Living the Thug Life as a White Stay-At-Home Dad

Americans have an ignominious relationship with thugs. In the 2008 election, Tom Tancredo’s campaign was focused on the threat posed by MS-13 (he even started rumors that the gang was joining the military to shoot our boys in the back in Iraq in a desperate attempt to make the threat relevant). Going back to the 1970’s, Nixon’s war on drugs was really a war on thugs in the form of people of color who used the wrong kind of drugs. As evidence of that, the drug war has never targeted “civilized” drugs the same way that it targeted crack, meth, and other “thug” drugs. Powder cocaine was sentenced far lower than crack cocaine until recently, and misuse of prescription drugs is still hardly even a blip on the DOJ radar. Yet, this image was cultivated from a website that is admiring of Pres. Nixon, confusing the issue even further. We throw the word at police, security guards, Obama is called the thug-in-chief by tea party members who are called thugs by Moveon.org, and black youth and Muslims are our go-to thugs. Anyone we find prepared to apply violence indiscriminately is a thug.

And just who is willing and able to apply violence without thinking. Sometimes black men, sometimes, white men, sometimes Arab men, sometimes Latino men, but always men. So what is the female equivalent of the word thug? What do we call a woman who is willing to commit violence indiscriminately? Do we even have a word for it?

The word you're looking for is not bitch. A bitch is a woman acting outside of her appropriate feminine role. Rather, thug is equivalent to slut, which is a woman acting within the appropriate feminine role but taking it too far in a dangerous and indiscriminate way.

A thug is someone who has learned his social lesson too well. From an early age, boys are trained that the ability to commit violence is a primary source of our power. We spend a lifetime training boys to kill, hurt, and maim. We indoctrinate them into violent sports, video games, and even glorifying the word “thug” in proper contexts. We show them thousands of scenes of violence on television, almost all of them perpetrated by men. As boys are coming to terms with what it means to be a boy and later a man in America, they are bombarded by images of men killing other people (often women). Occasionally, a woman joins in the violent blood romp, but only if she is sexy enough to make the man feel secure in his masculinity while she’s doing it. We are trained to be warriors, to protect our family, society, and country from thugs.

To twist the Apostle Paul's words in Romans 8:30, if warriors be for us, who be against us? When the cops are warriors, the criminals are thugs, and when the marchers in Selma are warriors, the cops are thugs. When the Marines are warriors, the terrorists are thugs, and when the men from the village are freedom fighters, the imperialists are thugs. The image on the right are not Taliban thugs as you may have assumed, but Afghan freedom fighters with the Northern Alliance fighting the Soviets in a different era. Somewhere in the middle are we who want free from this Madonna/Whore complex.

But while the the whore side of the complex may be able to be reclaimed (as the Slut Walks attempt), there is no reason to reclaim thug. Sluts have fun. Sluts enjoy creating life. Sure they take risks and break hearts, but they do not kill. Thugs, however, are irredeemable. Thugs murder, rape, steal, and beat. Talking about the risks involved in acting like a thug is ridiculous because being a thug is pure risk. If a thug doesn’t kill, he dies at the hands of a true thug in mixed martial arts, in the streets, or in Afghanistan.

So we must stop rewarding warriors, and stop reclaiming thug. We must push back against violence and try to learn from women's work how satisfying it can be to nurture and care for those we love. We must break out of the warrior/thug complex.