Simultaneously, people are exploring gender more openly and have easier access to online forums through which to explore differing types of gender and sexual expression.Īs Browning writes in the introduction to his books, apart from fundamentalist extremism, he says “nothing seems to stimulate or threaten conventional stability so deeply as the shifting terrain of gender – and indeed it may well be that the steady erosion of gender roles motivates fundamentalist rage even more than the historic abuses of race, poverty and imperial presumption”.
Browning said that today, men hold fewer positions of power and are being demoted in society. “We’re going to see in a decade what we’ve seen in the last five years, a movement for which Trump happened to be the dandy on hand,” Browning said. They move in and out of these roles as cultural hegemony permits them”.Ī key theme of the book is how the increased acceptance of gender fluidity and industrialization – which brought men out of the fields and into offices, where they have no inherent strengths compared to women – has destabilized traditional power structures.īrowning said the gender revolution can help explain the resurgence of rightwing extremism in Europe and why it is possible for a former reality television show host to become the presumptive Republican nominee for US president – even though he has made racist, sexist and xenophobic comments. “Human beings don’t like straitjackets unless they are French bureaucrats or North Korean apparatchiks. “The fluidity of gender is universal,” Browning said.
“There is a resentment that transfuses western society having to do with this change of a role of authority and power, and Donald Trump responds to that,” Browning told the Guardian in a phone call from his home in France.īrowning used his experience as a former NPR science correspondent to explore this topic under a close lens: from meeting with Shanghai’s “sexy sociologist”, Yuxin Pei, as she spreads the good word of female masturbation to talking with Norwegian preschool teachers about their classroom gender experiments, Browning provides scientific substance to discussions about how people shift from traditional definitions of gender, or are gender fluid, today.
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