Dictatorship advocate Curtis Yarvin recently got an interview in the NYT (not a direct link, but there’s a gift link in the LGM post) which includes the deep, deep insight that “When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.”
As I said in the initial link, it’s hard to say whether Yarvin is that clueless or spewing bullshit (to their credit, the interviewer pushed back a little). Because even in Jane Austen, it was a hard life if you didn’t find a man and there were few other options available. And as Yarvin points out, these are well-off women — the further down you go, the harsher life was. And even well-off women had no legal right to control their own money, could be beaten or abused (spousal rape would have been perfectly legal) or locked up in an asylum if their husband got pissed. But as the kind of right-wing dictatorship Yarvin wants is going to be misogynist, he has to pretend that women not having control over their own lives won’t be so bad, just like Bryan Caplan does.
Yarvin argues that voting gives women nothing but the illusion of power; if it was only an illusion, I doubt it would bother him as much. And it’s not just about power — voting, as Jamelle Bouie puts it, is an assertion of equal rights as a citizen in our Republic. Which an appalling number of people can’t stand.
As someone said in the LGM comments it’s hard to imagine a feminist radical arguing we need a dictatorship to get rid of patriarchy would get the same treatment. I don’t recall the mainstream media being at all fond of Andrew Dworkin, a radical feminist whose writing was way sharper than Yarvin’s: “We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.” Like I said Monday, that’s too horrifying to contemplate.
In other news, despite the Supreme Court throwing out the recent lawsuit to ban mifeprestone (nobody had standing to sue) Judge Matthew “I hate abortion” Kacsmaryk refuses to let the case die.
A male attorney slipped his wife anti-abortion drugs because he didn’t want the baby. In a state that claims abortion is murder, the man got 180 days in jail.
I found this via Atomic Junkshop and I just wanted to thank you for writing it. Good stuff