This piece, on masculinity in recent movies, has me thinking. One of the interesting points about the Trump era is the reassessment of received norms and a rather more thoroughgoing examination, and even critique of them, than has been given significant public space for a long time. We've seen this with the interesting fact that, over the past decade, the people who have seen the most movement on their views on race seem to be white liberals.
Of course, these changes actually pre-date the election of Donald Trump. It seems to begin showing up in measurable ways in polls around 2012.
Hence, similarly, the "#metoo" era begins before Trump, and so reconsiderations of gender, misogyny, "toxic masculinity" and sexual violence are really significant transformations. Same with Black Lives Matter.
SIDEBAR: These transformations seem tagged to more than just partisan politics, even though GOP obstructionism of Obama, the GOP-subsidized emergence of the racist Boomer "tea parties" in 2010, and the GOP-supported birther movement, were obviously significantly catalyzing forces for the changing perceptions. In fact, I would say that--and this is not to excuse the GOP's racist response to them--the cultural changes were underway when the GOP was thrashing about, trying to figure out its future.
(Consider: in the 2006 period forward, the GOP had to figure out what kind of party it wanted to be. It went with a warrior in 2008, though he chose an early adapter of know-nothing white Christian nationalism in Sarah Palin. It chose a plutocrat in 2012, though he chose an exemplary Tea Party/theocon libertarian quisling in Paul Ryan. Finally it chose Trump, and a toxic mix of factors put him in office.)
But the GOP's strategy is in some ways a reaction--it's too unthinking to call it a response--to these changes. It may win another election, as I think 2020 is too close to call this far out, but it's not a good look for an even medium-term success story. This is not, I think, a consoling story I'm telling myself; this is simply what we have. There is no victory for the GOP that can be imagined; all they can do is stave off the future for as long as they can. I think it won't work. But whatever happens, it seems, for the interests of this post, that the GOP's actions have not caused these changes, they have been significantly provocative of those changes. OK, back to the main story now:
So, in short, we are in a period, if you hadn't noticed, of very fast cultural change. I don't know of another time when the culture was changing this fast, AND the politics seemed so totally log-jammed. This seems an especially unusual mix, but the uniqueness of this reconsideration alongside the partisan political reaction is not what I want to focus on. What I want to focus on is the uniqueness of the reconsideration itself.
When was the last time there were such large-scale, wrenching transformations in cultural norms? I honestly don't think there's been one like this in my lifetime. That means, to me anyway, that the 2010s seem like the 1960s. (I know, I know--that's a really innovative analogy, right there.) That seems legit: it was my generation's parents, more or less, that created and endured the 60s. We then came along and were taught to value, or at least endure, far more gradual changes. (Whatever else Gen X was, it was the generation of children brought up in no-fault divorce culture, among other things.) We were in some ways conservative, because of the echoes of cultural trauma we absorbed. Plus it takes a while, maybe a couple of generations, for new norms to really settle in. Then, when they've settled in, people can begin to feel them as constraining. It seems that that is what is happening now.
One thing that's interesting this time, at least for me, is the absence of significant religious movers on the front-lines of these rebellions. There seems to be no prominent religious voices as part of whatever avant-garde there is today. It seems sparked by no theological, messianic, or apocalyptic pressures (at least on the left--the reaction on the right has a great deal of theological framing and provocation, but I'm talking here about the changes on the cultural level, not the partisan political one).
Another thing is the way that the past is becoming deeply "problematic," to remind you of a word the cool kids were using just a year or two ago but which seems to have declined in its popularity of late. I know this best here in Charlottesville and at UVa, of course, but it is obviously a national, and perhaps even nascently almost a world-wide, phenomenon.
Anyway. What does all this amount to? It amounts to a world that sounds, and feels, idiomatically very different than it used to. Consider: If you had fallen asleep In 1980 and woken up in 2010, you would have had to learn some new names, but the norms weren't very different. You would have heard about the US's ongoing struggles against an ideological enemy (though different ones). You would have heard about the slow acceptance of gay people in the culture and in families (this was happening in 1980 too, but it was much more nascent). Women were struggling to balance family and career, in 1980 and in 2010. Even on race: You would have found--surprise!--a black president, but the basic rhetoric and logic of racial integration remained fairly bourgeois and norm-core, the sort of politics of respectability that Ta-Nehisi Coates repeatedly complained about in President Obama's speeches, and not without reason. (Strange analogy but one I would believe: The Cosby Show is a lot more like the Bernie Mac show than the Bernie Mac show is like Black-ish, and the Fresh Prince is more like Chappelle's show than Chappelle's show is like Atlanta.)
In other words: maybe things have really changed in this decade. Just think about it for a minute, before you dismiss it, ok? And the point of the claim is: things are really changing now, and I suspect that when the partisan politics becomes less reactionary, you will be surprised at how sudden some changes will be.
(And I suspect also that people on the conservative side of stuff in the United States see some of this, and are terrified by it.)
So maybe this wasn't a "small post" after all.