#Republican Patriarchs

[originalleftist]

Rumour is that in North Carolina, they've been calling couples to vote together so the man can see how the woman votes.

I do not know if this is true, but just for the record, in case anyone tries to intrude on your privacy in any way while voting:

This is illegal.

You have a right to a secret ballot.

When I sent in my mail ballot, I had to sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury that I had marked and sealed it in private.

So again- if anyone* tries to observe you marking your ballot, or have someone do so, they are breaking the law.

And you can report violations of election law to:

-State or territorial election offices.

-Local FBI offices.

-US attorney's offices.

-The Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section.

-Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, Voting Section.

See the link below for details:

*I think there are exceptions for people who require assistance, and there are people designated to assist them, but I don't know the details.

[sunflowerdigs]

Somehow, Loki is healing my Roman Roy-related trauma. Idk what that says about me.

...he still should have fucked the fascist, though.

[scrambleseggy]

When people think women aren’t capable of misogyny I have to laugh because misogyny isn’t men just being creepy and weird and rating women on reddit. It’s not just statistics on violence and crime stories, even though that is a big part of it.

It’s also republican moms and mean girl sisters who encourage competition between women as peak femininity. It’s also women who think having friends is an equivalent to a bravo TV show that includes hair pulling and slut-shaming. It’s also women who tell you certain things make you ugly and “look like a man.” Women who make fun of feminine features in men. It’s women who think the best way to deal with a patriarchal system is by trying to befriend it so they can try to benefit off of it by “not being like other girls” — the way people boil feminism down to the proximity of femininity and masculinity on the internet really bothers me. Some of the worst misogynists I’ve known in my life have been the republican women I’ve grown up around.

[liberalsarecool]

Protecting sex predators is GOP mission. No child is safe from Republican patriarchal abuse.

Republicans know white supremacy coddles abusive men who prey on children.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

It is hard to imagine a worse candidate for the American presidency in 2024 than Donald J Trump. His history of dishonesty, hypocrisy and greed makes him wholly unfit for the office. A second Trump term would erode the rule of law, diminish America’s global standing and deepen racial and cultural divides. Even if he loses, Mr Trump has shown that he will undermine the election process, with allies spreading unfounded conspiracy theories to delegitimise the results. There are prominent Republicans – such as the former vice-president Dick Cheney – who refused to support Mr Trump owing to the threat he poses. Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Mr Trump, calls his former boss a “fascist”. America was founded in opposition to absolute monarchy. The Republican nominee models himself after the leader he most admires: Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump’s authoritarianism may finish US democracy. He has praised and promised to pardon those convicted in the January 6 insurrection. He has suggested bypassing legal norms to use potentially violent methods of repression, blurring the lines between vigilantism, law enforcement and military action, against groups – be they Democrats or undocumented immigrants – he views as enemies. His team has tried to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its extreme proposals – such as mass firings of civil servants and erasing women’s rights – that poll poorly. But it is likely that, in office, Mr Trump would adopt many of these intolerant, patriarchal and discriminatory plans. He aims to dismantle the government to enrich himself and evade the law. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, House and White House, he would interpret it as a mandate to silence his critics and entrench his power. Mr Trump is a transactional and corrupting politician. His supporters see this as an advantage. Christian nationalists want an authoritarian regime to enforce religious edicts on Americans. Elon Musk wants to shape the future without regulatory oversight. Both put self-interest ahead of the American people. Democracy erodes slowly at first, then all at once. In office, Mr Trump appointed three supreme court justices, who this summer blocked efforts to hold him accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election: their immunity ruling renders the president “a king above the law”, in the words of the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. Since Kamala Harris stepped into the spotlight following Joe Biden’s exit, her campaign has been a masterclass in political jujitsu, deftly flipping Mr Trump’s perceived strengths into glaring weaknesses. With a focus on joy, the vice-president sharply contrasted with Mr Trump’s grim narrative of US decline. In their sole televised debate, Ms Harris skillfully outmaneuvered Mr Trump, who fell into her traps, appearing angry and incoherent. She is confident and composed. He sounds unhinged. [...] Political hope fades when we settle for what is, instead of fighting for what could be. Ms Harris embodies the conviction that it’s better to believe in democracy’s potential than to surrender to its imperfections. The Republican agenda is clear: voter suppression, book bans and tax cuts for billionaires. Democrats seek global engagement; the GOP favours isolation. The Biden-Harris administration laid the groundwork for a net zero America. A Trumpian comeback would undo it. A Harris win, with a Democratic Congress, means a chance to restore good governance, create good jobs and lead the entire planet’s climate efforts. Defeating Mr Trump protects democracy from oligarchy and dictatorship. There is too much at stake not to back Ms Harris for president.

The Guardian Editorial Board's endorsement of Kamala Harris for the 2024 US Presidential Election (10.23.2024).

The Guardian’s editorial board gave a powerful endorsement for Kamala Harris, as our democracy’s survival depends on her winning.

[genderkoolaid]

(one of) the reasons talking abt misandry in the "negative effects of patriarchy directed towards men/masculinity" sense is important is that there are positive and negative gender roles in patriarchy for men and women. and not like "they are Equally Bad in the Exact Same Way" but its not like stereotypes about women are all negative and stereotypes about men are all positive. there are times where patriarchy sees women as "better" in a sense where men are "worse," like the fact that women are called the "fairer sex" and being seen as having more concern with morality and justice than men. and if your understanding of anti-patriarchal action is just "women good men bad, this is the opposite of patriarchy" you are colorblinding yourself to only a part of the issues. its like weeding your garden of some things and not others and thinking you've gotten rid of everything. the patriarchy is living on inside you!!

specifically recently i watched a parody music video from two White southern women, that was like. supposed to be feminist and calling out the sexual objectification of women in southern music- which is an issue! but like they have a whole line about how "women were treated with respect back in the day!" and it made me realize how there's a lot of like casual/pop feminists who think "feminism" is just "being nice to women," and they actually think misogyny is good when its polite, like republicans whose only issue with trump is that he was embarrassing and crude. & then you have "proudly misandristic" feminists, either radfems or proto-radfems who just continue believing misogynistic beliefs about women/femininity and harmful beliefs about men/masculinity and so their mindset is still very much based in patriarchal ideas. and we can't stop being controlled by gender and sex and sexuality thinking like that.

[dingodad]

it's interesting to look at jane crocker's political career not always in terms of how it makes her a ""fascist monster"" so to speak - along the lines of homestuck's literal fascist monsters like the condesce and lord english - but in how it plays into the crucial fact at the heart of her character that she is "normcore". jane is a character of the context she was born in, the almost-exact midpoint of the barack obama presidency; superficially and popularly, a time of great optimism for a liberalising america, but through this facade of optimism a time which also saw a great deal of "normalisation" of deeply evil american imperialism both abroad and at home.

jane's love of the NBC's Parks & Recreation is emblematic of this. homestuck and parks & rec are similar in one respect, which is that p&r also began and ended over the course of the obama presidency - and like jane, p&r is deeply of that era. in many senses it is the ancestor to the "copaganda" of programming like Brooklyn 99 which took over its position of popularity into the trump era: at the core of its comic dynamic is the interplay between leslie knope, a progressive-liberal "girlboss" and champion of big government, and ron swanson, the hard-working, moustache-toting libertarian sentinel of private capitalist interest. but in the classic mode of liberal american thought, the core message of the show is that these two characters are friends. despite the complete incompatibility of their respective ideologies, the two must work together and make compromise at every stage, ensuring that the political landscape of america - implicitly the perfect state - never changes or progresses from where it is now. and it's telling that, despite being the liberal "girlboss" with visions of political ascendancy, jane's love and admiration is for the male character. like obama himself, swanson serves to put a friendly, sometimes goofy but always loveable face on american patriarchal hegemony.

because by the time homestuck had closed up and the post-canon had opened america had crossed that threshold from obama's presidency into the next, it's impossible not to draw parallels between jane's descent into xenophobia and the overt isolationism of the trump republican administration. but i think putting jane on this trajectory is also in a very real sense just as much an indictment of the democrat majority of homestuck's genesis; xenophobia is not a "trump problem" but rather an AMERICA problem, and in fact the political landscape of the late 2010s and 2020s is an inevitable progression of the kind of politics that were considered "normal" in 2011, not the result of some freak misstep of electoral probability in 2016.

[originalleftist]

Trump is campaigning on defunding day care.

This will both help cut spending on helping anyone who isn't rich, and force more mothers to stay home, reinforcing patriarchal values and destroying womens' ability to have education or careers along with a family. Killing two rights with one stone, for these fuckers.

Of course, many mothers work not by choice but because they have to- because they're single mothers (which there will be a lot more of with Republican abortion bans) or because two pay checks isn't enough (which there will be a lot more of with Republicans gutting Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, probably abolishing minimum wage if they can, hiking prices with tariffs/trade wars, etc). So, I guess those mothers and their children would just... literally die.

The party of family values and pro-life, everyone!

But, just stop and think about this. This isn't something they're going to do that they're hiding because they know its unpopular. They are openly saying that they're going to do this.

Their entire campaign is: "We're going to hurt you, horribly. But we'll hurt other people more first, so vote for us!" As Adam Serwer famously wrote of MAGA, "The Cruelty Is the Point".

It is a cynical appeal to spite over all other emotions and basic self-preservation.

Will it work?

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans don't want voters to know what anti-abortion fanatics they are. J.D. Vance has been busy scrubbing his site and social media of his more virulent comments against reproductive freedom.

Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, is an anti-abortion extremist, but like the rest of the GOP, he’s doing his damnedest to cover that fact up. First, he scrapped the anti-abortion screed from the website for his Senate campaign, then he falsely insisted Democrats and the media were twisting his words on abortion. 

Just because he's hiding his extreme views doesn't mean he's changed them.

This was on the mobile version of his site before he removed it this month.

He tries to paint his views in glowing terms. But he shows no sympathy for 13-year-olds forced to travel hundreds of miles to blue states to end unwanted pregnancies. He is in sympathy with Texas laws which would rather have women die than end pregnancies which have caused life-threatening complications.

Society shouldn’t view those pregnancies as inconvenient, he said in a 2021 interview, explaining his support for a federal ban on abortion without exceptions for rape and incest.  “I think two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live.” 

It's not J.D. who is forced to spend 18 years raising the child of a rapist.

You hardly heard the word abortion mentioned at the Republican National Convention. But that doesn't mean that patriarchal Christian fundamentalists weren't salivating at the prospect of a Trump-Vance régime.

No Republican at the convention wanted to talk about abortion and the extreme position they have embraced. But don’t be fooled by the cover-up that Trump, Vance, or the Heritage Foundation are attempting. 

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) released a fact sheet on Project 2025 (the Trump blueprint for a second term) and reproductive freedom. It's a PDF which can be printed out and posted.

Blue Illustrated Medical Center Flyer - Repro-Project-2025-Fact-Sheet

[lesb0]

Leonardo specifically invented the serpentinata pose to liberate a female figure from rape, but the twisting figures of mannerism were emblematic of breaking the traditional Renaissance conventions of male decorum.

When the Medicis were just powerful bankers in republican democrat Florence, they loved their classical female figures, especially Marys and Judiths. Judith is a "type" of Mary, the celibate widow, powerful and stoic bringer of political justice against tyranny. Stepping on his penis, hacking Holofernes neck, and a hydraulic water system installed for his "blood":

After Alessandro de Medici became prince of Florence, he was killed, and the throne became susceptible to invaders (this was NOT because he was biracial and stupid, that was a lie made up by victorian racists). the next prince, Cosimo I, a weaker medici cousin, was left in a precarious position as new head of the family.

he commissioned insecure, pathetic, misogynistic sculpture to replace Judith at his new palace by the Loggia. Perseus ripping the head off the medusa and trampling her, and in Giambologna's (supposedly Sabine) rape which were displayed together at the Loggia:

I don't like them apart, but I hate them together.

The handling and bending of serpent poses requires an artist to exert his body into physical contortions, very physically forcefully bending wax or clay into a figure for a bronze casting. in Mannerism, these translated into a sense of male patriarchal power, valentuomo. There's a forceful physical dominance and aggression to twisting contrapposto.

When female artists depart from Renaissance social decorum, it looks like a visual exercise in their liberation. When male artists break standards of decorum, it looks sforzata; overly forced. Mannerist sculptors translated rhetorical devices like antithesis and chiasma, into visual form, with figures arranged in intricate contrapposto poses, the anatomy was less important than masculine power and beauty (medicis just really loved hercules)

But, it seems to that poesia (particularly petrarchan poems) allowed for more artistic permissions with rhetoric and narrative than storia could. To Mannerists, accurate narrative and anatomy is secondary to the enjoyment provided by good dramatic art. In this line of rhetoric, could a break in decorum be justified by an artist's virtuosity? could women artists break decorum if they painted good enough?

My research is pointing to..... yes!!! :-)

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women.”

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans only talk about distractions because they know THE REAL THREAT to children are white structural patriarchs.

Cops. Church youth leaders.

Never trans. Never drag. Always this guy. ^^^

[yeetspace]

It's crazy how people don't realize that patriarchy ISN'T just "when men"

Cuz like no. That hypothetical trans guy isn't entering the patriarchy because he's trans, he IS HOWEVER experiencing multiple layers of intersectional trauma from existing in a society that enacts violence on anything that isn't seen as masculine from before transition AND you actively trying to say he has some kind of magical invisible privilege that has never been there because you can only conceptualize someone transitioning into what you've been lied to assume is "the enemy" as being done as a power move, because you transphobically assume that someone's doing it for any incentive other than that person's happiness.

Like my gamer that constant accusations of having that so-called patriarchal privilege is ONE of those intersectional aggressions, separate from the overt acts of violence that already happens to trans people, now additionally being downplayed because of some perceived privilege in their cases a lot of the time. This is some "Republicans actively Go out of their way to remove all possible ability to do stuff for us, and then once people start getting desperate and just killing themselves over it they point to that as the reason why they took that stuff in the first place" type argument. Like it becomes obvious it was meant and done so in a "I finally did it kind of way" but being pointed out like a "think of the children" kind of way cuz it's real easy to lie to people when you say think of the children first, in this case "think of the victims of patriarchy" while actively stepping over people who are direct victims of the patriarchy.

I know it's a crazy concept to get through some of y'all's heads, but like multiple groups can have multiple different AND same delineating pieces of like information. There can be intersectional terminology AND intrasectional terminology.

Cuz no bitch, a trans man talking about HIS PERSONAL LIFE and the SPECIFIC TRAUMA HE FACED as someone who was forced to experience the inherent traumas that come with being socialized growing up as someone societally seen and presented as female, is not him "trying to make you feel bad for someone who's privileged". Because he doesn't have The Patriarchy™.

Patriarchy is when the homogeneous concept of a straight white guy is going to have as much leeway as he can possible in the systems and in terms of getting proper justice and treatment. Because patriarchy isn't when men, patriarchy is when the societal standard of "whiteness" & "man & woman" is upheld.

A standard that in its own right is completely arbitrary because any delineation of human, other than just "Person" is needless categorization or at the very secondary aspect the main part, the fact that that's a person first, as the existence of intersex people shows, what's considered the standard of sex even Is just random characteristics people who either didn't know better or could benefit off of making sure people thought about it this way, had decided are "the correct ones" amongst a sea of what is actually just how reality works; no two people's bodies being the same, just the same as no two people's unique existences are, and each individual strand of DNA is unique.

And this is coming from a trans girl. Because I'm on that intersectionality shit. No one's free till we all are, it's pretty simple. The best way to do that is to not try and get angry at someone else for... *Checks notes* sharing their personal life because they used terminology that applies to them as well, that you personally didn't want to hear used that way even though there is no reasoning why it shouldn't be as it also can apply to him too

and also separately because for some reason that's a different problem but from the same crowd, it's not making up a new word if you don't want people to be using what you've decided Is "your" terminology, and either way what even do you mean by "making up a new word" all of them are fuck you. Because it's just people trying to be bigoted from within which is FUCKING WILD TO ME. LIKE???

[useless-catalanfacts]

Florenci Pla Meseguer "La Pastora", intersex antifascist hero

One of the most famous maquis (guerrilla fighters against Franco's dictatorship) is Florenci Pla Maseguer.

(thank you @neonbutchery for the suggestion)

He was born in a farmhouse in Vallibona, in the rural mountains in north of the Valencian Country, in 1917. His body did not fit the categories of either male nor female, so his family were left with the choice of what sex to register him as. His parents decided to register him as female so that he could avoid the mandatory military service.

He grew up in the farmhouse being a shepherd, and never went to school as was usual at the time for the rural working class. When he reached puberty, he developed male secondary sex characteristics.

When the fascists did a coup d'état in 1936, sparking the Spanish Civil War, he wanted offered himself as a volunteer to fight in the republican (=antifascist) army, and he thought that this way he would get officially registered as a man, but couldn't.

He kept dressing as a woman until he was 30 years old, but always felt a man. In his words (originally in Catalan in this interview in El Temps from 1988):

Interviewer: What did you think of your sexual condition? Did it cause you any worries?

Florenci: Problems...? Mainly because of the beard. They said I was half man and half woman, but I never felt a woman. I still remember the first time I dreamed I had an affair with a woman, when I was 13 (...)

I: Have you always felt a man?

F: Always, and I have always liked men's jobs and being registered as a man. In fact, when I walked the flock I carried a sarró [=a kind of bag], like men, and not a basket like women.

He kept wearing women's clothes until he was 30, when he joined the maquis. By then, it was 1947; the fascists had won the war in 1939 and, as a result, Spain and its occupied territories were ruled by Franco's fascist dictatorship, which persecuted the political dissidence, the national minorities (such as Catalans-Valencians) and their languages, and everyone who didn't fit the strict normative and nationalcatholic morale, prominently LGBTQI+ people and women who didn't limit themselves to the roles that the patriarchal society considered fit. The maquis were the armed resistance.

I: How did you change the flock for the maquis?

F: Since I lived in the mountains, I had sometimes talked to them. On a snowy night, three maquis took refuge in a house that was only inhabited in summer -El Cabanil- but one of them ran away -one who was from Morella- and everywhere he went, he spread the word, he snitched it. And the Civil Guard [=the regime's military police] followed their clue until they found them and burned the house down, because they were resisting. The next morning, they arrested El Cabanil's owner and I got nervous because I worked for him, and I decided to escape out of fear of being killed.

I: Was it because of the fear of reprisals or for the humiliations to which the Civil Guard put you through?

F: Yes, that determined it, too. That was on the morning of the same day they burned down El Cabanil, and it was "teniente Mangas" [="lieutenant" Mangas, which he says in Spanish], six guards and two militiamen, one from Torremiró and the other one from Herbesset.

I: And what did they do to you exactly?

F: They were curious to know how could a shepherd girl be half man and half woman. I had sold thrushes to the militiamen, and they told the Civil Guard about my anomaly. Teniente Mangas ignored all rules and made me take off my clothes, until their curiosity was fulfilled. And when they were done, they said "bueno, a hacer bondad" ["well, behave" in Spanish, as a way to say goodbye]. And I felt so much rage, so much helplessness. (...) I joined [the guerrilla] and I dressed as a man. There, I was a man like any other.

From then on, he lived as a man and named himself Florenci, though he was known with other nicknames like "Durruti" (after the famous anarchist leader) and, most famously "La Pastora" (the shepherd).

He ended up living in Andorra, but a journalist for the Spanish tabloid El Caso published about him, attributing to him the crimes committed by other maquis, even ones that he had never met. For this reason, La Pastora became famous in all of Spain and the police intensified the search. The Andorran police turned him in to the Spanish police in 1960, accusing him of robbery, banditry and terrorism. He was judged twice for the same crimes: a tribunal sentenced him to 40 years of prison and the other one sentenced him to death and later changed it to 30 years of prison.

He spent 17 years in prison. First, in a women's prison where the women (and him) had to wear very tight miniskirts. He was later moved to a men's jail, where the case was further investigated. The detective saw that there was no proof and that the story didn't match up, so it was impossible that Florenci had committed these crimes. He was freed with a pardon in 1977 and the detective officially registered him as a man.

Despite the slander published by the press, when he came back to his hometown Vallibona, everyone came down to the village from their farmhouses to greet him. He died in 2004, at 86 years old.

Nowadays, Florenci "La Pastora" is by far one of the most famous maquis, if not the single most famous one. He is talked about in songs, books and documentaries, and has become an icon of the antifascist resistance.

[mariacallous]

In politics, the “gender gap” is the difference in the percentage of women and the percentage of men voting for a given candidate.1 The political gender gap has appeared in one way or the other in every election since 1980 with women tending to vote for the Democratic Party and men tending to vote for the Republican Party. But the apparent gender gap among young voters also appears in measures other than politics and points to some deeper and potentially even more concerning issues among young people.

In politics, we are seeing a gender gap amongst today’s youngest voters—aged 18 to 29—with young women being significantly more Democratic in their political leanings than young men. For instance, a recently released national poll by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard Kennedy School finds that among 18 to 29-year-olds, President Biden’s lead with women is +33 points in contrast to young men where his lead drops to a mere six points. When compared to this stage of the 2020 campaign, Biden’s lead among women was nearly identical (+35), while his lead with men stood at +26, representing a steep drop in just the past four years.

When it comes to party identification, Democrats have again lost significant ground with young men. In 2020, 42% of young men in Harvard’s poll identified as Democrats versus 20% who identified as Republican. Now, 32% are Democrats and 29% are Republicans, with the number of independents remaining relatively unchanged. Women over the same period have not moved as much. In 2020, 43% of young women in Harvard’s poll identified as Democrats, and 23% were Republicans. Now, 44% are Democrats, and 18% are Republicans.

Meanwhile, a recently released Economist/YouGov survey shows a staggering rise in support for Donald Trump among young people. In fact, the rise in Trump favorability among the young outstrips the rise in favorability among all other groups in the population except Democrats and liberals. We should view these polls with caution, especially because the subgroups are often too small to be statistically significant.

There are other indications of a growing gender divide among young people that goes deeper than just politics. For instance, a longitudinal analysis by international research agency Glocalities between 2014 and 2023 highlighted the growing rift in Gen Z. It found that young women have become significantly more liberal and embraced “anti-patriarchal” values over the last decade, while young men have stayed relatively the same. Additionally, it showed that young men have been the slowest among all groups to move towards more liberal values over the nearly 10-year period.

Glocalities found young women are most concerned about issues like “sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and mental health problems.” Men were generally more focused on “competition, bravery, and honor.” The study found young men have become more patriarchal in their orientations overall when compared with women and even older men.

The analysis further linked “feelings of despair and societal disillusionment, a focus on patriarchal values, and rebelling against cosmopolitan liberal values” to the growing rise of the radical right. This leads many to fear that as young men are resisting the tides of change, they may be vulnerable to far-right groups and movements who promise a return to more patriarchal systems which offer a break from the social developments which they believe have begun to unfairly work against their societal interests.

Gallup recently studied the gender divide and found roughly 25% of men aged 18 to 29 identify as “liberal,” versus 40% of women in the same demographic—up from 28% in 2003. Men were found yet again to be relatively unchanged in their self-identification during that timeline.

The Survey Center on American Life’s findings also support a divide in self-identification, with young women being much more likely to identify themselves as “feminists” than young men. Only 43% of Gen Z men identify in this way, much less than Millennial men, while 61% of Gen Z women describe themselves as feminist compared to 54% of Millennial women and 49% of Generation X women.

The study also shows young men increasingly feel as though they are experiencing discrimination over the past four years. Nearly half of all men aged 18 to 29 said they felt this way, the highest of all male age groups surveyed.

Men in particular feel isolated. Brookings nonresident senior fellow, Richard Reeves, has studied the issue arguing in his book “Of Boys and Men” that rapid societal changes combined with a market shift from brawn to brain have left many men feeling bereft and without purpose. Reeves, a self-described “feminist”, does not make the argument that the liberation of women is a bad thing but instead suggests finding new roles for men and a redefinition of “masculinity” in this changing world.

Young men have repeatedly been found in recent years to be apathetic towards voting, with young women in recent election cycles constantly turning out to vote at higher rates than young men. Politically, this is good news for Democrats. After all, there are more women than men in the country, they make up a larger portion of the electorate, they are more motivated to vote, and vote blue. From a societal perspective, it could signal potential danger if young men feel less tied to democracy and feel no need to participate in the democratic process while increasingly becoming disheartened with their social status. The incentive for change and action may be there, but not through democratic means. This is made more disconcerting by the fact that this is coming at a time when democracy could yet again be in peril this election year. But what exactly are men experiencing which could make this scenario a potential reality? Well, young men are overwhelmingly the loneliest demographic, with 63% of men aged 18 to 29 reporting being single, compared to 34% of women in the same age group.

Suicide rates among men in 2021 were four times higher among males than females. Men commit almost 96% of the mass shootings in the country, demonstrating how men are very likely to act upon their social isolation in extremely violent ways. In education, women now receive 58% of bachelor’s degrees and 61% of master’s degrees, representing yet another area where men are increasingly falling behind.

The social isolation of men creates major ramifications for women as well. Based on Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts, 45% of prime working age women (ages 25 to 44) will be single by 2030—the largest share in history—up from 41% in 2018. The social bonds of previous generations appear to be eroding among young people, and this has serious consequences for coupling, future birth rates, and social cohesion.

There are also darker concerns about the potential backlash to recent social developments. History is littered with examples of nations suffering from the consequences of young men finding themselves idle without purpose.

We may be in the opening stages of a social backlash to the progressive social movements of the past decades. When significant societal change occurs, some may feel left behind or cheated. Right now, young men fall into that camp. The challenge now will be ensuring that the backlash does not transform into real damage, especially for women. If the aim is to build a fairer equitable future where all feel they have a role and are respected, the polling of Gen Z appears to show we are moving in the opposite direction.

[qqueenofhades]

I was raised in an extremely conservative household and was friends with kids from other extremely conservative households. Voting was absolutely considered Part of Your American Duty there. Of course you were supposed to be voting for Republican candidates, but it was viewed as just as essential as going to church. How else were was one supposed to defeat the godless heathens (Democrats) and turn the country back to it's god-fearing roots and defeat 'evils' such as abortion? Sure, the politicians may not be perfect but what was important was the goal (of creating a theocracy).

I've long since ditched the conservatism, but I held on to voting being important. It baffles me that leftists cannot adopt a similar mindset of elections being part of an overall goal and not, I don't know, a fucking popularity contest?

I'd say that it's partly because the right wing nutjobs are predisposed to having a strongman dictator and thus don't mind being ordered to fall in line and do as the Patriarchal God Authority Figure says, because that is what their religion, their culture, and their politics all prescribe. And while this explains why right-wingers have no problem with being bullied to vote and are eager to obey, leftists theoretically (I stress, theoretically) don't believe in such models of authority, and don't think anyone has the right to tell them what to do, even when that is an obvious and basic social good. Except now, many self-labeled leftists have simply become flat-out crank anti-establishment libertarian-populist authoritarians who don't believe in any system at all, and the prevailing mandate of Don't Vote means they can't defy it, in the same way that right-wingers are used to obeying the Do Vote And Only For Republicans order without question.

While this Don't Vote "wisdom" has been crowdsourced, instead of derived from one central authority figure, the leftists can't disobey without fear of being Shunned, exactly in the same way as conservative fundie evangelicals. As myself and plenty of other people have pointed out, this is because American/Western leftism (both online and otherwise) rests on just changing the names, justifications, and set dressing used in said conservative fundie evangelical Puritan model to be "leftist," without ever actually questioning the underlying logic and setup. So they're now as pressured not to vote to maintain In-Group status as fundies are pressured to vote (for Republicans) to maintain In-Group status. Welp.