Leopards Ate My Face

Everything about conservative American women was explained in Dworkin’s Right Wing Women.

Women who grow up in shitty sexist communities (eg, imagine being a teenage girl growing up in fucking Disney, Oklahoma.) You have no future. You are supposed to find a guy to marry yourself off to. You are promised this is the greatest thing ever, taught to fantasize about your wedding, to imagine you’re happily ever after.

Then you get married to some guy. Maybe he’s great, maybe he’s not. But you never got to be a person. You were never taught that you could be something more. You feel bitter and powerless in your community - you’ll never be the deacon, but you’ll always be cleaning up after the potluck.

But then you see other women who don’t have to live like that. This is a societal threat to these communities. That there are clearly women in the world who are happy and fulfilled in an office or a field, while you will never be anything more than a church secretary or PTA mom.

So the propaganda is always that these women are lying. They aren’t actually happy. They aren’t actually competent - they only got their jobs through “DEI.” They aren’t better than you, it’s a liberal plot.

This is also connected to the fear routine - see how the right wing women sphere is the TERFs. They whip up a history to aim the real anxieties and fears related to a culture that covers up sexual violence against women (how many youth pastors have we never heard about?) and redirects it to an acceptable target. Women who perform this well enough are even rewarded with having their voice recognized - that Phyllis Schafly made a career of telling other women to not have careers, that Rowling has defined the exclusion of trans women as a prime most important feminist feat (while women in the US die of lack of access to reproductive health care…)

They don’t benefit from DEI because they’ve been told not to want careers, and they are mad at the wrong people.