I recently ran across the song by Kenny Rogers, "Coward of the County." In case you don't remember that one, it's about a guy named Tommy whose father was in prison and counseled him with these words:
Promise me, son, not to do the things I've done
Walk away from trouble if you can
Now it won't mean you're weak if you turn the other cheek
I hope you're old enough to understand
Son, you don't have to fight to be a man
The song suggests that, in following his father's advice, Tommy became known as the coward of the county. But one day the love of Tommy's life, Becky, was raped by the Gatlin brothers.
Twenty years of crawling was bottled up inside him
He wasn't holding nothing back, he let 'em have it all
When Tommy left the bar room, not a Gatlin boy was standing
He said, "This one's for Becky", as he watched the last one fall
And I heard him say
"I promised you, Dad, not to do the things you've done
I walk away from trouble when I can
Now please don't think I'm weak, I didn't turn the other cheek
And Papa, I should hope you understand
Sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man"
So the lesson goes: for Becky, Tommy resorted to violence in order to prove he was a man. But the song never addresses whether that is what Becky wanted. Did Tommy bother to ask her? In a story about gang rape, the need for Tommy to prove his manhood was centered.
While that is just a song about a fictitious story, it is the kind of framing we hear often when it comes to women being abused. Men who supposedly care about them focus on their own need for vengeance more than on what the woman needs at the time. That is framed as the "manly" thing to do.
Given that as a cultural frame of patriarchy, it makes what Cory Booker did in the confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown even more powerful.
Russell Berman talked to the senator from New Jersey the next day.
[B]eneath Booker’s beaming smile was a more painful recognition of how Black people, and especially Black women, were processing the particular tone of the Republicans’ treatment of Jackson. “You feel that familiar hurt,” Booker told me. “This is obviously a Supreme Court nomination, but I have yet to meet an African American woman this week who hasn’t come up to me and said she couldn’t relate to her, to what she was experiencing.”...
“I was not trying to center their negative attacks,” he continued. “I was trying to center her positive candidacy, her extraordinary light. I knew that those 20 minutes, those precious 20 minutes, were an opportunity to change the frequency from the negative back to the positive, to refocus the light on her glory.”
Under those circumstances, centering her extraordinary light was the "manly" thing to do - if you really want to be an ally. A woman as strong and capable as Judge Jackson doesn't need to be rescued - she needs to be supported, honored and empowered.
But Booker not only centered Judge Jackson, he centered every Black woman who has experienced something similar. Jonathan Capehart spoke to how that affected her African American brothers and sisters.
My thoughts on the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on PBS @NewsHour last night. 👇🏾 pic.twitter.com/scpo4Bf3pE
— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) March 26, 2022
It wasn't just Booker who showed us how to be an ally.
What felt like a corrective to that ugliness, though, was the clear and visible bond between Jackson and her husband, gastrointestinal surgeon Patrick Jackson, who was present for every moment of the hearings...[S]eeing him seated behind Jackson day after day (and occasionally tearing up as she’s knocked question after question out of the park) is an inchoate lesson in the power of true partnership...
Women everywhere—and Black women in particular, who are too often labeled strong without anyone stopping to offer them the support they have systemically been denied—deserve partners who look at them with a mixture of awe and respect while they achieve great things.
— 🇺🇸🌻🇺🇦 Thee Catherine #ConfirmKBJ (@CMargaronis) March 25, 2022
When it comes to being "manly" in response to a woman being attacked, forget that Kenny Rogers song. Cory Booker and Patrick Jackson just showed us how it's done. It means having enough empathy to center the woman's needs over your own.
This is all very nice, and no question that Booker and the justice herself were terrific. I'm also concerned for sexism among (a) men and (b) Republicans, with due awareness that they're both important but not the same. Still, can I say that the post somehow really really rubbed me the wrong way, for all my admiration for Nancy's writing?
ReplyDeleteThe problem with conservatives, the GOP (period), and their unconscionable behavior in the confirmation hearings isn't that they're just not following the right role models, that they're defending themselves and women against awful people when a proper person would back down, whatever. The problem is that they're the usual right wing and the usual party leaders using their position and a dedication to lies in order to further a horrible agenda that endangers our rights and democracy itself. They want first to keep the Supreme Court a rubber stamp for the party line, second to keep black women in their place, and third to use the hearings in order to stake out their claim to racism and the culture wars in order to win elections. And no degree of overcoming of toxic masculinity can change that. This is about politics, the politics of hatred, and I fear Nancy is turning away from it.
Incidentally, in regard to this and the fine earlier post on Booker, the mainstream coverage was lamentable. I honestly hadn't even noticed that the NY Times so much as mentioned him, and I read the paper diligently online or in print every day. They just kept covering the attacks. Turned out they did have a relatively short article about him, and even that was biased toward what they presented as preaching her virtues rather than questioning, overlooking his specific calling out of the GOP lies in Nancy's well-chosen video clip. Oh, and with regard to singling out Cotton? Too many candidates for most awful. How about Lindsay Graham denying the universal move toward rethinking some sentencing by repeating, loudly, that yeah someone who clicks on something, finds himself with porn, and moves on really should go to jail for decades.