The Day American Patriarchy Took its Mask Off
You Can Have a Democracy — or You Can Have Men Competing to be the Most Dominant and Abusive. But You Can't Have Both.
I don't know if I have the words to remotely do justice to today's especially grotesque chapter in American collapse. So forgive me if I fall short. I'm still angry, disgusted, and ashamed — maybe you are too. I'll come back to that.
We saw many things today. We saw an obviously, clearly still traumatized sexual assault survivor quivering with fright, displaying all the classic signs of severe emotional harm — yet still miles braver than all the jowled, preening, finely suited men taunting and goading and smirking at her. We saw those very men arrange something like a Kafkaesque, Soviet political sham trial — a public spectacle, designed to humiliate, replete with hostile prosecutor, who interrogated her with irrelevant question after irrelevant question, designed to cast suspicion on this frightened, impossibly brave woman's tiniest motive ("How did you get here?" "On an airplane."). And then, at last, we saw the accused himself — as high and mighty as Jove on a throne, sneering with disdain, dripping with contempt, voice cracking like a whip, rage flashing. And then — sobbing great, unctuous crocodile tears of self-pity. And then, in the end, finally, smirking that very same smirk all those men smiled, at the very beginning.
What are we to make of all this?
This was the day American patriarchy took its mask off. And revealed its true self to the world. Did you like what you saw? Or were you disgusted and repelled and ashamed, to be a part of this, too, enraged at the ordeal, like I was? (If you are anything like the men, then, I have noticed whose eyes glaze over at the mention of the word "patriarchy", I suggest gently that you keep reading. Do you want your wives and daughters to grow up in a society like we saw today? Is that a fair thing to say?)
What mask am I talking about? What does it look like? Why have so many of us had such difficulty seeing through it for so long? The mask American patriarchy wears is made of lacrosse games and fraternities and societies and prep schools and Ivy League universities. Of blazers and club ties and boathouses. Of a veneer of genteel civility and politesse. And yet none of these things seem to civilize these boys very much, or nearly enough. They become young men, who become adults but somehow stay children, at all.
Landon and Georgetown Prep and Hilton Arms and Holy Cross. I grew up amongst all that, it might surprise you to know — but just for a year. I rebelled so fiercely that my parents had to, shouting at me, apologizing to the principal, take me out of the storied private school they'd proudly put me into — not understanding, coming from another world, just how explosively destructive American patriarchy really was. Bang! It took me just a few months to really understand it, to see right through it, to know, deep in my bones, how badly I'd be corroded if I stayed in that world. In those few short months — and maybe only then — I was as disgusted and enraged and repelled and ashamed as I was today. I haven't remembered that feeling in quite some time. Some things never change. But I was powerless then, to explain what I saw and felt. Today, though, I will make try to my words as precise as scalpels.
What did you see Brett Kavanaugh do today? He flipped, in this strange, polarized, binary way, between extreme narcissistic rage — shouting, red-faced, about his many accomplishments, thundering how he'd been first in his class, and so on — and just as extreme unctuous self-pity, in great broken sobs — how can they have done this to me? Isn't that bizarre? Psychologically, we'd call it borderline level malignant narcissism — not an ounce of concern or regard for anyone else: he was the world's greatest victim, hounded and pursued by malign forces, unfair because he was as pure as the driven snow. A virgin, so they say.
All that — as confusing as it may be — is exactly what patriarchy really is. These are the only two behaviours that patriarchy really allows men. I will come to why, but first I want you to understand them. Men in patriarchal hierarchies — let's just say people who can only really climb up or slide down hierarchies — only have two behaviours available to them. Those who will climb to the top of such systems must do so by becoming the most dominant and controlling — they must threaten the most violence. When they cannot do that, they must become obsequious, maybe even weepy, playing the victim. That way, their potential power is maximized — those below them fall into line, while those above them aren't threatened.
Violence is the only language such men really understand — only now the mask is slipping away, so we can see it a little better. Hasn't that always been an especially American problem? I'll come back to that. For now, the point. He who can threaten the most violence, usually while playing the greatest victim, so that those above him never see him coming — he is the winner in such systems. Hence, again and again, we see such personalities rise in them — Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and so forth. Classic malignant narcissists — who skyrocketed through patriarchal systems, which were rising in collapsing democracies, as they always do. Pecking orders of violence were being established, as democracies were crumbling.
Do you see how the dynamics of social hierarchies neatly explain the strange, bizarre behaviour we saw in Kavanaugh today — the screams which became the sobs? It wasn't that he exhausted himself — not at all. He alternated rapidly, unconsciously, predictably between threatening a kind of ruinous violence — at one point he literally shouted at the country "you've reaped the whirlwind!!", I think — which was as plain as day to see on his face, which was why everyone who had been near an abuser commented how obvious his rage was — and then lapsed into great gasping sobs of self-pity and self-entitlement, instantly becoming the world's greatest victim ("I was number one in my class!!").
Now. Let us go a little further still. Why do American men of this kind, or men in these systems more generally, prey on people, so constantly, perpetually, relentlessly? Doesn't it typify them, to an almost comical degree? Why is it that preying on women, bullying the vulnerable, abusing the defenseless, and hurting the weak — for pleasure, for fun, for sport — seems to be quite literally all that such men know how to do, or want to do? That was precisely what I saw when I was just a little boy. It was what told me to run, as fast as I could. Maybe I knew then instinctually that one day I'd find out sunlight could kill me — I wasn't made of the same stuff they were. Deep in my bones, I was not like these boys. Maybe that was why — snap! — the very instant we met we'd seem to scent some kind of primal, vicious enmity in one another.
The reason that men in such structures make sport of abuse — gang rape, hazing, bullying, and so on — is that the abuse is what establishes the hierarchy. Remember, the one who is the most violent is the one who rises highest. And so the group must discover, together, who that one really is. Who will lead the rape tonight? Who will throw the first punch at the cowering little child? Who will aim the first kick at the gay couple? All these establish the leader of the pack, the top dog, if you like, amongst men in hierarchical structures. They need violence to "structurate", to establish the structures that bond them together, to form the tribal hierarchy. Pecking orders of violence.
Now. If all this is true — really true, not just idle theorizing — then we'd expect to see something pretty strange and gruesome in America: that violent and abusive men would, in fact, be rewarded, not punished — and so and they'd tend to rise higher, further, and faster, than less violent and abusive men. And isn't that precisely what we do seem to see? Whether it's Weinstein, Kavanaugh, Cosby, or any number of the seemingly endless men on the #MeToo lists. In America, power doesn't just seem to license abuse — "you get more abusive as you get more powerful": it's not the case that these were once decent and kind men. Instead, it seems that American social structures select for and reward abusers — because that is how tribal, primal hierarchies are maintained, enforced, and reproduced. It takes predation and abuse to establish the hierarchy, who is on top, who is on bottom, and who is not a person at all, and America is made of just such hierarchies, such pecking orders of dominance and violence, only maybe implicit, everywhere you look — from work to politics to culture — and hence, America is a place where abuse and predation have become endemic, systemic, and normal.
Perhaps you doubt me. Very well. What was it that we saw Senators — at least the male conservative ones, who are part of these structures — doing in response to Kavanaugh's classic pattern of borderline narcissistic flipping between extreme rage and extreme self-pity? A little pecking order of violence was being established, wasn't it? In that very room, you saw the enactment and creation of the very social structure we're talking about — the threat of violence, dominance, creating a little hierarchy. Senators at the bottom, Kavanaugh at the top. Through a kind of ritualistic gang violence — which was a double abuse, because it was conducted upon a woman who had already been assaulted — the group bonded, formed a tribe, and sorted itself into strongest and weakest, top, middle, and bottom, with the most vicious and threatening man at the top.
Go ahead and think about it if you need to. Would you really disagree that is what we all saw happening in that room? Why else were we so repelled, disgusted, enraged, and ashamed?
It is because we are civilized people, my friends. These last few of us, anyways, perhaps. And to see the enactment and creation of pecking orders, of tribal structures, through the threat of violence, through rage, anger, and hate, before our very eyes, contradicts everything we suppose is true about our collective selves. Aren't we better than this? Can this really be happening? Is there no decency, no sense of honor or dignity or grace, left in us?
Those are the very same questions I asked myself as a little boy. When, for example, I saw teachers and coaches and principals and parents encouraging kids to be more ruthless, competitive, domineering, and cruel, prizing and cherishing the little predators among us most of all. Pecking orders of violence were being not just permitted — but nurtured. Even at that age, I felt something was badly wrong with such values — and the systems they would go on to produce. I don't mean to patronize you — please don't misunderstand. I am only saying that I was exposed to the true face of all this sooner, perhaps, than you were — and that as a disabled child, perhaps, it struck me especially forcefully. I saw little boys who were learning to build these pecking orders of violence, even then — and I saw them doing it all over again in that room today. They have not grown one inch, really.
And that is the problem, my friends. The abusers who we call elites will not grow or go away unless we demand it of them, and do not back down. If we keep letting them get away with treating gentle and civilized women like Dr. Ford like mere playthings to be laughed at, to be dismissed, to be mocked and abused over and over again — then all there will ever really be in America is the tribe, the hierarchy, dominance of it, who is the most capable of it, and that will be who it has always been: the most violent and abusive of all.
But there is a very great problem with that, and I think that tonight you understood, some of you at least, for the first time, viscerally — really felt it, deep in your bones. You can either have patriarchy — or you can have democracy. But you cannot have both. America has never really become a genuine democracy — just 20% of the American Congress and Senate are women, compared to 40% in Europe, for example, less even than in Pakistan — and that is because what it has always been is far too much a patriarchy.
But now that you understand what that word really means, let's state it more plainly. It has always been ruled by a little tribe of men among whom the most violent, abusive, and narcissistic rise to the top — because rigid hierarchies will quite naturally always select for such a person. Social structures which go on selecting for violence, not say, courage, truth, kindness, wisdom, intelligence, or compassion, are the grim residue — the toxic waste — of centuries of supremacy, of racism, of slavery, of genocide, if we are honest. They are what made America rich, and maybe even powerful if you think power is only a thing had at the point of a gun. But now this structurally selected, encouraged, inculcated, and cultivated violence — so prized amongst American elites — is what is tearing America apart, too.
That is America's curse. Only a fool would suppose that they can go on destroying everything in their path and get away with it — either as a person or as a country. Ghosts are real, and they curse us, laughing, as they haunt us — they turn us into the very monsters we fear. How do you think you produce a man like the men we saw today? You abuse the little boy, tell him he's nobody, nothing, worthless, unless he's the best, but to the "best" means he must rise atop the hierarchy, with violence, with intimidation, by instilling fear, through establishing one's position by preying and abusing anyone less powerful. Until at last, one day, without even knowing it, he has become just the man his dad was, once — and hated, too.
That is why we see monsters rising in America today. America's fundamentally undemocratic social structures were never really undone, unraveled, unmade enough — and so the pecking orders of violence which structurate America rule on and on. People were never really made equal — which is to say, liberated from being preyed upon and abused, for the sake of the social status of the predators and abusers. Instead, ultra-hierarchical structures select for the greatest, hungriest, most savage predators and abusers — which is what we see over and over and over again, until we are have gone coldly numb, when we are not bitterly furious — and which is precisely what we saw happen in that room today, too. Not the exercise of anything resembling equality. But the exercise of men preying upon a woman, twice over, and a nation — at least those left in it with working minds — watching in horror, in shock, in a terrible and blinding shame.
All that is what today proves. And you are very right to be ashamed, because, in truth, we all stand disgraced, as a nation, as a country, and as a people. And yet there is a task ahead of us, too. To build a society of something more like genuine, true, enduring equality. In which the structures and norms and ways above have been unraveled, and the thread tied up and thrown into the sea. Only that kind of society can really be a democracy. The country we saw today? It is not one. We mustn't consider it one. We disgrace the word, and we disgrace our better selves if we dare to say such a thing. The country we saw today was something more like a ritual humiliation, a tribal contest, a predatory game — a group of old, decrepit men, who are still little desperate boys, fighting over who the most dominant, violent, and controlling one of them all will grow up to be.
Umair
September 2018
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