#being fed up with patriarchal structure and a general 'men' is one thing. i get that shit | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”

#bret devereaux #spinning #textiles #weaving #ancient #medieval #history #writing #slavery

9K notes · View notes

rosenthrns · 4 years

Photo

✦ ▓ AND WHO GOES THERE? oh, it’s just [ OLENNA TYRELL ]. some say [ HER ] resemblance to [ ANGELA BASSETT ] is almost uncanny, but the [ SIXTY-SIX ] year old has been in the capital for [ FORTY YEARS ]. many suspect that they are the notorious [ SENESCHAL ] of the [ TYRELL ] family: perhaps that has made them [ CONNIVING ] && [ UNYIELDING ] of late, when they used to be so [ METHODICAL ] && [ SILVER-TONGUED ]. during the daylight hours, [ OLENNA ] can be found working as a [ FORMER SENATOR ], but when night falls over king’s landing, they are best remembered listening to [ FEELING GOOD BY NINA SIMONE ]. may the gods be with them in these dark streets.

hey now, hey now i’m mac, im 23 and i live in the pst. i didn’t know i needed this rp until i found it, and i honestly was so shocked when i found out i could play the fucking queen of thorns herself olenna tyrell. and whomst better to play a queen than the queen mother angela bassett ? nOBODY !! so feel free to read, and dm me for plotting !!

THE QUEEN OF THORNS.

her father once told her, one hot virginia afternoon as they walked through the winding vineyards of her family home, that power was to be taken, not earned, not given away --- least of all to those that looked like them. he told her a lot of things in passing especially when he grew older, some important, some not, but these words always stuck with olenna. afterall, she had seen him claw his way up from nothing, taking what he could, sacrificing what he could, fighting for what he could. all in the name of creating a legacy for their family.

runceford redwyne was a crafty man in his day, driven by the need to do better by his children, by his wife. they knew they were never supposed to fly above their station, to be left in the dirt like the generations before them even with the false notion of equality in their faces. but runceford was determined to soar, and in the childhood years of olenna’s life, they would climb from their single-room wooden shack to a manor overlooking acres and acres of land.

she could hardly remember it now, but the vineyard used to be as destitute as they were. a piece of land once owned by her father’s employer, tending to the grounds that he would later take when he saw the chance. when the old patriarch of the farm had finally died, the will had evidently left the land, the manor and a large sum of money to olenna’s own father. it was never made clear to her, what her father did, but she could still recall the timid fear in the eyes of the owner’s children as runceford proudly collected his inheritance.

there as no opposition, no utterance of retaliation, just a clear understanding that whatever he did was enough to keep the dogs at bay. it was the first time olenna saw what could be done with enough ambition and enough planning, and it would certainly not be the last. as she grew up, she only saw her father’s vineyard grow until it became the liquor giant it is today, establishing redwyne spirits co., one of the largest distributors to the american south. she watched, from afar, as her father took meetings in the barrel rooms, made deals under the dining room table, collected more than his fair share. olenna watched, then, as runceford took her brother under his wing, teaching him all that olenna wanted to learn.

it was not for a lack of trying either, as olenna would request time and time again to learn the art of the deal, to make her mark on her family’s history. but runceford, with all his love, would rather olenna have some deniability, and instead turned her onto politics. first in city council, then at the state legislature. she was still young but far wise beyond her years. by the time she was in her twenties, she had accomplished a lot for the state of virginia, namely in the agriculture and commerce sectors at the very least to boost policies for her own family gain.

all this work was appreciated, but olenna wanted more, wanted the power her father had tenfold. she knew better than to bite the hand that fed her but she knew she had the ability to soar higher than her father ever dreamed of. she broke off her engagement to daeron targaryen, a man her father had arranged for her with the intent of political power, and moved to king’s landing anyway to find something she can build up herself like her father had before her.

she eventually found luthor tyrell, a man with a business he inherited and a will she could easily bend. there was potential, not a lot of it, but it was enough to help her leverage the acquisition of a dying conglomerate and through dealings of her own, not to mention her connections to high places, created tyrell and associates. she won her husband over to deal with the company, while she made good with her connections to build the citadel underneath it. they worked in tandem to raise their businesses as well as the tyrell family name from nothing, and did together for a number of years until their son, mace, was old enough to walk.

she returned to politics, again working to benefit the industries she had a stake in and later ran for senate once tyrell and associates was stable enough to stand on its own. splitting her time between d.c. and king’s landing only gave her more pull when it came to dealing with the other families competing in king’s landing. her network now not only included those of the eastern seaboard, but across the entire country and even into foreign territories.

by the time her children started having children, olenna’s legacy was already put into place and ticking. she had retired from government but her role in politics still flowed like blood through the lifeline of king’s landing. if you wanted something done, you would go to olenna.

but olenna knew her legacy needed to be sustainable without her. she had been preparing her eldest daughter, mina, since birth to take over, to follow in her mother’s footsteps, to keep the tyrells in power. mina was everything to her, until she was nothing. olenna never knew heartbreak until she held her beloved daughter’s body in her arms, silent and shaking with fury in her eyes.

olenna was now left to restructure the politics of her family, making the difficult decision of announcing her newest heir. it may seem out of bounds, to declare one of the youngest, her margaery, but when has olenna never been anything but methodical. she’ll deal with the family later, but in the meantime, olenna has bigger lions to tame.

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

FLOWER BUDS; are you someone who wants a break from the patriarchal structure of society ? are you someone who wants to be appreciated for your worth, your ability, your achievements ? do you want to overthrow the men in your life for the power you deserve ? then allying with olenna tyrell sounds like the best thing for you ! think about it...olenna...her power...her mind...taking YOU ?? under HER WING ??? think of all she can teach you. of course...she needs to find you useful to her as well.

POLITICAL ALLIES; her power not only stems from being the baddest bitch alive, but it also comes from her ability to schmooze and make deals with people even if she all she wants to do is stab someone in the eye. she’s a lady, she knows how to put on a face for the sake of getting shit done. they don’t have to like each other, they just have to work together. not to mention she still has connections with people in government and the 1%.

POLITICAL ENEMIES; idk why you would try to go against her *cough* tywin *cough* but maybe the tyrells have wronged you in some way that you would try to vilify a sweet old woman who is just trying to live her best life with her grandkids. try to come for her, i guess, but don’t just expect her to sit idly by and let you do it.

A COMMON ENEMY; can you believe olenna trended #LANNISTERISOVERPARTY world wide ?? currently, olenna wants revenge for the death of her daughter and she’s prepared to live for another sixty years to just see the fall of the lannisters. if you have the same goal, slide into olenna’s secretary’s assistant’s dms to submit your plea and ally with her. who knows, you might get to your goal a lot quicker.

GARDEN PARTY; this is purely for spilling the Tea™️ and giving information ( whether intentionally or over several glasses of wine ) to olenna that may be useful to her. you’ll be given a handwritten invitation to her private garden where tea and shade are a plenty. and if she learns something that she can later use against you or an enemy then that’s on you, she caught you slipping.

#vixere:intro #points.#20 /#g*d this got long

7 notes · View notes

destroyyourbinder · 6 years

Text

ROGD is driving me crazy (part 5)

I was planning on writing a long, well-researched piece on why "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) is not really a thing as such, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to it. I don't dispute that there is something really bizarre going on with the tremendous increase in female children and adolescents seeking transition or gender-dysphoria-related care, and I don't dispute that there is a social contagion aspect, linked to social media use and access to the internet, to this rise in gender dysphoria/trans-identification. But the whole concept of ROGD is suspect, and it drives me nuts that it's taken as the gold standard now for questioning the wiseness of transitioning children or the broader claims about gender made by transgender ideology. Here's a not-so-brief, but as brief as I can get without weeks of research, rundown of what is bothering me, in several parts (PART 1) (PART 2) (PART 3 & 4) (PART 5) ------- I have seen terrifying behavior from parents in online trans-skeptical communities attempting to coerce their so-called ROGD kids into "desistance", including one example of a mother forcing her child to watch my "Destroy Your Binder" video. There was an incident in the detransition community where a detransitioned woman reported that a mother of a trans-identifying teen (a complete stranger to the detrans woman) attempted to get her to fly across the country to stay with her family to try to lecture her daughter into desistance. Obviously a parent with such frightening boundary issues is probably contributing to her child's mental health issues, but framing the kid's issues as a stubborn and bizarre form of "trendy" or "attention-getting" behavior will never help the whole family system realize that dude, there's a bunch of big problems going on beyond the individual child's gender stuff. Defining the problem as "ROGD" versus "legitimate" gender dysphoria is inherently individualizing and invalidating of a young person's very serious issues with gender and sexuality and social interaction/relationships; it makes the problem the gullibility of the child, a nebulous problem with "technology" these days, or pathologizes the dynamics of teen girl relational networks and identity formation without recognizing that it is heteropatriarchy (including that within family systems and school hierarchies/organizational structures) that drives the toxicity of so much teen girl behavior. Without understanding this, there is no good basis for therapeutic work with children and young adults affected by new narratives of transgender identity and gender dysphoria, and I am very much afraid of what parents and professionals are willing to try to get a kid to "desist" when just raw "desistance" is the goal and not finding a way to cope with the horrible set-up for female people, autistic people, and/or gay people in this world. I am scared that much of the information we have about this phenomenon is driven by the self-interested reports of parents rather than by the voices of the kids themselves, including kids or young adults who did desist or who have come out the other side, and that some parents seem to be motivated by discomfort with gender non-conformity or homosexuality in general rather than a concern about the bodily integrity or long-term well being of their children. One of the hardest things for me to hear from these parents and professionals is that these ROGD kids' distress "makes no sense" because they were formerly feminine girl children who seemed happy with their lot and now they've gone about ruining themselves. There is even a quote in the Littman study about female children whose trans-identification was considered so particularly boggling because they formerly wore bikinis or makeup. These kids' daily or weekly gender progress is measured against resemblance to a former fantasy childhood where these girls were satisfied with their gender conditioning rather than quietly discontent the whole time, their feelings continually dismissed by their caretakers and peers in favor of inculcation into femininity and a heterosexual life. This belies horrible, regressive ideas about gender development in children in many ROGD-invested parents and professionals, where there exists a proper development for female children, such that if they are "actually girls" they will develop into a being that is properly satisfied with all the shit women put up with and likely appropriately feminine, rather than being a confused and discontent teen who rejects their embodiment (supposedly a different creature than that thing that is a "transgender boy", who is some medical anomaly where male gender stereotypes erupt from the brain-mouth connection of a 3-year-old female child). This sort of apolitical view about gender which refuses to acknowledge that all female children develop their gender identity under conditions of pervasive low-to-high-level sexual captivity, violence, violation, and coercion, totally misunderstands typical gender development in girls, the eventual gender development of gay women, and the development of any type of gender dysphoria in children. Most crucially, it fails to recognize that the typical development of female people is not the healthiest way we can be, because we live in a world fundamentally antagonistic to us and our needs. Whether you as a medical professional hold the view that trans boys and men are such because their gender development went awry early in life and transition is the best we can do for such difficult and tragic cases, or trans boys and men are such because they have some innate difference from women, you will have difficulty drawing a line between these cases and cases of gender non-conforming or unhappy girls and women without relying on severely regressive and anti-feminist gender stereotypes, stereotypes that will ultimately condemn those on both sides of the line to being fed to the wolves-- different wolves maybe, but wolves nonetheless-- of patriarchal abuse. I guess some people are fine with this, and maybe I can say nothing to them. But the point is that ROGD kids, adolescents, and young adults clearly are not, and the reason why their cases are so hard to resolve or treat both ethically and successfully is that they point out that awful practice of drawing the line itself. ROGD patients very vocally do not want you to draw the line on the side that will include them with their birth sex, even if there’s no particular reason why you shouldn’t. But parents and some medical professionals absolutely do and will travel to hell itself to box them in. What is at stake when we draw the line, and for whom? And who, after all, gets to wield the cosmic (or perhaps just pharmaceutically-well-funded) fluorescent spray paint can that does the drawing? Those girls with so-called ROGD, as well as most trans people who are female, know exactly what’s at stake, and most wish to magically appear on the other side of that line without having to see the ugliness of how the line is made or acknowledge the existence of the lines-- and a line-drawer-- at all.This is impossible so long as we’re in the business of transitioning people, and so long as the medical industry does it there is going to be a line, and people in white coats drawing it. I ask you to notice that the line, the gatekeeper, doesn’t already come provided by nature; you’ll never discover it somewhere out there in brains or bodies or god forbid, the toy preferences of tiny children. If we accept the inevitability of transition, the line will always have to be drawn, and by somebody, with consequences for the real flesh and blood of the real human beings who live in the bodies standing on each side. There will always be two sides. So: will you pick up the brush and paint to draw the line? Will you play the grand referee in this gender game? Or are you willing to see what this game is, and put it all down, and walk away?

#dysphoria #writings #ROGD

25 notes · View notes

fem-mem-mine · 3 years

Link

How Conservatism Failed Its Women

By Lili Loofbourow Nov 02, 2020

My politics are progressive now, but I was raised conservative among conservatives. A lot of the people my family spent time with were hardcore right-wingers, some of them John Birch Society members (or sympathetic ex-members—when the JBS became too racist toward Hispanics, which many of us were, some broke off but otherwise hewed closely to its principles). In California, extreme conservatism made me something of an outsider. It often seemed to me that the liberal milieu in which I lived misjudged us—stereotyped us as believing things I did not think we believed. Or accused us of hypocrisies I did not think we harbored. The conservatives I grew up around were charitable and generous—they welcomed strangers to their social gatherings with open arms. They were ideological in ways I found stringent and uncompromising, certainly, but admirable for all that. Their beliefs seemed sincere and foundational. They required (at least in theory) self-discipline and sacrifice. The men made mean jokes and were unquestionably sexist, and yes, I was tasked with politely pretending to find them funny when they weren’t. (“Impeach Clinton and her husband” was the height of comedy.) They were homophobic and attached to displays of national power. But their principled commitments seemed sincere, and they appeared to live in accordance with them. They supported their families. They weren’t wealthy, just averse to government interference. And their revulsion toward Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct, to take one example, seemed visceral, not partisan. I found their anger and their authority a little bit scary, even if some respected me for being smart (for a girl).

And as far as I could tell, the women took a lot of pride in the position they occupied, even if it was structurally subordinate, and even if some were clearly smarter and more capable than their partners. I could not reconcile this—the notion of assenting to a false inferiority seemed slightly dishonest to me—but it was clear to me that they could and I respected that. They cooked and fed improbable numbers of people with good humor and endless patience. Many of them worked, but work wasn’t the point. All in all, these were people who believed in things and spent a lot of time at activist gatherings that mixed fun with a smattering of outsider pride.

But the older I got, the more I heard. A couple of the women I looked up to and loved turned out to be abused by their husbands. I heard one advise another to deal with it by crying in the closet. (I also watched one woman help another get out of her abusive marriage to a man with many guns—she made it, but she was not seen in the group again. The cost of leaving seemed to be extremely high. He remained.) As an adolescent, I became conscious of a slight but definite creepiness some married men expressed toward me and the other girls my age. In time I would hear this wasn’t unusual, and that when it happened, the women they targeted tended to lose out: When one married man was found to have groped another woman in the group (she rejected him), his wife defended him and called the other woman a liar and worse. She stopped coming. He stayed. Women kept disappearing from the circle. I missed them. Whatever sexual degeneracy the men vituperated against in others was somehow defined out of their own conduct, unpoliced. They joked and debated and sometimes shot at targets outside while the women cleaned up, and the fantasy of male protection started to seem increasingly unstable: When it became known in the group that a woman had said she was raped, she was neither treated well nor universally believed. And so, too, predictably, we saw her less.

The rules were acquiring a certain vaguely authoritarian arbitrariness, in short, which I can best explain with a story: One abusive husband wanted to show off his son’s obedience to the assembled company. I had spent a lot of time with the little boy; his eyes were watchful and it was virtually impossible to get him to talk. The topic had been responsible gun ownership, and the father told us all he had taught the boy not to touch his weapons under any circumstance. He put his revolver on the coffee table to show us how well he’d trained his son. “Bring that gun to me,” he kept saying to the boy, who, confused and fearful, finally obeyed. The man’s face fell; he was humiliated and angry. The boy would be punished.

These were people I loved. They were practically family, and there’s a lot of joy and beauty in my memories. I was treated kindly. The kids I grew up with are dear to me still, though we don’t see each other much anymore. And sometimes it seemed like the system worked: The men were slightly pampered would-be warriors upholding standards a decadent culture had let lapse while the women cleaned and cooked for them, and the women liked that the men acted like and considered themselves providers and protectors. In practice, that protection rarely materialized: Whenever the men did something damaging or disruptive, they stayed and the women left. In practice, what I witnessed repeatedly was how the women protected the men against consequences, even social ones. I did not know how to fit into this innocently—or whether I could opt out. Once, when I was 7 or so, one of the men (who was white) used me to humiliate his errant Hispanic nephew on whom I had a silly crush. The boy, some five or six years older than me, had trouble reading, so I was instructed to read a passage from his book in front of him. The objective was clearly to shame the boy. I did it, vaguely understanding that my being a girl was an unspoken factor redoubling his shame. I read as fast and as well as I could. I was trying to escape my own small share of humiliation by proving that girls were smart, but that was the wrong quest just then and I couldn’t figure out how to pivot. I sided with the man against the boy and against myself. I will always regret this. I don’t know whether that particular incident marked the boy, but he eventually disappeared too.

There were many such attempts to harden boys (and to soften girls), and it was clear that people were unconsciously carried along by—and consciously making trades to preserve—a way of living that prized authority and punished weakness. Not surprisingly, I didn’t want to be the weaker sort, and I resented my own femaleness. The men seemed to have more power and less stress. I wanted to rise to their challenge, live up to their stringent definitions of freedom, share in their fun, participate in their anger. I never did, of course. My place was with the women whom I loved but whose conversation seemed, by comparison, more constrained—gossipy and sometimes parochial in its adherence to punishing social standards.

Then came a shock: After one beloved matriarch’s genial but dominating husband died, she became far more easygoing and philosophical and—to my surprise—liberal. Abortion came up in conversation, and she stunned me by gingerly approving of it; being pro-life at the time, I found myself in the bizarre position of arguing against a person whose positions I had found formative. I see now that she hadn’t felt at liberty to express the full range of her convictions while her husband was alive. I spent the final years of her life getting to know the real her in puzzled gulps. And realizing that the earlier framework I thought I’d been taught by her was treacherous—beliefs cannot be borrowed or inherited, even from people you love. Or maybe: What women say they believe changes once the men who need them to believe those things die.

What happened next is no secret since you’re reading this. I acquired different ideas, tested them out, found them persuasive and drifted away. It was painful at first; being an outsider to outsiders doesn’t help you belong anywhere much. But even as recently as five years ago, when Donald Trump was leading early GOP primary polling, if you had asked me, I would still have said that the people I grew up with, and who mean a great deal to me, felt everything they said they believed in. I would have defended their values as real and from the heart despite notable (but perhaps human?) hypocrisies. Because I saw how they reacted to the Clinton scandal, I wouldn’t have guessed that a single one would support Donald Trump—a former Democrat! an immoral playboy! a corrupt con artist!—especially after the Access Hollywood tape. But most of them did. And still do.

I am not proud to admit how unprepared I was for this revelation. Naiveté is embarrassing to confess to, but there it is. Five years ago, I still thought ultraconservative men did sincerely want to protect the women in their lives, however frequently they failed, from threats including those posed by bad and predatory men. Trump proved otherwise, and I find myself disgusted by that violation of the bargain all those women actually did honor. I’d witnessed so much stern political fanaticism, and it had come with an extremely high price tag—for women. The protection the men offered was theoretical, but the sacrifices the women made to sustain the ultraconservative American dream were real, and included assenting to a lower-power status in exchange for an idealistic, family-first vision of protection and respect. In practice, it frequently required jettisoning their own close friends in order to mask male misconduct. Yes, this was a trade I avoided: The nebulous benefits of gun-toting chivalry were not, in my view, worth the constant, everyday sacrifices it exacted from its female beneficiaries. I am nevertheless chilled on behalf of the women I knew to find that there was no substance to it at all. Their financial and social subjugation in this grand patriarchal bargain between the sexes was quite real, but the political framework that made it necessary was fake—for the men, it turned out to be little more than a pretext, or a binding agent, or a game. The contract was no contract at all but a rule they could make and break on a whim, and at their pleasure.

Republicans had to normalize Trump, and they did it so easily it barely registered, even if it meant denigrating men in general by redefining him as typical and writing women out of the ability to testify altogether. Any woman who came forward to talk about Trump’s treatment of her was immediately labeled a bad actor trying to take a good man down. What Republicans floated in 2016 was a country that would be a safe space for men in which women—and children—would not get in their way. The party of personal responsibility offered up a new, more accurate version of its social contract, one that conferred great power on men with no responsibility at all.

The politics of sex are the politics of power. The majority of white men who still support Trump and the women who remain loyal are supporting a vision of power expressed as wealth and impunity—where his lies and corruption are a feature, not a bug. This may also underpin the growing male support for Trump in Black and Hispanic communities. It conceives of power as a limited resource that needs to be not just hoarded but abused. The power to be arbitrary—unconstrained by rules, but free to punish and enforce them on others—is seductive.

A lot of women have turned against Trump. I don’t know if conservative women, for whom the promise of protection must matter in order to make wifely obedience worthwhile, are reevaluating some of the bargains they made in light of how baldly their men have sided against them. (There have been several memorable anecdotes during this election cycle about women not wanting their husbands to know they are voting Democratic. And men advising each other to “make sure your wife votes exactly as you do.”) But for people like me, who drifted uneasily away, sometimes wondering if we’d been wrong to do so, or overshot, or missed something crucial about the holy bargain of “submitting” to a man in exchange for his sacred protection, seeing Trump as the purest expression of that patriarchal ideal—unfettered by ethics, enlivened by cruelty—has been clarifying.

#2020-campaign #donald-trump #sexism #men #women

0 notes