Angry Women of America

A Tale of Two Furies

Women in the United States are furious right now. There are two different rage clusters, and one is getting a whole lot more attention in the mainstream media than the other. Let’s start by looking at the one in the spotlight. As some readers may know, I’m an avid listener to the New York Times’s The Daily, “All in with Chris” and “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Once a devoted fan of all three, today I listen mostly out of curiosity at the cognitive dissonance that pervades the liberal media.

So, Chris Hayes boldly headlined a recent show “‘Enraging’: Trump spawns ‘revenge for Me Too’ with cabinet picks”. Yup, there are a lot of seedy characters who have been accused of sex crimes in the upcoming Administration, not least of whom the commander-in-chief. As someone points out during the show, given that personal fealty seems to be the overriding qualification for Cabinet appointments, it’s hardly surprising that such characters float to the top. It’s a grubby crowd. But this obvious point is brushed aside in favor of a darker, more conspiratorial take: men angered by the “Me Too” movement are determined to take revenge on those evil women.

I don’t think revenge is uppermost in their minds. To want revenge you have to see someone as an opponent, and these men just don’t give a damn.

Of course, I wholeheartedly supported the “Me Too” movement and loathe the whole world of the misogynistic “pussy-grabbing” male entitlement gang. Otherwise known as “the patriarchy.” But although misogyny literally means “hatred of women,” it’s mostly made up of contemptuous indifference. Indifference is perhaps the main problem with everything.

Chris Hayes himself is a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance and a simplistic good-guys-versus-bad-guys vision, as reflected in his own contemptuous indifference for women’s rights when they are not the particular rights that line up with the views of the current liberal establishment. In the same “Enraging” show mentioned above, he expresses his disgust for Nancy Mace’s bill, supported by House Speaker Johnson, to restrict the bathrooms in the Capitol that are reserved for women to, er, women – that is, biological women, as we idiotically have to say these days. He says Mace has decided “to devote herself full-time to bullying, harassing and abusing” the freshly-elected trans Rep Sarah McBride. Hayes cannot bring himself to frame the bill in terms of women’s rights. There’s a brilliant summary on X of the years of build-up to Mace’s bill in a thread by an account called @poetrypainter.* And since the bill itself is fairly unremarkable, the only reason Mace is having to talk about it more frequently than should be necessary is because of the hyperbolic cries of “genocide” and whatnot.

In a different episode, Hayes discusses the incoming Cabinet as emboldened “misogynistic trolls.” He denounces the anti-abortion policies and generally anti-women rhetoric of the incoming Administration. He looks back on the outpouring of women’s rage after Trump’s election in 2016 and predicts a similar backlash this time around. (At some point he mentions an extreme example of a backlash -- the 4B Movement that originated in South Korea, the subject of a post I’ll be publishing next week). One of his guests for this item is the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who says women are “outraged and terrified.” The other is Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us, who highlights the economic context and what she calls the “meaning-making of material conditions,” which she says is “completely owned by the right wing.” There is a sideswipe at Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform X. Hayes picks up on the problems of “meaning making” for young people, “whatever their gender identity is.” Gender identity? Where did that come from? We were just talking about misogyny…

If we’re going to talk about material conditions: one of the most important material conditions in life is sex -- whether we are born male or female. That’s quite important when you’re talking about misogyny. And to say the “meaning making” about that particular material condition is “owned by the right” is clearly false. It is the identity brigade that has been setting the rules here, by telling us that sex doesn’t matter and how a person defines themself is everything.

Outraged and terrified. Yes, they are. Many women are so outraged they interpret Trump’s election as an attack on women by young men in particular. We find women saying in defiant self-congratulation on social media that they refused to share their Thanksgiving celebrations with anyone who voted for Trump. That’s a pity, for two reasons. First, it’s plain intolerant and sanctimonious to ostracize friends or family members because of the way they voted. Note – only Democrats do this. That’s because it’s so blindingly obvious to them that they are the good guys that no reflection is needed. The second reason it’s a pity is because it was a missed opportunity: they didn’t hear anyone explain about that other rage cluster – women who are enraged by the anti-women policies of the Democratic Party, which the mainstream media either fails to mention or reports with extreme bias.

Yup, many lifelong Democratic women are pretty outraged right now – and many of them voted Republican. Not because of but in spite of Trump. They’re pretty sick of the Democrats blathering on about misogyny while eagerly undermining women’s rights under Title IX. Women’s rights have always been based on the specific biological characteristics that lead to disadvantage. Democrats have trashed that entire concept. Women are pretty sick of their daughters being told they have to suck it up if compelled to compete in sports against boys – yes boys, however they “identify” – and branded bigots if they stand up for themselves. The hypocrisy they see and hear in the media astounds them. While rightly alarmed by the dangerous views of the incoming Health Secretary, especially on vaccines and on questioning the relationship between HIV and AIDS, they find it incomprehensible that the Democratic Party can roundly condemn this weirdo while ignoring their own dangerous Assistant Health Secretary, Admiral Rachel Levine. This is a man – now “identifying” as a woman – who is on record saying he is happy he waited until age 54 to “transition” because it enabled him to raise his two kids: He says: “I can't imagine a life without my children.” Meanwhile, he actively promotes medical interventions in minors that will render them infertile. He lies to the public that puberty blockers are harmless and reversible – no, they really aren’t – and actually pressured the activist organization WPATH to scrap the minimum age limits for “gender”-related drugs and surgeries in its notorious Standards of Care 8, published 2022. The consequences of all this for many distressed teens and their parents have been devastating.

To put it bluntly, staunch Democratic feminists have plenty of reasons to be mad at the Biden Administration. You can find them openly praising the Republican Representative Nancy Mace for drawing a line in the sand. Those MSNBC listeners who are still baffled but have an inkling that something may be up that they need to know about will need to catch up – for instance by talking to people with different views. Since they missed the opportunity to do so at Thanksgiving, perhaps they could try Christmas.

* See https://x.com/poetrypainter/status/1859355217537454384?s=46