What’s America’s biggest problem?
Not catastrophic climate change, not income inequality, not systemic racism.
It’s women.
OK, also communists. They’re everywhere, but the Florida Legislature means to nip that in the bud. Schools will be forced to teach kindergarteners about the evils of the proletariat owning the means of production and how this makes Jesus cry.
But even the threat of a worker’s revolt pales in comparison to the “woman problem.”
To the increasingly hysterical Right, women – and their unruly bodies – are a danger to the Republic.
Christopher Rufo, the man behind the destruction of Florida’s once-renowned honors college, says women in higher education cause “all sorts of cultural problems,” turning universities into “social justice ghettos.”
Back when New College was nationally ranked and celebrated for its creative approach to learning, enrollment was two-thirds women.
Rufo’s response to New College’s success? Admit lots of men instead. Shut down gender studies and lower academic requirements so a critical mass of jocks can get in.
More Kens, fewer Barbies. A campus full of dudes will help run off those woke professors.
To Rufo and his anti-intellectual fellow travelers, college was better when it was all about mandatory chapel and sports and frats and pretty girls in hard-to-get-off panty girdles.
Challenging corsetry might help address another burning issue: the scourge of “recreational sex.”
Rufo, whose attitude toward women would embarrass John Knox, claims the pill causes “health problems for many women.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists begs to differ, but why let medical science get in the way of misinformation?
Undeterred by reality, Rufo declares “single-mother households,” which are to blame for “poverty, crime and dysfunction,” stem from having sex for fun: “The point of sex is to create children – this is natural, normal and good.”
Rufo is not the only idiot reactionary to hold these opinions. The Heritage Foundation says it wants to “restore the consequentiality to sex” by “cracking down on the senseless use of birth control pills.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas agrees. The concurring opinion he issued with the Dobbs decision suggests the court should “reconsider” same-sex relationships and contraception.
It’s not enough to take away the right to abortion, you need to make sure that if these jezebels have sex they can’t try to avoid getting pregnant.
You have one job, ladies: Pop out those bundles of joy!
(@BadDebutante/Twitter)
Diane Roberts
The uber-Right keeps wishing chicks would just pipe down and accept their place in the Christian Nationalist order as good mothers and good wives, serving wenches at the masculinist feast, worker bees helping to make America 1850 again.
Some girls got the memo.
The book-banning, fit-pitching Moms for Liberty want to make sure America’s innocent babes never encounter icky realities such as our history of racism and genocide, or the complexities of human sexuality.
Those pearls they wear are for convenience of clutching.
Conservatives, both male and female, have always sought to control women – their bodies, their sexuality, their opportunities.
They’re afraid the old bumper sticker is true: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London, The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others.