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This Week in the War on Women [1]

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Date: 2023-05-20

In Rural America

“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair. ... In 2012, a team of population-health experts at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that white women who did not graduate from high school were dying about five years younger than such women had a generation before—at about 73 years instead of 78. Their white male counterparts were dying three years younger. From 2014 to 2017, the decline in life expectancy in the U.S., driven largely by the drop among the least-educated Americans, was the longest and most sustained in 100 years. Women in Clinton and places like it, women I’d grown up with, women I knew, were losing years of their life. What was going on? ... In Clinton, sex—and the question of whether we were allowed to have it or talk about it—was related to how people viewed girls’ futures. The idea that we might become fully realized adults, experiencing sexual freedom and fulfillment, was not fathomable. We could become helpmeets for our future husbands, or we could be ruined. www.theatlantic.com/…

The article quoted above is exerpted from an upcoming book by Monica Potts, who went back to her hometown in Arkansas to research the differences in the lives of girls she grew up with. Potts tells agonizing stories of girls lives and ties their lost futures to the lost future of the town itself. Ifind it a compassionate look at women’s lives, but also at the effect conservative evangelical culture can destroy girls lives She writes about the way young girls do not talk to adults about the life-changing adult decisions they are faced with. This is the place of girls and women within this culture.

The Trump Base case

This culture is an important part of Donald Trump’s base of support. The Republican party has consciously embraced race and sex/gender issues as most essential to their platform. Another Atlantic article looks at the CNN interview, focusing on Trump’s response to losing the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, finding that he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her. The jury assessed the damage to her at $5 million. In response to a question about this, he once again defamed her. The article looks at the audience response of laughter and applause as indicative of the conservative/Trumpian attitude towards women, in particular, powerful women. This is the other end of Potts’ story. Both represent an attitude towards women and abusive sex that has become central to the Republican cultural base.

In part, the laughter demonstrated the strength of Trump’s grip on his supporters. But the reaction also displayed something discussed much less often: how much of the GOP coalition is resistant to more assertive roles in society for women, which has produced, among other things, more frequent and visible accusations of sexual impropriety against men. ... Resistance to demands for greater gender equality remains a defining attribute of the Trump-era GOP electorate. A national poll conducted last summer by Undem’s firm found that about two-thirds of Republican voters agreed that “women are too easily offended,” nearly three-fifths said that “most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist,” slightly more than seven in 10 agreed that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men,” and almost seven in 10 agreed that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now.” Most Republicans in that poll also agreed that “there is full equality for women in work, life and politics,” and most agreed that they were “more comfortable with women having traditional roles in society such as caring for children and family.” Further, a preponderant majority of Republicans in the poll expressed unfavorable views of the #MeToo movement, as they did of Black Lives Matter. ... As Schaffner noted, one reason Trump’s hold over his supporters is so strong is that he thrills them by publicly denigrating calls for more racial and gender equity in ways that many conservatives have felt “society tells you that you are not really meant to express, or even to think.” That call-and-response was evident during the CNN town hall, as the Republican audience’s enthusiasm encouraged Trump when he mocked Carroll. “It was really the audience reaction that was the most disturbing,” Jane Junn, a political-science and gender-studies professor at the University of Southern California, told me. But, she added, after GOP voters (including women) have stuck with Trump amid all his boundary-breaking language and behavior, “it should not surprise us. What have we been witnessing for the past eight years?” www.theatlantic.com/...

So, while small towns are dying with their girls’ dreams, Republicans are working towards making that culture dominant in many states and in the country as a whole.

Other Stuff

Tue May 16, 2023 at 08:10 AM MST

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/20/2170397/-This-Week-in-the-War-on-Women

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