18 Comments

YES, this grievance administration is gobbling up everything — the money, the rights, the attention, the air in the room. I literally feel my chest tighten just looking at photos of Pete Hegseth, for example, not to mention the gaslighting he and his team did during his testimony. I wonder how to keep breathing through all this!

Expand full comment

TY! For some reason I don't feel outrage yet, so much as a a sad resignation that every ridiculous and stupid thing that can happen will now happen. And indeed, it is. Somehow we will deal and get each other through it.

Expand full comment

I wonder: what does it do to young men to be so left out of the discourse on women's reproductive rights and rights to live in an unpoliced female body? How does this deep gender inequality shape their relationship to their own bodies? And, more specifically, how do they relate to their own capacity to cause pregnancies when this state can potentially prove so dangerous for their female friends?

Expand full comment

Elisabeth, this is SUCH a good question. Thank you for framing it this way!

Expand full comment

I have to wonder how young men feel about the possibility of having the government force fatherhood on them just because they want to have sex. I’m a mom of boys and girls and I don’t want my boys to have decisions about their future made for them by the government any more than I want my girls to. I’m not happy about this new push to have boys jump into marriage and fatherhood out of high school and try to take on two or three jobs to support a family. That’s completely irresponsible because in many, many instances it simply cannot be done anymore. I know a young man my son’s age who lives in a camper with his fiancée because there is nowhere to own or rent. They are paying her nursing student loans and had to get a co-signer just to have a loan for a $6,000 camper to live in. It’s -12 degrees here right now. Thank goodness they don’t have children yet. It’s just so irresponsible of our government to push a pronatalist narrative on young people. Unless you are wealthy you aren’t going to be able to graduate high school, get married, buy a house, and support a wife and children. There are people who have graduated college who cannot do it!

Last night we watched Coal Miner’s Daughter. Loretta Lynn’s parents begged her not to get married at 13. They had something like 8 or 9 kids and her father died young from inhaling coal dust all the time working in the mines. They didn’t want her to live the way they lived. She did get married and was 14 when she had her first baby. Obviously things eventually worked out very well for Loretta Lynn but even in the movie when she found out she was pregnant like the fifth or sixth time, she admitted to Patsy Cline she didn’t want to have it. Of course that wasn’t an option and she wound up having twins. Loretta Lynn wound up being a strong advocate for the birth control pill and caused quite a stir with her song about it.

Expand full comment

Yes!

I think about this quite a bit. It's sad that we've been conditioned to believe the obvious lie that forced pregnancy is bad for *families and *men--any man who is not ready to be a father, any man who stands to lose a daughter or wife who can't get life-saving care, any father whose 13-year old daughter is forced to give birth. It makes no sense that this is framed as a "woman's" issue but it's sadly v successful.

Expand full comment

This was such an informative read! As a young white male and a college student who was until recently a hardcore conservative, I was blinded by just how much of a chokehold the patriarchy has on society! Seeing just how much of an influence and representation men have on society and the numbers that backed it up really stood out to me considering, like the article says, our current government seems to be pushing this idea that masculinity is in danger and men are in danger of being cast aside. In reality, they are using all the tools at their disposal to push this agenda which targets women, minority groups, non-binary individuals, etc. It’s not femininity that’s the issue, it’s the patriarchal systems and toxic masculinity that are ruining our society

Expand full comment

Thanks so much! And wow, what a journey. Curious what brought you over! Please tell all your friends :)

Expand full comment

You’re welcome! And thank you, I honestly got brought over due to having wayyy more female friends and female coworkers over the last year and a half or so and just seeing and listening to how they’re impacted by what goes on in society. Also taking a look at all the women I would argue with and shut down in the past and realizing I was completely wrong and they were 100% right. That’s really what made me start to change. And yesss I will definitely share!!

Expand full comment

Amazing. Thx for sharing.

Expand full comment

This is so so good!!!!!!!! Thank you for this. Amen.

Expand full comment

TY so much, Andra!!

Expand full comment

"All Supreme Court justices were males until 1981 when Reagan appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor. (1981!! And am I the only one shocked to learn that RBG was the second woman ever?)"

Short answer?

I certainly hope so. Now is a time to support each other and everything but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't really troubled about it. It's not specialized information that's lacked coverage. When did you think other women justices were appointees? Where did you think they'd gone? This is the kind of thing that I expect a woman writing a feminist newsletter to know? I don't even have a degree but I definitely knew this.

I had a lot of feelings about this statement. I sat on them for a while to see if it was indigestion or perimenopause symptoms making me unreasonable. I don't want to sound nasty or combative and it's overall not nearly as important as the good work you do, but it bummed me out.

Expand full comment

When men “dominate” society, they’re effectively just expanding the influence of their wives, because that’s price women demand for loyalty...

Expand full comment

Give me a break. This last outgoing administration was staffed by a cadre of incompetent women & pretend women: Mop-head diverse press secretary, VP Madam Prostitute Cackles, Admiral Skirts aka Richard/Rachel Levine, nuclear specialist stolen evening gowns, chest feeding Transportation Secretary.

Actually that clown car cast of characters would logically preclude any women in a subsequent administration, except they were all DEI extra diverse hires.

Now to the essence of your fictional post:

Pam Bondi had your dufus Dimocrat Senators for breakfast, mid morning snack, lunch, and would have for dinner, but she was only given 4 hours to slice & dice them.

POTUS DJT’s press secretary seems to be more than a match for the Democrats in the press; Christy Noem seems like she will likewise eat Dem Senators for a meal or 2, and on and on….

I think you don’t know what the eff you are talking about & the air head dimbulb women are all on your side of the aisle.

I suggest you drop your column & go take some home ec classes, find a good man kick your shoes off and get him to get you pregnant, & raise a family under huu in s headship. You are not making a good case for matriarchy.

Expand full comment

Hello Sir, obviously we disagree, but your comments do move us up in the algorithm, so I'll take it. Thanks for being curious enough to read even if it's not your thing.

Expand full comment

Very much admire this response :)

Expand full comment
User was indefinitely suspended for this comment. Show
Expand full comment