I'm hearing a lot lately of about how scuzzy men are. How they let themselves go to hell.
Even the men whom my women friends love- the women, they get annoyed, they have to groom their men, tell them how to dress and keep up their appearance. They wonder why they have to do this.
Of course, the answer to the question of what men are doing and why couldn't be more obvious, but maybe it needs to be spelled out.
Men are dressing in the uniform of their affiliation.
What does this mean?
Well, who dresses in fancy business suits?
Men who are already successful in business or, who want to be very successful.
Who wear chino and khakis and polo shirts and that kind of junk?
Men who are very successful middle managers, or who want to be.
The men I'm talking about - the ones letting them themselves go to hell, who are perhaps good family men or who are even capable and strong-willed in some areas, are not grooming themselves. They don’t brush their hair, they wear the same socks several days in a row — these men are disgusted by their role in the system.
And there are millions of us.
This type of behavior is obvious, and well documented. When you have a lack of control and some aspect of your life, you exert an absurd amount of control other other parts. You harm yourself to say my body is mine, my appearance is mine, my spirit is mine.
We the disheveled, are men disgusted with our inability to be anything but soldiers in a corrupt system.
And in our off hours —which are now more frequent with automation, pandemic etc. (and we now don’t have to put anything on our bottom half at all)— are signaling that we're not playing that game anymore.
The uniforms, grooming and all that stuff is for the system. It was the way you moved up in the world. It was the way you signal to your bosses that you were ready for a promotion.
It's a game, a lot of independent minded, white-collar workers choose not to play anymore.
“Dress for the job you want” the saying goes.
A lot of us want the job of Dropout.
Hairstyles and attitudes
My hair lately has been going through a very distinct Bernie Sanders phase and I've heard complaints.
But I like Bernie Sanders. He's on the team, in fact, he’s one of the leaders of the team I support. I don’t mind signaling my affiliation. His team is the team that says The System is wrong.
Bernie can do what none of us can.
He can stand literally next to Mitch McConnell in the literal halls of power, he can stand there disheveled, and say NO.
Of course he would be our leader.
And because the system is so broken, and it effects so many different types of people, Bernie’s movement of wild hair and saying NO is a populist movement.
It takes a certain cranky insubordinate energy to lead such a thing. And in a populist movement, there's not really space for somebody less caustic or more put together.
So you get Bernie with his hair and devil-may-care clothing choices.
Could a woman lead a movement like this, and be disheveled like Bernie?
Of course not.
We live in an patriarchy full of idiots and man-children drunk on their own specialness.
(I voted for Elizabeth Warren, by the way, thank you very much.)
And so any large scale populist movement is gonna reveal a large section of behaviors and patterns and affiliations that we’re unhappy about. Bernie has attracted leftist fucking assholes, The Bernie Bros (am I spelling that right?)
Bernie Bros are men who want something different in some ways and in some ways, they don’t. Like a lot of us, they’re low in the system, but where we want a new system, they want their rightful place in it. A lot of our Bernie Bros are pretty into their roles as white men with some power. They dominate women, primarily, but also any other group around them.
They believe they are best suited to be leaders in the new system.
They've missed the point that part about seeing everybody equally and not being such assholes.
When a fascist scumbag came to my town in Florida, there was a crowd of a thousand of us shouting and protesting (we shouted him out the door, thank you very much.)
Here we are, my student and friend Roxanne in dead center, in green t-shirt and sweatshirt around her waist, focused on the job of showing this a*hole the door.
Hiding in the crowd, there were a handful of fascist types. You could tell them because interestingly, they were the best groomed — their hair, short and tended-to with hair product. Nice sunglasses. Joking about microagressions.
And up on stage, the head fascist, arguing with the crowd that he was a radical intellectual who deserved to be heard, ready to say (as he did at Texas A&M), “I don’t have respect for the types of gutterpunks who spend their life protesting other people”, tugged firmly at his suit and vest, and paced the stage, until he didn’t, and went home.
I'm not a progressive (just left of center on the political compass), but I always wondered why the hatred directed at Bernie and, later, Warren. I mean, the whole Sanders-Warren thing seemed to have more to do with the personal ambitions of two politicians than anything else. They were ideologically pretty close, but once they were both running each one had to use whatever minor difference they could to gain advantage over the other.
I kind of wonder how much of a real difference there is between 'wanting a new system' and 'wanting your rightful place in it' in practice--one tends to turn into the other (and this isn't limited to men, either). Seems like power corrupts--this was seen at the birth of the term 'left' in the French Revolution, and occurs wherever power is. All the People's Soviets in the USSR just turned into rubber stamps for the nomenklatura.
Not to say nobody should ever revolt or try to change things (things like the union movement and civil rights movement show actual change can occur). But you may have to repeat a few times.