Political Events I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Political Events I Can’t Stop Thinking About

I can’t get them out of my head

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Even though these are both old news items, I find myself unable to stop thinking about them. They enter my mind every day and I shake my head over them for similar reasons.

They are The White House Correspondents Dinner this year with the assassination attempt on Trump and also the fact that Nancy Mace lost her primary election.

Yes, these two events are heavily related to each other.

All of my life and into the current day, I’ve been told that women need to submit to men.

As a child, I heard it so much while going to church that it caused me to have crises of faith.

Christians always say the most important thing to them is to save people’s souls from hell, to encourage them to be Christian, but it’s not.

The most important thing to them is to create clubs where only the people that perfectly conform to who they want them to be are allowed in their church and to make it into heaven.

That’s why, when I had crises of faith growing up about how the Bible spoke about women, they kept pushing me anyway. Even when it drove me to extreme forms of self-hatred and depression, Christian adults kept pushing the idea on me repeatedly, as a child, that I needed to understand my place in life as a woman.

This isn’t an essential doctrine for salvation, but they preach it as if it is. It’s to the point where they’ll lecture me about it even now that they believe I’m going to hell, despite the fact that I could never become a Christian again because of it.

Because they don’t want me to become a Christian unless I agree to also submit to all the specific morality that their special club uses to control people with.

And when I didn’t like the idea of being submissive, sweet, quiet, and pretty all the time, as a child, there would always be men whining about how it’s so much harder to be a man in a man’s role.

Because while women do the supposed tiny act (in their eyes) every day of obeying their husband and generally taking care of all his (domestic) needs, they do the supposedly hard thing of being willing to die for the family and protect them no matter what.

They always tell me that’s the balance. That’s why it’s fair and that’s why women must submit every day.

And you can never call them out on it because most of life isn’t a bunch of traumatic experiences. People aren’t in danger every day of being physically attacked by a strange man or animal.

The thing about The White House Correspondents Dinner this year, though, is there was someone trying to break in and shoot everyone. So conservatives were finally being called to task.

Conservatives are the ones who always push this idea of women submitting and men leading.

Their wives were in danger. They were pretty and had submitted, so now they were supposed to give their lives up for their wives.

And they failed.

Neither Trump nor RFK Jr. tried to protect their wives in any way. They were swept away and protected themselves while their wives were left behind. Cheryl Hines even chased after RFK Jr. in desperation. And Melania Trump was left alone to hide under the table.

And conservatives will defend it, saying they are important American leaders, so they had to be swept away instead of doing the protecting because if they didn’t, then it would throw the country in chaos if they died.

They don’t even see that they’re running into the entire point.

It is a lie, always a lie, every single time, to say that a woman must submit and that the man, as the important one and leader protect them. Because in reality, those that are considered the leader, the most important one, are the ones that always get protected and the ones that submit to them are the ones in danger.

Women can’t expect to always be treated as the unimportant one in a relationship and then the day they are in danger, to suddenly become the most valuable one. That’s not how it works.

It reminds me of my ex. We were long distance and for years while I paid for all the plane tickets and submitted to him, he complained about how he was the one who was going to give up the most in the relationship because he was supposed to move to live where I lived someday.

We’d agreed to this.

He got constant comfort from me about it and sympathy. He used it to convince me to sacrifice more and to submit to him more because he’d be giving up so much. Then when it was time for him to actually move in to be with me, he poofed and disappeared. He wasn’t going to suddenly start sacrificing in a relationship where he never sacrificed.

The second he was called to task, he refused, because that was the precedent set in our relationship.

And while Nancy Mace might seem like a different thing entirely, it’s again the same. Not with a husband, but to men politically.

Conservative men allowed her into the space because of her willingness to cooperate with misogyny.

We don’t use this word enough, but Republicans aren’t merely transphobic. Their absolute obsession with women’s genitalia and who gets to use the women’s restroom and play in women’s sports is transmisogyny.

Yes, they care some that trans men are using the men’s room, but not nearly the way they obsess over trans women.

We have to use the word transmisogyny, so TERFs stop acting like this is about women having rights when they are actively fighting to take away the rights of women.

It’s not transphobia vs misogyny. You’re not choosing between women and trans people. You’re deciding whether or not it’s okay to single out one specific type of woman or not.

Nancy Mace genuinely thought that she could make her entire platform about misogyny by targeting trans women and then when she wanted to protect cisgender trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein that everything would work out fine.

She didn’t realize that the misogynists she supported through transmisogyny would continue to be misogynists with everything else.

She thought the rest of their misogyny would evaporate and that they’d take her side.

Instead, Trump destroyed her political career. He’s happy to not only try to silence his victims but also silence Nancy Mace as well. She’s as disposable as any woman is to him.

It’s the same thing. Women get abused so much to set us up to want to be protected by men, but then we comply with their shitty demands and they don’t protect us.

It’s a cycle I see continuing every day. And it frustrates me how many women fall for it, out of desperation to have privilege.

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