You Don’t Need to Have a Dick to Be One

Wielding Big Phallic Energy in the Female MAGA-sphere

“I want to be a prick just like Donald Trump,” proclaimed Michael early in our psychoanalytic work together. Finding his “deep masculinity” through mythopoetic men’s drum circles, shooting his gun at the local firing range, and pumping iron did not suffice. He longed for a personality makeover that would enable him to be cold, cruel, and ruthless, believing it would make him a “real man.” That was his goal for treatment, which I continually frustrated by exploring his need for it. Michael’s failure to weaponize himself in that way led to relentless self-denigration, as well as disappointment in me.

That moment in our work took place in 2004, thirteen years before Trump became a serious candidate for office. Back then, The Donald was merely a vacuous celebrity famous for being famous, and a corrupt, racist, and predatory nepo-baby developer who cultivated the fictitious persona of a bootstrapped business genius, which he enhanced with mob-boss affectations. This was also the year the self-proclaimed entrepreneurial savant filed the first of six bankruptcies for his failed casinos. (Let’s remember that a casino is a business in which customers line up to give you lots of money in exchange for brain-addling quantities of alcohol, a dopamine-fueled fantasy of instant wealth, and the risk of a greased slide into poverty. How Trump could come to financial ruin by hoovering up the hard-earned cash of the desperate and gullible remains a mystery.)

While a secular evangelist of the prosperity gospel, Trump was (and remains) a grifter relentlessly on the prowl for the next mark. Many, like my patient, were smitten with the performance and saw him as a model to emulate. As Michael already had an anatomical prick, what he envied was Trump’s psychological prick – the sense of entitlement to dominate others, to take what and whom he covets, and crush those who impede his pursuit of self-interest.

While “penis envy” was second-wave feminism’s Freudian bête noire, the conventional critique mistook the organ (the penis) for the symbol (the phallus) and missed the real sufferers of this hypothetical condition – males. The phallus is a signifier of omnipotence, invulnerability, absolute self-sufficiency, and complete domination. It is something that no one has and many want. Readers may recognize the centrality of this phallic psychology in the rhetoric and policies of MAGA Republicans. In one of the few manifestations of gender equality on the Right, being a dick is an opportunity available to women and well as men, and it is rapidly becoming this regime’s governing philosophy.

The phallic woman is depicted in this reproduction of an ancient Roman sculpture.

The symbolic equation between untrammeled power and the phallus did not originate with the fanciful conjuring of psychoanalysts with too much time on their hands. We can find it etched on the ancient Greek pottery used to commemorate military victories, which featured erect penises and scenes of losers in a war being anally raped. It can also be found in the imagery of contemporary editorial cartoons. In my 2005 book, The Wimp Factor, I describe numerous iterations of this theme. In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton redefined the role of First Lady. Determined not to be a demure, cookie-baker standing by her man, she showed herself to be an intellectual and wonky power-house partner to her husband, Bill. That defiance of female gender norms ushered in decades of right-wing depictions of her as both a castrator of men and the one in the marriage who not only wore the pants but also the package. Even Spy Magazine made an unsubtle contribution to this genre. Their cover featured an alteration of the famous Marilyn Monroe photo over a heating grate. Photoshopped with the head of Hillary, it showed hot air blowing the hem of her skirt upwards, revealing a pair of men’s underwear fully equipped with a penis.

This cover may be blurry due to decades of photocopying, but the message remains clear.

This image and the many others like it that circulated at the time illustrate how some in our culture, especially those on the Right, view female power. It also suggests that the phallus and what it represents are perceived as detachable and mobile. While Spy played gender fluidity for laughs, it was and remains an abiding fear for conservatives. It terrifies them because, at some level, they believe gender is not so immutable and view that possibility with horror. For decades, conservative men in particular have projected their anxieties about the instability of manhood onto the political playing field. Trapped in the gendered version of their zero-sum worldview, women’s agency is seen as a theft from men. The exception to that paranoid narrative is when female conservatives don phallic armor to fight for the patriarchy and other elite privileges.

The Phallus as a psychological and social signifier is quite portable.

The OG phallic woman of the modern Right is Ann Coulter. In the early 2000s, she was fond of insulting her male critics with femiphobic epithets like “girly-boy” and “panty waist.” Regarding predominantly Muslim nations, Coulter advised her Republican colleagues to “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Following the revelations of Rush Limbaugh’s drug habit, comedian Bill Maher said in his January 23 2004 monologue on his HBO show Real Time, “This has been the toughest week for conservatives since Ann Coulter admitted she had a penis.”

Combative, arrogant, obdurate, and lacerating of opponents, Coulter was the prototype for the next generation of fascist Barbies that became the standard for Fox News’ primetime lineup. She also provided a role model for the MAGA dominatrices currently holding political office, like Kristy Noem and Pam Bondi, who translate their boss’s sadism into policy. We also see the Coulter legacy of dickishness in the repudiation of empathy expressed by Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst at her recent town hall. An anxious constituent responding to the proposed cuts to Medicaid in the Republican budget bill yelled out, “People are going to die.” Ernst shrugged and replied with icy dismissiveness, “We are all going to die.”

Destroying health care is lethal enough; the pistol is redundant.

In my most recent book, Hatreds We Love, I look at the subtypes of MAGA’s most oxymoronic strata, anti-feminist women. It includes trad-wife warriors for female subordination prominent among the base, and the policy pugilists who now staff the administration. It is the latter I’m focusing on here. They are part of the regime charged with delivering the punishments Dear Leader mandates for his enemies of the day, whether it be abducting and transporting migrants to the perpetual torment of Salvadoran gulags, enabling an early death for the millions who rely on subsidized food, shelter, and health care, shuttering universities that don’t end fact-based education, or investigating and incarcerating political opponents.

For MAGA’s female enforcers, their actions are accessorized with the cosmetics of phallic fem cruelty. Various observers of right-wing fashion have described the carefully curated look. It includes stiletto heels, makeup so thick it functions as a kind of facial Kevlar, heavily lacquered talons, pendulous plastic eye lashes, warpaint eyebrows courtesy of Sharpie, and the de rigueur glistening metallic crucifix that no holy warrior would leave home without. When lip plumpers, cheek fillers, and wrinkle relaxers are added, the result is what some have called the “Mar-a-Lago face,” the perfect complement to gravity-defying and surgically engineered neo-breasts.

Ultimately, her “Mar-a-Lago face” would not save her from replacement.

The aesthetic seems to be the cosmetic equivalence of Trump’s toilet chandeliers and garish gold wall adornments — defiantly unsubtle, unapologetic, and cheesy status displays. It must be said that prominent political women and men on the Left also make use of fashion signifiers, but like liberals more generally, they are more heterogeneous in their fashion choices. At least, that is the observation of a sociologist of fashion, Anna Akbari. As I document in my current book, when it comes to policy, opinion, neighborhoods, and self-presentation, liberals tend to prefer diversity to uniformity.

All this may leave some wondering why MAGA women’s exoskeleton of phallic hardness is not just tolerated but admired by an administration and voting base that otherwise revile any deviation from traditional gender norms. The answer may lie in the fact that it is a display ultimately designed to please their man – the Royal Prick himself, Donald Trump. He is quite likely flattered to see his dickish cruelty reflected back by what one reporter dubbed his “MAGA Mean Girls.” Trump’s snickering pleasure at the violent and sadistic actions of the national lynch mob over which he presides has always been obvious. He is no doubt gratified that his foot soldiers in Manolo Blahniks stand ready to stomp on anyone who displeases him. As Echoes to his Narcissus, they are perfectly aligned with the Right’s perspective on who women and men are supposed to be.