In comments to Digby’s post on latent homoerotic political mancrushes viz the Republican debate, Aimai cuts to the heart of Republican fixation with male sexual power:
I’ve always thought the republican male attitude towards their male candidates smacks more of a kind of pedophilic victim’s stockholm syndrome. In other words, their longing for a strong, powerful, daddy figure is so strong that they wind up fantasizing about them in this almost sexual way. That is because, if I can turn to a different area, they are locked into a totally binary world: male /female, strong/weak, republican/democrat, sexual dominance/sexual passivity and attraction to dominance. If their candidates are ever going to be strong enough to dismiss the republican bases fear of weakness, they have to be so strong that all other entities in the universe are seen as their opposite. So even “manly men” are as women in the equation “republican leaders:followers” “men:women.” It reminds me a bit of the thread in judaism that treats the Torah as masculine and by implication the reader/lover of Torah as a woman attracted to, in love with, enthralled with Torah. Unless I’ve got that backwards (!) But either way, in a binary, manichean universe there is only one truly masculine identity and all others become merely female. In fact, I might also argue that where leadership is represented as wholly masculine the viewer/commentator sees himself as essentially feminized. And within the category of feminized he can only choose either slavish adoration or some kind of catty spurning of the failed love object, or to transform the love object into a woman and despise it (the breck girl accusation).
aimai
aimai | 06.06.07 – 2:30 pm | #
That also ties in with the Christian church’s imagery of itself as ‘the bride of christ’ and the repeated requests to ‘fill me with your spirit, lord’.
I beleve I wrote something to the same effect as this comment about 5 years ago, but with much less eruditition and civility than Aimai.
The words I used were something like ‘Why don’t they all just give each other a good butt-fucking, preferably wearing uniform, and get it over with”. But then I’m not nice.
