For the first year or two of reading Digby, the influential liberal blogger who until this week was completely pseudonymous, I just assumed that s/he was a man. At some point I was tipped off to the possibility that, since s/he didn’t claim a particular gender, s/he could just as easily be a she as a he, but I still figured he was a he. There was something about the way that Digby talked about misguided machisimo that suggested to me that s/he’d wrestled with it from the inside. Take this recent post, for example:
I honestly don’t know what to make of all these men in the political establishment who insist on using their mancrushes as some sort of guideline for who is and is not "presidential." Honestly, even Kathryn Jean Lopez’s famous drooling over Mitt Romney isn’t as embarrassing. Other than her predictable true confessions I’ve not seen a lot of females (except Margaret Carlson) going on about the candidates as if they are romance novel heroes. No, this particular form of dreamy prose is oddly confined to ostensibly straight, middle aged men who are so taken with certain alpha leaders that turgid descriptives just come pouring out of them.
Here’s Roger Simon in the Politico, via Media Matters:
From Simon’s June 6 column:
Here are the winners and losers of Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, accurate to three decimal places.
FIRST PLACE: Mitt Romney
Analysis: Strong, clear, gives good soundbite and has shoulders you could land a 737 on. Not only knows how to answer a question, but how to duck one.
This is on top of his earlier embarrassment from a few months back:
But Romney is so polished and looks so much like a president would look if television picked our presidents (and it does) that sometimes you have to ask yourself if you are watching the real deal or a careful construction.
Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.
But, hey, at least Romney actually is a handsome, chiseled fellow. When they start going on and on about the babe magnet Fred Thompson or the hunky Giuliani I have to shake my head in wonder. There’s something wrong with them and it has nothing to do with being gay or straight. This is way deeper than that — so deep, in fact, that someone should do their psychology thesis on the subject. Why do so many male Washington courtiers have giggling mancrushes on phony Republican politicians? A question for the ages if there ever was one.
Well, it turns out that Digby’s a chick, and the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that I thought she was a he, in large part, because I wanted her to be a man. I wanted to be able to take heart from the example of a man who was open enough to the tortured daddy-yearning in his own soul to be sensitive to the tortured daddy-yearning of our political and media elite.
I can’t quite decide whether that’s a sexist impulse or not. On the one hand, as I’ve written before, being able to genuinely look up to, and want to emulate, women is kind of the final frontier in the evolution toward an enlightened masculinity, and I s’pose that if i were truly enlightened I would be as open to admiring she-Digby for her insight into masculinity as I would to admiring he-Digby. On the other hand, there is something non-sexistly compelling about a man being able to break through his own he-bullshit to see the general truths about he-bullshit. A woman, by contrast, can’t walk ten feet in the rain without having he-bullshit thrown in her face.
Anyway, congrats to Digby for the award she won that brought her out of the shadows, and in her honor I’ll try not to make as many asses out of u and me in the future.
