Where was Billy Bush?
When Donald Trump bragged about getting away with sexual assault because he’s “a star,” where was television host Bush’s admonition, “That’s disgusting”?
Bush’s failure to speak up actually speaks volumes about masculinity and the confusion that men grow up with, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel. Kimmel, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has lectured and consulted with governments all around the world, earning the title “the world’s most prominent male feminist” from The Guardian newspaper.
Kimmel visited Washington State University Vancouver on Wednesday to describe his interviews with members of extreme right-wing groups and his 2013 book “Angry White Men.”
Trump doesn’t appear in the book, he said. But the Republican presidential candidate and his fans — mostly downwardly mobile, seething white men — were very much on the minds of Kimmel and his audience of around 100.
“I think what I actually did was write about his followers, who were waiting for their leader to show up,” he said. Kimmel, who founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook in 2013, said he backed into research about the extreme right wing after visiting his very first gun show — at a hotel where he was staying — where he ran into proud white racists handing out literature.
Kimmel started interviewing them, one by one, to find out exactly what they were thinking and feeling. He always resisted the urge to counsel or debate them, he said. As a sociologist, his job was to understand.
What are white guys so angry about? It’s pretty simple, Kimmel said: Their station in society has changed. We are at the end of an era of “unquestioned male entitlement.”
“White men are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world,” Kimmel said. “It’s called — the history of the world.”
But now, more whites than blacks believe they have been discriminated against, Kimmel said. Their sense of entitlement is permanently unsatisfied. “The system no longer guarantees that they get all the rewards,” Kimmel said. He mentioned that he once participated in a TV panel on the topic “A black woman stole my job.”
His question to the panelists, all of whom were white men: Where does this word “my” come from?
It’s a tale of the modern economy that we’ve been lamenting at least as long as the Great Recession, if not much longer: Previous generations could count on decent wages and job security, affordable homes and a respectable lifestyle. The new economy is far more complex, competitive and damaging. It has left millions of men behind.
“Their fathers’ farms failed. Their parents’ mom-and-pop shops closed when Wal-Mart moved in,” Kimmel said.
Manhood at stake
To these men, downward mobility feels like emasculation, Kimmel said. It signals weakness, dependency, effeminacy — and it can lead directly to blaming and scapegoating others.
To demonstrate this, Kimmel showed a series of propaganda cartoons and illustrations from recent racist publications; many featured a hapless white hero whose very manhood is at stake as he’s besieged by forces such as immigrants, feminists, multiculturalism. In each case he redeems himself by joining the resistance movement — skinheads, Nazis, the KKK, take your pick. He builds his manly muscles and defeats the invaders. In each case, he then scores an absurdly buxom and often topless female. She appears to be the guaranteed reward.
It’s crucial to remember, Kimmel said, that white men’s feelings of emasculation are real and need to be understood. The worst mistake a therapist can make, he said, is telling someone in pain that their feelings are “wrong.”
What is wrong, Kimmel said, is their analysis of their own predicament. “I don’t think illegal immigrants are the ones who approved those predatory loans,” he said. “They’ve been screwed by the system. They’re right to be angry, but they’re delivering their mail to the wrong address.”
Kimmel lays that at the feet of right-wing ideologues. He remembers hearing a freshly unemployed man call the Rush Limbaugh radio show to describe his feelings of grief and sadness. Limbaugh replied: “You don’t sound sad, you sound mad,” and proceeded to rile the man up with hatred for whoever had taken “his” job.
Expect to see plenty more hatred — plenty more threatened masculinity — if Hillary Clinton becomes president, Kimmel said.
All men grow up absorbing conflicting, confused messages about proper masculine behavior, Kimmel said. We’re usually taught to be good men: kind, reliable, responsible, moral. But there’s another kind of manhood in the air that’s hard to resist, especially when you’re down: strong, tough, macho. The king of the hill — because he’s entitled to be.
What men must start doing is what Billy Bush didn’t do, Kimmel said: reject that second man, and encourage and support the first.
