Red Scare and the license to be an offensive woman
One of the worst tropes of liberal pop-feminism is the idea that women who have achieved any sort of mainstream success should be forgiven for doing the same bad things that men do.
The apotheosis of this is the idea that Hillary Clinton should be forgiven for facilitating a right-wing coup against a liberal government in Honduras as Secretary of State, because it’s harder for a woman to get to that level professionally, so we should be forgiving of missteps. The idea that one woman’s professional ambition supersedes the lives of thousands of women in another country makes no sense even just on the surface, and the implication that Clinton didn’t personally believe that US business interests are entitled to having whoever they want running Latin America, just like men in her position often do, is even more absurd. All in all, this impulse to forgive ambitious American women and reframe them all as innocent girls trying to play with the boys is very bad.
But I think that this impulse to forgive ambitious women for trying to compete in a man’s world is correct. We just apply it to the wrong ambitious women.
When I’m staring at a screen, it’s hard for me to tell the difference between reading about a thousand people losing needed healthcare and reading a joke about fat people. Both are unnerving for me to read. But when both things are far away — the people dying for lack of healthcare, and the person making the joke — they can feel similar. Reading about them both in the same rapidly refreshing Twitter feed, they feel even more similar.
This brings me to the offensive podcast “Red Scare.” I’ve listened to it and I don’t love it. Sometimes I hate it. I think that their comments about overweight people sound like libertarian fake science. My reason for defending it here is not because it’s a show that means a lot to me, and which I feel a personal need to defend. My reason for defending it here is that I think the realm of independent podcasts is a realm (unlike holding political office) where the encouragement of problematic women competing in a men’s world should play out. In the entertainment realm, that forgiveness is good.
Men have had a license to be offensive forever. That is not really changing, even if people pretend it is. Bill Maher still has a show after saying the n-word. Liberal women don’t get to have shows as edgy as Maher’s to get fired from. Meanwhile, conservative women have a clearer path to success in media than any centrist-liberal or lefty women: just say the same things that your male counterparts say, with an addendum of “That’s right, a woman said that.”
I’ve thought a lot about how it works for me, as a dude, that I feel comfortable saying what is on my mind in a way that many women I know don’t. And I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: after hearing, for years, that I was naturally confident just because I was a dude, I started to believe it, even though I wasn’t actually that confident. I was still extremely timid and obsessed with saying the right thing. But because I’d been told that my male speech was equivalent to confidence, I continued worrying about saying the perfect words and believing that I was as confident as a person can possibly get.
More recently, I’ve overcome that fear of saying the wrong thing. A lot of women I know haven’t. I realized that it’s a lot more complicated than the idea that men are somehow imbued with confidence universally.
Men are not universally imbued with confidence. We just have more incentives to grow that confidence, and — here’s the kicker — unlike many women, we have fewer incentives to perform the role of someone who empathetically & cautiously considers everybody’s possible reactions before saying anything.
That, I think, is the real problem we are touching on when we speak of the dearth of women’s voices in the world. While timid men are encouraged to overcome it, their female counterparts are encouraged to lean into that timidity.
When I see all the harsh criticisms & call-outs of the problematic women of Red Scare, I don’t really see a criticism of Red Scare. I see a message sent to all women: you’re supposed to be timid and eager to please. You’re supposed to perform an acceptable simulation of a universally likable woman. It’s not even about being likable — as their Patreon page shows, the Red Scare women are very liked — but about performing what society has decided is the correct simulation of being a woman.
Among socialist anti-racist activists, I’ve heard a common refrain that too many liberals would rather have a world where white people are as poor as black people than a world with less poverty. A world where the cops shoot more white people rather than a world where cops shoot fewer black people.
The idea is that liberals are committed to the poisonous social order that they criticize, and propose egalitarian fixes that aren’t actually egalitarian in a good way. I see a similar theme in a lot of conversations about double standards for men and women.
Many people — either because of a deep commitment to the status quo or because they just haven’t thought it through — don’t actually want women to be more confident. They don’t truly want their daughters to have better role models.
Every time I hear someone defend the destructive political decisions of Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, or Angela Merkel, I get mad. I get mad because the double standard for men and women is important, and this is a deranged way to engage with it. This gender role-subversion should play out in culture, not in literal geopolitics. Not in a realm where people sign off on the deaths of thousands of other women.
Too many people see it in the opposite way: they are OK with politicians subverting the gender norm by supporting the same foreign dictators that men support, but want to stop female entertainers from subverting the gender norm by making the same provocative comments as male entertainers.
A common problem comes up in all scenarios: the standards set by men are not good, but they are the standards, so ambitious women have to engage with them. Ambitious women have to do many of the shitty things that ambitious men have always done, in the systems that men set up. But for goodness sake: can we give a little more respect to the women who do that without leaving a direct body count? Can we respect the women who do what men do, and the outcome is that there are more women’s voices out there, more than we respect women who do what men do, and the outcome is that thousands die?
Every time the Red Scare women express a stupid opinion, I cringe, but then I have the same thought that I do when I hear a man express a stupid opinion: I turn the show off, knowing and accepting that someone else, for some reason, is enjoying it.
