Political Violence Toward Women

Nancy Pelosi, Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton —

Speaker of the House

Governor

Vice President

Former FLOTUS, Senator, and Presidential Candidate

It is painfully clear who republicans and right wing media, magas, and foreign conspirators fear and target.

We’ve seen it in every online community all the way back to MySpace and AOL chat rooms. They target women and girls in all avenues. From gamergate, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, to TikTok, Snapchat. The attacks involve more than insults and slurs, they also involve revenge porn, grooming, trafficking, sexualizing girls, and criticizing girl’s and women’s bodies, clothes, make-up, hair, weight, skintone, dance moves, cooking, parenting, driving, laughing, buying, expertise, and on and on.

They say they’re “entitled” to sex so they get their candidates elected and they make laws ok’ing child brides, child r*ape, and forced pregnancy/birth while fighting against healthcare, abortion, testing r*pe kits- and ultimately exempting themselves from societal oversight.

They create replacement theories to bolster their desire to force women into submission and subjugation. To still women’s voices and silence women’s opinions.

They mock women, trans women, old women, fat women, and women who choose not to become mothers/give birth. They convince themselves through their religious teaching that their acts are righteous and what their male god-head wants

And they enjoin their same-belief women to be out front and the faces and voices of their twisted misogyny. You know them — from Anita Bryant to the Fox News blondes, to popular conservative women across media.

It’s insidious but loud. And dangerous.

But it’s okay to them because they know their message resonates with.. tens of millions of women who want and expect the warm familiarity and reassurance that patriarchy provides no matter how dangerous and deadly it has always been and will continue to be.

And don’t misread this and exclude Black, brown, and Asian men from advocating the same patriarchal dominance over women. Patriarchy has rank, of course, and the mid and bottom ranked men are still as deadly to women.

Seeing our nation’s top elected women become targets with frequency and to have those attacks mocked, downplayed, ridiculed should cause us all to compare and contrast with Iran’s women fighting for the right to decide for themselves whether or not to wear a hijab, or Ireland’ women protesting abortion bans, or Rwanda’s women fighting for government representation post genocide, or China’s women fighting online abuse, or Indigenous women fighting to acknowledge missing Indigenous girls and women in the U.S. and Canada, or women in Mexico protesting violence and femicides…

.. And you begin to see that women all over the world are fighting for the right to exist, to be safe, to be allowed to express, dress, walk, talk, jog, work, get educated, and decide for themselves what is good for them…. and you realize that we are not that different here in the U.S.

We cannot “right” this nation without taking into account that the majority of its citizens -women- are targets.

And of course far too many women vote republican and could effectively change the course of the nation by refusing to vote for their subjugators.

I also know that white women are collectively in an abusive relationship with white men and escaping abuse is never easy, safe, or supported by “the system.”

We’re seeing extremist try to intimidate women and instill fear so they stop running for office and concede power exclusively to men. Again.

Those days should never return.

But they very well may return if we lose focus and don’t see the danger right in front of us that’s happening far too often.

Some say men should consider their daughters, mothers, wives, etc. and I suppose that’s true and I wouldn’t want to diminish the importance of that necessary viewpoint.

But I think that men should *also want what is best for us all, and that means we should strongly advocate for equality and equity for women because it is the right thing to do.

It is the best thing to do. And it is the only way forward if we are to be a fair and functioning nation

Voting is the best most expedient way to achieve gender (s) fairness for all. And we can do it locally in our homes and neighborhoods, and schools and businesses. Opportunity is everywhere not only at the ballot box.

But if we cannot protect our nation’s most prominent women I fear for all the rest of women who are just going about their lives trying to be their best in the torrent of misogynistic waves that try in every way to drown them out.

© 2022 by Myron J. Clifton and Dear Dean Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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Myron J. Clifton is slightly older than fifty, lives in Sacramento, California, and is an avid Bay Area sports fan. He likes comic books, telling stories about his late mom to his beloved daughter Leah, and talking to his friends.  

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