Fairness - The Commentary

It’s apparently been wishful thinking that thought our culture was moving beyond the straight role that was necessary to keep patriarchy going in the U.S. When I wrote Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to be Human over twenty years ago, I remember I had hope then that my analysis would be outdated by now. But, on the contrary, as an academic friend who studies masculinity told me recently, that analysis is even more relevant today with the political victories of the old straight-acting masculinity in politics, the renewed down-grading of all things feminine, the media obsession with something they tout as click-bait: the “crisis of masculinity” in boys, and the reactionary and militant embrace by the religious right-wing of a warrior culture that ignores the Jesus of the Gospels. For a while it was labelled “toxic masculinity” as if it were one version of the masculine gender role that dominated patriarchy, but that label was beaten down by th...

Since right-wing religionists and politicians discovered the use of “culture wars” to scare people into voting for them and their pet causes back in the Moral Majority era, we can understand why the leaders of these so-called “wars” have pushed this idea on the country. Choosing human beings that already reflected cultural prejudices as scapegoats and stoking fear of them, has kept politicians, clergy, right-wing talk show hosts, and what we now call “influencers” in the limelight by fulfilling their desperate personal needs for attention, bringing in big bucks, creating personality cults around them, and increasing their political power. Whether these public figures are actually believers in anything but themselves or not, they’ve learned that right-wing religion is easily manipulated to sanctify their biases, fears, hypocrisies, moralistic attitudes, and violent rhetoric. But why do these things work to draw in everyday people who aren’t getting these personal benefits even when the ...

We have few good role models to show us how to clean up the messes everyone inevitably makes in life, love , and leadership. Our president, in well-conditioned masculine fashion, won’t even entertain the idea that he’s made any . Our public relations industry and social media accounts dominate our institutions with their ability to put a positive spin on anything, even if their mistakes are deadly. Our corporations can’t admit problems even to their stockholders. Cover-up and confusion, deception and denial are second-nature to a business model that produces numerous failures and bankruptcies, such as Trump industries . Back in 1993 M. Scott Peck in A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered argued that there will never be true civility and community until our institutions, including our businesses, are willing to publicly speak of their mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, and to risk the vulnerability they fear such admissions would entail.   It's unlikely that we le...