So, women are pissed. But appearantly not pissed enough in great enough numbers (last time I looked they constituted 50% of the electorate) to keep Hippo Don out of the WH.
If taking away their abortion rights wasn't enough to stop Hippo Don, then why would taking away any other right?
The number of pissed women isn't big enough to counter the number of men who can't wait to put women back in the box.
Will it literally be The Handmaid's Tale? Of course not.
But back to the fifties, when women needed the signature of their hubby to withdraw money from the bank, and were automatically fired when they married? Hell yes.
Thanks for reading, Michiel. Are you saying that American women will tolerate that? Side note: I don't think Dobbs was as central to the MARGIN of people who voted Trump in this time as economic factors were. Put another way, for many of them the economy and prices trumped (no pun intended) rights that I don't think many of them realized were really at risk.
Thank you for replying, Cassidy. I think not only will they tolerate that, I think they already have.
I agree that economic factors, as well as immigration, played a larger role than abortion rights. But that, if anything, only goes to show that women, at least a very large number of them, don't care about abortion rights - not enough, evidently, to stop Hippo Don and Project 2025.
I don't have to argue this. It is not projection. It is history. It is fact.
Two things will happen. The rights of both men and women (American Citizens) will be put under pressure (as you know, Miller is proposing to get rid of Habeas Corpus). And in the chaos and confusion, Miller cum suis will undermine the rights of women even further.
I wouldn't even rule out that men will come down hard on the rights of women in even greater numbers. It wouldn't be the first time that one group of people take their anger, frustration and fear out on another group - start kicking 'down.'
You are suggesting (hoping?) that at some point more women will wake up, and take a stance, but the track record since the rollback of Roe suggests otherwise, if not the opposite.
I fear that the women who know, and hate, what's happening, have already reached maximum numbers, and that there aren't enough of them to stop their rights being taken away, gradually and increasingly.
The only thing we can hope for are the same economic factors - for the economy to turn so bad that Hippo Don and his minions are driven from the WH, thereby stalling Project 2025.
If women's rights are 'saved' it won't be out of principle, or because enough women realize the danger (like I said, they don't), but because of purely earthly bread and butter reasons...
So here in the backwater state of Ohio, we restored Roe. We also submitted twice as many petitions as needs to put our anti gerrymandering bill on the ballot.
Here’s the problem as I see it. This gerrymandering bill will pass, but will our wonderful Senator Sherrod Brown get re-elected? Idk. I can see folks here crossing over and voting for his Maga opponent.
This anger somehow must translate into voting every single republican out and I’m not sure that it does. When will women, and the people who love them and care about their future, get a clue?
You must vote blue all the way. A message must be sent. Crushing the Magas completely is the only way.
As much as I'd love to be reassured, this just doesn't ring true to me. I live in Ohio, a state where a majority recently voted to encode abortion protections in our state constitution. In response to that vote, the state legislature is spending its time and energy exploring ways to challenge or ignore that vote, while they are also challenging or ignoring the requirement that their highly gerrymandered districts be redrawn. Popular opinion - no matter how activated it may be - does not, in and of itself, unseat those who already have the power. If mere numbers could decide the future, cisgender men would not be in charge at all, as they've never been the majority.
Where did you find the statistic that only 1-2k women were at the Capitol on Jan. 6? Maybe "in" the Capitol, including Rosanne Boylan and Ashli Babbitt, who were both killed, but there were a lot more on the grounds. Read "Ashli" by Jack Cashiell to find out how abominably women protesters were treated, including those who went into the Capitol, prayed or looked at the statuary, and left of their own accord ten minutes later. The pussy-hatted fembots who showed up for the women's march didn't have to worry about being turned on by the deep state--they were acting on its behalf. The most courageous, principled women I know are in the MAGA movement. Sorry.
As someone who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment -- and marched at the Texas state capitol (with my adult daughter) in a ridiculous pink hat to protest the swearing-in of a misogynist, racist mobster as President -- this hardly rings true. What we saw on Jan 6 was a mob that was clearly intent on breaking into the Capitol, and it was not just men who were breaking windows and beating people up. They were there with the avowed purpose of changing the results of the election.
In fact, this is probably the ditziest thing I've yet heard about that day. The women who were there were only breaking in so they could pray? and... admire the statuary? Right. I do not believe that progressives have a monopoly on courage or principles, but it does suggest a lack of acquaintance with reality to declare that MAGA women do -- particularly MAGA women who break into one of America's most iconic symbols of democracy to er, browse the art collection.
Amazingly enough, I don't think I saw a single fembot among the tens of thousands of women who marched at the Texas capitol in Jan 2017. My own beliefs and the principles I try to live by were not inserted into my brain by robots or aliens; I learned the usual way, at church and in school and by reading -- and by living. My ability to think for myself is not an illusion.
Also, please note that the reason the marchers in Austin were not attacked by Capitol security had nothing to do with the "deep state" or any other right-wing fantasy. The peaceful nature of our march did, however. We didn't carry weapons. We didn't construct a gibbet and put a sign on it threatening to hang the Lt Gov. We did not break into the capitol building or threaten legislators or assault officers who were providing security. We had no plans to occupy the legislative chambers or reverse any lawful election results. As citizens, we exercised our 1st amendment rights, lawfully and peacefully.
Sorry, Paula -- finally getting to this. I sorta halved FBI's official estimate that 2,000-2,500 people entered the Capitol on January 6 in an effort to thwart the peaceful transition of power. And wasn't Roseanne Boyland crushed to death by the pro-Trump crowd? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/us/rosanne-boyland-capitol-riot-death.html
Just noticed: I didn't say that 1-2K WOMEN were at the Capitol; I was saying that 1-2K PEOPLE OVERALL were at the Capitol. Or I hope I successfully grammatically said that. (I find a grammatical goof every so often... after I post one of these things.)
I'm still looking for the 30-minute shoving match in the tunnel on the West Terrace (I watched it a few times in the days after the fact, I think on bgonthescene's YouTube channel, -- it's the reverse angle of this 3-hour video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAzkPKAdhGc ) but think it might have been removed because it was entered into evidence but a few seconds of it are shown near the 4-minute mark in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnHIJkZZAs . But then again these weren't the praying-statuary-gazing people who were trying to prevent the peaceful transition of power folks, these were the other 800-1,000 or so violent ones.
I did -- back then -- track where Boyland died. She died right outside the tunnel a step or two to the right in that video. The first word I got (back then) was that she overdosed on meth and had a heart attack from the meth and, you know, the riot itself. I'll go back and double-check that.
She was trampled. MAGA tried to say it was a drug overdose. But she was trampled. She was also a victim of Putin/QAnon/Flynn. She would not have been there but for disinformation.
I think it more likely that the reason the "pussy-hatted fembots" weren't turned on by "the deep state" (by which I assume you mean law enforcement) is that they were protesting peacefully, as was their right. If some MAGettes were treated poorly -- for praying or looking at the statues -- it's because they took part in a violent protest.
Cashiell profiles eight women who went to the Capitol that day, including a great-grandmother, a former NYPD detective, and the physician-daughter of Holocaust survivors who had already earned the ire of the Jacobins for having contested the safety of covid vaccines. The doctor was tried in a court whose judge was a guy whose advances she'd turned down at Stanford decades earlier. He wouldn't recuse himself. She later said, "my crime was to have turned against my social class." Everyone went to jail.
Democrats only like pliant, agreeable leftist women who don't think too much and parrot their slogans. These women read absolutely nothing besides drippy female novels and maybe the Style section of the Post. No history, no philosophy, nothing serious.
On the Handmaid's Tale, my dystopian novels (set in 2089, 2094) make the very valid point that even when the woke/Jacobin men are in charge, the women are still oppressed and sexually abused. Reality bites.
I'll read up on the Jacobins. I'm not a political scientist, of course -- I got my theology from, well, theology and Scripture. So I'll look for Jacobin influence on theological argumentation over the past couple of centuries. Very happy for some places to start if you have them!
Paul invokes Turkish women. I'd add Iranian and Afghani women to that. We've got some powerful examples of countries that successfully turned back the clock on women's rights and made it stick. Which suggests that women's rights seem inevitable until the day they no longer are.
OTOH, they tried it in Poland, too, and the Polish women handed them their asses. And it's too early to tell what'll happen in South Korea, but the women there are on a nationwide Lysistrata-style sex strike that the men are responding to by electing increasingly authoritarian leaders. (The guys' theory of change here seems dubious at best, but it's what they're going with.) It's a standoff that's brought the entire nation to a demographic standstill, and nobody knows right now how that will end.
The sticky point in the system you describe is this: Male politicians have always (and often, tragically) underestimated women as political actors -- and this trait is apparently resistant to any known solvent. I can't go a week, even now, without seeing some political dude pontificating about how Dobbs doesn't matter, because it's just about the girls, and girls' social job is to forgive and forget, which they probably already have, and who cares about their little votes anyhow? Our rage over this is completely invisible to a certain kind of Beltway insider -- and these dudes thrive in both parties. This is why that stunning record of post-Dobbs electoral drubbings to date isn't taken seriously as a factor by Very Serious Men. It's all one-offs, so surprising, won't happen again. And when it does happen again, that time is a one-off, too, because they've already forgotten the last one.
Even when they're doubled over, clutching their punched dicks and wondering where all those winged harpies came from, the lesson persistently does not stick. It happens over and over: two weeks later, they have forgotten this humiliation entirely, and are back to underestimating us, because they are congenitally incapable of seeing women as people or learning from even repeated electoral catastrophes when women are involved. (The Hollywood parallel is that movies made by and for women don't get funded or made, even when they consistently over decades make more money than anything else. Those guys have the same blind spot.) They do not hear us, no matter how loudly we scream. They can't remember events involving us long enough to notice that there might be a pattern here. And until they grow the cognitive capacity to hear us and remember us, their behavior will not change.
We may do better when the good women of Texas, Idaho, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama -- the states where this nonsense has taken deepest root -- step up and vote out the state GOP guys who are driving this insanity both locally and nationally. They will have to do it repeatedly, for a decade or more (likely, until a new generation of politicians rises up that came of age in the new reality) for the lesson to sink in. But it's probably the only way this insanity comes to a stable and permanent end.
Thank you for the image of Susan B. Anthony and St. Patrick and the snakes leaving my neighborhood for the wilds of Virginia on the other side of the the 14th St. Bridge. I am still laughing. Next step -- getting all of us women to REALIZE that we outnumber them. And we do. Unless we are afraid of them.
I'm proud to be a woman from Virginia. We are indeed made of tougher stock than the weeping violets of DC. Not that that's saying much. Off to the range this weekend!
I sure hope you are right. I feel like we need to arm ourselves because there are more #MAGARats in their spider holes who will ooze up when called; we have understated the filthy underbelly of America before and that’s how we ended up with #RapistTrump & #FascistGOP
Cass, hope you're right. I remember talking with a Turkish woman about 30 years ago---before Erdowan---and she was adamant they weren't going back. And yet they have. Not all the way to Handmaids tale, but they're certainly not where they were 30 years ago.
I think you have coined a word: rapism, as in the doctrine of our Loyal Opposition. The thought of what a lot of pissed off women will do in November is grimly satisfying.
Great essay! I’m impressed with the mind image of 200,000 women shouting down 2,000 proud boy types. NOW I am confident that women will prevail! Thanks for the glimmer of hope that we can derail the GOPs plan for the women of America.
You are dangerously naive.
So, women are pissed. But appearantly not pissed enough in great enough numbers (last time I looked they constituted 50% of the electorate) to keep Hippo Don out of the WH.
If taking away their abortion rights wasn't enough to stop Hippo Don, then why would taking away any other right?
The number of pissed women isn't big enough to counter the number of men who can't wait to put women back in the box.
Will it literally be The Handmaid's Tale? Of course not.
But back to the fifties, when women needed the signature of their hubby to withdraw money from the bank, and were automatically fired when they married? Hell yes.
And isn't that bad enough?
Thanks for reading, Michiel. Are you saying that American women will tolerate that? Side note: I don't think Dobbs was as central to the MARGIN of people who voted Trump in this time as economic factors were. Put another way, for many of them the economy and prices trumped (no pun intended) rights that I don't think many of them realized were really at risk.
Thank you for replying, Cassidy. I think not only will they tolerate that, I think they already have.
I agree that economic factors, as well as immigration, played a larger role than abortion rights. But that, if anything, only goes to show that women, at least a very large number of them, don't care about abortion rights - not enough, evidently, to stop Hippo Don and Project 2025.
I don't have to argue this. It is not projection. It is history. It is fact.
Two things will happen. The rights of both men and women (American Citizens) will be put under pressure (as you know, Miller is proposing to get rid of Habeas Corpus). And in the chaos and confusion, Miller cum suis will undermine the rights of women even further.
I wouldn't even rule out that men will come down hard on the rights of women in even greater numbers. It wouldn't be the first time that one group of people take their anger, frustration and fear out on another group - start kicking 'down.'
You are suggesting (hoping?) that at some point more women will wake up, and take a stance, but the track record since the rollback of Roe suggests otherwise, if not the opposite.
I fear that the women who know, and hate, what's happening, have already reached maximum numbers, and that there aren't enough of them to stop their rights being taken away, gradually and increasingly.
The only thing we can hope for are the same economic factors - for the economy to turn so bad that Hippo Don and his minions are driven from the WH, thereby stalling Project 2025.
If women's rights are 'saved' it won't be out of principle, or because enough women realize the danger (like I said, they don't), but because of purely earthly bread and butter reasons...
So here in the backwater state of Ohio, we restored Roe. We also submitted twice as many petitions as needs to put our anti gerrymandering bill on the ballot.
Here’s the problem as I see it. This gerrymandering bill will pass, but will our wonderful Senator Sherrod Brown get re-elected? Idk. I can see folks here crossing over and voting for his Maga opponent.
This anger somehow must translate into voting every single republican out and I’m not sure that it does. When will women, and the people who love them and care about their future, get a clue?
You must vote blue all the way. A message must be sent. Crushing the Magas completely is the only way.
As much as I'd love to be reassured, this just doesn't ring true to me. I live in Ohio, a state where a majority recently voted to encode abortion protections in our state constitution. In response to that vote, the state legislature is spending its time and energy exploring ways to challenge or ignore that vote, while they are also challenging or ignoring the requirement that their highly gerrymandered districts be redrawn. Popular opinion - no matter how activated it may be - does not, in and of itself, unseat those who already have the power. If mere numbers could decide the future, cisgender men would not be in charge at all, as they've never been the majority.
Where did you find the statistic that only 1-2k women were at the Capitol on Jan. 6? Maybe "in" the Capitol, including Rosanne Boylan and Ashli Babbitt, who were both killed, but there were a lot more on the grounds. Read "Ashli" by Jack Cashiell to find out how abominably women protesters were treated, including those who went into the Capitol, prayed or looked at the statuary, and left of their own accord ten minutes later. The pussy-hatted fembots who showed up for the women's march didn't have to worry about being turned on by the deep state--they were acting on its behalf. The most courageous, principled women I know are in the MAGA movement. Sorry.
As someone who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment -- and marched at the Texas state capitol (with my adult daughter) in a ridiculous pink hat to protest the swearing-in of a misogynist, racist mobster as President -- this hardly rings true. What we saw on Jan 6 was a mob that was clearly intent on breaking into the Capitol, and it was not just men who were breaking windows and beating people up. They were there with the avowed purpose of changing the results of the election.
In fact, this is probably the ditziest thing I've yet heard about that day. The women who were there were only breaking in so they could pray? and... admire the statuary? Right. I do not believe that progressives have a monopoly on courage or principles, but it does suggest a lack of acquaintance with reality to declare that MAGA women do -- particularly MAGA women who break into one of America's most iconic symbols of democracy to er, browse the art collection.
Amazingly enough, I don't think I saw a single fembot among the tens of thousands of women who marched at the Texas capitol in Jan 2017. My own beliefs and the principles I try to live by were not inserted into my brain by robots or aliens; I learned the usual way, at church and in school and by reading -- and by living. My ability to think for myself is not an illusion.
Also, please note that the reason the marchers in Austin were not attacked by Capitol security had nothing to do with the "deep state" or any other right-wing fantasy. The peaceful nature of our march did, however. We didn't carry weapons. We didn't construct a gibbet and put a sign on it threatening to hang the Lt Gov. We did not break into the capitol building or threaten legislators or assault officers who were providing security. We had no plans to occupy the legislative chambers or reverse any lawful election results. As citizens, we exercised our 1st amendment rights, lawfully and peacefully.
On Jan 6, in DC, that was clearly NOT the case.
Sorry, Paula -- finally getting to this. I sorta halved FBI's official estimate that 2,000-2,500 people entered the Capitol on January 6 in an effort to thwart the peaceful transition of power. And wasn't Roseanne Boyland crushed to death by the pro-Trump crowd? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/us/rosanne-boyland-capitol-riot-death.html
Just noticed: I didn't say that 1-2K WOMEN were at the Capitol; I was saying that 1-2K PEOPLE OVERALL were at the Capitol. Or I hope I successfully grammatically said that. (I find a grammatical goof every so often... after I post one of these things.)
You said people.
I'm still looking for the 30-minute shoving match in the tunnel on the West Terrace (I watched it a few times in the days after the fact, I think on bgonthescene's YouTube channel, -- it's the reverse angle of this 3-hour video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAzkPKAdhGc ) but think it might have been removed because it was entered into evidence but a few seconds of it are shown near the 4-minute mark in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnHIJkZZAs . But then again these weren't the praying-statuary-gazing people who were trying to prevent the peaceful transition of power folks, these were the other 800-1,000 or so violent ones.
I did -- back then -- track where Boyland died. She died right outside the tunnel a step or two to the right in that video. The first word I got (back then) was that she overdosed on meth and had a heart attack from the meth and, you know, the riot itself. I'll go back and double-check that.
She was trampled. MAGA tried to say it was a drug overdose. But she was trampled. She was also a victim of Putin/QAnon/Flynn. She would not have been there but for disinformation.
I think it more likely that the reason the "pussy-hatted fembots" weren't turned on by "the deep state" (by which I assume you mean law enforcement) is that they were protesting peacefully, as was their right. If some MAGettes were treated poorly -- for praying or looking at the statues -- it's because they took part in a violent protest.
Cashiell profiles eight women who went to the Capitol that day, including a great-grandmother, a former NYPD detective, and the physician-daughter of Holocaust survivors who had already earned the ire of the Jacobins for having contested the safety of covid vaccines. The doctor was tried in a court whose judge was a guy whose advances she'd turned down at Stanford decades earlier. He wouldn't recuse himself. She later said, "my crime was to have turned against my social class." Everyone went to jail.
I'll look up Cashiell's account. Thanks!
They didn't go to jail for breaking the law?
Democrats only like pliant, agreeable leftist women who don't think too much and parrot their slogans. These women read absolutely nothing besides drippy female novels and maybe the Style section of the Post. No history, no philosophy, nothing serious.
You are clearly not well-acquainted with any actual leftist women.
I know no leftist women like this. At all. It certainly goes against type.
On the Handmaid's Tale, my dystopian novels (set in 2089, 2094) make the very valid point that even when the woke/Jacobin men are in charge, the women are still oppressed and sexually abused. Reality bites.
I'll read up on the Jacobins. I'm not a political scientist, of course -- I got my theology from, well, theology and Scripture. So I'll look for Jacobin influence on theological argumentation over the past couple of centuries. Very happy for some places to start if you have them!
Oh good lord, get a life, honey. And have a dose of reality while you're at it. You talk a lot but are saying nothing.
Paul invokes Turkish women. I'd add Iranian and Afghani women to that. We've got some powerful examples of countries that successfully turned back the clock on women's rights and made it stick. Which suggests that women's rights seem inevitable until the day they no longer are.
OTOH, they tried it in Poland, too, and the Polish women handed them their asses. And it's too early to tell what'll happen in South Korea, but the women there are on a nationwide Lysistrata-style sex strike that the men are responding to by electing increasingly authoritarian leaders. (The guys' theory of change here seems dubious at best, but it's what they're going with.) It's a standoff that's brought the entire nation to a demographic standstill, and nobody knows right now how that will end.
The sticky point in the system you describe is this: Male politicians have always (and often, tragically) underestimated women as political actors -- and this trait is apparently resistant to any known solvent. I can't go a week, even now, without seeing some political dude pontificating about how Dobbs doesn't matter, because it's just about the girls, and girls' social job is to forgive and forget, which they probably already have, and who cares about their little votes anyhow? Our rage over this is completely invisible to a certain kind of Beltway insider -- and these dudes thrive in both parties. This is why that stunning record of post-Dobbs electoral drubbings to date isn't taken seriously as a factor by Very Serious Men. It's all one-offs, so surprising, won't happen again. And when it does happen again, that time is a one-off, too, because they've already forgotten the last one.
Even when they're doubled over, clutching their punched dicks and wondering where all those winged harpies came from, the lesson persistently does not stick. It happens over and over: two weeks later, they have forgotten this humiliation entirely, and are back to underestimating us, because they are congenitally incapable of seeing women as people or learning from even repeated electoral catastrophes when women are involved. (The Hollywood parallel is that movies made by and for women don't get funded or made, even when they consistently over decades make more money than anything else. Those guys have the same blind spot.) They do not hear us, no matter how loudly we scream. They can't remember events involving us long enough to notice that there might be a pattern here. And until they grow the cognitive capacity to hear us and remember us, their behavior will not change.
We may do better when the good women of Texas, Idaho, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama -- the states where this nonsense has taken deepest root -- step up and vote out the state GOP guys who are driving this insanity both locally and nationally. They will have to do it repeatedly, for a decade or more (likely, until a new generation of politicians rises up that came of age in the new reality) for the lesson to sink in. But it's probably the only way this insanity comes to a stable and permanent end.
Thank you for the image of Susan B. Anthony and St. Patrick and the snakes leaving my neighborhood for the wilds of Virginia on the other side of the the 14th St. Bridge. I am still laughing. Next step -- getting all of us women to REALIZE that we outnumber them. And we do. Unless we are afraid of them.
I'm proud to be a woman from Virginia. We are indeed made of tougher stock than the weeping violets of DC. Not that that's saying much. Off to the range this weekend!
I sure hope you are right. I feel like we need to arm ourselves because there are more #MAGARats in their spider holes who will ooze up when called; we have understated the filthy underbelly of America before and that’s how we ended up with #RapistTrump & #FascistGOP
Cass, hope you're right. I remember talking with a Turkish woman about 30 years ago---before Erdowan---and she was adamant they weren't going back. And yet they have. Not all the way to Handmaids tale, but they're certainly not where they were 30 years ago.
I think you have coined a word: rapism, as in the doctrine of our Loyal Opposition. The thought of what a lot of pissed off women will do in November is grimly satisfying.
Great essay! I’m impressed with the mind image of 200,000 women shouting down 2,000 proud boy types. NOW I am confident that women will prevail! Thanks for the glimmer of hope that we can derail the GOPs plan for the women of America.