Daddy wars

The era of institutionalized male grievance has arrived

Welp, the inauguration was pure political spectacle— a wrestling ring replete with tech oligarchs and their trophy wives, who were posed with maximum cleavage.

This is what we get when we combine corporate late capitalism with white Christian nationalism. But it’s also what we get when we allow male supremacy to go unchecked. When we soften our responses to the election of rapists, when we suggest Me Too has gone to far, when we demonize immigrants and trans people, when we refuse to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute. When we lack any moral clarity.

Welcome to the daddy wars. We have entered the era of institutionalized male grievance and insecure masculinity, run by a presidential administration whose sole platform is white male complaint. It’s hard not to speculate that this will be four years of men fighting with men about being men.

Either way. While male supremacy has long been law of the land, the narrative of white men as persecuted victims has not—at least not at this rhetorical scale. We’re entering a new era in which tech bros are not only jockeying for favor, but for their own masculine validation, right in front of our eyes. It’s laughable, pitiable, and dangerous.

And I’ve been thinking about how women have been taught to carry water for, and to excuse, this kind of behavior.

Some speculated that the pandemic— which brought conversations about the false divide between private and public life into the mainstream—might finally end the “mommy wars.” Instead, the "mommy wars” are back, as Republicans try to pit women against each other over abortion and motherhood.

These new mommy wars, of course, are just a repetition of what’s come before, and we shouldn’t be fooled by the term. The phrase “mommy wars” was popularized by a 1990 Newsweek article and the concept implies that women are always cat-fighting, forever warring between the only two choices they supposedly have in their lives—to stay at home with kids or work outside the home. Such a depiction of women and of feminism begs critical thinking. But also: “choice” (that is, unfettered free will) is an illusion in America, especially in this era of high reproductive and social control.

And the “mommy wars” have always, actually, been daddy wars.

Photo by Dad Grass on Unsplash

As a trend in public debate, the phrase “mommy wars” implies that we are living in some kind of post-feminist world in which women simply can’t agree on the best kind of life, and so they duke it out— to stay home or not to stay home? But is that really the question we should be asking?

If you needed reminding, or proof, we are obviously not living in a post-feminist era.

Over the weekend, Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald released his new song, “Daddy’s Home,” which features a box-braided Roseanne Barr spewing transphobic lyrics before MacDonald’s chorus, which referenced the election of Trump, and repeats the phrase, “Now, your daddy's home.”

Before that, Mark Zuckerberg, in a desperate plea to get in with the cool boys, told Joe Rogan that “masculine energy is good” and “having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more, has its merits.” He then alluded to feeling like corporate culture espouses the idea that “masculinity is bad.”

As Moira Donegan wrote this week: “America is ruled, now, by men who are extremely psychologically transparent: their resentment and greed, their desperate, seeking needfulness, their insecurity and rage at those who provoke it; these things seep off these men, like a stench. They are evil men, and pathetic ones: mentally small, morally ugly. They are relentlessly predictable.”

Then, today, this popped up in my feed on Zuckerberg’s Instagram:

Why all this mommy and daddy imagery? Because insecure masculinity proceeds from this wounded place— this need for the approval and acceptance not just from the Father, but from women. It operates on the assumption that to be strong and worthy, a man shouldn’t feel or connect or care or change or give. Rather, a man must be both needed and constantly wanted by women—needed for protection, wanted for her own validation and fulfillment. For masculinity to function, women must be incomplete without it.

Any daddy—understood as the rulemaker, the fixer, the warden—needs a mommy— a nurturer, a sexual object, a domestic engineer.

Though I mostly stayed away from live coverage of the events on Monday, I did peak at the news late in the afternoon, where I read that our current president claimed that “there are only two genders, male and female.” He also issued an executive order to that end.

I was outraged, but not surprised. As I’ve written before, there’s a reason that these guys are so obsessed with the gender binary, with phrases like masculine and feminine energy, and with attacking trans people. These rigid ideas about gender serve an entire worldview that these men fear losing, where women not only need men to protect them, but to keep everyone in line. But the truth is, that form of power, power-over, is violence.

Even so, too many have been duped into thinking that women’s full liberation is more of a threat than this. As

Sara Petersen

wrote recently, “Tradwives and the powerful white men who hold tradwives up as political figureheads (with or without the tradwives’ permission) have done such a masterful job at convincing so many Americans that domesticity, home, family, and the pleasure one might find through caregiving are the sole provenance of the conservative right […] the right has created a rift between women who have never argued that mothering and care and domestic arts are anything other than valuable.”

These false rifts—these daddy wars disguised as mommy wars—are only going to get worse as we grope in the dark of a million false realities online. Even those of us who are careful to identify what’s real are bound to get lost in the constant repetition of bogus ideas, reactivity, and bad faith questions.

Get ready for gaslighting on a national scale.

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