George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency is linked to the fact that the United States is a country that is “anxiously hypermasculine,” writes Mark Dery on the op-ed page of The Los Angeles Times. “George W. Bush learned an unforgettable lesson about the anxious nature of American masculinity when Newsweek branded his father a ‘wimp,’ a perception Bush 41 never really overcame,” Dery writes. “The resolve never to look like a wimp is the key to Dubya’s psychology.” Dery adds:
The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it’s maintained by frantically repressing every man’s feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, “The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity,” clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind “femiphobia” — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that “the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.”OK, so maybe I’m overstepping the bounds of my Learning Annex degree in pop psychology. But the hidden costs of our overcompensatory hypermachismo are far worse than a few politicians slimed by pundits. The horror in Iraq has been protracted past the point of lunacy by George W.’s bring-it-on braggadocio, He-Ra unilateralism and damn-the-facts refusal to acknowledge mistakes — all hallmarks of a pathological masculinity that confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength. It is founded not on a self-assured sense of what it is but on a neurotic loathing of what it secretly fears it may be: wussy. And it will go to the grave insisting on battering-ram stiffness (stay the course! don’t pull out!) as the truest mark of manhood.
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