Having lost its fight to elect Hillary Clinton, to destroy U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with false rape allegations, and take both house of Congress last week, the feminist Left has settled upon a new narrative to explain its losses.
White Republican women are the problem. They are “gender traitors” who just don’t get it.
They are stupid. They are evil. They are the enemy.
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So says the leftist Guardian’s U.S. writer, Moira Donegan, whose column about The Evil, White Republican Woman runs under this headline: “Half of white women continue to vote Republican. What’s wrong with them?”
Of course, this datum means the other half of white women voted for Democrats.
That said, the 53 percent of white women who voted Republican “can elicit exasperation, rage, and even suspicions about the moral legitimacy of the feminist project. It casts doubts on the political convictions of liberal white women, colors leftist perception of female-coded liberal political projects like the Women’s March, and has prompted long-overdue calls for increased political leadership by women of color.”
Political parties and their members are supposed to cast doubt on the other side’s convictions, but that truth, apparently, doesn’t apply to women. They must vote as a block — the way Donegan wants. Real, non-GOP women are fighting for “the soul of America, between the peevish, racist cruelty of Trump and his supporters and a vision of inclusion, justice, and decency forwarded by an increasingly diverse coalition on the left.” So white women must “break with their historical loyalty to white supremacy and embrace a kinder, more sustainable model for the future.”
White GOP women might believe the GOP offers a “more sustainable model for the future,” not least because it does not offer outright socialism. But while Donegan is heartened that fewer white women are voting for the GOP, at least according to her, they aren’t leaving the party fast enough. And here’s why:
White women’s identity places them in a curious position at the intersection of two vectors of privilege and oppression: they are granted structural power by their race, but excluded from it by their sex. In a political system where racism and sexism are both so deeply ingrained, white women must choose to be loyal to either the more powerful aspect of their identity, their race, or to the less powerful, their sex. Some Republican white women might lean into racism not only for racism’s sake, but also as a means of avoiding or denying the realities of how sexist oppression makes them vulnerable.
In the reality-based world, that’s called nonsense.
White GOP Women Are “Gender Traitors”
After the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh, the New York Times opened its pages to one Alexis Grenell, who wrote that supposedly abused women “all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol.” That was a good description of the insanity, except that Kavanaugh didn’t traumatize any women.
Still, Grenell assured readers, the GOP women senators who voted for Kavanaugh, particularly Senator Susan Collins, are “gender traitors” who “made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job.” They “probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.” And “these are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped.”
And Grenell’s screeching rhetoric didn’t stop there: “But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.”
And as if we didn’t know, Grenell explained, “we’re talking about white women.” Due process for men, which greatly concerned Collins during the Kavanaugh smear campaign, by the way, is “nonsense.”
White Women Don’t Get It
After the midterms last week, the racist remarks about white Republican women continued.
“White women,” Mona Eltahawy tweeted, “are footsoldiers of the patriarchy.” Tweeted another sane analyst: “White women are so gross it’s f***ing embarrassing and we need to f***ing stop.”
A genius at Rolling Stone saw it this way: “White women are a Republican constituency, and in many states they again voted as if patriarchy would protect them. 50 percent or more for DeSantis, Cruz, and Kemp. I am unsure when they will understand the damage that they do, and not just to themselves.”
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