I’ve written before about the reasons so many autocrats are anti-women: because in a world developed by men to favor men’s interests, women asserting equal rights and equal dignity feels like the men are losing. If your life is shit but hey, you’re a MAN, dealing with women as equals must feel like you’ve slid down society’s hierarchy by 100 levels.
Foreign Affairs offers another angle: women have been major players in every revolutionary movement. In our own country they’ve been involved in the civil rights struggle, abolition, the anti-lynching movement, gay rights and other protests (not to mention evil movements such as white supremacy). See also the long litany of complaints that women shouldn’t have the vote because they don’t vote the right way: too liberal, not sufficiently libertarian. Pushing back against women’s rights thus eliminates a potential source of trouble. For example US right-wingers arguing women have no role as leaders.
And as Robert Altemeyer has written, right-wing authoritarians are obsessed with drawing sharp lines in the sand: men must be A, women must be B, blurring or questioning the lines will bring on the apocalypse. It’s particularly acute when the lines, as drawn, work out so well.
For example, we have gibbering right-winger Charlie Kirk declaring that men are men and women are women, which is why men should never be kindergarten teachers and women shouldn’t fight on the front lines: “They are different from men. Our differences are beautiful. We should celebrate them.” According to Kirk’s group Turning Point USA, celebrating our differences means women should be happy to keep house and bear kids for their man. I can imagine Kirk would find celebrating that difference appealing — it’s way convenient for him. Likewise, male sexists asserting women shouldn’t be leaders or providing affirmative action for men at college on the grounds majority women student bodies are inherently bad.
It’s also convenient that for all Kirk’s talk about fighting on the frontlines, he hasn’t served himself, though he claims he’d have gone to West Point except affirmative action stole his spot. Lots of conservatives are happy to cheer for war and heroism as long as they’re not part of it. Likewise the antifeminist women at Turning Point’s conference telling women to prioritize the home front don’t follow their own advice.
And Kirk is, unsurprisingly, wrong on the facts. It’s true very few women can compete at the highest chess levels, but that’s true of most men. And while he explains gender difference is why men do coding and women don’t, the first coders were women. It became male-dominated after the focus of the industry shifted from hardware to software and coding became more prestigious and better paid.
For more on misogynist lies and those who spread them, feel free to check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward
