Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

As I’ve blogged about before, the religious right’s worldview is deeply entwined with misogyny and male supremacy. And authoritarian movements everywhere are also anti-woman (I’ve made that point before but I can’t find the link). Women have been part of every resistance movement and freedom movement: not just suffrage but civil rights, gay rights, temperance … and that’s true around the world. And in Minneapolis.

Katherine Stewart points out the flip side: “Throughout history and around the world, male supremacy has supplied the backbone of authoritarian movements. Fascist parties always glorify the virtues of manliness (by which they typically mean some form of brutality) and despise the supposed weakness of womanliness (how they interpret empathy, moderation, and compromise). They always appeal to the resentments of the disempowered, and they promise to dominate the objects of resentment, which for a great many people happen to be sexual in nature.”

But it’s not just practical, it’s emotional. Tariffs are good because they’re manly — they’ll put men back in factories instead of sitting behind a desk (said by people sitting behind desks on Fox News). And if they hurt our pocketbooks, well worrying about that is feminine. “But it’s feeding off a recent trend, fed by predatory social media influencers, that conflates masculinity with punishing self-discipline, the kind that rejects all pleasure and comfort as a feminizing — and thereby evil — force.”

The same point has been made (I don’t have the link) about the desire to bring back factory labor: it’s partly the fantasy that if we have lots of men working manly jobs with good incomes (note: I do not believe for a minute we’d get the equivalent of 1950s breadwinner wages if the factories came back) women would happily quit their jobs and become tradwives. They’d give their eyeteeth to push women back into that role; James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal thinks to make it happen we have to give employers the right to discriminate against women.

Or consider the $50,000 signing bonuses for ICE recruits: “Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.” As is their whole recruiting tone: “ICE is a force of men who have felt small and have now been empowered by an administration that tells them they’re manliest of men, hands them guns and tactical gear, gives them precious little training, explicitly tells them they will be held to virtually no legal or moral standards, and sets them loose on a public it has warned is full of not just criminal illegal immigrants, but un-American subhumans, among the worst of whom are AWFULs: Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.”

Or consider Pete Hegseth, hating the Boy Scouts because now they let girls join.

While I rarely agree with Glenn Greenwald about anything, I think his assessment of Matt Walsh is spot on. And it applies to Hegseth and multiple other misogynists.

Then there’s the new catchphrase, “toxic empathy.” As I’ve said before, “compassion is a weakness” is not a phrase the good guys ever use. However empathy for people like Alex Pretti, Rebecca Good and every other victim in Minneapolis gets in the way of fascism and theocracy. Therefore empathy must be destroyed. And because, according to Allie Beth Stuckey and other right-wingers, empathy is girly. “That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith.” Here’s an earlier post of mine discussing fears women must be controlled because they’re too nice to be in charge.

Religious writer Rick Pidcock says it should be simple: “When men witness women being harmed, the choice appears straightforward: Do we protect them, or do we justify the violent power being exercised over them? Do we care for them or control them? For many men of the Religious Right, the answer is not clear.” As Jasmine Crockett puts it, “Now my colleagues want to be the protectors of girls & women. I didn’t hear them screaming this when Renee Good was killed in the middle of the street by the same people the vast majority of you just voted to give more money to. It was a lot of crickets, including about the Esptein files”

Even for right-wingers and patriarchalists,, empathy isn’t always bad. We’re supposed to feel “himpathy” for 90 percent of rapists, for how this could ruin their career or their chance at a college scholarship. For how unfair it would be if Brett Kavanaugh had to settle for a lifetime federal judgeship and lost out on SCOTUS because of a rape attempt or two. Etcetera, etcetera (I’ve got posts on this stuff but no time to link to them today). We’re supposed to sympathize with the poor men petrified that Me Too means they’ll be slapped with a sexual harassment suit if they say one thing wrong and not with the women relieved there might be less harassment. Right-wing jackass Riley Gaines thinks we should have empathy for the heroic ICE agents not for Alex Pretti or Renee Good.

I doubt I’ll live to see the end of the struggle but it’s still worth fighting.

Megyn Kelly explains women like Renee Good wouldn’t be out on the streets confronting ICE if they weren’t too “obese and unattractive” to get laid. Yep, it’s the old Undead Sexist Cliche that if a woman isn’t hot enough, her opinions are invalid (though of course if she’s too hot, her opinions are also invalid). More on this cliche here and here. Kelly would undoubtedly feign outrage if I said I found her unattractive because of her belief torturing innocent people would be cool.

Here’s a related post: “Many, if not most of the messages shared a common thread, which was some version of: You can’t get laid by a real man yourself, and your feminist beliefs are only a reflection of your bitterness and jealousy about this. (As my smart friend Yael pointed out; only a woman’s own unfuckability could possibly propel her to care about her rights as a human being.)  “

Gen Z is more liberal than their elders in lots of ways, but the men are more sexist.

A reminder that forced-birth laws have horrible consequences. For all that centrists Dems think we should stop discussing abortion, this kind of thing has gotten voters to the polls before — and even if it doesn’t, fighting these laws is absolutely the right thing to do. “If they really cared about ‘protecting women’: they would care about the fact that this administration refused to release the Epstein files… or they wouldn’t cut grants for crime victims’ services for survivors. They’d actually care about the fact this administration has elevated people who shield alleged sex traffickers like Andrew Tate. And they certainly wouldn’t be trying to force rape victims to stay pregnant no matter what.”

At the same link, a discussion of South Carolina’s efforts to criminalize donating to abortion funds.

“Men who call women fucking bitches don’t much like it when women talk back. They especially don’t like it when women remind them who they really are: small, pathetic, cowardly. What’s that Margaret Atwood quote? “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.”” — Jessica Valenti on Renee Good’s killer.

“They say that the reason maternity wards are shutting down and doctors are leaving is because there aren’t enough babies being born in these states—a problem, they claim, “pro-life laws could be expected to help solve. That’s right: The Charlotte Lozier Institute says that forcing women to give birth will help to keep maternity wards open.” — Valenti again. Even if true (it’s not), as I’ve said before women are not a means to an end.

Toddler Toady Mehmet Oz, however, thinks it’s awesome that rural hospitals with no ob/gyns are now having to use robot ultrasounds.

England “got freedom, they got liberty, they got rule of law, they got technology. They got better treatment of women, a polite society. So many great virtues. But these were products of a coal-powered society.” — Energy Secretary Chris Wright explaining why using coal as an energy source is a good thing.

“I am talking about something much subtler but widespread. It is a factor in the coverage of abortion rights and other “women’s issues” in the news. It is a factor in the election. I am going to start from my experience of something I might call a black mental hole. Some subjects simply cannot be comprehended by some people. They may be able to read the words and even parrot some ideas, but then the ideas drain out of their heads, beyond the event horizon. It is not a denial of those ideas or argument against them. It comes before those mental processes. The subject simply does not exist in their universe.” — Cheryl Rofer

For an example of Rofer’s point, “Whisky Pete” Hegseth can’t conceive that women are qualified to fight in combat.

“Murder didn’t make us sweat or feel like we were wrong for watching it. Boobs did.”

“Historically, church attendance and participation has been more attractive to women than to men. So Oh Noes!!1! — How can we make church “manlier” and more appealing to men to keep it from a supposed death cycle of feminization? It’s always been an odd panic, one based on choosing to view churches’ apparent success in attracting women as, instead, a threat to men and to masculinity in the abstract.”

“I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.”

The Trump administration’s recent amplification of a narrow research study suggesting that acetaminophen use during pregnancy can cause autism gives Pregnancy Justice additional concerns about what else could make pregnant women vulnerable to prosecution in the future. “We are moving into a place, potentially, where pregnant people’s behavior and exposure of their pregnancy to any risk—whether perceived or actual, justified by science or not—can further diminish their rights.”

“They have justified [sexual assault] against minor girls by refusing to hold abusers accountable, and by vilifying girls as the temptress and enemy of men, and by shopping for wives in the youth group, and even by using 14-year-old Mary as the first holy example, for years.”

Cheryl Rofer provides an excellent round up of more moments of sexism.

I’ll close with this post, which I think has much truth to it.

Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller has been active in politics as a spokesperson, staffer and currently podcaster. Like so many other right-wing professional women, she’s decided women should stay home with babies: “Feminism failed to liberate women. Women were told we needed to work to be as successful as a man. We were told we had to chase the next pay raise and climb the corporate ladder. The most fulfilled a woman will ever be is raising babies in a house full of love.”

Setting aside that “a house full of love” doesn’t quite mesh with the vicious anti-immigrant demagogue she married, Miller is reciting an undead sexist cliche. Actually two: that feminism has failed that women are happiest staying home with their little angels.

This reminds me of a quote (I can’t locate the author) to the effect that under patriarchy men are free to tackle any job or field they can make a place in. They can build, heal, teach, study, explore. Women get one option: stay home with babies. And that’s a perfectly good option, one lots of women might take … but not all. Women are not innately hardwired to want that above everything. Women are not innately good at it or happy with the option — I’ve known several women who have zero interest in kids. That’s as valid a choice as any other. Human skills spread over a huge bell curve — some women will be great caregivers, but not all. Some husbands will be better caregivers and happier with the job than their wives would.

Then there’s the first point that “feminism failed to liberate women.” Um, how? Since modern feminism got going we’ve made tremendous progress as a society. Not enough, but a lot, as this post about women’s rights in the 1950s discusses. It’s not just about a married woman being unable to get a credit card of her own, it’s about men having absolute control over the family finances, where the family lived, the freedom to beat their wives without legal consequences (as long as it didn’t require too many stitches), marital rape not being a crime, sexual harassment being more common.

We’re a long way from equality but that’s because we’ve been fighting a backlash against women’s equality for the past 45 years. And Katie Miller’s side of the political aisle is all in on backlash and more backlash (as witness the Heritage Foundation just welcomed odious misogynist Scott Yenor to their team). Feminism hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t won yet. It’s like complaining in 1942 that the Allies have failed because the Axis wasn’t beaten yet.

There is a lot of debate in feminism about whether climbing the corporate ladder in the face of so much sexism is a solution or whether some kind of systemic reform is necessary. And some women certainly don’t want to climb the ladder, just like some men don’t. Saying “therefore you should all go home and be housewives” is as misogynist as telling black people to go back into the fields as sharecroppers is racist.

But feminism for right-wingers has always been failing. In the last century it was failing because women who chose careers or political activism would never find a man and now they were at home alone, crying softly with nobody to hold them (I saw this one quite a lot). More recently there’s the “women like alpha male heroes in romances therefore feminism has failed!” argument. Or some variation of Katie Miller’s claim — feminism has failed because women don’t want equality (that one was around as far back as the early 1970s).

We live in a country where Columbia University turned a blind eye to a massive, monstrous blind eye to Dr. Robert Hadden, an ob/gyn who preyed upon his patients. Hundreds of patients. As noted in the article, he wasn’t a superstar or a college leader, just one average employee. They still did nothing. Lots of his patients stayed quiet, nurses stayed quiet, but some spoke up. It’s a horrifying case but the little justice the victims would have been zero around the time I was born.

Feminism may fail. The misogynist slime may yet drown us all. But then again, equality might win. And that’s what scares people like the Millers. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, the people saying feminism has failed are really saying “stop trying to win! Stop now! Stop it!”

As Jesus and John Wayne details, the religious right’s embrace of toxic masculinity is built around the idea that society has become too feminized, too soft, too girly. Women have too much power and we have to fix that by making society masculine and patriarchal again because patriarchy is soooo awesome! Spoiler: patriarchy is stupid, unjust and generally shit. Nor is the world so dominated by women that being a misogynist jackhole makes you a cool rebel.

As you know, the whole point of calling these posts (and my book) Undead Sexist Cliches is that these arguments have been around forever. But Moira Donegan’s column about the right-wing’s opposition to women voting points out that one of the arguments is that women are just too nice. They care. They have empathy. They don’t support the ruthless domination and violence that the strong, realistic men know is necessary to protect them. They’re “resentful about sex and status, insecure about their masculine identity, engaging in juvenile fantasies of power and dominance.”

These guys are the movie villain who sneers that compassion is a weakness. Well, compassion for the “undeserving” — I’m sure they feel entitled to compassion from others. “Fascist parties always glorify the virtues of manliness (by which they typically mean some form of brutality) and despise the supposed weakness of womanliness (how they interpret empathy, moderation, and compromise).”

This gets to become a circular thing. Being ruthless and cruel is supposed to be manly, therefore being ruthless and cruel is commendable. Pete Hegseth’s “War Department” gunning down innocent fishermen is just being strong and powerful, according to TechBro Joe Lonsdale who thinks we should go further: “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.” (It may not be a coincidence that he’s a co-founder of Palantis, whose current CEO wants to make war crimes legal).

The more cruel you are, it appears the more butch you are. And this isn’t a fringe position. The Heritage Foundation a few years ago put out a Project 2025 promotional video in which a woman staffer (see, they can’t be misogynist!) said the foundation wants to end recreational sex and restore consequences to sex. There is no reason to advocate for that other than thinking women are enjoying sex too much — because lets face it, they ain’t thinking of consequences falling on men. It’s always going to be Hester who wears the scarlet letter. And they have no problem with teen pregnancy if the teens are married.

Now the foundation has hired the odious woman-hater Scott Yenor who thinks we should once again be a world of public men and private women. As the National Organization of Women says, Yenor “has pushed for employers ‘to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households.’ He has openly called for a return to the English common-law concept of ‘coverture marriage,’ in which women lose the right to vote, work in professions, or hold property—ceding all authority to their husbands.”

I can’t say I’m shocked — for the right wing, Yenor’s the mainstream — but I am repulsed.

I’ll leave with this quote about educating women from Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley), courtesy of Matriarchal Blessings: “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing.”

For more of me venting about the loathsomeness of misogyny, check out Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook.

A couple of years back I posted about the Southern Baptist Conference’s ongoing rape and harassment scandal on Facebook (ongoing in that they still haven’t adopted a system to stop this happening again, and that some scumbags in the church still think this is trivial compared to the threat of women preaching). Someone responded that I was biased: why didn’t my post acknowledge the SBC is no worse about rape than any other organization?

Of course he didn’t suggest which organization he was thinking of; people who make this argument never do. And most of them would be outraged by the corollary, that if the SBC is no different than other big organization, then they don’t get to pose as being a superior moral voice. The religious right hates the idea they’re not our moral superiors, except when they get caught doing something bad, then “we’re all sinners.” Sorry, you don’t get to have it both ways.

While I do think religious groomers and rapists are worse than secular ones — your project manager can threaten your job if you report them, but they can’t threaten you with God’s wrath — it’s also true that (as I point out in my Undead Sexist Cliches book) these things happen plenty in secular society. Liberty University turns a blind eye to students reporting rapes but many colleges are bad about that. The late, unlamented preacher John MacArthur punished a parishioner for keeping her abusive husband away from the kids but so do secular authorities.

But anyone who says a variation of “all organizations are like that” is a rape apologist (I blocked the commenter). Because even if the SBC was, statistically, no different from another organization of the same size, that’s irrelevant to judging them. According to the report they commissioned on their failure, the SBC refused to take action despite credible rape and harassment reports. One of the board, Augie Boto, kept track of cases in a database while publicly claiming no such database was workable. He bore false witness, claiming the accusers were mostly liars. This is morally disgusting, regardless of whether it’s typical. “We are all sinners” is supposed to be a call for humility, not a get out of jail free card.

To put it another way, if someone rapes a woman, we are not obligated to write “he only raped one woman, in contrast to serial rapists Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.” One rape is evil enough (I am fully aware that lots of people don’t think rape is evil at all, but they’re wrong). And I suspect if I’d written about harassment in a secular organization and commented that “it’s no worse than the SBC” my friend wouldn’t have liked that either.

Comparing the SBC to other organizations doesn’t make what happened okay, doesn’t excuse anything. That’s true of all organizations and individuals. That rape, harassment and misogyny are widespread doesn’t mean we should great specific incidents with a shrug (“It’s no worse than Augie Boto.”), it means we should get mad (or determined or whatever it is that pushes you to fight) and stay that way.

I have zero acceptance for people who pretend otherwise.

Also zero patience for Michael Knowles explaining Somalis suck (they’re the Necrotic Toddler’s latest hate object) “because Somalia is a rape culture. Africa, the African continent is a rape culture. They rape people there a lot, in the Middle East, in the subcontinent. They that’s what they do. And so we don’t like that, right?”

Dude, America has a rape culture, particularly Republicans (not exclusively). The response of multiple right-wingers to Blasey Ford’s accusation against Brett Kavanaugh was that even if he did it, it was no big deal — lots of boys do it, she didn’t fight hard enough, etc., etc. Churches (including but not limited to the SBC and the Catholic Church) cover up for their priests and pastors and screw over the victims. People choose to believe most rape victims lie even though statistics don’t support that. I will guarantee that Knowles doesn’t care except when it’s convenient to bash immigrants or the like. But he’s part of the rape culture he pretends he hates.