Being born in the 1970s meant being raised by Second Wave feminists — family, friends’ families, teachers. At the time, it did not feel very distant from when there was no Roe vs. Wade. Women in my parents’ generation were required to have a male cosigner if they wanted a loan or credit card. As someone who never has needed a cosigner for anything, I can’t imagine how I would have negotiated existing when forced to be vulnerable to so much manipulation.
It’s stunning to hear about the rise in males who believe they have the right to both know and control who their (female) spouse votes for. This was not a climate in the 1990s; I would have laughed if anyone then suggested I would witness this in my lifetime. After all, we’d come a long way. Who would willingly go back?
Maybe the phenomenon of the gender reveal party should have been our first clue. Obsession with a baby’s gender? Creepy. What purpose have they ever served — besides to start wildfires — than to reinforce gender essentialism, or what we used to simply refer to as the myth of “biology is destiny.”
Those popped up around the same time as we saw bacon in everything and the prefix of “man” being attached to so many words. Are you a male who carries a bag? Now it’s a man-bag. We watched this awkward grasping for masculinity. As it has revealed itself, gender is not something one can simply hold onto as an unchanging given.
This was happening while men who were socially isolated began increasingly lashing out with mass violence. As of 2021, 81% of all murders in the United States involved guns; gun production tripled from 2010 to 2021.
Now, we are in an election season with one party pretending that the biggest threat to Americans’ safety isn’t coming from inside the house, so to speak. One candidate for the office of the president has been found guilty on 34 felony counts, and has had the nerve to say that “whether the women like it or not” that he would “protect them.” That’s got the vibes of someone’s skeevy uncle threatening to walk them to their car in a secluded parking lot, even after she has declined a half dozen times.
I could go on, but my point is that this hostility will not stand, and that the men who thought they had themselves a little loneliness epidemic already haven’t seen nothing yet.
What’s promising is that women aren’t stepping en masse into some archaic line. Females have been leaving notes in women’s restrooms, reminding others of something that I thought was common knowledge: your vote is secret and untraceable, unless you choose to broadcast it. The beauty of this campaign is that it’s a clear case of you make your bed you lie in it, or rather, you fuss about and obstruct bathroom access, you live with the consequences of the spaces you fought for in your culture wars.
In West Hartford, I saw a message left at a bus stop. This one is out in the open, for anyone passing by to see.
After the votes are counted, maybe we can do outreach to those who have these controlling spouses. It’s never too late to start over.
