As a Guy To Guys
(On Martin Luther King Day, 2025) If what I am about to write doesn’t apply to you, ignore it. But before you ignore it, do me a favour and consider what you would do, what you have done in situations such as these: Today the US could have inaugurated its first woman president, a mixed race black- south-asian woman of more or less good character and a track record of serving the people who elected her at every level so far, on Martin Luther King Day, and instead they inaugurated an adjudicated rapist, felon on 34 counts of fraud in an attempt to subvert an election – with around 50 other counts of state and federal indictments duly rendered by grand juries, not political gangs – but, for a variety of reasons, untried.
The only explanation I can conjure up that comes close to satisfying the facts as I see them is that we guys are a pack of racist, sexist, excrement dispensers (RSED). (I’m sorry. I just can’t bring myself to using a terser, more colloquial term.) And what’s worse, we’ve co-groomed the women in our lives to hold the same prejudices – if not in fact, then at least in effect.
Long before this “Rough Beast”’s<1> first election, David Sedaris compared being undecided in a certain election to this: when given a dinner choice of some chicken dish and a plate of feces and broken glass, asking how the chicken was prepared<2>. I wish the comparison were becoming less topical but it isn’t. And it’s not entirely an American problem, either. Over the course of Justin Trudeau’s term in office, he has treated more than one woman disrespectfully, but I call to mind especially, the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould (J W-R). In every case, but especially with regard to this attorney-general, the loss of standing, of reputation affected the various women FAR more than it affected Trudeau.
I said, from his swearing-in as our Prime Minister, that he suffered from being a performative twerp. I have been shunned by some acquaintances of otherwise good will over that remark, but I stand by it. He knows how to say the right thing. All too often he has no idea how to do it. In nothing did this ailment show up so starkly as in how he treated JW-R, but it affected others, too. With JW-R’s departure, Chrystia Freeland could have – should have – been groomed to take over from Trudeau. She was not. She was loyal – too loyal one could say until almost the end, when she was asked to make a statement on Canada’s finances that she had points of disagreement with, at the same time as she was to be shuffled out of the very high profile Finance portfolio to some other of significantly less standing. It seems to me that Justin felt too threatened by her.
Now, she has a reputation of being “damaged goods” politically and the tar of the later parts of Trudeau’s term is sticking to her, so that
(a) if she were chosen as leader of the Liberal Party she would likely lead it to a defeat similar to the sinking ship that was delivered to Kim Campbell and which she steered to an undignified appointment with an iceberg, but
(b) she’s not likely to be chosen anyway – whether any of the other options has a particularly good chance of keeping government out of the hands of a fascist-adjacent performative twerp who is probably also a foreign asset. (the current leader of the opposition)
To my mind this situation has come about almost entirely because the voters, especially the men (and even in Canada) are largely RSEDs. And it’s not just white guys. I mentioned this idea to a Macao-Chinese co-worker, narrowing it to white guys and he said, “no. We are too.” And I’ve seen more than one article about the state of play around gender and “white-ness” in south Asia: When “eye candy” is “needed”, especially the women being so presented are unvaryingly of more pale skin than not. This situation is intolerable and needs to change. And so, as a guy to guys, I’m going to call it out.
Prove to yourself, in terms that might convince a black or brown woman that you aren’t an RSED, or else. Or else, be willing to assume that you’re probably acting like an RSED some of the time, even if you aren’t actually playing the part 24x7x365. Look at your voting patterns, your preference patterns in politics, in business, in every kind of relationship. Stare them down, each one, like Chuck Norris wearing the last two verses of Psalm 139 like X-ray glasses.
A young man of my acquaintance once thought of spending a “gap year” in Asia and made a passing remark to his Mother about finding a wife among the women he might meet there and asked her (he thought of her as a pretty open-minded and accepting person) what she would think of such a thing. Her response was that she would cry – and that left him stunned.
I tell the story because the “grooming” into racism, and like it, into sexism, is subtle and durable, deep and pervasive, like the extent to which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown’s neighbours were perceived by him to be in league with evil powers. That story has multiple lessons and resonances to read, but one of them could be this: that when a community has been devoted to any kind of evil for multiple generations, it becomes a structure that is hard to oppose, even if the community loyalty to that evil (as in the case of that young man’s mother) isn’t overt or intentional, but comes clothed in concern and care. In the case of this young man and his Mother, perhaps it was cultural differences, or what would become of mixed race children, or maybe she just didn’t want her grandchildren to have divided loyalties between living nearby or near to their other grandparents. Who knows!? And at some point, what does it matter? The prejudice is still problematic.
And this is not to impugn the Mother – any more than Obama told stories about his white grandparents to impugn them – but as a demonstration of how deep-seated and thorough-going these racist structures are – and therefore how deep-seated and thorough-going the accompanying sexist structures are, too. Nobody is immune from a tendency toward bias. You’re not. I’m not. “This is my trouble, these were my fathers. So how am I supposed to feel, living on the rim of the broken wheel? ... You and me we are the break in the broken wheel, a bleeding wound that will not heal...”<4> Or cue up the better known line from Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil going through every human heart.
If you’re unattached and looking for a potential relationship, where do your preferences as to looks run? Whiter? Blonder? “Caucasian”? What does the record look like? Do you put up with mansplaining when you see it happening? Do you mansplain? Are you as ready to follow a woman’s lead as a man’s in work/life? Time to grow up folks, to leave childish things like this behind us, to see with new eyes.
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<1>Olear, Greg. Rough Beast. 2024. referring to "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats
<2>Sedaris, David. “Undecided”. The New Yorker, October 20, 2008
<3>Joke line: “Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares at them until they quail and hand over the info he wants.”
<4>Cockburn, Bruce. “Broken Wheel”, Inner City Front.
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