Sex Roles and the Political Parties

The sexual revolution is still in progress.

Republicans:  Men are men.  Democrats:  Women are people.

A lot of people are old fashioned about this.

Democrats are clarifying their brand:  sexual equality.   Democrats are purging men who made unwelcome sexual advances on women.   Behavior toward women is a matter of culture and respect.  Men lie about this because they are ashamed, and should be.

Republicans are clarifying their brand:   Men are men and women are women.  Men find women irresistible.  Manly men seek out women.  Women's attractiveness is a woman's own special power.  Men and women think differently and they have different, asymmetric sex and power strategies.  Men lie about sex, and so do women. Men exaggerate and women minimize, but they are both doing stuff with each other, each interpreting what they did and they cannot both be accurate.  Good men make advances; women are the ones with the job of saying no, if they are good.    Powerful leaders are men and male sexual overtures are traditional and inevitable and therefore no big deal.

Policy Differences.  Sometimes the different roles of the sexes show up as policy wedge issues.  Democrats brand themselves as the party that respects a woman's right to contraception and abortion; Republicans want government control over this, voiced as concern for the personhood of the fetus. 

Traditional thinking is that gender is fixed, linked to physical sex organs, and that heterosexuality is natural and moral.  Democrats are more tolerant of gender fluidity, and more comfortable with the idea that gender is a mix of culture and biology.  Trump's announced a ban on transgenders in the military.  The military itself had accommodated itself to both homosexuals and transgenders, but it remains an issue for Trump supporters.  Same, too, with gendered bathrooms.    

Both political parties consider sexual assault by men in the workplace and elsewhere to be wrong.  Sexual assault is indefensible, but there is party difference on how to deal with it.   Democrats are condemning it.  Republicans are ignoring it when they can; it is wrong but men will be men.

The more powerful difference in this cultural divide shows up in party message signaling, not specific policy.  Each political party is communicating a general message of what they understand to be the essential nature of human sexuality, 

Trump proudly communicates traditional male sexuality.  He felt it appropriate to assert that his hands and genitals were large.  He shows off his trophy wives.  He bragged of sexual aggression.  Republican voters were reassured by this.  He was a manly man. He had the bearing of a leader.

Republican criticisms of Democrats reflect that understanding of the gender roles.  Hillary Clinton was criticized as "weak."  When she did things that were strong they were interpreted as unpleasant.  Shrill.  Bitchy.  A Republican insult of Democrats and progressives is to call them "cucks", short for "cuckhold", husbands whose wives have sex with other men.  Republican men are the man of the house.  Democratic men are nice, which means weak.

Women exist in context with men.

They are snowflakes.

Fox News optics reinforce this.  Women on Fox News fit a stereotype.  Attractive, hyper-feminine, wearing sleeveless, body hugging, short dresses in primary colors, with bare legs, facing the camera, legs crossed for modesty, dress hiked up the thigh.  They all have long hair, mostly blonde.

Fox women flirt with the camera.  Their secret power is their beauty.  The women are in context with men, smaller, prettier, smart and sexy.

Rachel Maddow: MSNBC

Democratic and liberal signaling communicates a different style: smart, aggressive women, who are attractive but not flirty.  Short hair.  Direct.  Confident.  Individuals.

Donald Trump looming up behind Hillary at the debate was not an accident.  Trump understood he was communicating the dimorphism and different roles of the two bodies.  Trump was powerful and the aggressor.  Hillary was smaller, and as she reported in her book, confused by the invasion of her personal space.  He was dominant.  With all her professionalism, she was "the little woman."

Sexual Dimorphism

Democratic officeholders and strategists have a presumption that, in 2017, women want to be treated as respected colleagues, not as subordinate sexual objects.  It reflects the values of the educated, the young, the urban, the secular.   It may well be the future.  The country is getting more urbanized, more educated, more secular.   Old people are dying and young people have different values and expectations   Here is the full Washington Post report on the demographics of the Alabama election:   Click Here

Democrats may be the future but they are not necessarily the present.   There is a huge audience that rejects those cultural trends.  Male Fox News anchors say that women are de-masculinizing men.  Rush Limbaugh says that it is inevitable and necessary for perpetuation of the species that men make overtures.  Fox and Limbaugh have big audiences.  Women slut-shame women who "get themselves in trouble, asking for it." 

Jones won, barely, under unusually favorable circumstances.  Democrats who find Moore laughable and unpopular and celebrate his loss need to reflect that he carried a wide majority of white voters.  He overwhelmingly won the vote of America's largest social cohort: Evangelical Christians.  He nearly won notwithstanding the spirited opposition of the establishment of his own political party which said they might not seat him, that he nearly won having been outspent 6 to 1, and that he nearly won in the face of multiple accusers saying he was guilty of sex crimes against a 14 year old.  An important lesson for Democrats is not that Moore lost but that even a candidate as flawed as Moore nearly won. Moore represents the cultural values of a great many people.

Franken and Moore are archetypes of the two parties.  Franken accepted the judgement of women and went down quickly. He apologized, accepted the premise of their condemnation, and resigned.  In some quarters he will get respect for his sensitivity and respect.  In others, he looks like a wimp, modern and feminized, giving up without a fight. 

Generational difference

Roy Moore, defeated in an election, fights on, denying the accusations of misbehavior, demanding a recount, and putting forward his wife to assert that Moore was not anti-semitic since, after all, one of their lawyers was a Jew, and besides, he hired a black person once.  Roy Moore is old school.  Traditional.  Men misbehave, then deny it.  

How do women feel about this?  We have the testimony from an expert witness, someone with years of experience with women's responses to sexual overtures: 

"I moved on her and I failed.  I admit it.   I did try and fuck her.  She was married.. . . You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful--I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet.  Just kiss.  I don't even wait.  And when you're a star they let you do it.  You can do anything."