Our Fearless Leader pointed me toward an excellent essay about Republican men and their attitudes toward women by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. Here’s what struck me:  its powerful conclusion:

If you have opted to move through the political landscape under the view that flawed persons are disposable and potential persons are flawless, the benefit of the doubt will always be afforded to the unblemished, someday rosy-cheeked soul that resides inside of the actual living human with the actual uterus. (emphasis added)

I want to point out here that that attitude was also brazenly on display during the covid pandemic, and it reminded me of something I wrote:

As the virus started mainly killing groups other than the elderly, the narrative shifted. See, the people who were dying were overweight, or unhealthy in ways that are socially undesirable, so the shitty morality play that passes for conservatism in the US deemed them expendable too, and therefore not deserving of mourning.

Here’s the rest of the conclusion of the essay that sparked this post:

Indeed, the very instant that the hypothetical perfect babe becomes a real-life, in-the-world girl, a future pregnant woman is also birthed, and she will begin a long journey toward putative moral decay: potential miscarriage, poverty, health challenges, and other ostensible infirmities that will make her too flawed to be trusted to make judgments about her own future pregnancy. The tie will always go to the fetus, perfect in its secret unknown-ness. The mother will never be able to show that she wanted the pregnancy enough, took good enough care, made every correct predictive decision. And as such, the state will happily dismiss her interests as not only irrelevant, but self-serving, greedy, and dishonest. That it’s being said aloud in courtrooms, in pleadings, and in affidavits should not surprise anyone.

The pregnant woman has always been the fallen and the damned. Now, according to red states, it’s acceptable—necessary, even—to ensure that she knows this, from the very moment of conception until the moment she loses the power to make any choices about how she gives birth. Even if she dies, she was forever that which stood in the way of flawless, purest life.

I have written before that Republican men (and to a smaller extent, Republican women) just hate women, so after reading that essay I went in search of data. I found this really interesting PerryUndem survey that was released in January 2023 which looks at how sexism and other negative views of women translate into opinions about abortion.

Here’s the big picture view:

Here’s the detailed data:

 

I think this study is a great tool to help understand why Republican men are so hostile to women, and I recommend reading the entire document.

Now that I’m thoroughly upset by how far women still have to go, I need some Aimee Mann.