Tucker Carlson's sexist rants reveal an ugly truth just how much misogyny continues to be tolerated
(this article is disturbing on so many levels, be warned)
Tucker Carlson's sexist rants reveal an ugly truth
Moira Donegan
The Fox News host has shown us just how much misogyny continues to be tolerated – and encouraged – by men
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‘It is not especially surprising to hear Tucker Carlson saying disgusting things in these newly rediscovered recordings.’ Photograph: Richard Drew/AP
Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator with a primetime show and a history of vitriolic racist rants, is in the news again after the media watchdog group Media Matters unearthed recordings of him from the mid-aughts, in which Carlson calls into a radio shock jock program to make a series of luridly sexist assertions and racist asides, palling around with a host who goes by the moniker “Bubba the Love Sponge”. In the recordings, Carlson says women are “like dogs”, claiming: “They’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” He insists that women find misogynist degradation pleasurable and makes sexual, antagonistic comments about women he does and does not like. He calls Arianna Huffington “a pig”, Justice Elena Kagan “ugly” and “unattractive”, and Martha Stewart’s daughter, TV host Alexis Stewart, “cunty”. He says he “wants to fuck” Sarah Palin and called for the elimination of rape shield laws, provisions that make it illegal for defense attorneys in rape cases to bring up an accuser’s sexual history as a way to discredit her. He laughs at a story about a woman being choked and calls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “the biggest white whores in America”, a phrase that seems to imply that there are other, bigger “whores” who are not white. In other recordings, he makes repeated racist overtures, saying that white men are responsible for “creating civilization”, calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and creating virtuosic combinations of racism and sexism in attacking Michelle Obama and white women who date black men.
The radio shows aired at a pivotal moment for Carlson’s career, when he was transitioning from a bow tied conservative commentator for CNN and MSNBC with pretensions to seriousness into a full-throated avatar of the Republican party’s sexist and racist id. Revealingly, in the transcripts he returns again and again to a Freudian fear of castration, calling Hillary Clinton “anti-penis”, claiming that Oprah Winfrey “hates the penis” and asserting that if Clinton “could castrate you, she would”. In one paranoid fantasy, Carlson draws a one-to-one causal connection between the rise of a woman to power and the likelihood, in his mind, that he will subsequently lose his penis. He implores the radio hosts to imagine a world in which Clinton was president, asking: “How long do you think it would take before she castrates you?” It’s clear from the recordings that Carlson’s sexist remarks are part of an effort to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Carlson clearly wants the approval of Bubba the Love Sponge, and is trying to establish a rapport with him by making degrading and lewd attacks on people he perceives as their shared enemies – namely, whichever woman they are talking about at the moment. It is a long-established pattern of male bonding in which misogynist aggression is deployed as a signal of irreverent joy and shared virility, a tactic that Donald Trump, the man Carlson so frequently carries water for on his television show, famously termed “locker room talk”. It is likely that Carlson’s conservative fanbase – which notably includes a white power group that uses his show for recruitment – will dismiss the recordings as readily as they dismissed Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments, seeing them not as examples of Carlson’s ugliness and indignity but as evidence of his red-blooded masculine authenticity. Carlson certainly seems to think so. He has already taken to Twitter to parlay the controversy into a bid for ratings.
What might be more revealing about the recordings are Carlson’s frequent, repeated and apparently unsolicited defenses of Warren Jeffs, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practiced polygamy and ritualized child molestation. “I should make the laws around here,” Carlson says when the conversation turns to Jeffs, who recorded himself raping a 12-year-old girl and telling her to “feel the spirit of God”. “Warren Jeffs would be out on the street.” He also suggests that polygamy should be legal, and calls the then-ongoing criminal charges against Jeffs – who is currently serving a life sentence – “bullshit”. Child marriage is different and less severe than stranger rape, Carlson asserts, because “the rapist made a lifelong commitment” to “take care of the person”. He also exhibits a conspicuously thorough knowledge of state consent law.
In another exchange, Bubba and his cohost chide Carlson for sending his daughter to a boarding school, saying that she will probably be sexually experimenting there with other girls. “Well when she’s in a dormitory-type setting and these little girls start to experiment around,” Bubba begins. “If it weren’t my daughter I would love that scenario,” Carlson replies. In the same interview, he says that his daughter is 14. This willingness of Carlson to sexualize young girls, and to publicly defend a man accused of raping young girls and of helping and encouraging others to rape them, speaks to a pervasive aspect of heterosexual culture that normalizes sexual predation: the public, shameless and frequently professed attraction of adult straight men to adolescent and teenage girls.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/12/tucker-carlson-sexist-rants-reveal-an-ugly-truth
