Why Does a Sisterhood Scare MAGA?

tHERSday thoughts

What is it with MAGA men? Are they so threatened by women that every action they take, everything they say, evidences their fears?

Recently, former Congressman Matt Gaetz excoriated women claiming “over-educated, under-loved White women are this nation’s true pandemic.” Excuse me? Over-educated? Does that mean women getting a college degree causes instability in our society? Ahhh. That would explain book bans, targeting DEI (from which women, including White women, benefit), and the suggesting that women dedicate themselves to the 1950s visage of a homemaker. Under-loved? I won’t go there. It’s too easy when you’re dealing with an ex-Congressman investigated for sex with underage girls.

Gaetz apparently doesn’t understand why women who may be past child-bearing years would care about issues like abortion. In 2022, he insulted women, sarcastically asking: “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.

What!?!? Do I need to remind him that his name isn’t Adonis? Do I need to remind him that we succeed when we look beyond our own needs and consider the needs of our wider community?

So let me get this straight… because conservative White men - college educated or not - believe they know everything, even independent of their limited personal experiences, they may sit in judgment of all of us, they may pass laws affecting all of us, hurting us but protecting themselves.

I get it. It doesn’t surprise me that GOP men want to control women, women’s bodies, choices, job opportunities and wages, education. But by Matt Gaetz’s world view then, because men cannot give birth, they ought not have the right to speak about abortion. They don’t see it that way. Nope. It defies logic, but of course, the MAGA worldview doesn’t feel beholden to logic. Just the opposite.

Instead, when White women exercise our right to speak up for others, we suffer ridicule. When women who have privilege dare to use it to benefit others, MAGA now brands us a deadly virus? Can you hear my screams?

It recalls JD Vance’s bemoaning “childless cat ladies.” In 2021, JD Vance declared: “the country is being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He never did explain which choices supposedly made us miserable … getting college and advanced degrees, succeeding in business and politics, ensuring the affordability of having children if we want them? Hmmm.

When his dismissive words came back to haunt him during the 2024 Presidential campaign, he suggested the core intention of his statement remained true, that “we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”