Two quotes from Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon First there’s Laura Ingraham who unloaded on football great Brett Favre who teared up when he announced his retirement.

“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL.”

“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.”

“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”

Find the appropriate links here.

And can we just send her a giant “eat shit?” Because who would know better what it really means to be a man than a quack talk-show host?

And here’s a more interesting quote, from Stephen Duckat’s The Wimp Factor (if you buy the book with that link it’ll be credited, appropriately, to Marcotte.)

... It suggests that being biologically male is not sufficient to confer or sustain masculinity. Instead, it must be asserted through repetition, words and actions. The everyday vocabulary and common-sense notions of gender remind us that in the majority of patriarchal cultures, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.

Do I need to restate the case that contrary to what aficionados of “masculinity” and “femininity” claim, the constructions of gender are almost entirely subtractive rather than additive? “Real men don’t cry.” (Though, obviously, real men do.) “It’s not feminine to cross your legs when you’re wearing a skirt.” Blah, blah, blah.

And sorry, saying “well, I’m mostly feminine but I fall asleep after sex like a man,” or “Well, Brett Favre’s 100% man but on top of that he does feminine things like crying too” just doesn’t work because you’ve still got all these scared, narrow little people who can’t make contributions of their own who use false distinctions like “a) crying is feminine” (and really I could just rest my case there couldn’t I?) and then go on to “b) Brett Favre cried” and then on to the technically logical but otherwise irrational conclusion that “c) Brett Favre is feminine” and therefore (by logically invalid extension) Favre is a woman.

“Being biologically male is insufficient to confer or sustain masculinity.” Huh. In other words, if there’s anything wrong with that picture it’s obviously masculinity and not men. (And no less obviously femininity and not women.)

I mean… doesn’t it just make more sense to say “some men never cry, others do” and just ditch the whole “he’s just a man but he’s not masculine? And “some women are interested in the way they look in dresses, other women aren’t” and dump the extra step of distinguishing “feminine” women from “regular” ones?

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Oh, and in yet another one of those small coincidences, while I was just out with my children for their evening romp at one of the local playgrounds (don’t ask) I ran across a line in Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Privatethat, while I’m pulling it slightly out of context, proposes a different perspective on men’s tears as a, literally, “softer side” that succeeds without invoking gender at all.

Tears are permissible, even admirable, when they fill the eyes of an old warrior reminiscing about battle or a jock talking about his teammates. In such contexts, tears are like the soft penis after satisfying sex.

Again, while the point Bordo is working towards is almost contrary to the text of the quote, what really matters is that the text doesn’t need to ship in “otherness” as an explanation. And unlike Ingraham’s invocations Bordo’s version implies no mysterious insight into what it must be like to be a man. Instead she relies on what could be confirmed by aobservation. That’s pretty cool.