To be alarmed at the number of women who are throwing support behind causes that are clearly anti-woman?

[DorothyGaleFromKansas]

With the recent threads about flags/immigrants and Charlie Kirk etc, there seem to be a bewildering number of women supporting causes that directly go against their own interests, and it’s baffling and frankly a bit disturbing.

Reform have voted against tougher laws on stalking, sexual harassment and upskirting, against clamping down on revenge porn, and against further protections in the workplace. Farage cited Andrew Tate as “an important voice for men”.

Then you have Trump, who was found to have committed rape, forced himself into changing rooms where teenagers were undressing, made sexual comments about his own daughter, not to mention 34 other felonies, and that’s before we even get to the Epstein files.

Charlie Kirk said that women should only vote if they were voting for the candidate chosen by their husband, that women shouldn’t go on to higher education unless it was to find a husband, that women should have to submit to their husbands, and that little girls as young as 9 or 10 including his own daughters should be forced to give birth to babies conceived as a result of rape.

What has happened to us that there are so many women willing to endorse attitudes like this? And how do we fix it?! How have we sunk so low that there are women who think this is what we all deserve? It’s terrifying.

He also specifically said women shouldn’t vote differently to their husbands.

Honestly, I’m not sure. Off the top of my head, maybe accepting him to be the main financial breadwinner, the wife be the ‘homemaker’, trad roles, letting him be the ‘head’ of your household. I’m sure it makes sense to evangelical Christians (it doesn’t to me).

I still don’t think CK thought his wife shouldn’t have her own opinions but happy to be corrected with any presented evidence.

You do seem to be extremely focused on Charlie Kirk, when he wasn’t a politician and had no way of setting policy. He was a man with opinions, some of them horrendous and extreme and with which I fundamentally disagree, but he didn’t deserve to be shot dead for them.

People believe different things, your opinion doesn’t carry any more weight than anyone else’s, you can’t expect all women to agree with each other because that’s ridiculous. There were plenty of women who actively campaigned against women’s suffrage, there are plenty of women today who actively campaign to allow men pretending to be women to have access to women’s SSS. Neither of those things make any sense to me, but it isn’t a new phenomena, it’s always been like this.

i have responded to points about him, yes. I’m also worried about other racists misogynists, but people have specifically referenced Kirk so I have responded. I have already pointed out up-thread he was not a politician, and I have never said my opinion counts for any more than anyone else. I have asked WHY these women feel inclined to support things against their interests.

Did he not say that they should be honest about who they are voting for, in response to a Kamala Harris ad saying women should be able to vote for her in secret to avoid marital strife?

To quote -

"This wife is wearing the American hat. She's coming in with her sweet husband, who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provides for the family, and she lies to him saying I'm going to vote for Trump, then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth. Kamala Harris and her team believe that there will be millions of women who undermine their husbands."

I don’t agree with pretty much all of his principles other than trans ideology but I think what he’s said needs to be presented in full.

I thought you perhaps might not know. It’s a specific subset of extremely subservient tradwife prevalent in American right wing extremist Christianity. If you genuinely wanted to know more about it there have been some really interesting documentaries into it?

This.

Sadly.

Always up for learning more. Happy to watch these documentaries but I also want to see evidence of CK adhering to this rhetoric in the extreme end of it. I’m not trying to ‘stick up for him’ but would prefer claims to remain factual.

You can add 'hate for the unborn, due to them being an inconvenience, etc etc' to that.

Can't find the post I was thinking of (maybe MN search gremlins, maybe a thread lost to the monitors) but from memory:

I've been thinking about this a lot recently.

Most people take on the values, norms and power structures of the society in which they grow up.

For individual members of an oppressed group, getting power and status (and therefore safety) is more achievable by obeying the rules and trying to gain roles of relative power, or at least respectability, within the existing structure than by demolishing the existing order and freeing everyone.

Women are no different. Plenty of women today and historically have aligned to Patriarchy's values even to the degree of exploiting or controling other women and genuinely believe this to be doing the right thing in society.

Indeed women are often the first line in policing the immediate social context and enforce the social norms.

It's not even that surprising when you think about it. We have less autonomous power in society so we need it to run on predictable rules even if those rules are objectively bad for us in the long term because without the social and economic power/agency to deal with the unexpected, and without the physical strength to defend our own interests, we need society to be predictable in the short term so we can predict and avoid dangers.

And I think subconciously one of the dangers women are watching for is men's agression towards women: violence, sexual aggression, emotional entitlement and rage. Traditional social norms implictly accept these things as facts of life instead of challenging whether men have to be like that, but also broadly keep them caged. So women, unable to directly prevent men's destructive behaviour towards women, police women's behaviour on behalf of men in the hope of keeping male rage away from all of us.

And of course, believing that women who suffer at the hands of men did something wrong lets women who obey the rules feel they are going to be safe.

Never forget the people who wield the FGM razors are women who had the same done to them. Women who were prostitutes run brothels. They may even care about those girls and treat them with care within the boundaries of that social context. Because if you admit these things are wrong you have to deal with your own abuse and powerlessness.

Well. Supporting a party that doesn't have your best interests at heart seems.pretty daft to.me..A lot of them have huge health needs and Reform will sell off rhe NHS for profit and make it harder for the poorerst and mist ill to access the care they need. If that isnt turkeys voting for Chtistmas then Im sorry but I dint know what is.

That makes it sound like he was saying a wife has to justify her voting intentions to her husband. Is that what you meant. That she can't just go into.a booth and vote any way she wants ?.

No he didn’t - once again you are misrepresenting by leaving out the context.

His comments were in response to an advert in which Kamala Harris was basically encouraging women to vote for her in secret and then lie about it to their husbands if necessary. What he said was that the left were encouraging women to undermine their husbands and that they should honest about who they are voting for. That does not translate into telling women their votes should align with those of their husbands.

Submit does mean to obey. I don't think anyone can prevent another from having an opinion. But I would take it as being allowed to have an opinion, but not act on it if it contradicts what the husband wants.

No. See my post below.

To the example, way upthread now, about a SAHM supported by her husband voting for lower taxes rather than state funded childcare being an example of voting for her own interests rather than some imagined "womankind", I disagree.

She's not voting in her own interests, she's voting to put all her eggs in one basket.

No human in a tax-funded, legally regulated society should be dependant on the private goodwill of another. It's such a vulnerable position and so many women are abused or live reduced lives because of it. IMO the belief that the provision and funding of childcare should be a personal arrangement between the parents that the state has no part of is such an abandonment of women. There should always be a safety net for women with children to escape being dependant on a man.

People have repeatedly suggested why many women are turning away from the left. I imagine traditionally right wing women were never persuaded. Handwringing about it doesn’t help. You need to ask those women, listen, and be prepared to challenge your own prejudices too.

Missing the point. Over the course of decades NO party has had their best interests at heart. And disillusionment makes people turn to the people who are promising to rectify that. It doesn’t mean they’re thick - just that they’ve been let down by every other party.

Did you see that ad at the time?

There are threads on MN every day where women talk about what they'd do if they discovered their husband had secretly voted for Farage - and everyone nods and says this is terrible and a huge values clash and they could never date someone with such a huge dark secret, etc etc.

This. Sauce for the goose………….

Last Sunday the UK government did a (frankly daft) emergency alert to all phones.

Every domestic violence charity / support group had to warn the ladies
(and yes its 95% ladies)
to make sure that the man who is the cause of their secret phone
could not hear it.

How many men have hidden phones
how many 'tradwives' have hidden phones

what people do on the surface may not be the reality

This is insulting. The poster clearly has her own opinion having listened.

No, its incredibly stupid to vote for something that makes your life even worse. You should.know the ins and outs of what will happen. But like I also.said, maybe they are being very successfully lied to. But really if you allow yourself ro be conned then you are a bit naive at best and stupid at worst..Being disillusioned is no excuse.

They voted for Boris....what a dog's breakfadt that was.....they voted for Brexit.......the country's poorer .......I'm sick of the stupidity snd the lack of learning....

The problem here is believing the promises of politicians whose ideas are ‘strongly’ guided by outside interests.
The fa pct his party is financed by the petrochemical industry or the extremely strong links with Trump (Farage supported his campaign and has done so for years) should make anyone wonder if the Reform party has the best interest of the country trying to in mind or if this company has been set up for other purposes.
The fact Reform is an Ltd rather than a party should also raise question about democratic process etc…. At least within his own party (but also more generally. If he can’t stand democratic process in his own party, what tells you he’s going to better if he is elected??).

So yes a lot of people are disfranchised and easily manipulated. They fall for the first scapegoat they are offered. It doesn’t mean that their views are representative. It just mean a big part if the electorate is fed up and sees no way to get out of their struggles. So they clutch at straws.