authority. They were the breadwinners in their families, and with that financial control came authority over their wives and children. They were the bosses at work. They set the culture norms and the discourse, and their interests and experiences and opinions were simply recognized as “American.”

That’s what Donald Trump embodies, and what he promises to bestow. It’s why his gaffes never quite seem to derail him — crude displays of male entitlement don’t hurt you when you’re running on crude male entitlement. It’s why his own history of multiple divorces and marriages to models and bankruptcies and gold-plated everything don’t make Republican voters conclude that he’s immoral or decadent or wasteful or foolish. Trump’s ethos is simple: he does whatever the hell he wants and he never has to say he’s sorry. If that’s not the dream of the adolescent American male, what is?

The true story is not that these men hold women in contempt. Say what you want about Donald Trump—and I have not refrained from offering my views—but surely he does not hold his daughter, for example, in contempt. No one is going to say that Ivanka is some kind of hothouse flower of suppressed womanhood.

No, what matters here is that Filipovic and her feminist sisters hold men in considerable contempt. They systematically derogate and denigrate what men have achieved and condemn them on the grounds that they are suffering from the privilege of white entitlement.

Ask yourself for a moment what kind of men made America great. Was there something wrong with the group that Tom Brokaw famously called the greatest generation? Was there something wrong with winning World War II and rebuilding America in its aftermath?

The men who did it did not feel entitled. They were willing to fight and die for their country. Should they have received some recognition for their strength and their victories? Should they have received respect for the privileges they earned? Is there something wrong with providing for your family or for being the boss at work?

Well, Filipovic thinks that everything was wrong with the old days, with the time of the greatest generation.

In her words:

His tagline, “Make America Great Again!,” harkens back to an America ruled by white men — before desegregation, before gay rights, before legal abortion, before many women could have credit cards or bank accounts, before raping your wife was illegal, before more than a handful of women went to college. For many Americans, America wasn’t actually so great in the Good Old Days. But in their opposition to feminism, to abortion rights, to wider contraception access, to marriage equality, to thorough and effective school desegregation, to family policies that would make it easier for women to remain in the workforce, the GOP has fetishized the Good Old Days not just in rhetoric, but in policy that aims to take us back to them.

One notes that the first steps toward desegregation were taken in the 1950s, by members of the greatest generation. But now, according to the politically correct zealots, everything that those white people accomplished is worthless because the country did not have same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. During the 1950s, one must notice, more than a handful of women went to college. Back in the day before feminism, young women did not hook up, either… but I suppose that that was bad too.

Filipovic considers such activities to be adolescent dreams, but surely she does not believe that America’s founding fathers, the men who fought the civil war, the men who won two world wars were acting like adolescents.

Unfortunately, she is blinded by her ideology and by her contempt for men.

In her world, America’s new version of greatness involves victories in the culture wars, especially in the wars against white men and against Anglo-Saxon culture:

But for their disillusioned brethren today, there’s something clearly soothing and inspiring about this soft-focus rearview vision of how America used to be — a sense that at some point, roles were clearly delineated and everyone knew their place and straight white men were on top. Today you can go to a wedding and there’s no bride.  Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year used to be a strapping male Olympian. One of America’s most famous and beautiful pop stars just did a Black Power salute at the Super Bowl. Everyone, it seems, has an identity that matters, a modifier for “American.”

I would emphasize that the true enemy, sometimes named, is Anglo-American culture. The Anglosphere won two world wars in the twentieth century. It won the Cold War. For that many people will never forgive it. And those who attack the Anglo-American branch of Western Civilization are really trying to re-fight the last wars… by using psy-ops to make America less competitive. One must recognize that they have enjoyed some considerable success.

The culture warriors who are defending the oppressed peoples of the world, who are defending the Islamist terrorists and the refugee rapists, hate white Americans and white people in general.

They hate the bad old days when roles were delineated, when people knew who they were and where they were. In the bad old days people knew what they had to do and what they should not do. White men were often on top because they had accomplished things, not because they were running a vast conspiracy to suppress women and gays and the transgendered.

Of course, America has given non-white, non-males multiple opportunities over the past few years. But that is not what the culture warriors want. They want to sow dissension, they want people to turn against each other, they want Americans to be the hyphenated Americans that Theodore Roosevelt famously reviled. Doubtless they believe that America would have done better in the world wars if its armies were co-ed and if they were led by lawyers from the ACLU.

Culture warriors like Filipovic have scored many victories of late. Perhaps the Trump candidacy suggests that someone has finally been willing to call their bluff. 

Of course, when it came to the question of whether women should sign up for the draft, Trump said nothing. Ted Cruz came out forcefully against it.

The trouble with Trump, if I can put it this way, and I have often put it this way, is that he is not made of the same stuff as the men of the greatest generation. He looks more like a caricatured version of manliness than the real thing.  He is more machismo than manliness. He is what manliness looks like in a feminized culture. 

No one would dispute his success in real estate and reality television. But, to believe that his real achievements in one arena will naturally translate into great success in a completely different arena is folly. Trump has succeeded by posturing. If, at some point, he is obliged to try to fulfill his political promises, we will see whether he is a real man or a macho man.