While single herself, the always belligerent Ann Coulter seems to have a bit of a grudge against other single women — single mothers in particular. In a recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Coulter complained that the Democrats — and the media — were paying too much attention to what women think, and suggested that Romney could win the election without appealing to women — or at least to single women.
Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.
Huh. Well, this might answer the central question in that National Review piece we discussed yesterday — why Romney isn’t getting 100% support from women, even though he’s the sort of rich guy alpha that evolutionary psychologists suggest is inherently appealing to “hypergamous” (i.e., golddigging) women. Turns out these women are already married to Obama!
The notion of government as a “substitute husband” is, of course, an old Men’s Rights trope. Warren Farrell devoted roughly a third of his Myth of Male Power — the 1993 tome from which the Men’sRights movement still gets most of its talking points — to explicating this particular theme. And it’s one that MRAs today return to again and again and again and again. (The notion of the “husband state” also, not coincidentally, played a role in the sprawling manifesto of mass killer Anders Breivik.)
As for Coulter, this isn’t the first time she’s singled out the single ladies. In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, Coulter went after Obama and the Democrats for focusing on what she called the “stupid single women” vote. “And I would just say to stupid single women voters,” she added,
your husband will not be able to pay you child support. If Obamacare goes through and Obama is re-elected, you are talking about the total destruction of wealth in America. It is the end of America as we know it. …
Great, you will get free contraception; you won’t have to pay a $10 co-pay, but it will be the end of America. Think about that!
Coulter is so miffed that single women don’t like Republicans that she’d be willing to give up her own right to vote if it means these “stupid … women” wouldn’t be allowed to vote either. As she once famously explained,
If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’
Here’s a much more appealing take on single women. Well, honestly, it’s as terrifying as it is entertaining:
@fembot- While they’re at it, why don’t they just make DEMOCRATS illegal or something? After that, they can start copying the Spanish Inquisition and come up with ridiculous reasons to make being black in public illegal or openly gay or having sex for non procreative purposes and then make the punishment for all these “crimes” be DEATH, so they can build big old walls and cover them with corpses of the people that DARED to break the LAW and be all fucking medieval and shit.
Oh right. This was already written about.
IN THE HANDMAIDS TALE.
Cue Bible Thumping Rape And Murder Land Of Fuck All.
And watch as these people who thought they had it all become king shit of fuck hill, deluding themselves that living in a medieval hell where they can lord around and treat other humans like less than objects is somehow preferable to a society where we have advanced technology, progressive values and social programs that help us all do better as a species.
Welcome to the future:
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that single women tend to be more educated than married women. I saw a study somewhere that said that the more educated a person is, the more left leaning their politics. Now this is not to say that all married women are conservative (I am married and my husband and I are liberal–and we are both college educated). Certainly there are college educated conservatives. I think rich conservatives are simply voting to protect their money. Poor conservatives vote republican because they tend to be religious and uneducated. My two cents.
Your very first comment in the thread was made after you quoted TheBionicMommy. Really, anybody can just go back through the thread and see that. You chose to use her statement about being a wife and mother who makes use of the free lunch programs as your entrance into the discussion.
And nearly all of your subsequent posts have been, by turns, argumentative, ignorant, and/or disingenuous. Now it’s one thing to employ the kind of shallow rhetoric and diversion tactics that you’ve used repeatedly in this discussion in an attempt to both bolster and obfuscate your points. It’s something entirely different to flat out lie.
I am just expressing an opinion. I’ll apologize in advance if I’m offending anyone.
No. Tell us how women need to be built up so that men don’t leave them when they become pregnant.Tell us how much of what you eat you grow/produce on your own. Show us evidence that the majority of children that eat free lunch come from households headed by single mothers. Provide evidence that the free lunch program exists in order to help single mothers feed their children.
Defend your positions; back up your arguments and assertions. Alternatively, you could try communicating your ideas in a manner that is cogent and coherent.
But fuck this “I never said that!” back-pedaling bullshit, every time you get called to the carpet for your obvious dog-whistles.
22:59
You know, asshole, I’ve actually attended these things. Quite recently. Of course, the fact that I have a master’s degree and an extensive resume and got laid-off at a really shitty time isn’t what’s preventing me from OMG having a job RIGHT NOW! It’s that I haven’t been to some crappy training program! What? No one’s been hiring in your field in five years? Well sucks to be you! Why don’t you go train in retail? What’s that? You have years of retail experience but can’t get hired because they look at your education level and decide that you won’t stay? Well, maybe another training program where they tell you that you can put together this thing called a “resume” and it will help you get jobs will get me right off assistance.
Which, having spent years as a happy worker and contributing to programs that make it so that I can mostly, pretty-much, not-die and lose everything I own…
*and now head-asplodey*
I am lucky. Very, very lucky. My dad decided he didn’t want me to die, so he carried my ass (literally) to the ambulance and has been with me from emergency room until now. I also manage his business. I was having him bring in the books and the work computer to the fucking rehab hospital and now that I can walk again I go to work seven days a week. I still think he was a shitty parent when me and my sibs were little, because he was! He’s a fantastic granddad to my sister’s kids, and always has been, but when my mother was having to deal with the four of us, no less than 20 months apart, he was out of there whenever possible. People can change, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call out bad behavior.
It’s hilarious that this proponent of STEM, and NASA, and possibly getting rid of other types of degree programs to make more room for technology, guy has never heard about the welfare reform that took place in this country more than two decades ago.
I doubt this, honestly; if anything, I rather suspect that stats on education and marriage would be more likely to lean in the opposite direction. I think, instead, the single biggest factor is likely to be simply that married women tend to be older than single women. As of 2000, for example, 69% of people age 35 to 59 were married, as were 59% of people 60 and up, while only 13.4% of people under 25 were. When the vast majority of the youngest voters are single and a strong majority of middle-aged and elderly people are married, it’s no great surprise that single-vs-married is going to skew the same way as young-vs-old.
Race and class are also likely to be major factors – black women are less likely to be married than white women, and IIRC, working-class women are less likely to be married than upper- or middle-class women (although I can’t find a source on the class difference other than “I’m pretty sure I remember reading that at some point,” so take that one with a grain of salt). It’s no great secret that being older, richer, and whiter tends to predispose one to favor the party of old rich white people.
Ahem, my head went asplodey before I made my point that I’ve no where even near gotten the money back that I paid into the system, but it’s been enough to let me get by and not lose fucking everything, and that’s why I pay into the system. That’s fucking WHY. Also so that no one else has to lose everything when I’m doing okay. Why would it be better if everyone loses everything? So that Mittens can build a nicer house for his boat?
Yeah, that is true. Good point.
@fembot – that’s basically the jist of it AFAIK. Single women who vote (which is an important distinction from all single women) tend to be better educated and more liberal, although that’s not at all universal. I imagine there’s a correlation between attitudes about marriage and position on the political spectrum where people who value marriage more strongly, especially for religious reasons, tend to be more conservative, while women who pursue a career and don’t marry would have different views. However it would be absurdly reductionist to assume that is the entire story.
There’s also the fact that women have been socialized to care more about families, children, communities and the welfare of others, including other women, although again that’s not remotely universal to all women in the US. Given that Democrats historically are the party supporting legislation that benefits these areas, it’s not surprising women would lean more Democrat overall and that single women who are more aware of the risks they face would be even more so, and that’s before the recent Full On Handmaid’s Tale swing the Republican party has performed right out in front of God and everyone, so to speak.
But those are big generalizations.
And as for Coulter, this year started with the right wing trying to use Komen as their proxy for the decimation of womens’ well-being and rights, after a record year of assaults on women in 2011. Whinging about the media paying too much attention to what women think after all that? Y’all fucking started this shit, now you have to deal with the aftermath, losers.
(Y’all = right wingers, not, you know, y’all here.)
Still waiting for the troll to apologize for not understanding why food deserts exist. I might as well go to bed, since that’ll never happen. Trolls never address me when I’ve made a valid point. *sigh*
Wow, really? You WANT half the population, yourself included, to be politically impotent? That’s just…wow.
(Prays for blockquote success >.<)
YES!! I am the blockquote king! =D
@Polliwog- I’d go a bit further here and extrapolate that the people who tend to vote have the least amount of barriers to voting.
For example, very young people. I worked the phones during the Obama election to help people find their local polling place. I got a disproportionate amount of calls from young college-aged students who had not registered and thought that they could both register AND vote on the same election day (you can’t).
Very old and very young people tend not to vote. Heterosexual married white people in their 30’s to 60’s are much more likely to vote, and they are more likely to vote conservative because they are more likely to follow our social stereotypes of power and privilege.
Plus, if the women are living under a man’s thumb in a conservative, “Traditional” marriage, chances are, they feel obligated to vote the same as their spouse (of course this could also be because like-minded political people tend to have more stable marriages).
And let’s not forget all those apathetic people. The number of people who actually vote is kind of abysmal compared to the number of people who are actually ABLE to vote in our country.
What we should look at is the proportionate amounts of people voting from various demographics as compared to the whole, and then figure out what barriers are in place to keep certain populations from voting more regularly.
And honestly, I do think that voting should have more controls to it- even if it’s something simple like a fingerprint or a photo ID of some sort. I know that there’s a lot of people who say that this stuff is a way to keep conservatives in power, but I do think we need to combat voter fraud because it *has* been a huge problem (*COUGH* JEB BUSH ELECTED BY DEAD PEOPLE *COUGH*), so we need to figure out a better way to combat it.
Watching the news over here, I often see US politicians saying the USA is a “great democracy”, but I also get the impression that they make it hard to vote. Harder than here, anyway.
Right, I did sort of forget that part. I’m not used to accounting for people who don’t vote. (I don’t really understand anyone who can vote and doesn’t, and I’m not sure I ever will.)
It’s been tried here in Australia, fuckwit. It’s called Work for the Dole and it does NOTHING to help or train people. Our social setup is a lot better than the US’s when it comes to unemployment but it still sucks. People are made to jump through endless hoops, unemployment payments are so far below the poverty line that even some of the Liberal (aka Tory) Party are starting to take notice, and the whole setup is punitive. I know what it’s like from both sides of the desk: I worked for the agency that handles it – and quit, because it was disgusting. Only job I’ve ever walked out of.
So if you’re talking reductio ad absurdum, try looking at your own shit first.
Why are you all being so mean to tmason? He’s an oracle you guys! The reason we can’t understand what he’s saying is because he’s in a MAGIC ORACLE TRANCE and GOD’S TELLING HIM ALL THE ANSWERS TO EVERYTHING!
Quick, who can interpret prophecies?
What’s the point? That your bleating about the change in jobs is old news. It’s been going on for millenia, as tech, and habits, change.
Praying for embed success …
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqaQ_Bhgmrc&w=560&h=315%5D
This is confusing; it was a three mile walk to the nearest grocery, but if you didn’t have a car it was a two-hour walk?
What’s confusing? I have a walking pace of 3 miles an hour. One hour out, and one hour back = two hours of walking, though the trip back was probably a bit slower, from the weight.
Then again, I was a soldier, and have a faster walking pace than most.
But let’s flip the question. If there are 20,000 people there; why didn’t a company see fit to open a store there? They’d make a ton of money, and yet no one decided to make the investment.
Fuck if I know. You could ask them, not me. As it was Mi Pueblo had (as I said) a lot of resistance, no small part from the fast food joints in town.
A five year hiatus from the last supermarket? As for the competitors, of course they’ll resist to it. But I believe I am, not getting the whole story here. Why would a business put off building a store for five years knowing they could make a significant amount of money? And only the resistance of a few stores? They don’t have that much clout.
Naw… PepsiCo, and McDonald’s are piddly-squat when it comes to lobbying.
As I said, it was five years, and the “big boys” (e.g. Kroeger) didn’t do it, it was a local chain; which hadn’t been around when the last market pulled up stakes.
When I was in a different town (Bell Gardens) which was also seen as, “poor” and “dangerous” the big name grocers weren’t around. There was a local chain (Boy’s, no longer in business), and a single market (McCoy’s, also no longer in business) and a local grocer, who refused to give in (Princess) for the longest time (finally selling to a casino in 1986), but the cheaper companies, who had the clout to make the bulk purchases which keep prices down, they weren’t having any.
So the poor part of town paid more for food.
Curses! How does one get a youtube video to actually show up?
@ Molly moon
Wait a second, getting into interpretation mode…I’m starting to see it…got it! I shall now interpret everything Tmason has to say for you in the form of a song.