Quote of the Day

[Content note: misogyny]

Via Echidne, linking to the words of Christian pastor Steven Anderson:

"'I’m gonna tell you this: It’s not gonna be humanly possible for anyone to commit fornication with my daughters. [Laughter] And you know what? You’re laughing but I’m not kidding… You say, what about when they go get a job? Well, they’re not going to get a job. Why would my daughters go get a job? What do they need a job for? You know what, I’m gonna pay for them, I’m gonna pay their bills. And you know what? When I’m done paying for them, their husband’s gonna pay for them.'"

It's interesting because, well, conservative Christians usually tend to express an opposition toward the exchange of sex and childbearing for resources and money.

It seems as though at least some of them make an important distinction between coercing sex work upon their daughters for religious reasons (acceptable) and having their daughters choose sex work for themselves without explicit parental coercion for non-religious reasons (not acceptable).

Makes..... sense?

In Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin noted that many right-wing women are drawn to conservatism because "traditional marriage" meant selling sex to one man, rather than to the hundreds purportedly demanded by the liberal, male-centric sexual revolution, and that they therefore saw traditionalism as "the better deal."

Although, she noted, both liberalism and conservatism treated women like they existed in states of perpetual consent to sex, and neither offered women full autonomy.

Dworkin was writing in 1983, but even today I tend not to get too caught up in liberal versus conservative identity politics in the US, as I am largely repulsed by the male-centric and anti-feminist tendencies within both political movements.

Too often, men in both movements decry misogyny only insofar as they can score political points against "guys on the other side," without actually taking meaningful measures to address it because addressing it is a good in its own right.  Too often, some of the few things men in both movements agree upon is that feminism is sucky, man-hating, and completely unnecessary these days.

Suffice it to say that, yes, I do get anxious when liberals and conservatives start patting themselves on the back for having purportedly "new conversations" together, among themselves, about marriage - especially when these conversations are largely devoid of feminist input.