TDPS: Fascinating interview on masculinity of Presidency, political sexism - no MSM fluff here

[celtics23]

Run time: 08:20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7fO2kXyg0o   Posted on YouTube: February 15, 2011 By YouTube Member: MidweekPolitics Views on YouTube: 125   Posted on DU: February 16, 2011 By DU Member: celtics23 Views on DU: 898

 
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkUz4Iya-_8

This is a fantastic interview, something I can't imagine we'd see on corporate media

From: www.davidpakman.com | Subscription: www.davidpakman.com/membership | YouTube: www.youtube.com/midweekpolitics

[aliciaabs19]

1. This is a great topic, thanks for posting, going to watch now

[tins0404]

2. EXCELLENT discussion

[JDPriestly]

3. Enlightening! That explains the double standard about the

affairs of politicians on the right v. the left. Certain influential elements in the public think it is just terribly sneaky and dishonest when Democrats like Spitzer, Edwards, etc. have extramarital affairs but don't seem to care at all when people like Vitters or like Sanders of South Carolina and Ensign having mistresses. The Democrats are viewed as acting inconsistently with the feminine, monogamous image, but the Republicans are viewed as just being men being men.

That explains a lot. I don't think I have expressed myself well in this post.

[Capitalocracy]

4. Transcript

Provided by me. Transcription, captioning/subtitles, and translation services: www.Subscriptorium.com



David Pakman: All right, Jackson Katz is here, anti-sexist activist, author and expert on violence, media, and masculinity, also somebody that I know from taking classes with Seth Jolly and having him show all sorts of different documentaries. He made you-- I don't know if I'd say a star, but a well-known figure at the University of Massachusetts. Thanks for being here.

Jackson Katz: Thanks for having me.

David: I've been reading a lot of your Huffington Post stuff, I've been looking at some of the topics from your upcoming book, and I'm interested to talk... your expertise covers a broad range of specific areas we could focus on, but I love to talk about the presidency, the Tea Party, the 2012 election, and kind of where you see gender, masculinity fitting in there. But to get into that, it might be good to step back and say over the last 10, 15 years, what has been the role of gender in politics, elections, kind of as an overall picture?

Katz: Well, sure. When most people hear the word "gender" and "politics" together, they assume that it's a discussion about women and women's political choices or women's voting patterns or women as candidates, and of course, those are all important issues. But the focus of my work has been on looking at how men are gendered beings and how men's political choices and men as candidates are gendered as well, and that's a discourse that I think is incredibly important in American politics and presidential politics specifically that rarely gets discussed.

And so the lens that I use, if you will, to look at the last 30, 40, 50, 100 years of American politics, certainly in the media era, is the gendered lens looking at men and masculinity. And my basic point is that gender is always an issue in presidential politics. It's always an issue, but only when a woman is running, like when Hillary Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination in 2008, do people actually talk about gender, but even when two men are running against each other, gender is a central force in presidential politics.

David: And it's interesting you mentioned, usually when someone says "gender", you're thinking of women. And I think this applies when there's discussions of race, I think people's minds go to either black people or brown people, Hispanic people, what have you. When there's a discussion of class, your thought goes to poor people. So I think that the default has been to talk about those things only when there is an outlier from the norm. That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't a discussion to be had about the norm, why it is the norm, also, right?

Katz: Right. Well, what you're describing is how dominance functions by stealth or invisibility. And so making visible what has been rendered invisible is one of the most, I think, important progressive projects, whether it's in politics about racism or heterosexism or sexism, making the dominant group visible and examining the mechanisms by which it maintains its dominance is a key, you know, it's a key act of, you know, progressive transformation.

But it's one of the most challenging things, because people take for common sense what they think is the... the "norm", if you will, is another definition of common sense or unexamined. It lacks introspection or lacks critical examination because people don't even think it's worthy of examination or study. And so examining masculinity, not just presidential politics, but masculinity in general, is a shift that's been happening in the fields of sexual assault prevention and domestic violence prevention, and even issues as, ranging as, you know, prostitution and sex trafficking. It's looking at the... instead of looking at the supply side, like the prostitutes, you look at the demand side, you know, the demand side meaning men who are buying sex. This is all... all of this is about shifting focus off of the subordinated groups or the oppressed, if you will, groups, and looking critically at the dominant group and how it maintains its privilege.

David: So to be really specific, when we think back to the 2008 election, after it became clear that Hillary Clinton was not going to be the Democratic nominee, John McCain, Barack Obama, two men, for... not two white men, for once, so that was something a little bit different to start with. Let's be specific about how gender was a factor. I mean, I think many people who will see this will say OK, I get what you're saying, that when someone says "gender", you're thinking of women, and the fact that the two of them are men is also important. How is it a factor? What questions aren't being asked? What aren't we seeing in the media? Let's get into it.

Katz: Sure. Well, the first thing I think that I look at in my work, and I think it's really fundamental and basic, is that there is a persistent gender gap in voting patterns in the United States. And among white men in particular, white men have been voting radically disproportionately for the Republican nominee for president for the last 40 years. And working class white men, and there's different ways of defining working class, but with a high school education, men with a high school education, voted in 2000 for George Bush by something like 27 points over Al Gore, and Kerry, about 25% voted for Bush over Kerry in 2004. Barack Obama cut into that pretty significantly in 2008, although he still lost the white men's vote.

David: That's right.

Katz: But he lost it by like about 16 percentage points, so he made some significant inroads into the white men's vote. But if you look at white male voting patterns, the only way a Democrat can win at the national level, in the presidency, is if they win so... such a dramatic percentage of the women's vote that it offsets their deficit among the white male vote.

David: That's right.

Katz: And so how can we not talk about gender? Why are white men so dramatically voting for the Republican candidate for president? Now, some people, of course, for the last... since the Civil Rights Act have been talking about race as one of the central forces subtextually at work in presidential politics.

David: And it's being talked about looking forward also because of the increasing Hispanic population and how that will play a factor.

Katz: That's right. And of course, Obama being an African American, that brought to the surface a lot of discussions about race and politics and such that had always been there, but they were talked about even more explicitly, would white people vote for an African American for president, etc.

My thinking is that it's not just that white men are voting as a racialized block for the Republican candidate, although that's a big part of it, they're also voting in a gender sense as men because since, especially since the late 60s and early 70s, and then increasingly after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the way that the two-party system has been sort of shaken out, if you will, in the gender binary is the Republican Party is the party of real men...

David: Right.

Katz: And the Democratic Party is the party of women and feminized men, and that has heterosexist implications as well.

David: Sure.

Katz: Because the party is seen as, the Democratic Party is seen as the party of gay rights, if you will, in addition to the men in the Democratic Party feminized in the national discourse. And I think this is a cultural/political analysis, right? I think that this is an incredibly important reason why lots of white men, including working and middle-class white men, vote against their economic interests, at least as some of us understand those economic interests.

David: No question about it.

Katz: Right. So this complicates the analysis of, say, Thomas Frank and others who have been trying to figure out why so many Americans, especially white Americans, have voted against their economic interests for the past generation.

David: You mentioned the issue of gay rights, and we saw that really incredibly directly and just at the forefront in the discussion of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I mean, I interviewed people who said the reason we shouldn't have homosexuals serving openly in the military is because the American military is manly. And implicit in that, even though it's not discussed, is that there's something bad about, you know, femininity and women in the military. And when I challenged some of those people directly, it was made very clear that that is involved in that subtext, just barely underneath the surface. But other than that particular issue, what else is it that has driven this white male voting block towards the Republican candidate?

Katz: Well, in my book that I'm working on and just about to complete, I look at three issues. There's so many issues, and so you have to really narrow it. But...

David: Yeah. Well, the major ones maybe are...

Katz: Yes. Yeah, sure. I looked at three issues that all involve violence, and they all involve important political issues over the past 40, 50 years. The first one is the cold war, the second one is the rise of street crime as a domestic political issue in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the discussion about, you know, violent crime, street crime, has a definitely racialized undertone to it, and then the rise of terrorism as a political issue in the late 20th century and into the 21st century.

All three of those issues, cold war, domestic crime, and terrorism, have to do with violence, and the president is a stand-in, in a certain sense, the symbolic leader of the country. He embodies, if you will, the national masculinity in a very important sense. People talk about the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the mourner-in-chief when national tragedy happens, the first family, the... I mean, he's the one who everybody salutes to and everybody stands when he enters the room. He really does, in a certain sense, represent the country.

David: And how can we...

[Agent William]

5. This is why I enjoy the David Pakman Show so much...

I'm glad to see these guys getting bigger.

:hi: