I would think that Alec Baldwin using macho homophobic baiting to insult a right-winger would be the grossest thing I’d read from a male lefty celebrity today:
SEAN HANNITY: You don’t have the courage to answer questions.
ALEC BALDWIN: And what are you gonna do? And what are you going to do about it, Sean Hannity. If I come on your program, what are you going to do?
MARK LEVIN: He’s going to show that you have a two digit IQ – that’s what he’s gonna do. […]
BALDWIN: And who’s that – who’s your little cabin boy there with you.
LEVIN: I’m not a cabin boy, butt-boy.
BALDWIN: What are you doing there, cabin boy? … I now dub you Sean Hannity’s cabin boy.
Gee, thank goodness we have such articulate, smart lefty celebs to make our case for us, right?
Anyhow, I would have thought that would be the most annoying example of male lefty macho hateful bullshit I’d encounter today. But that’s because I hadn’t counted on Sean Penn weighing in on his funny doll of a famous right-wing woman:
Hollywood activist SEAN PENN has a plastic doll of conservative US columnist ANN COULTER that he likes to abuse when angry. The Oscar-winner actor has hated Coulter ever since she blacklisted his director father LEO PENN in her book TREASON. And he takes out his frustrations with Coulter, who is a best-selling author, lawyer and television pundit, on the Barble-like doll. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Penn reveals, “We violate her. There are cigarette burns in some funny places.
A great actor, but still an asshat.
Pingback: The Uncommon Man
Pingback: feminist blogs
Pingback: feminist blogs
Pingback: Liberal Blogosphere
You see a lot of this crap in comments on Artios and other mainstream lefty blogs. I think that some of this has to do with how very right wing the political spectrum is in the US. By most measures, democrats are very center right, if not just right wing while the republicans are far right. So people supporting the democrats can also be pretty right wing. And sexism and right wing politics go hand in hand.
I find this kind of thinking to be very frustrating. Every time somebody writes “Anne Coulter is so ugly.” “Anne Coulter is a man.” “Manne Coulter has an adams apple!” etc etc, it is contrary to left wing political goals. Every time somebody judges her by her looks and uses an ad hominem attack against her, it advances her goals. She argues for a world where women are judged by her looks and her detractors are often willing to give her that. Again, I think this is because most democrats aren’t left at all, they’re just not as far right as Bush. And maybe they only care because their own wages are falling and they’re totally happy with supremacy of their race, class and sex. They’re happy living in a rape culture and “violating” Coulter. It’s fucked up.
The US is in desperate need of a real left wing.
(I have my own response to Coulter)
Alec Baldwin, despite his “lefty” credentials, is also closely linked to the Fathers Rights movement, which tends to be pretty conservative.
I thought Alec left the country. I sure need to keep up my entertainment…err…polititainment news.
Thanks for posting about Sean Penn’s comment. I read about it in Salon’s “The Fix” and it really bothered me then.
Unless there are connotations I don’t know about, it seems like calling him a cabin boy is calling him a servant, not a homosexual.
Off topic: I love the word asshat, where did it come from?
Just for Rob.
http://www.odps.org/glossword/index.php?a=term&d=8&t=2437
(That was the first link to a google search with the terms: “cabin boy” gay.)
This would make it interesting.
http://1290whio.com/info/alec.html
There was a big to-do on Pandagon recently when a male poster said something about b-ffing Coulter and got called on it. He was confused about why women were “defending” Coulter, but eventually he seemed to get it. My two cents is that if a man can understand why it is inappropriate to attack Justice Clarence Thomas by calling him the N-word, then he can transpose this knowledge to why it is inappropiate to talk about raping Ann Coulter, let alone actually do it to her effigy. Creepy.
I wish liberal men would stop with the hilarious jokes about sexually assaulting Ann Coulter. I loathe being put in the position where I have to defend her. And I will defend her, even though I know full well she’d have no problem letting my ass swing in the wind.
But as Portia once said, “I don’t have to like her to want her to be free.”
You don’t have to defend her, flea. (I don’t like her either, so it’s a bipartisan Coulter-disdain.)
But I don’t think that “liberal men” make jokes about sexual abuse. Men with really bad values do. For some reason, at least some men with really bad values feel the need to camouflage themselves by pretending to be liberal.