DeSantis Stars in “American Psycho” Remake
A Major Outbreak of Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder
Collage of images from the Ron DeSantis campaign video for the end of Pride Month
On Friday, the last day of Pride Month, the Ron DeSantis campaign put out a video attacking Donald Trump for not being sufficiently anti-LQBTQ. In it, images of DeSantis and comments on how anti-gay and anti-trans he is are interspersed with images of “manly actors” (reel men), and shirtless men with bulging muscles.
It is the sort of pathetic attempt to show “manliness” that has become a trademark of America’s authoritarian party.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay member of a United States Cabinet, referred to the DeSantis video by noting “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders.”
The Party-formerly-known-as-Republican wants you to know that they are “real men.” From their Little runaway-run-run-run-run runaway Josh Hawley through Tucker Carlson wishing the American military had real men like the Russian army does, Tommy Tuberville, whose only acquaintance with the military was drawing up football “battle plans,” to Ted Cruz, who was never in the military but denounced the US Army for becoming “a woke, emasculated military,” and so many more.
Then there’s their Führer. Donald Trump was the sort of “Fortunate Son” about whom Creedence Clearwater Revival sang in 1969, a little more than a year after Trump received a 1-Y medical deferment from the draft for his alleged bone spurs after a doctor who was a tenant in one of his father’s buildings provided him with a letter saying he had the condition.
Trump told Howard Stern that his “personal Vietnam" was avoiding STDs while having sex with so many women. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” He agreed with Stern that “Every vagina is a landmine.”
Trump has referred to Americans in the military as “suckers” and those who died in battle as “losers.” But he loves to cosplay as a military man.
Trump playing dress-up as a “real man” on the USS Ford, March 3, 2017
My diagnosis of all these men is that they are afflicted by a psychological condition yet to be listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder (AMID), which has been a major cause of much of the evil throughout recorded history. I’ll discuss it at length in my next book
AMID is a complex that often presents as faux aggressiveness: boasting, bullying, bravado. It necessarily involves projection. Trump is said by those who have known him well to be a coward, is the poster boy for AMID.
The Poster Boy for Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder.
It is unintentionally appropriate as an indicator of where the “Republican Party” is that the DeSantis video includes a shot of Christian Bale in American Psycho.
NOTE: My times they are a-changin’. I have just retired after teaching for, they tell me (I’m thinking of demanding a recount), a half century, at Millsaps College. I’ll miss the classroom and stimulating discussions with students, but my life won’t change that much, as I have for decades spent most of my time writing and that will continue.
One thing that will change, though, is our income. Without my teaching salary, I need a new source of revenue. A patron or group of patrons establishing a fund to support my writing would be nice, but that’s not in the cards. Accordingly, I have decided to start taking paid subscriptions to my Substack essays. I don’t want to keep anyone from reading them without charge, but for those who can afford a paid subscription, I hope you will do so. There will also occasionally be a premium essay that is only available to paid subscribers.