Tucker Carlson is doing that not-so-delicate dance again, inciting violence against his ideological foes without literally telling his listeners to beat anyone up in those exact words.
This time he’s accusing teachers who teach sex ed of committing “sex crimes” against children with their words, and imploring American dads to “give out instant justice” — by which he clearly means violence — “to anyone who even thought about sexualizing their kids” by talking about anything vaguely related to sex and gender in their vicinity. It’s really only a matter of time before someone takes Carlson’s implicit advice and does something terrible to a teacher.
This is who Tucker Carlson is. Anyone who has followed him for any length of time know he’s a bigot and a bully, a straight-up transphobe and misogynist and a committed stochastic terrorist who regularly lies about the assorted outgroups he hates the most and vaguely — deliberately vaguely — incites violence against them.
So-called “Gender Critical” activists like to think of themselves as feminists, and progressives of a sort. They’re well aware of what Tucker Carlson is. So why do so many of them set aside their reservations about the far-right bigot as soon as he says anything negative about trans people and their supporters?
Ok, yes, it’s because they’re bigots, and he’s a bigot, and in this case they all agree on the focus of their bigotry. But there’s still some cognitive dissonance going on, as I discovered by doing a simple search for “Tucker Carlson” on Ovarit, the Redditesque hangout for self-described Gender Crits. For some, the cognitive dissonence is enough to keep them from endorsing Carlson. In other cases, not so much.
In one Ovarit thread earlier this year discussing an appearance by anti-trans author Kara Dansky on Carlson’s show, GCers shared their strange and, to some of them, unexpected admiration for “TC.”
Gluhbirne reported that
I fell out of my chair when TC said he was ashamed of Republicans, and ashamed of their backing of big business. WHAT
He clearly has a lot of respect for Kara. He gave her an entire hour without pushing back or talking over her, looking for a gotcha. I have a kneejerk negative reaction to him, but honestly I can’t imagine more civil treatment of her and her ideas
Immersang replied:
Absolutely agree with this. I never would have thought I’d ever say this, but I found him quite likable in this. (I’m sure this will be the only context though that I feel that way.)
Added CharieC:
Thanks for posting! Good interview. Gotta say: my only reference for Tucker Carlson is his interviews with Kara (never even heard of him before she started appearing on his show), in all of which he comes across as a calm and respectful presenter — which is not something I can say about many of the supposed “leftist GC ally” men whose interviews with feminists on this issue I’ve heard. So, it’s always weird to me when everybody says that otherwise, he’s a complete monster. XD
XD! LMFAO! It’s so WEIRD you’re embracing a fascist!
In another thread on another appearance by Dansky on Carlson’s show, BogHag wrote:
You know liberals are failing women when it takes Tucker fucking Carlson to address a women’s rights issue.
A commenter called LunarMoose offered this bizarre appreciation:
I’m not a fan of his … But I will say – he’s always so respectful of feminists who appear on his show. I appreciate that.
Elsewhere in the thread, one commenter was less reserved in her praise.
I’m grateful to Fox News and Tucker Carlson for covering this. I also loved how she concludes by saying she’s not happy about Republicans being the ones to hold the line on material reality. Neither am I, but I’m still grateful.
In a thread with nothing whetsoever to do with Kara Dansky, a commenter called TheEthicalHedonist asked herself:
Why is Tucker Carlson the voice of reason?!? Why do I agree with Tucker Carlson?!? What is wrong with this world???
In a more recent thread, OneStarWolf suggested that Carlson’s support of their anti-trans crusade means it’s time to look less harshly on the right as a while.
This really has emphasized to me that society needs to be careful about categorizing groups of humans as either all evil or good, black or white.
The reality is people are complex, they can both hold good and bad positions and ideas at the same time. It’s all shades of grey, and we need to be careful to not demonize and dehumanize those who we may view as politically opposed to us.
Some GCers, though, still recognize that it’s self-defeating to get into bed with far right-wingers, Carlson included. As eyeswideopen put it in a thread on Ovarit a couple of years back:
I’m worried that too many of us are exhausted by essentially fighting this on our own in the U.S., and so we’re running to embrace “allies” that will make it easy to tar us by association (e.g., Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson). If we lie down with dogs, we -will- get up with fleas, and the GC movement will be dead before it gets off the ground here in the U.S.
In yet another thread about yet another appearance by Dansky on Carlson’s show, doloresonthedottedline offered a similar take:
I mean realistically it doesn’t offset how much harm [Carlson] does the rest of the time. He’s a trust fund kid who plays a buffoon on tv to sell self-sabotaging policies (that benefit the rich) to a right-wing audience and he invites people like Kara Dansky because there’s an opportunity to emphasize the depravity of the left (knowing his audience won’t count that people like her are also coming from the left and are against it). He doesn’t care about women’s rights, he’s 100% in this for the kind of partisan tug of war that helped create the environment where this is happening.
I am grateful for any chance for Kara Dansky to reach a bigger audience but Tucker Carlson isn’t even close to being redeemed by it. He’s still one of the most harmful media figures in the US at the moment, overall.
You don’t have to convince me about Carlson’s perfidy, delores.
But maybe you should ask yourself: If my friends and allies are suddenly cheerleading for a fascist, does that suggest that maybe there is something wrong with the ideology we share? I’ll save you a little time by just saying that the answer is “yes.”
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I love when someone tells me adults doing whatever they want with there own bodies is somehow going to harmful to me as an autistic person. Whats next lard? you want me to dress in pink with little flowers in my hair and high heels to make sure that I’m being a woman correctly or something?
Is it also dangerous and harmful for me to get tattoos as an autistic person lard? Should my husband make those choices for me instead? I’m changing something I don’t like about my body after all instead of just accepting it. Better stuff me in an assistance living home, Obviously I’m harming myself.
or maybe, just maybe, many afab people are nonbinary because trying to be feminine and a woman the “correct way” is tedious, painful, uncomfortable, and requires spending most of your time trying to meet impossible standards and those who have a hard time reading social cues, don’t want it.
@opposablethumbs
Oh yeah, only a handful of boys have ever made their way through my dance studio. Most of time its a younger brother who looks up to his big sister and wants to do everything she’s doing. That’s the “excepted way” they come into the class. If a boy just is like “i wanna wear tights and twirl around” then the parents get worried. Also it does permanently change you physically. I’ve been dancing since I was 3 years old. My feet are beyond fuck. I’ve broken almost all my toes, some of the nails are just gone. I’m typing this right now with my feet slathered in Vaseline and shoved into a wool sock.
But you know, so graceful and beautiful. Nothing ever ugly about a ballerina. well, there is also this. If I was still dancing professionally, I would be to overweight right now to be considered a healthy dance weight. I am currently 113 pounds.
@Surplus
Suffering from medical pain and good bound of depression because ever breath felt like I was being stabbed. it is getting resolved and now on pain medication that should be helping a lot more in the future. Also one of my pervious students has received the role of Clara in our states big production of the Nutcracker. It’s very exciting and I went to some rehearsals to see her. I’m very proud and I feel very old.
@Elaine it’s good to see you. I hope the medication helps and the depression lifts!
Yeah, that point you made about ballet really lit a lightbulb for me.
Just absolutely loving @Crip Dyke’s posts on feminist “waves”. I feel like I’m back in postgrad again (and that’s a good thing).
To the extent that there are even waves (I don’t fully trust the metaphor, partly because feminism has never really not existed in those “troughs”), I don’t see how we’re in a 4th wave yet, either. Discussion around the topic is always interesting though.
@Surplus
Hard to say re social transition vs. hormones, because I was lucky and able to start HRT before social transition. That’s getting more common these days I think? I will say though, the improvements in confidence, mood, and motivation were almost instant. People around me started noticing I was doing much better, without knowing why, basically the day after I started HRT.
Re alexithymia – the answer is complicated. And more complicated in my case because I don’t think it was alexithymia; more just being stuck in my own feelings all the time, depressed, dissociated, and also in particular being hypersensitive to other people’s negative emotions. So reading anger and fear where it wasn’t dominant, and being afraid to ask about it or try and provide support. Stuff like that.
That last took a long time to resolve, I think it was less directly transition/HRT and more secondary to having unmanaged CPTSD and no confidence.
However, I would not be surprised if a lot of trans fems overcome normative alexithymia as part of transition. Many of us learn early that being too emotional, too sensitive, etc. gets us insulted and beaten. Paradoxically these things can be safer as a woman, and feel safer when one is presenting as a woman.
Also related it all this is one of the things I’ve noticed about transphobes – IME a lot of them like doormats. These sorts are all approval and liberalism until their shy trans friend comes out and starts growing confidence, then the dogwhistles and conservative talking points come out. In retrospect I got to learn pretty quickly who my real friends were.
Thanks, folks! I had a vague memory of knowing that the original text hadn’t been popularized as it should, but nothing more than that. I blame work eating my brain.
@Elaine:
Not to mention spending most of your money. Especially in this economy.
@Mish:
I’ve always thought of the waves more as waves of change, sweeping through the system and leaving permanent* changes, not as the sort of waves that have troughs. Like a propagating phase transition, with the major names listed in all the history books being the initial condensation nuclei, as it were. Or an adaptive memetic allele rising to fixation as it benefits the majority of those who receive it through horizontal meme transfer …
@opposablethumbs:
Seconded.
@Cyborgette:
Fascinating. Is there any way to “detect this in advance”? I.e. for a neurodivergent person to distinguish social or other difficulties that might stem from those causes, from ones that don’t?
@anyone:
The topic has occasionally come up here, usually in connection with some troll ranting, that there is a distinction between toxic masculinity and all masculinity. But rarely is that claim elaborated upon. What, precisely, lies inside the category of “masculinity” but outside that of “toxic masculinity”? Almost everything about masculinity, as constructed in this culture at least, appears to boil down to some combination of a right to and an ability to bully one or another group of people. A small portion might be characterized as “not being a floormat”, i.e. assertiveness in defending one’s own boundaries and personal autonomy, a right and ability to resist being bullied.
Looking at the flipside, the stuff that’s been pushed into the “femininity” box consists of nearly every actually positive-sum mode of engaging with the world, from nurturing rather than competitive ways of relating to other people down to appreciating beauty (other than in the narrow context of sexual lust directed at the feminine) or possessing it (including, this time, in a sexual context — being sexually attractive is itself feminized, as consider the connotations of the phrase “pretty boy”). Basically the only problematic traits generally put into the “femininity” box fall under the rubric of “being a floormat”, either for everybody (connotations of “slut”, “whore”, etc.) or for a specific husband. So, not asserting boundaries or resisting being bullied, at least not by one’s designated male owner.
As far as I can tell, the ideal person, both from the perspective of their own individual empowerment and from the perspective of constructing a Pareto-optimal society, would have all of the non-doormat feminine traits and only the non-doormat masculine one … which would erase all gender distinctions, and produce a society consisting wholly of people who would (aside from assigned-sex-at-birth) all by present standards be considered women, but “modern” reasonably boundary-assertive women rather than the pliant Stepford Wife material featuring prominently in the reactionary right’s “back to the 50s” fantasies and their “waifu” Asian fetishism.
That, in turn, suggests a possibility for an actual fourth wave, that really would make a fundamentally new ethical claim, but one that might not be easily stomached by present-day liberals; as radical as veganism (and, perhaps, as inevitable in the longer term?): that to destroy patriarchy will necessitate destroying masculinity, and perhaps largely destroying gender as we know it altogether. I do think that something a bit like a gender binary might remain (and, as now, with a fuzzy boundary and some people being various kinds of non-binary), based on something akin to a mild version of the “dom/sub” distinction in the BDSM community (but not restricted to a sexual context). Some people like to be the driver and some prefer being a passenger, as long as a) they trust the driver and b) they have the option to refuse a ride, or to pull their door handle and bail out at any time. Both in sex and in broader matters, like picking the movie vs. being willing to go along with most possibilities of someone else’s choice, and things like that.
Those interested might like to look up the bird species “white-throated sparrow” (Zonotrichia albicollis), in which these characteristics are genetically determined in a manner orthogonal to biological sex — the species has two pairs of chromosomes that “act like sex chromosomes” during meiosis and fusion, not just one, so in a sense it has four sexes, or two orthogonal sex binaries, one of which determines “who has the dick vs. who lays the eggs” but the other of which determines “who tends to be the dominant partner in a pairing” … In humans there’s no evidence for a genetic mechanism influencing such things, and it may be more complicated, since the “follower” traits (Altemeyer’s RWA) and the “leader” traits (SDO) can be independently present, so in particular both or neither might be present in a given individual, and are matters of degree rather than just on/off switches. (That said, those with high levels of both traits at once are extremely dysfunctional. One of them is named “Donald Trump”.)
@surplus
There’s plenty, really.
Simpleness in attire, an aversion to makeup. While I support people who like to play with their bodily expression, there’s nothing wrong or toxic with going simple — short hair, practical clothing without ornamentation, little jewelry. Those are completely valid choices that are coded masculine and are not only non-toxic, they happen to be choices that minimize consumption which behaviour if aggregated can make a difference to the environment.
Making one’s money working independently doing physical labor. Jobs that require less interaction with other human beings are coded more masculine, as are jobs that require more physical exertion. Jobs with the most human interaction and the least physical exertion are coded more feminine. All these jobs should be valued, and the ones which happen to be coded masculine are not toxic.
TO BE SURE… the social demand that each job be coded on a scale of masculinity is toxic, but that’s about compulsory gender performance. The mere existence of a masculinity rating for an occupation doesn’t make the occupation itself any more toxic than a femininity rating might make another job.
I could go on, but you get the point. There are lots of things that are coded masculine that aren’t bad. What is bad is forcing people to conform to the code, not that individuals dress simply while simultaneously being men. Simple dress isn’t a virtue when done by a woman and a vice when done by a man. Simple dress is simple dress. It’s coded masculine, but there’s nothing toxic there. COMPELLING OTHERS to dress a certain way is toxic as fuck, but again that’s about the denial of freedom, not the number of rhinestones on a particular pair of jeans.
There’s one last thing of course, and that’s that deliberately violating social codes for the purpose of breaking down boundaries can be heroic. In this sense a man wearing feminine dress, if done for the right reasons and in the right context, can do good that wouldn’t be accomplished by a man wearing masculine dress. But failure to do something heroic doesn’t make what you do do toxic. And we can’t all be heroes all day, every day.
So when a guy shaves his head and a dyke shaves her head, there might be different meanings there, but the guy isn’t being toxic because he likes a simple look that’s easy to manage and takes little time and effort.
@ crip dyke
I kept reading that as if there was an ‘a’ in there and got really confused; as that would sort of tie in with your point.
Btw, turns out one advantage of being Queen is you can get a dress with pockets.
POCKETS!!!
My favorite skirt is made of denim and has pockets. Real ones, not purely decorative, stupidly narrow or uselessly shallow ones. I’m concerned that when it wears out I might not be able to replace it easily.
(Though admittedly, my second favorite skirt is a black miniskirt with no pockets. Because even in my late 40s I dress slutty occasionally.)
@Surplus
IDK but I don’t think so. It’s all very variable per person too. And also I’m not sure they can be distinguished, like… just having the constant brain overhead of anything (gender stuff, unmanaged chronic pain, whatever) on top of autism is going to make the autism problems more difficult.
Even granted some of this might be direct effects of hormones on the brain, it’s so varied and complex and vague that I doubt someone could make any kind of checklist. But also IDK brains, so IDK.
@Snowberry –
Hey, I have one like that too! It’s long and heavy, so kind of a cold-weather-as-long-as-there’s-not-too-much-snow garment, but I love the material and the pockets.
About the comments, I’d agree with the one that said people were complex and not all good or all bad etc., etc., if I saw that in isolation. In context, though… *shakes head.* The person who wrote that is massively missing the point.
@Cyborgette:
So, e.g., there’s no way for someone to know if they’d benefit from HRT except to try it … expensive, difficult to access, and with lasting side effects in case they don’t decide to stick with it though that may be?
That’s not good.
@Crip Dyke:
I can’t say I agree about the jobs part. Maid work is low-social-interaction, high-exertion and strongly coded feminine, and upper management is high-social-interaction, low-exertion and strongly coded masculine. It seems more to be the case that high status jobs are coded masculine, and low status jobs are coded more-or-less arbitrarily (why is cleaning houses, including not-your-own, feminine but cleaning offices, workshops, factories, and public facilities masculine, for instance?) … high-social-interaction jobs in particular are coded masculine if they involve exerting power and feminine if they don’t, but do involve being subjected to the power of others. Which means that that part of it, at least, goes right back to masculinity-as-license-to-bully and femininity-as-lack-of-freedom-from-bullying.
The “more spartan = more masculine” also appears to me to be a side effect of the power bit. First of all, what were the capital-S Spartans known for? An austere minimalist style, hyper-masculinity, and war. So a part of this is “less resources put into frilly decoration = more resources that can be put into a fight, or into readiness for one”. Useful for bullies, and for those granted license to attempt to resist bullies, not so much for those denied both. On the flip side, women-as-objects-that-exist-solely-to-please-men means women are under an obligation to be decorative (“you’d be so much prettier if you’d smile”) and therefore self-decoration becomes coded feminine, because being pretty is, or at least can be, a way of being submissive, acting to please others. Spartan, on the other hand, is something you can get away with if you have structural power and less need to rely on ingratiating yourself to others, and also “reduces attack surface”. Short hair is harder for your opponent to pull in a fight; if the furniture gets knocked over and walls banged into, it’s much easier to straighten up a spartan place of robust, simple furniture and few decorations (none of them fragile) than a frilly flowery place. Jewelry can snag on things and be damaged, or damage you, in a fight; if you wear a necklace your opponent can strangle you with it. The major exception is that a ring with sharp protrusions can be weaponized by the wearer, and a tight-fitting, simple plain ring (such as a typical man’s wedding band) cannot easily catch on anything or be damaged or dislodged inadvertently.
So I maintain that the “non-toxic” masculine-coded things are all, more-or-less, side effects of the toxic ones, and would have no reason to correlate with sex, gender, or even one another without the underlying, aligning “magnetic field” of “men are warriors and women are their decorative playthings”.
Which fits with the observations in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity … I suspect that the real “original sin”, to the extent one even exists, was some societies orienting themselves around parasitic raids on others and coming up with that sex-based division of labor and the notion of property (no one is more concerned about keeping control of their stuff than a thief!), and/or the parasitism itself (they likely co-evolved anyway). And then infecting everyone else by eventually setting themselves up as a protection racket (pay tribute and we won’t raid you and will protect you from the others like us) and, eventually, from there evolving into a ruling class (“blue bloods”, hereditary royal family and nobility).
I would absolutely listen to a band called “Boudiccan Destruction Horizon”. Feminist punk or rock n roll, with some Celtic elements, maybe. If Lilith Fair was still a thing, they’d be on it.
@Elaine: Many of us afab straight neurotypicals are tired of the whole “how to be a woman, correctly”. I haven’t worn a dress or makeup at any time, for any occasion, in at least 15 years. And I never wanted kids. I have cats, jeans, casual wear, and had a ton of pantsuits years before Hillary ever did. I get a haircut once a year, and never get it styled. Wash it in the shower and go. This has occasionally led to being hit on by lesbians, but since they are always more polite than dudebros and neckbeards, I take it as a compliment and tell them “thank you but not interested.” They smile and say “OK” and go look for someone else. I know how to perform girliness, and I have; I just don’t any more.
Mr. x-n does not buy me jewelry, he buys me books, videos and CDs. These also last longer than makeup and can be resold to recoup some of the cash when you’re tired of them.
My mom had feet like yours and she danced from age 3 through college. Her feet were gnarled and weird and painful from then till she died.
@Alan: A friend of mine makes much of her own clothing (even period styles) and I last saw her in the Before Times, where she was wearing a satiny tea-length dress like the late 50s/early 60s. We were all admiring it when she revealed POCKETS she’d worked in via the side seams and there was literally gasps and applause and much outburst of “POCKETS! OH MY GOD!” Not those dumb little ones either, she could put her whole hand into them, plenty to carry her ID, phone, and lipstick. And you couldn’t tell. There were literal “we’re not worthy” bows.
Same reason many of us wear mens’ jeans. Ladies’ jeans/trousers either have no pockets or tiny decorative (or even worse, fake) ones. For reasons, one day the husband had to wear an old pair of mine which were clean because I never wear them. He was shocked at the difference between proper pockets and ones you can barely get your fingers into.
Presumably the Queen could just order pockets and someone jolly well better do it.
@Crip Dyke, Fount of Knowledge: There’s one job that requires both close contact with people and has significant manual labor — nursing or home care. Hauling people in and out of beds or wheelchairs, bathing them, laundry, cleaning up, etc. But of course that’s coded female too.
Computer programming takes no public interaction or physical labor, yet is toxically coded male.
@Surplus
.
No, that is not correct. At all. On several levels.
First, here is no way to know *definitively*. But actually wanting to have a differently sexed body, or a differently gendered appearance, is an accurate tell the vast majority of the time. I was talking more about the effects on autism stuff, specifically – as I thought you were.
Also the effects of HRT are generally reversible within the first few months, many states in the US allow it by informed consent now (though I can’t speak to Canada), and the direct brain effects mean most people will know if HRT is right for them within a few days. Accessibility and cost does also depend on insurance coverage, but in a lot of states here even ACA public plans will cover it.
Also, though? There is a reason why a lot of people make their decision in HRT (including a decision against) only after they start hanging out with trans people. Seeing it in action helps people decide, and helps their thoughts cohere.
Also also? Not all trans people need or want HRT.
When I tell you stuff like what I have it’s out of a sense of trust and good faith. Cool it with the leaps of assumption, please. Don’t give me reason to doubt that good faith.
@ gss ex-noob
I picked up some really nice jeans. £2.50 (new!) in the local hippy shop (They get end of line stuff and just dump it in a big pile on the floor. Any two items for a fiver.) But they turned out to be Victoria’s Secret. I didn’t even know they made overwear. And whilst they do have pockets, they’re only like an inch deep.
It’s weird that they’re such a half way house. I could get it if they were purely decorative. You get fake pockets even on posh waistcoats; but it’s the fact they are a bit real. So you are drawn into a false sense of functionality. Until you lose your car keys.
ETA: As for the Queen, this was an interesting read.
https://www.vogue.com/article/queen-elizabeth-ii-royal-dresser-book
@ surplus
Funnily enough, the Spartans kept wearing long hair, even after short hair had become the norm in the rest of the Hellenic world.
As Plutarch has it, they though it made “the beautiful more comely and the ugly more frightful.”
And of course I am sure people are familiar with how the Persians thought it was strange that the Spartans would spend the time before a battle preening themselves, doing their hair, oiling themselves up etc.
The usual explanation for that is that they had committed themselves to death and wanted to look pretty in the afterlife. The contemporary writers though say this was just a way of steadying the nerves. They would divert themselves in activities like that and reciting poetry etc. Ironically, that is still advice they give to soldiers today. Don’t dwell on the upcoming mission; just occupy yourself with something.
@Crip Dyke Thank you so much for your posts, I am learning a lot!
Along with clothes that have honest to goodness real deep pockets, I’d add in pants with enough belt loops to let a belt hold them up without looking like the top of a drawsack. Seriously, it seems like virtually all the clothing designers think women/girls only use belts as a fashion accent piece and not to, you know, hold their pants up. Five loops total on female pants (two in front, one on either side, one in the back) when male pants have at least seven (two extra in back) is annoying, to say the least.
/fashion grump of the day.
@Alan: YES! Now you understand the plight of women who try to buy lower-half clothing.
Either fake pockets or useful ones, none of these unusable ones. Ruins the line for no reason.
@Redsilk: I co-sign your belt loop complaint.
@Surplus: The only good thing about the current plague is that mask-wearing has spared untold millions of women being ordered to smile. I’m gonna keep wearing the damn things indefinitely. I did buy some pink ones though, such is the power of the patriarchy.
I may have said this here before, but in my experience vintage dresses are way more likely to have pockets than modern ones. My hypothesis is that when dresses were everyday wear, they were more likely to have practical designs, whereas most modern dresses are meant to be formal and/or sexy. Also it’s easier to conceal pockets in a skirt (unless it’s really tight) than in trousers.
YES on the pockets, I get most of my clothes from a company that do do proper useable pockets on most of their clothes, and seem to be reasonably ethical, though that of course means not cheap. But the clothes are well made and last so I reckon it balances out.
But they do the five belt loop thing too. My bum is two sizes bigger than my waist so I have to wear belts, they would be so much more comfortable with more loops.