The 2024 Grammys: The Sum of All fears of Insecure Males
A Window into the Allure of Authoritarianism
Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, Victoria Monét
“Women Dominate”
“Taylor Swift Makes History as Women Rule”
Such headlines lead insecure men to follow authoritarians.
Sixty years to the week after 17-year-old Lesley Gore singing the revolutionary lyrics of “You Don’t Own Me” soared to Number 2 on the Billboard chart (kept from the top spot only by the Beatles taking that position for the first time that week with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), the 2024 Grammys forcefully reaffirmed that message. The song, written by John Madara and David White, announced the arrival of the modern women’s movement even more boldly than Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had a year earlier.
The 2024 Grammys last month added up to the sum of all fears of the sort of insecure males who have jammed the ranks of authoritarian movements in the United States and around the world. Women’s History Month is an appropriate time to have a think on both the wonderful reality of that awards show and how men who feel threatened likely perceived it. That can provide us with a window through which we can see some of what has led so many people to embrace authoritarianism. It can also shine a light on where we are as a society and a polity in this year of extraordinary peril for the American Experiment in freedom and rule by the people in a diverse society.
Not only did women win all the major awards that were given out during the primetime show—Album of the Year (Taylor Swift), Song of the Year (Billie Eilish), Best Record (Miley Cyrus), Pop Duo/Group (SZA & Phoebe Bridgers), Pop Solo (Cyrus), Pop Vocal Album (Swift), New Artist (Victoria Monét), but also, in all but the last of those categories almost every nominee—7 of 8 in each of the first three, all 5 in the next two, and 4 of 5 in the sixth—is female. The only males even to be nominated in any of those categories except New Artist were Jon Baptiste (in three) and Ed Sheeran.
Female artists also dominated the live performances on stage. In addition to most of those already mentioned, Olivia Rodrigo, Tracy Chapman, and Joni Mitchell. And, not included in the televised show, Paramore became the first female-fronted band ever to win the Grammy for Best Rock Album.
As Ben Sisario wrote in the New York Times, “The narrative of the night was all about the excellence and the empowered voices of women.”
That narrative of female empowerment, which is reflective of much else in contemporary culture and society, is what so frightens males who suffer from masculine insecurity and helps to explain why so many of them are attracted to authoritarianism. The vertical binary of ♂ > ♀, which had come to be generally accepted in most societies by the time writing was invented about five thousand years ago, is the foundational lie of human history. Sexism is the original sin of humankind. Misogyny is the gateway drug to all other hatreds. The belief that men are superior to women is the model on which all other vertical binary divisions—race, class, nationality, master/slave, religious hierarchies, and so on—have been constructed.
The presumed impermeable barrier between “superior” and “inferior” categories provided those whose self-worth is dependent on their membership in a caste that was above some other classification with the assurance that they could only fall so far:
What is a glass ceiling for those below the barrier is also a glass floor for those above it. Those above the transparent floor can see the people below it and many of the self-doubting men are intent on assuring that the floor beneath them is restored.