Christina Forst
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Christina Forst
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Reposted by Christina Forst
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And yeah, somewhere in the mire of the national unconscious, Democrats are the wives who are supposed to placate and Republicans are the husbands who expect appeasement.
In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages. And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet." Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.
April 8, 2025 at 4:08 AM