#rebecca traister

[jomiddlemarch]

"More than that: I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win."

[readtilyoudie]

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs.

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

[the-final-sentence]

Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.

Rebecca Traister, from Good and Mad

[idont-even-know-anymore]

The best way to discredit these women, to make them look unattractive, is to capture an image of them screaming .... The act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly.

Rebecca Traister

[gwydionmisha]

CW: Rape.

[erainbowd]

Click the Clicks You Want to See in the World

The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth…

[biglisbonnews]

Abortion Wins Elections The fight to make reproductive rights the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s 2024 agenda. https://www.thecut.com/article/abortion-democratic-party-2024-elections.html

[mariacallous]

Hi mariacallous! Some of my friends have started spouting the 'abortion is a class issue because rich women always have access to abortion' BS, and I was wondering if you had any resources/articles etc that might be helpful in convincing them. Sorry to barge into your inbox!

The notion that rich women will be fine, regardless of what the law says, is probably comforting to some. But it is simply not true.

Yes, abortion bans will disproportionately affect poor women and women of color in a country that already has appallingly high maternal mortality rates, no federal paid family leave and little support for parents who struggle to provide for their children financially. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in New York magazine, this is nothing new: The Hyde Amendment and state restrictions have already made abortion effectively inaccessible to many women without means or mobility.

But we should not lose sight of the reality that the Supreme Court decision has created a crisis for all American women. Even the richest Americans — the one-percenters and the upper middle class — will not escape the effects.

Attenuating the rights of half of the population will have systemic effects akin to climate change. Just as no amount of investment in Mars-bound space colonization, air-conditioned bunkers and private firefighting services will save the rich from terrible outcomes if the planet becomes uninhabitable, the rich cannot avoid the effects of the overturning of Roe. Residents of blue states won’t be exempt. And men who think the ban won’t affect them are mistaken; it will affect women they know and love, and it will change the political economy in which they live and operate.

The persistent myth that the wealthy will be unaffected is predicated on the vague notion that they’ll be able to find and purchase abortion pills by mail, travel to places where abortion is legal or get abortions from local providers willing to break the law.

And sure, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a red state one-percenter has his daughter or wife airlifted to another state for an abortion — or, potentially, for in vitro fertilization, if it becomes illegal to terminate embryos. We are accustomed to different rules and privileges for the wealthy, and witness these injustices daily. People with more money and privilege conferred by race and class — people who have access to better lawyers — experience our justice system differently. They also get better health care and pay less in taxes as a share of income. We hold the rich to a lower, not higher, standard and tacitly accept that they will get away with cheating various systems.

But the wealthiest are in for some unpleasant surprises when it comes to abortion. The scenarios in which a woman needs an abortion include medical emergencies in which any delay in treatment can have severe, even fatal, consequences — and in those circumstances abortion pills obtained by mail won’t help.

One in 50 pregnancies in the United States is ectopic, for example, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. The embryo must be removed, and delaying that treatment can result in sepsis, internal bleeding and death. Placental abruptions must be addressed immediately to avoid extensive bleeding, renal failure and even, in some instances, death.

Any woman who finds herself in either of these scenarios is not going to be able to pack her bags and go for a long drive. Even for someone with the means, an airlift to a medical facility in another state may not be quick enough to save her. She will need to be treated locally and immediately. Some of the bans going into effect around the country include medical exceptions for these situations, but if there’s any ambiguity about what the law allows, the time it takes a medical professional to consult a lawyer may be the difference between life and death.

Some states are expected to try to ban interstate travel for abortions. Bans in Texas and Oklahoma leave room for that possibility. Planned Parenthood’s Montana branch has reportedly decided that it will no longer provide medication abortions for patients from certain states where bans are in effect or in the works, citing the “rapidly changing” legal landscape. It’s also clear that many Republicans view the Roe reversal as an inroad to a total federal ban. If they gain electoral victories in 2024, this is a very likely outcome, and in that case there will be no blue state abortion clinics to travel to. Even now, the lines and waiting times at abortion clinics in safe haven states are likely to get very long.

Many people also assume the wealthy can always find a local doctor willing to perform an abortion, even in a state where it has become illegal. This seems unlikely. While some providers did flout the law and provide women with abortions before Roe in 1973, the ubiquity of digital surveillance and other mechanisms for violating the privacy of women seeking abortions have made it far more difficult for them to do so privately and safely. Trigger laws are already forcing medical professionals to consult lawyers before they provide care, and laws that criminalize abortion leave health care workers with little incentive to violate them. When faced with the prospect of prosecution or losing a medical license, how many doctors will take this risk, even when money is offered? Meanwhile, anti-choice conservatives are already working to make it harder to obtain abortion pills.

Some believe abortion bans won’t affect them because they’ll never find themselves in need of an abortion. Conservatives might imagine the typical woman who needs one fits an archetype: poor, single, liberal, promiscuous, anti-family and irresponsible. But most women who get abortions are already mothers (60 percent). Nearly half of abortion seekers live below the poverty line, but a significant portion are not poor. (Women with higher incomes have more access to contraception, but that dynamic might change if the Supreme Court follows through on Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion to revisit earlier rulings, including the right to contraception.) Conservative families also include teenagers and young women whose privacy, autonomy and ability to seek medical care, regardless of whether their parents approve, will be severely compromised by abortion bans.

The reality is that women from every demographic need abortions. Well-off conservative women are not immune to contraception failures, gynecological emergencies, miscarriages, incest or rape. Many women find that despite their beliefs, carrying a pregnancy to term is just not something they can go through with, for a range of reasons. Pregnancy itself can be life-threatening for women with certain existing medical conditions, and even for women who don’t have those risks, it is life-altering. The kind of person who might need or want an abortion is, put simply, any person capable of getting pregnant.

Women will die because of this — disproportionately poor and middle-class women but not just poor and middle-class women. Rich women could just as easily suffer and die, too, even those who think that they would never need an abortion or that they would never be denied essential medical care in the United States of America in 2022.

There will be other effects: Roe is a privacy law, and there are implications for the ruling outside of the issue of abortion. Forced birth will take women out of the work force in an already tight labor market. Women could be treated like criminals for having miscarriages, which are incredibly common. And women who are pregnant when their partners don’t want them to be will be more at risk for domestic violence and homicide. Individual wealth won’t prevent these outcomes, either.

It is, of course, true that the wealthy are the least vulnerable in the new post-Roe world, and this is not a requiem for them on a tiny violin. But it is important for all parties to understand that all people are going to participate in this nightmare, whether they realize it now or not. The wealthy unfortunately have an outsize influence on politics, so how much the bans harm them, inconvenience them or enrage them will most likely affect the will of politicians to vote for and maintain abortion bans.

The overturning of Roe will affect all of us. And if you are lucky enough to be wealthy, your money probably won’t shield you.

The Persistent Myth That Restricting Abortion Rights Won’t Affect the Rich

the problem is that it's a class issue, but not only in the way they think, and the point is that all women are impacted by it, but obviously some way more than others

[femmefatalevibe]

Femme Fatale Booklist: Decentering Men, Feminist Dating, & Childfree Living

Books On Decentering Men/Feminist Perspectives On Dating (for the times you're in need, you know):

A Single Revolution by Shani Silver (most important rec, IMO!)

Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women's Happiness and Fulfillment by Valerie Rein, Ph.D

What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower's Guide to Why You Are Already Enough by Chidera Eggerue 

How To Get Over A Boy by Chidera Eggerue 

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

Enjoy Your Solo By Mary Delia Allen

How to Be Single and Happy by Jennifer Taitz

Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good by Elise Loehnen 

We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives by Manon Garcia 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy 

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling  Men by Lundy Bancroft 

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All by Laura Bates

Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward by Gemma Hartley  

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by Bell Hooks

All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks

Books On Childfree Living:

Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington

Childfree by Choice: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence by Amy Blackstone

Confessions of a Childfree Woman: A Life Spent Swimming Against the Mainstream by Marcia Drut-Davis 

Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Orna Donath

No One Tells You This: A Memoir by Glynnis MacNicol 

25 Over 10: A Childfree Longitudinal Study by Laura Caroll

The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World  by Laura Caroll

The Baby Trap by Ellen Peck

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood by Michele Goodwin 

Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington 

[azspot]

Here’s the reality, for women and everyone else: you can’t actually determine someone’s character from their costuming. None of us can see past every mask, every time. If guys who yammer on about how white men need to just shut and listen for awhile were reliably good people, if they never DM’d teenagers or put their hand on a woman’s ass on the subway, the world would be an easier place. But I’m afraid that sometimes Try Guys cheat on their wives with subordinates, and sometimes nice guys are only nice until they can get women into a vulnerable position. Sometimes lunkheaded Joe Rogan-worshipping video-gaming men who complain about woke Star Wars and belong to Barstool’s shirt of the month club are fundamentally moral beings who don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they have stupid politics. And sometimes vice versa to all of that. The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort. Rebecca Traister doesn’t know Tim Walz’s character, and while sometimes a Try Guy is just a scared man trying to navigate an evolving social world as best he can, sometimes a Try Guy is a predator. You don’t know until you know.

Freddie deBoer

[someone-will-remember-us]

The first time it happened to Hannah, it lasted “just a few seconds.” Without warning, the man she’d met on a dating app and was now having casual sex with grabbed her neck and squeezed gently. Flustered, she swatted his hand away and tried to wipe the gesture from her mind. A year later, it happened again: Another dating-app match wrapped his fingers around her neck. Then this past May, a third time, when a man she’d just started seeing wordlessly placed a hand on her throat while they were hooking up. “Then I said ‘no,’ and he took it off,” she remembers. Each time, Hannah said, she had a basic conversation around sexual desires and preferences with these men before anything physical took place. But the partners never brought up choking outright, let alone asked her permission to do so.

“In all of these scenarios, the men otherwise seemed very sweet, conscientious, and well-informed, and I think that’s why it always comes as such a shock,” Hannah said. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s this coming from?’ It’s a pretty violent thing to come out of nowhere, especially from men who otherwise seem so vanilla.”

What does it mean, then, that this “pretty violent thing,” an out-of-nowhere chokehold during sex, is happening in the post–Me Too age of consent? Today’s straight, liberal men are assumed to be considerably more interested in centering women’s pleasure and safety — so what gives? For one, panicked reports of an anecdotal “rise in choking” during sex have been circulating online for years, growing in frequency since 2019 and often offering up the middling explanation that young people have simply picked up the habit from porn. This year both Business Insider and the New York Times warned of the “trend” among Gen Z and teenagers alike. And while choking is not a particularly transgressive kink — it’s not unheard of for women to enjoy, as psychotherapist Esther Perel puts it in Mating in Captivity, the “politically incorrect … poetics of sex” — these particular instances serve as evidence of something sex-positive feminists had hoped would lessen with time: the unrelenting dissatisfaction of casual sex.

Generations of us have been there. Nearly a decade ago, New York’s Rebecca Traister investigated what she labeled “male sexual entitlement,” the tolerated if not expected discomfort of heterosexual sex. And as sex writer Nona Willis Aronowitz observed in her 2022 memoir, Bad Sex: “Sex has never been more normalized, feminism has never been more popular, romantic relationships have never been more malleable — yet we still haven’t transcended the binds that make sex and love go bad.” Just last month, new research reported in the New York Times confirmed the obvious: The orgasm gap for straight women still persists.

But while the threat of a bad time has always been part of the packaged deal of sleeping with a stranger, those of us aspiring to operate as sexually free agents, ever the optimists, had hoped that with age and education, the quality of casual hookups would improve. Instead, the feeling of despair among young women engaging in casual sex has reached a fever pitch. Just take a scroll through TikTok for proof. The individuals I spoke to (most of whom, like Hannah, requested anonymity for the sake of their privacy) shared sexual encounters that ranged from awkward and annoying to harrowing and traumatic, from unexpected slapping and anal play to a hesitance to wear condoms when asked. The issue isn’t so much that the sex is always outright unenjoyable or ill-intentioned but that consent to casual sex still seems to be operating as a catch-all for anything men only assume women want.

For her part, Hannah doesn’t believe that her sexual partners were acting out of malice. If anything, it seems they were making an attempt at tending to her needs, however misinformed. “But of course, in considering women’s pleasure, the only way that some men can seem to conceive of is strangling,” she added. “It makes me sort of depressed if I really think about it. That instead of asking, ‘Hey, what do you like?’ or ‘Hey, do you like this?,’ they’re just going straight for the throat.”

Other women I spoke to had similarly jarring experiences during recent hookups. Tiana said she’d been slapped in the face on a few different occasions while performing oral sex, a “weird thing to do without consent” even when administered lightly, she says. She noted how common it was for “guys to try to eat or finger my ass without asking first.” Similarly, Ash says lots of anal play happens without her go-ahead — often a finger inserted into her anus in the middle of vaginal sex: “In doggy, it’s always a big ass thumb for some reason.” And much like Tiana, Nicky Josephine, a 33-year-old Brooklyn-based writer, recalled being slapped by a sexual partner without consent, to which she responded by slapping him back.

“I felt it was insulting more than anything,” Josephine said. “I like it as long as it’s not too hard, and it’s discussed beforehand. I was just super mad he didn’t ask or warn. That being said, I kept having sex with him.”

Alyssa, a 31-year-old Brooklynite, describes herself as practiced in BDSM and generally more open to experimenting during casual hookups. (That is, only after boundaries have been discussed.) She’s found that insecurity in beginners can sometimes breed aggression, a textbook sign of overcompensation. “I’m learning that men who have no experience in kink tend to completely overdo it on their first time and just be really, really rough and also not listen,” Alyssa tells me. There are echoes of the same sentiment on Reddit in r/TwoXChromosomes, where users point to the mainstreaming of BDSM as one of the factors producing “ill-informed ‘practitioners’” who don’t understand the negotiation of consent, let alone the practice of aftercare. In January, Alyssa found herself at the hands of one such man in his early 30s.

“I would have been fine with some choking in theory, but it ended up being more of a strangulation that I did not consent to,” she said. “He was shaking me by the neck like in a TV show or true-crime reenactment. It was like he was copying strangling someone as he’d seen in the movies.”

It’s no wonder hordes of young women are opting for celibacy instead. Celebrities like Julia Fox, once positioned as the apex of male desires, have sworn off fucking men altogether. Queer pop star Chappell Roan gave voice to her pleasure-less interactions with men in “Femininomenon” (“lying to your friends about / how he’s such a goddamn good lover … I don’t understand / why can’t any man / hit it like … ”), while former country star Maren Morris divorced her husband, came out as bisexual, and now seems to be taking pleasure in the bliss of sexual discovery: “Sittin’ on the fence / Feels good bеtween my legs.” Meanwhile, online, women are recording TikToks after horrific first dates as they search for solidarity, yearn for real love, and unpack their listlessness toward men. As someone who regularly requests to be choked, this inquiry made me pause to ask whether I really draw pleasure from the act or if I am subconsciously bending to the whims of the men under which I am pinned. Easier to stomach if I get ahead of it and convince myself I wanted it, anyway.

Curious about what exactly compels a man to go for the throat, I turned to Jake, a 28-year-old straight guy who lives in Manhattan and works in tech. He doesn’t often talk “explicitly” about sex when gearing up for a new hookup. Rather, he describes the whole process as a somewhat delicate “dance” that can’t really be taught, composed of subtle hints like “touching on the wrist, or touching on the forearm, or touching on the shoulder when we’re laughing.” When Jake does place a hand on a woman’s neck, he says he’ll either ask outright or gently place it there if it “feels like something [he] should do.” Besides, no one has ever told him they don’t like it.

When I ask why he wouldn’t initiate a conversation beforehand, Jake thinks for a moment. Talking about sex risks “removing the spontaneity of it” or might “feel like a sterilization when you put it into words.” He pauses again before musing that maybe it’s just something he’s seen in movies: that a man should be able to intuit what a woman finds pleasurable and when she wants it. “I understand it could be good to ask,” he adds. “But personally, there’s almost a sheepishness when it comes to discussing sex. I am scared of making an assumption and being wrong.”

Of course, men do talk about sex in other settings. Jake mentioned that both some of his friends and the male comedians, podcasters, and content creators he follows frequently boast about pleasuring women as a means of clout-chasing. “It’s now almost like a sense of pride to make a girl come in my own circle,” Jake said.

So it’s not that men are ignorant of — or worse, don’t care about — women’s pleasure; it’s who benefits from that pleasure that’s up for debate. Take, for example, Andrew Schulz’s bit about squirting (“We know it’s pee, ladies, we’re not stupid … but here’s the thing, we don’t give a fuck because we made you pee”). Or Mike Majlak describing his “process-driven” approach to foreplay on the Rawtalk podcast and his need to “spray in every nickel hooker.”

“This sounds bad,” Jake tells me, “but I think a lot of men are seeing women not necessarily more as people but more as sexual beings who also like sex. Things have changed a lot in the past decade, but I think that the pendulum has swung in a way that’s probably also not healthy.”

While casual sex is a two-way street, several of the women I spoke to expressed regret that they hadn’t been more clear in the midst of a hookup about what they did — and, more importantly, didn’t — like. Maybe they’d issued a curt “no” or pushed away a grazing hand, but they hadn’t articulated why a particular act made them uncomfortable or bothered them, the words caught in their throat. Hannah, for instance, doesn’t think it’s her job to close the systemic knowledge gap around consent and pleasure burdening men. Still, she wonders whether she could’ve stopped the cycle by educating her partners more clearly.

“It’s just another burden. It makes me feel like I’m gonna have to take this on myself,” she explains. “It’s just another responsibility that women have. I’m not doing a lot of work in terms of trying to make sure that they don’t do it again with someone else, but like, I’m exhausted.”

Willis Aronowitz writes of this feeling — of all we stand to lose when we express sexual discomfort: “Even the most sexually confident among us sometimes hesitate to talk about all this, because we don’t want to hurt our partners’ feelings or seem demanding, because we want to appear as horny as we initially advertised ourselves to be, because the length of time it takes us to orgasm will spoil the mood … because too much is at stake, because we’re simply not sure what we want.”

For Samentha Teah, a 25-year-old who lives in Virginia, taking a vow of celibacy seemed the only way to discover what she really wanted out of casual sex. After a particularly irksome on-again, off-again situationship with a man in 2021, she swore off sex, albeit unintentionally. But by February of the following year, Teah began actively identifying as celibate. For nearly a year and a half, they tried to unravel their attachment to penetrative sex and rethink the possibilities of physical connection. She needed to get to know herself “outside the expectations of hookup culture, because hookup culture is dependent on you having no boundaries.” Toward the end of last year, Teah decided they were ready to have sex again. Naturally, the hookup wasn’t great — her male partner repeatedly ignored her requests “to slow down, or to take it easy and be gentle.” “I feel like through sex, I can understand how a relationship is going to go,” Teah said, “And the way that he was with my body, I just didn’t want to interact with him anymore after that.”

While many women have documented the intense disappointment of breaking celibacy for milquetoast men (and renewing their vows immediately after), Teah had a different takeaway. She still engages in casual sex but is now “very, very selective,” prioritizing “fooling around” with men and women she already knows over vaginal intercourse with strangers or dating-app matches. Their new relationship to physical intimacy, they tell me, feels like “true liberation.” “I get to have sex when I feel like it. I get to take breaks when I feel like it. If I don’t like sex, I can walk away from a person. I can stop sex mid-act. I didn’t know that I really, truly could do these things … I was searching for autonomy.” Within herself, at long last, she’s found it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rebecca Traister at NY Mag's Intelligencer:

Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her party’s effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands — and represents — womanhood more broadly? Well … that’s getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

“A true conservative woman,” Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouri’s next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, “speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesn’t sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.” The 25-year-old Gomez made a viral ad in February in which she took a flamethrower to a pile of sex-education and LGBTQ+ books from the public library. In May, she filmed herself running through St. Louis wearing a weighted vest and advising, “Don’t be weak and gay; stay fucking hard.” The day before, she had embraced her softer side, posting a photo of herself on X in a pale-pink pantsuit and pumps, with a winning smile and her eyes cast heavenward, under a caption restating Blackburn’s question: “What is a woman?” Gomez told me feminists “have made men the enemy,” adding, “they end up alone with three dogs at the age of 50 with no kids or husband” — a time-honored Republican sentiment that liberal women, unlike conservatives, are sexless, unmarriageable spinsters. But even that rusty rhetorical frame is wobbly: In April, 31-year-old far-right activist Laura Loomer, standing outside Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, told the New York Times, “You think I have a dating life? You think I’m married? You think I have kids? Do you think I go out and do fun things? No. Because I’m always putting every extra bit of time that I have into supporting President Trump.” Loomer told the paper she would not be at the courthouse the next week because she had to return home to Florida to take care of her dogs.

Contradictions abound among conservative women in Washington. In response to Jackson’s testimony, Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to be authoritative on the matter. “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” she said. “We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner’s, our husband’s, wife.” But Greene, who has since divorced, regularly refers to men, including Speaker Mike Johnson and President Biden, as “weak” and is not shy about showing off her own brawn. In May, in the wake of a dustup with Democratic Texas representative Jasmine Crockett in which the two traded barbs about each other’s appearance, Greene posted a video of herself lifting heavy weights to a song by Sia: “I’m unstoppable / I’m a Porsche with no brakes / I’m invincible / Yeah, I win every single game.”

“Under the surface, subcutaneously, there is a tug-of-war,” said Nancy Mace, a 46-year-old second-term Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. Mace was reflecting on the tension between presenting as traditionally feminine and deploying emasculating language that can make her sound more like Andrew Tate and his overheated manosphere buddies than Republican foremothers such as Margaret Chase Smith or even Michele Bachmann. Mace regularly declares that her male enemies, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, with whom she has a bitter rivalry, and Hunter Biden, the president’s son, have “no balls.”

“There are the traditional roles of women in society, some biological. We’re meant to nurture; we’re meant to breastfeed our kids,” Mace told me over Zoom. “But my mom worked. I’ve worked my entire life since I was 15. It’s a balance between what’s your feminine side and your Main Character Energy.” Mace was explicit: “I do have Main Character Energy. I am an alpha dog, and so is my little six-pound dog, Libby.”

The Republican women seeking to steer their party into the future are finding themselves in a series of constrictive binds: between upholding a conservative white patriarchy that has outlawed abortion and asserting their value as women; between projecting traditional notions of compliant, cheerful femininity and channeling the testosterone-driven rage of the conservative infotainment complex; and, above all, between trying to build independent political identities and slavishly following Donald Trump. That devotion has come at the cost of alienating suburban white women, who have been crucial to Republicans for decades but, since 2016, have been peeling away in response to Trump’s pussy-grabbing malevolence and his party’s ruthless campaign against reproductive rights.

It’s surely a nasty tangle for them, but for those of us watching at home, Republican women’s efforts to bridge these impossible chasms have a stupefying quality: What to make of these women? As the Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote after Katie Britt, his state’s U.S. senator, delivered the response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address from her kitchen in a demonic whisper, “Katie Britt glitched out on national television and left millions of Americans asking what the heck they just watched.” Weeks later, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s strenuous efforts to show off her casually cruel streak to Trump derailed her own vice-presidential audition when it emerged that her book contained a story about how she once shot her puppy and left the body to rot in a gravel pit.

Then there are the duck-lipped, smoky-eyed stylings of Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who danced to “Gloria” shortly before insurrectionists tore through the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and this spring announced a children’s book called The Princess & Her Pup. The former president’s daughter-in-law, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, recently promised “four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House” and posted a video of herself in sequined pants and stilettos as she played “Let It Be” on piano. The gun-toting congresswoman Lauren Boebert has railed against “teaching kids how to have and enjoy sex, even same-sex sex, how to pleasure themselves,” yet last fall was ejected from a theater for lewd behavior that included grabbing her date’s crotch during the performance. Mace made headlines in 2023 for joking about her sex life to a roomful of Christian conservatives at a prayer breakfast.

Some of this is surely just old-fashioned political hypocrisy, particularly unpleasant coming from a right that has for generations sought to police all sorts of things that it itself engages in: Do as I legislate, not as I do. But in a post-Dobbs political climate in which Republicans have grown only more aggressive on issues of gender identity, contraception, and sex education, the ways in which the party’s women have been comporting themselves loom large.

On the cusp of an election season that could further reshape this democracy and women’s place within it, the questions facing the women of the American right are tricky. Are they supposed to be cutthroat or cute? Cold enough to kill a dog or warm enough to bake an apple pie? To whom is their devotion chiefly addressed: country, husband, God, or Trump? And how might their womanhood complicate their responses to the closing of obstetrics wards or the fact that their party’s leader was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an extramarital affair with an adult-film actress? The challenge of navigating these thorny questions has left many of them caroming from high-pitched rancor, to contorted eroticism, to the seemingly snug comforts of trad-wife chic. The spectacle can provoke amusement, fury, and a frisson of horror-movie unease. For if the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, they’re doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.

In both parties, women have never had it easy; this is a business that remains, 235 years in, overwhelmingly run by men. And for a time, it was Democratic women who encountered the gnarlier complexities. As members of the party that at least theoretically represented the gains of the women’s movement that were so disruptive to the old gendered order, they could not themselves present as too aggressive for fear of being seen as radical, nor could they be too vulnerable, feminine, or even conventionally beautiful lest they be dismissed as unserious. Jennifer Granholm, a former pageant contestant and the first woman to govern Michigan, has described cutting her hair short and trying to add gray streaks when she ran her first campaign in 1998. “You had to look completely asexual,” she once said. “The first thing they think about is how you are shaped, what you are wearing. You have to be as neutral as possible so that people will pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth.”

Meeting ridiculous gendered expectations could mean ridiculous micro-humiliations: When Hillary Clinton told reporters in 1992 that she had chosen to pursue a paid profession rather than stay home to bake cookies, she was pressured to participate in a “First-Lady Bake-Off” to prove her wifely chops. Fifteen years later, during her first presidential run, the presence of a body that was not male was such an anomaly on the campaign trail that the Washington Post published a fashion feature about how she was choosing to handle her cleavage. Clinton was perhaps the most acute example of an assertive Democratic woman whose efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female.

Meanwhile, Republican women faced limitations of their own but for a long time appeared at ease with them. Many came off as maternal and content, conservatively coiffed and shoulder-padded, a comfortable match for a party that wanted to offer reassurance to a nation jittery about women’s liberation. Think Elizabeth Dole, a Reagan Cabinet member, future senator, and presidential candidate whose chatty, Oprah-style stroll through the crowd on the night of her husband’s 1996 presidential nomination was the (sole) highlight of that convention. But they could also be tough and mean — Barbara Bush once called Geraldine Ferraro a bitch!

The Republican Party, through the 1990s and into the new millennium, included quite a few “moderate” women, such as Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who believed in fiscal conservatism but also held positions on so-called social issues that were comparatively liberal. They were, like many in their party before its sharp anti-abortion turn, “pro-choice.” They worked with Democrats to reach compromises, and the women on both sides of the aisle appeared to be friendly with one another: Collins partnered with Kirsten Gillibrand on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Gillibrand helped then-Senator Clinton throw Collins a bridal shower.

A turning point in the evolution of conservative womanhood came when John McCain selected a little-known governor of Alaska to be his running mate in his presidential race against Barack Obama in 2008. Sarah Palin was in her mid-40s, young enough not to be collared by the pearls and propriety that inhibited many of her forerunners in both parties. She was charismatic and uninterested in conforming to outdated gender stereotypes. Or rather, she conformed to a bunch of them simultaneously: She had a sexy-librarian beauty and no qualms about playing it up; a macho snow-machine-racing husband who had taken a leave from his job on the oil fields to be the primary parent to their five kids; and she used her youngest child, Trig, born with Down syndrome, as proof of her hard-core anti-abortion bona fides. She had white-nationalist instincts that led her to counter Obama with language about “real Americans,” and she pioneered a Mama Grizzly persona that was both sporty and menacing (fuck your dead puppy; this lady wanted wolves to be shot from helicopters). She was unafraid to stake her own claim to women’s equality, advocating for a “new, conservative feminism.”

[...] There is surely a perverse pride in emerging victorious near the top of a power structure built to exclude you. These are the dynamics that have long rewarded white women for acting as foot soldiers within a white patriarchy, willing to take one another out to get closer to power, their positions adjacent to the brutes at the top a signal of their uncommon tenacity. But there is a difference between the status granted those willing to do whatever unhinged thing it takes to get ahead in contemporary right-wing politics and the political autonomy these women might yearn for just as much as the classical feminists they wage war against. [...]

In the past, it was easier for Republican women to get away with inconsistency and self-contradiction. Phyllis Schlafly, the brilliant, diabolical political strategist, could inveigh against the masculinized ambitions of women working outside the home from pulpits well outside her own home because her professional efforts paid lip service to restoring certain comforting hierarchical expectations about men’s and women’s spheres. That paradigm has been subverted. What Schlafly and her generation feared most — that the expanded opportunities and protections for women would become their own kind of traditional expectation — has come to pass. This is why the overturn of Roe was not greeted as some welcome restoration of a bygone order but as a threatening attack on the protections that plenty of American women, especially white middle-class women of all political persuasions, had come to count on as an established norm during the 49 years Roe stood. Every one of these Republican women relies on the gains of women’s liberation, and well they should. This was, in fact, what the women’s movement was for: not just so those who agreed with it might enjoy more opportunities but so those who did not agree with it also could. As an early political ballbuster, former New York congresswoman Bella Abzug famously said, “We don’t want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemielto get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.” Welcome, ladies.

Remarkably, these dark years have seen women on the left conduct themselves with new ease and assuredness. Democratic women at both the center and the left edge of their party now communicate in a range of styles that appear more authentic and less stilted than those of previous generations of female politicians. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fluent on social media; Elizabeth Warren lets her professorial freak flag fly; Ayanna Pressley is bald and beautiful. They tell stories of abortion, of assault, of pregnancy and childbirth, of their gay and trans offspring, of their disabilities and military service, weaving the facts of their lives into arguments for civil rights, health-care access, and housing.

Whitmer is perhaps the most prominent Democratic woman to experiment with mixing a traditional white femininity and historically masculine cadences. Though her politics could not be more different, she is perhaps the closest we have yet seen to a natural echo of Palin’s swashbuckling cheek. In May, Whitmer wore a fuchsia wrap dress to pick up an award for a campaign she undertook as “Governor Barbie.” Her five-word acceptance speech was “Wear pink; get shit done.” In the days after Noem’s disastrous book tour, Whitmer took a break from posting about the NFL draft to put up a photograph of her with her two dogs, Kevin and Doug, with the caption, “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit.” It’s certainly all performed in its own way. But for the first time, it’s the Democratic women who can articulate the mix of football and Barbie and health care and labor without tripping over themselves, who seem more comfortable in their own bodies. The women on the right appear in perpetual confusion and find themselves, like some negative image of Clinton, twisting into something unrecognizable.

[...] But there is no way to understand these varied approaches to gender expression outside the context of their own political aims. These are politicians who regularly refer to gender-affirming health care as “castration” and “mutilation.” Boebert famously campaigned against drag story hours, while Noem wrote to South Dakota’s college board asking it to ban campus drag shows. Republican women longing to attach themselves to the feminist brand leverage transphobia to do it, a riff on the TERF movement currently flourishing in the U.K. Mace has argued that conservatives laboring to keep trans women out of athletic competitions are “the feminists of today,” and Haley has cast anti-trans policymaking as the “women’s issue of our time.” Yet these women express themselves via a dizzying mash-up of gendered conventions: They augment their smiles, bedazzle their pantsuits, and broadcast their bench presses. In their fevered performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, so many of the GOP’s most visible women are themselves engaging in a form of drag.

Of course, drag in its queer context offers the chance to slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity. The show these Republican politicians are putting on is its cold opposite: asphyxiated, distended, nasty. Theirs is surely drag’s gothic inverse. Still, it is possible to catch a glimpse of pathos beneath the performance because the show covers for something awful and real: The identities of those women are no more valued or recognized by the party for which they labor than gay or trans or feminist identities are. Women fundamentally cannot lead a party that wants to oppress women; they cannot, in fact, even be fully human within it.

This NY Mag piece on Trump-era Republican Womanhood and the tug-of-war between expressing traditional femininity and asserting their value in womanhood, such as opportunistically branding themselves as “feminists” when they stand opposed to trans rights.

Read the full story at NY Mag.

[jkottke]

“None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway.” Rebecca Traister writes about “the thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris”. (I’m not quite there yet…being thrilled instead of anxious.)

[drst]

Rebecca Traister in The Cut today.