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Bad People Have Bad Opinions [1]

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Date: 2023-01-23  

Okay, so I promised a detailed take-down of Steve Sailer. I still plan on doing that, but not this week. This week, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I decided to focus on the Right’s misogyny.

They want a national ban with no exceptions. The writer of the linked piece quite openly states that there should not be an exception for the woman’s life. In the middle of her essay, the writer says “Why would we ask a mother to die for her child? Why wouldn’t we? Who else would? If you’re not willing to die for your own child, you’re not willing to die for anything, and thus you cease to live for anything either. “ The writer is, of course, not a mother and in no danger of having to make this decision but she’s happy to make it for all other women. Viewing all women as nothing but incubators is basic to the right wing worldview, even more than racism is. The Left needs to emphasize exposing how the right wing views women as worthless, because they’re going to be leaning a lot more heavily into misogyny in the future.

This poem captures perfectly the conservative view of women: we are to be mindless, thoughtless, extensions of our husbands. More polished versions of the same sentiment say that pregnancy and lactation are a kind of female superpower.

The misogyny in these arguments can be difficult to spot at first. They’re saying that women do something irreplaceable! What they are in fact saying is that women are placental mammals, and that the bodily functions of a placental mammal are the same as the creative work of the mind. This is obviously not true. Coma patients can carry pregnancies, give birth, and even lactate. There is nothing unique or individual about pregnancy and lactation. No creativity goes into either bodily function. There is no mystery involved, any more than there is a mystery involved in sweating or sneezing. Rats do pregnancy better; cows have an entire industry devoted to their lactation. To make pregnancy and lactation the standard for being a woman is to deny that women are human.

The immediate effect of denying women the use of our minds is to reinforce the gender hierarchy of men with power and women begging to be allowed to eat and live indoors. As a friend of mine once put it, men get the sugar and women get the shit. This reinforces traditional hierarchies by giving lower class men someone to beat up — often with actual blows — and burdens such men with dependents so that the men can’t organize for better wages or working conditions. It also reduces the competition for creative careers since most men won’t be able to afford the kind of education necessary or the time to learn and practice. The costs to women are obvious and need no further discussion.

I can make a longer argument about how the Right is so very wrong about all things gender-related. I mostly wanted to unburden myself about how dumb their arguments are.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/23/2148834/-Bad-People-Have-Bad-Opinions

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