It's Time To Reckon With The Left's War On Women
The Republic of Gilead's threat isn't only from the right. The 'woke' left hates women every bit as much.
I remember a Persian Gulf War veteran in an Internet forum damning the Saudis after 9/11. Stationed in Riyadh, he had little respect for their misogynist, authoritarian, terrorist-supportive culture. He resented having to 'protect' them from Saddam, describing how weak and lazy they'd grown from luxurious overindulgence. Why couldn't they protect themselves? Why did they need the Americans?
American women grew lazy too, steeped in the luxury of living in a rich, democratic, First World country where women made breathtaking gains in equality, most especially marked with the 1973 Roe decision liberating them from unwanted pregnancies. Women, who were expected to hand Clinton the 2016 win, didn't value what they had and in a joint, mostly white effort they allowed a guy like Trump to stack an aging Court, having been warned repeatedly they might kiss Roe goodbye. They didn't listen. Trump promised he'd end Roe, and for once, he didn't lie.
But the right's War On Women isn't the only one. On the left, it stems from two main branches.
2016 Chicks For Hillary Breakdown
The first arm of the left's War On Women comes from women who don't vote against their own interests, but won't vote for them, either. Like the voters not included in the above graphic. Opinion poll analysis and political blog FiveThirtyEight suggested that progressive voters who stayed home might have swung the election toward Clinton. Why didn't they vote? FiveThirtyEight's data showed 44% of self-identified registered Democrat voters didn't vote, compared to 46% Republican voters, and 13% who were neither.
"The biggest reason given by [all] non-voters for staying home was that they didn’t like the candidates."
Black, Asian and Hispanic voters stayed home by 42%, although voter disinformation campaigns and Republican vote blocking efforts may have contributed. What was it about Hillary Clinton otherwise impotent white 'progressives' found so appalling they simply couldn't bring themselves to vote for her? She wasn't good enough for them, either. She knew Washington politics well. She was an 'insider'. Quel horreur!
Not voting when one's own self-determination rights are on the line looks an awful lot like not caring about those rights, or those of others.
Some progressives may have voted for misogyny more for their pocketbooks with the candidate who favors higher-income households since they can get an abortion whether it's permitted or not. One progressive woman from an upper-middle-class neighborhood told me she and her husband are 'almost making enough to make it worth voting for Trump.' "I won't do it," she added, understanding she's still responsible for those who can't afford a seat at their table.
Other progressive homebodies may suffer from internalized misogyny's doubt that women can truly be effective leaders. Naomi Wolf chronicled certain feminists' fear of power and female leadership years ago, and Trump performed well with college-educated women.
I wonder who might have been 'good enough' for those SAH voters to get their butts to the polls. Or who might have been toxic masculine enough to motivate them. Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-Un? Harvey Weinstein? Darth Vader? Does a man have to destroy an entire planet before milquetoast Millennials can pull a lever?
Seriously, how much worse must the Republicans dredge up before non-voting chickie-boos whining about Roe get thee to a voting booth? If Trump couldn't do it, who can?
Maybe misogynist Hillary-hating 'Bernie Bros' spoke for more liberal women than they realized.
The left's obsessive need for 'political purity' hurts women, and everyone else, by rendering every political candidate completely unacceptable. How many feminists obsessed over Joe Biden's 'handsiness' and ancient personal space violations in 2020 when he was up against a confirmed sexual predator?
Are those lazy ladies happy now with the world they've wrought for themselves and others?
When one gets too steeped in First World luxury (everyone, not just white women) and consequently lackadaisical, this is what happens.
Misogyny, dick service and the trans movement
The left's misogyny has always been more subtle, easier to hide when the right's misogyny perches like a MAGA-breasted robin on the tallest tree in the park. Progressive men have a higher tolerance for women's rights only when it doesn't immediately threaten their dominance birthright, but the rise of Hillary Clinton thirty years ago began teasing it into the open. Clinton was arguably the first in modern times to step beyond the traditional First Lady role of sticking with a pet cause, like others before her. As First Lady, Clinton had the audacity to chair a task force on healthcare reform, in which she publicly challenged many male Republican conservatives and critics. She lost that battle, but received kudos from many, including a few, grudgingly, from a few of the victors. When she ran for President she unleashed misogyny on both sides, especially the Bernie Bros.
Men and their sexual fetishes bring us to the second arm of the left's War on Women.
On a less visible level, so-called progressive men's feminism stops at their dick, when the subject is the high rate of sex trafficked women and children in porn and prostitution.
Feminism is great as long as it doesn't interfere with every man's entitlement to get off.
Traditional, dick-focused misogyny has found a safe haven, at least for now, in the trans movement, where many transwomen - no one knows how many - are autogynephilic. They're erotically aroused by dressing as a woman, pretending to be one, and now, with medical science, becoming as female as a biological man can possibly get.
Autogynephilia (AGP) is a remarkably taboo subject in the rise of the male-dominated trans movement. Pre-Internet research on transitioners indicated it was mostly powered by gay men and heterosexual autogynephiles.
Activist transwomen's War On Women includes its increasingly censorious silencing of women, often with the help of natal female supporters, erasing the word 'woman', and silencing women with bans and restrictions on social media if those feminist bitches don't shut the eff up and do as they're told.
The trans left's War On Women might lead to a 'woke' dictatorship that doesn't look any better for women than Trump Part Deux does.
How do you feel about a Republic of Gilead featuring TransCommanders and collaborative Regressive Left 'aunties'?
Feminism's War On Women warriors
Some feminists never shut up about how much they're silenced. The left's War On Women includes women who de-platform other women for expressing opinions that don't meet their ideological purity test.
Speak truth to male power at your professional and personal risk: It's not all abusive misogynists threatening women for speaking out against male violence and abuse. The left's misogynists shout down, threaten, assault, and Twitter-ban women for defending the right of women to remain women and not 'people who menstruate,' 'people with wombs', and the other silly-ass euphemisms the world has adopted to cater to those who are still defending their traditional male dominance, now in wigs and with better makeup than their critics.
The difference is that when women are threatened for speaking truth to men who identify as men, feminists are less likely to defend the accused.
Women speaking up against 'people with penises' in women's-only spaces and lesbians calling out 'transwomen' pressuring them to have sex with male genitalia are shut down by far too many women, defined as people who were born into it, i.e., those who should know better. Social activism now allies with cyberbullying and violence against women. Often by women.
'Woke' feminists ignore the silencing of women by misogynist men in dresses and their lady lackeys. They tolerate a self-absorbed, largely male movement defining women and dictating to women what 'real women' are as men have done for thousands of years. They support those who disrespect and challenge women who challenge them.
The trans left's War On Women has infiltrated Twitter's 'hateful conduct' policy, amended to support trans misogyny over natal women's right not to be harassed, abused, or threatened online. Twitter barely had any fucks to give when the harassers were honest cis-het cybertrolls. One easily violates their so-called 'hateful conduct policy' by stating the glaringly obvious: Transwomen aren't the same as women, or, as happened to Jordan Peterson recently, by using the 'wrong' pronouns when he pointed out Elliott Page cut off 'her' breasts, leading to the usual world-class Twitter hand-wringing freakout. Why did 'he' have to cut 'his' big round breasts off if he's a dude? What is Elliott Page, underneath the chest scars and short hair?
Calling Elliott Page 'she', which he was for more than thirty years, is verboten.
Where is this silencing of female voices leading us?
Silence of the Libs
When women can't speak their minds freely, we're back to the dark days when women really were silenced, upon threat of violence or death.
Modern feminism is a blink of Darwin's eye on the human timetable. It only began a few seconds ago at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention where the first gentle statements that women should have the right to vote were immediately condemned as 'unladylike'.
Feminism from a position of greater female agency only dates, arguably, from the '60s and early '70s when women began marching and agitating and eventually getting what they wanted.
What we're still not good at though, because honestly, we're still infants in our own feminist r/evolution, is challenging male authority. It's ingrained in all of us, no matter how feminist we think we are. It's why I encourage feminists to always seek to root out the misogyny and patriarchy between their ears first.
We still unconsciously respond to male direction, especially if accompanied with strength and confidence and a deep voice. This goes a long way in explaining how gaslit by the trans movement many alleged progressive feminists have become, and why they're so submissive to obviously misogynist men who act more like men than women. These guys know how to handle, dominate and manipulate unconsciously receptive women.
The other feminist challenge is cleaning up our culture of too-embrasive 'tolerance', or 'idiot compassion' as one Buddhist teacher might call it. 'Idiot compassion' is when one shows so much compassion for others, you let them walk all over you, or willfully ignore their transgressions against others. Modern leftism, including feminism, has devolved toward an unfortunate regressive 'tolerance' in which traditionally, universally marginalized women ignore women's rights if some other male-dominated marginalized group complains loudly enough.
Like with fundamentalist Islam's abuses against women, which Christian-critical feminists conveniently ignore, and Female Genital Mutilation, against which Western feminism's white, post-colonial guilt prohibits them from standing up for their darker sisters, because 'marginalized' misogynists citing 'cultural traditions' can shut them up on command.
It's why and how misogynist men have weaponized female submission so politically.
Toxic masculine men have figured out a way to hate, threaten, abuse, and harass women with feminists' blessings. We've witnessed the most brilliant feminist hornswoggling in history by the trans movement's greatest victory in its War On Women: Getting women to misgender boys and men so they can compete on women's sports teams while everyone nods like good little Stepford Wives and parrots the party malarkey: "Transwomen are the same as women."
Non-misgoynist transwomen may be too scared to speak out. These other transchicks can seriously kick their asses.
When late-blooming transwomen rip the mantle of victimhood from female shoulders, malleable feminists put their critical thinking faculties on hold and accept the mind-blowing premise there's no difference. They harm those many transfolk who don't hate women and live just fine with anyone who can treat them like normal human beings without requiring kid glove treatment, thankyouverymuch. Radical trans-activists won't entertain the notion of compromise because they don't want it, they want total female subjugation, and when women haven't cleared out the patriarchy between their ears, the boys will get what they want.
As always.
However crazy might be the right's insane conspiracy theories, at least they're not demanding we deny the evidence of our own eyes of the simple difference between boys and girls.
Like it or not, we do live in a sexually dimorphic world but we can carve out a place for those who don't feel like they don't quite fit either side. Let's sit down and talk about it, and figure out how we can live and work together happily enough.
We'll even make room for you 'wokies' too, if you promise not to shout down, talk over, or wokesplain to women you disagree with.
You know, like disrespectful men do.
When I'm not waging war on misogyny, however well-dressed or not, I help women and others reclaim their power on my website Grow Some Labia.