The Roe v Wade Disaster: Our Misogyny Has Come Home to Roost
Don’t just blame Christians. It’s all of us.
Naturally, Twitter’s been a hornet’s nest of late over the Supreme Court’s (suspiciously) leaked intention to overturn Roe vs Wade. Crickets on Facebook, unsurprisingly but kind of not.
That’s got me a little triggered, so please mind the mess here. Ok, lol, I get that Facebook is the new AOL, that it’s a G-Rated kids/boomer app where everyone larps that everything in their (largely privileged) bubble is fine, your life as a Hallmark card and all that stuff. But this Roe v Wade thing could certainly happen, and if it does, a lot of women are going to die and/or have their personal freedoms severely restricted because of it unless there’s a continuous string of massive, all-in marches on Washington DC as soon as possible. This weekend’s admirable initial effort will not be near enough.
It’s show time. John Roberts cannot control the Supreme Court anymore. If he’s going to save Roe vs Wade, he’ll have to take an unconventional step. The worry is maybe he won’t. The court is now owned and operated by a bizarre cult of fundies who really think theocracy is best for everyone. Those loons want to take the ball right to the house and spike it.
If they do, it’ll get worse, and it won’t end there. Contraception definitely could wind up getting banned in the moron states.
Yes, owing to its utterly unworkable ridiculousness, it does feel like a “this too shall pass” thing, but citizens need to stop pretending it will just magically go away, not with this Supreme Court. I mean, I honestly thought this business was just a psyop to distract from our government’s going even more insanely deep into debt just to kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine, doing it as slowly as possible, Bill Casey style, just to enrich Halliburton and all those guys while ignoring the needlessly mounting pile of Ukrainian bodies. But no, it’s real.
It’s easy to blame it on the Christians, but it’s not just them. The thing that people really need to hardwire into their brains on all this is how totally misogynistic our culture is and always has been. We hate women when they’re unattractive, we hate them when they’re sexy, we hate them when they get a little power, we hate them when they breast-feed at Olive Garden, we hate them when they’re aggressive, we hate them when they’re meek, we hate them when they’re ambivalent, we hate them when they’re sexually active, we hate them when they don’t put out, we hate them when they’re stupid, we hate them when they’re smart, we hate them when they’re dragging around kids, we hate them when they remain childless. We simply hate them. They are marginalized people. We have to get that.
Margaret Atwood commented in her recent Atlantic article that, “Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me.” It’s apparent to me that she didn’t write the piece to sell more books or virtue-signal; she needed to get some dry, bemused and casual observations off her chest. Who would have ever thought this was even the remotest possibility?
I don’t know what the best strategy is, but citizens need to figure that out, band together and do something. I mean, the alternative (unlikely as it may seem to some) is absolutely fine by me: balkanize the country, split it up into New Canada and Gilead or whatever. Let’s just do it and get it over with so we can feel all superior in our comfy houses and flats, watching the latest CNN story, live from Phoenix, on the rising death toll from ectopic pregnancies and back-alley abortions. Tsk tsk, pass the Doritos, right gang?
Not that I don’t think that anyone who happens upon this uncharacteristically screamy screed isn’t already, but I really hope to fuck that everyone is paying close attention to what’s going on here. This is the ball game. Until we’re all 100% sure this will just dry up and go away, do something, it’s not a goddam drill.
Ok thanks, I’m calm now. Time for some toast and coffee, maybe chase the cats around the house.
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