Another Day, Another Anti-Choice Law

Yesterday, the Alabama Senate passed the nation's most restrictive abortion ban in the US, making it a felony for a doctor to provide an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Anti-choice advocates are hoping the law will eventually be contested at the level of the US Supreme Court, since Donald Trump was able to stack the high court with two arch-conservative justices, including the one who was credibly accused of sexual assault.

This is truly dystopian misogyny that, I think, a lot of progressive feminists feared during the 2016 election.

I think now about the ever-expanding field of white male Democratic men who are now running in 2020 and can't help but think that a segment of our population, many of them well-off white men, see opportunity in this political moment- book deals, popular podcasts, political ambitions - while many women, and other marginalized populations, live in fear.

I also think about the misogynist backlash we're in and how a good portion of it comes from a complacent left that cruelly sneers at different groups of women on the regular, and puts targets on their backs on social media in these really dehumanizing ways.

Take, for instance, this piece that McSweeney's, for whatever reason, published in June 2018, "An Open Letter to White Women Concerning The Handmaid’s Tale and America’s Cultural Amnesia." It's a bad piece for many reasons. For one, it uses the same joke over and over and over again. And yes, we get it, mocking yuppy white women's names is hilarious. But like any joke, it ceases to be funny after the third time or so. It also seems to be this writer's one trick.

Secondly, it adopts the popular MRA convention of telling a relatively privileged class of women, in this case white women, that because things are worse for a different group of women, that the relatively privileged group of women should shut the fuck up with their hysterics. A difference here is that MRAs, and their more outspokenly-anti-feminist ilk, tend to use Muslim women in the Middle East as their comparison group to white women.

See, for reference, the Richard Dawkins/Rebecca Watson blowup circa 2011, in which Dawkins specifically referenced the plight of Muslim women to denigrate Watson's concerns about sexism in atheism.

I say all of this acknowledging that white women do actually have race-based privileges compared to non-white women. In addition, as a society, even within social justice movements, many folks still aren't great at knowing how to talk about groups of people who are privileged in some respects yet marginalized in others, such as white women. And, I know I'm not perfect here. I just question whether it's wise, progressive, feminist, or just to adopt MRA talking points to essentially gaslight women who actually are experiencing the loss of rights in this political moment.

Also, there are valid criticisms to be made of privileged women and then there is misogyny masquerading as social justice criticism. Part of the backlash is that we're seeing a lot of the latter these days.