We’ve heard a lot in recent days from assorted manosphere dudes about how the “slut vote” – and the endless hunger of our nation’s “sluts” for free contraception – helped to bring about a humiliating end to Romney’s presidential hopes. The sluts went for Obama, we heard, because he promised them (and women in general) what they supposedly want most: “free stuff without ever having to work.”
Minus the word “slut,” this was the basic argument we’ve heard over the past week from a lot of right-wingers as well, including such big names as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who’ve been loudly complaining that Obama won over women – and minorities – by promising to give them “stuff.”
Well, today, a new voice joined this chorus: Mitt Romney himself. In a conference call today with some of his big donors – no doubt a fairly dispirited bunch – Romney offered this explanation for his defeat:
The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. … In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.
Never mind, as the Los Angeles Times points out, that Romney lost in some key states that have a minimal minority population, or that Romney’s promised tax cuts could be considered gigantic gifts to the rich.
While Romney talked less about gender than he did about race and enthnicity, he did single out one group that he said Obama had been especially generous to: young women. And you all know the easiest way to bribe a young female voter. As Romney put it:
Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women.
Apparently the government has been shipping out birth control pills along with those Obama Phones.
I’m not sure where you’re seeing that equivalence being drawn – could you give an example? Because what I’ve said, and what I’ve seen others say, is not “liberals are just as bad as conservatives” but just “liberals choosing to make stupid, offensive generalizations about entire regions are not helping to endear themselves to other liberals or moderates in those regions.” If the problem is that we’re not calling out conservatives enough in this discussion, it’s because, speaking for myself, (a) I really don’t think I’m likely to find very many conservatives here to call out, aside from a few trolls, and (b) I’m actually pretty cool with conservatives doing things that alienate people and help cost them votes, for fairly obvious reasons. :-p
Howdy Y’all. I’m new here (first post so b gentle with me), but I just got around to reading the cached version of that ‘blog’:
“[Romney] played up his alpha cred in the first debate. But one photo-op on the Jersey Shore with Obama looking tough in a bomber jacket destroyed all that, which is yet another reason sane societies don’t let women get involved in government.”
Obama was wearing a bomber jacket? Sorry, I was too busy caring about government policy to notice, but I’m intrigued as to how Obama’s fashion choice justifies disenfranchising women on a global scale or why on earth it could possibly matter to me that Romney is an ‘alpha’ (which is a term that seems to be used exclusively by PUAs and other date-rapists).
“the only First Lady who could possibly be bitchy enough to make Hillary Clinton look feminine.”
The physically unappealing straw feminist line (that bit is par for the course with these guys though, I suppose) with the added twist of trying to portray Michelle Obama as “bitchy”. I might be totally wrong here, but everything I have seen and heard of the First Lady is that she is a model citizen as well as being an extremely attractive and stylish young woman; have I missed something?
“While the right usually wins married women, the fact is that married women constitute an ever-decreasing share of the female population. Women want to delay marriage as long as possible so they can “have it all,” and usually “have it all” means “have as much hot alpha sex as possible without any consequences.” And thus, less married women and more sluts (not that these two groups are mutually exclusive, per se)”
That was a big u-turn for a single paragraph; first married women are paragons of virtue (for being chaste or for supporting the GOP?), but then the caveat that ALL WOMEN, including the ‘good ones’ are latent ‘sluts’.
The stuff about Civil Rights and Lincoln are just too depressingly deluded/disingenuous to be snarky about.
“One thing one has to remember about women, especially slutty ones: They usually don’t make decisions based on reason.”
This is, of course, a completely sane way to view half the population.
” so many of them still operate from a feminist world-view: Women are pure, perfect, kind, and altruistic, and the only reason they “get into trouble” is that some evil, conniving, manipulative man tricked them into sleeping with the entire football team.
Twice.”
How many women have really slept with an entire football team, let alone twice? How much of this person’s anger is really based on their own insecurities and failings?
” America is over-regulated because women don’t want to have to compete in the free market.”
Because regulation of the market is about greed and not about sensible economics? I thought greed was good?
And from the comments:
“Cane, well said. The GOP is the emotional tampon of American politics. The very act of trying to win over the female vote makes women less likely to vote for Republicans, since women despise men who supplicate.”
I see, women vote for whoever is going to give them the most stuff, and the Republicans messed up because women never vote for the party that represents their interests…wait, what?
Oh gee whizz, that turned out quite a bit longer than I had intended.
@drst
My gawds. Things are a lot worse there than I could have imagined. And that’s from 2010. Did anything change? Is a house and property burning down due to forgotten fee (genuine reason or not; it could happen to anyone, in any case) enough to wake people up? Or is it their own fault and thus justified? What if it was due to administrative error that a payment doesn’t register and your house burns down? Or is that solvable by sueing the city, then?
Tea Party third world America is the new conservative American dream, I guess.
It’s really quite shocking to read this discussion. Educating, but shocking.
It’s ironic, as a kid I used to thank my random good chance (atheist kid, you see) of not having been born in Africa and having to suffer from hunger and daily struggles. Now as an adult I’m even more thankful of not having been in the US, but in a relatively sane European social democracy. I’m infinitely grateful for my taxes guaranteeing basic infrastructure and services necessary to prevent most of these devastating and life-threatening problems.
It’s massively frustrating to think some people who have the opportunities and wealth to create a good society to live in flat out refuse to do so. I mean, it’s bad enough that some people don’t have the means and that should be enough of problems to solve without the one country the rest of the world looks upon as a “dream come true” artificially creating problems to itself. But I’m positive the illusion of the perfect America in the minds of the rest of us (first and third worlds both) is coming to an end, little by little. It has to. Hurray to Internet and direct international conversation between the “little people”!
But what is there for us non-Americans to do to help? Real third world problems are easier to solve, hypothetically at least. Money, education, health care and the usual to start with. What to do about people who have it all and are happily throwing it all away? It sounds like a difficult problem to solve locally due to the decades of manipulative politics plus some fundamental misunderstandings and unwillingness to listen what the other side has to say, let alone trying to find a middle ground to make everyone content. Is it a truly hopeless idea to even think what an outsider could do?
I’m torn on the whole idea of progressives reaching out to rural/Southern whites.
On one hand, I can relate to Seraph’s anger. There are a lot of pugnacious right wing jerks in my very red corner of my purple state. I hear racial slurs used in casual conversation. I had an Obama/Biden sticker on my car for three months back in 2008; it collected more dents and scratches during that period than it had during the previous nine years. When I phone banked for the Democrats on that election night, people cussed at me. I’ve had folks turn and walk away from me when they found out my politics didn’t jive with theirs. It is really, really stinking hard to hold out an olive branch when you know certain people are just going to spit on it, then spit in your face.
OTOH, there are delightful people in my area. People who work hard with no hope of a pension or even a 401K. People who have to pay for their groceries with an EBT card or WIC vouchers – often while they’re wearing their work uniforms. People who want an education but can’t afford to got to school, even with student loans. People with kids who get sick, like the couple who held a fundraiser at a wing restaurant so they could hopefully raise enough money to get their toddler her umpteenth heart surgery since she was born.
A lot of these good people skew conservative. Some do for religious reasons (and obviously progressives probably aren’t going to reach them, ever). But some do because they hear the message from the Republicans that liberals don’t respect working people, that we want to take what little they have and give it to people who don’t work at all. Then Bill Maher or David Carr make their snarky little clever-clever comments, and the right wing pundits can point and say “See? That’s what they think of you!” So any time they hear a progressive message saying “Hey, guys, we’re just trying to give you a hand up,” they think “Screw you guys, you smug jerks think I’m a superstitious square dancing Neanderthal.”
As bionicmommy mentioned a few comments ago, I think attitudes are slowly changing. If progressives can frame the message the right way, and if we’re willing to listen as well as talk, we can probably bring some new folks into the fold. But we really do need the high profile people on our side to stop hating on entire areas of the country. People as smart as that shouldn’t have to be told that taking cheap shots at others isn’t going to send the message that progressives care.
I am reading a thread on the WaPo about Hostess closing down and how they are blaming the union workers for striking for decent pay (and for having the unmitigated gall to expect that contracts will be honored.) And that is because the union simply voted to reject the contract, they actually never went on strike.
The right wing is chortling and saying “haha, unions suck and this is why we should not have unions and look at these idiots…” never even considering that they themselves will eventually be harmed by this. Nor are they willing to consider that a set of vulture capitalist firms are at all to blame because this is always seems to happen as soon as the hedge funds get involved. For instance, one of the firms was giving up $60 million in fees which is only an 18% discount-meaning the fees were over $300 million. But nope, it was the workers and their refusal to take a $75 million hit to their retirement and wanting to not have their wages reduced.
*sigh*
The people responding are the same people who would benefit from unionization but how do you get them to want to accept when unions are blamed for everything?
The curious thing about the “Obama gives people stuff” theory of the election is that the most common mindset I ran across amongst
Romney supportersObama detractors was that their current life wasn’t good, the economy sucked and they wanted someone to change things for them. So, essentially, they were pretty deliberately arguing that they wanted someone to make their lives easier by magic, cause Obama was taking too long and they wanted a solution NOW, dammit! If that’s not asking for a magic handout, I don’t know what is.Another giant problem with appealing to the “Real Americans” is that certain keywords automatically register as conservative in their mindset, regardless of the truth. For instance, I made a status post purposely mocking the fact that most conservatives are against government-sponsored health care, yet “socialist medicine” is exactly what we give to our soldiers and their families and I don’t see conservatives freaking out that their precious “troops” (a buzzword in conservative politics) are being forced to suffer under socialist medicine. (And indeed, as a spouse of a soldier, I can attest to how wonderfully AWESOME being fully insured by the government is. Thank you, taxpayers!) And every single one of my conservative, Army wife Facebook friends liked the damn status! They didn’t get the damn joke! All they saw was “Army” and they assumed I was just talking about how awesome it is to be an Army wife. Because Army = conservative every time, dontchakno?
The conclusion I draw from this is that for a large portion of the conservative voting base, for whatever reason, political logic devolves into buzzwords like “troops”, “socialism” and “welfare.” It’s frustrating because I don’t want to believe such a large portion of the country is stupid . . . but how else do you explain so many strident Obamacare detractors liking a status essentially knocking their own position just because it has the word “Army” in it? Or perhaps it isn’t that they are afraid of socialist medicine per se, but simply are against people getting good health care who didn’t “earn” it like our troops do? In which case we come back to my beginning paragraph: Obama detractors are just as “self-interested” as the Welfare Queens and Pill-Gobbling Sluts they bitch about.
And there’s no reason to assume that religious people are a lost cause, either. Religious opinions change, too! Everyone’s heard about the large majorities of Catholics that reject official Catholic positions, for instance.
Thing is, these people are hearing from their churches that religion is incompatible with feminism or science or whatever; they need to get exposed to the opposite message, that they’re perfectly compatible (because they are). It’s when they hear from the left (yes, from dudes like Bill Maher) the exact same message–that religion is incompatible with progressive ideas–that’s when they become unreachable.
Katz, you’re right that there are plenty of religious people who can reconcile a belief in the Bible with science (there are scientists who are also people of faith) and feminism (many churches – my old one included – ordain women as ministers). The folks I was saying were probably out of reach were the ones who hard-core believe that man > woman, Earth = 6000 years old, and abortion = savage murder. It’s going to take more than muzzling Bill Maher to make up the distance between those positions and progressive ones.
I won’t say that it can’t be done – of course it can. It would be a really long, hard process though.
I always liked the bumper sticker that said unions were “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In general, though, I think the labor movement in the U.S. does a piss poor job of making the case for its existence to the public at large, or even to their own membership. There are a few exceptions: the Justice for Janitors campaign in LA enjoyed a pretty high degree of popular support; the UPS strike back in 1997…
Bill Maher is way too smug. Even when he says something I like and agree with, I’m still annoyed by his personality.
The way I see it, too many church-going folk act like not having conservative values is being a bad Christian. The pastors talk about how so many churches are ‘straying from the faith’ and ‘becoming too worldly’ by allowing gay clergy/marriage or not being adamantly pro-life or believing in evolution or using bibles with gender-neutral pronouns or saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ or not embracing ‘traditional values’. It pretty much paints the liberal side as the ungodly heathens and false teachers that Paul always warned you about. And then they warn you not to let yourself be influenced by ‘worldly’ people, pretty much ensuring an echo chamber.
No wonder I haven’t been to a church service in well over a year (still go to sunday school classes every so often).
Yep-one of the things I wish the writers in the writers’ strike would have done was work on videos that showed unions in a good light.
For every Norma Rae movie there is a hundred anti-union film showing them to be thugs and/or just greedy people.
I think there’s actually more malleability among those people than it might appear. Yes, if you’re looking for a group of potential swing voters to reach out to, they’re not the ones, but I think a lot of the reactionary attitude is because they’ve been fed the line that they can’t believe in science (or whatever) and also be a Christian, and given that dichotomy, they’ve chosen religion. I think many of them really just don’t have much exposure to any kind of holistic, self-consistent merging of Christianity and progressive values.
Welcome, Emmy! 🙂
And don’t you love the inconsistency – that it’s okay when Romney goes all alpha (because the wimminz will get ‘gina tingles and vote for him) but that when Obama dons a bomber jacket that transfers the tingles/votes to him, then it’s time to disenfranchise women?
American politics scares the bejeezus out of me (although I’m not naive enough to think my own country is a bastion of reason); I watched an interview with Ann Coulter where she argued that the fact that women and people of colour usually vote democrat is sufficient justification to revoke their right to vote at all. WTF?
Emmy, I missed your original post until now. Welcome!
Every time I run across a woman in the public sphere who wants to give back her suffrage and/or disenfranchise every other woman, I always wonder how she’d enjoy her situation afterwards. When the big boys tell her “That’s nice, honey. But politics is a man’s business again, we don’t need you girls trying to tell us how to run it. We’ll make sure we keep you in mind, though,” what’s her reaction? Does she say “Great, now I have more time for genteel ladylike past times?” Somehow I doubt it, especially in Ann Coulter’s case.
Emmy – yeah, Oz politics sucks too, but most days I do a metaphorical sideways glance across the pond and hope it doesn’t get that bad.
Speaking of which (kinda) did anyone read about that tweet from Georgia where the tweeter got EVERYTHING wrong? Said she wanted to move to Oz if Obama won, because our president is a Christian who stands up for what he believes in. Most impressive fail, that.
Hey Kittehs’ Unpaid Help, how do you keep abreast of politics? I know about US politics because of the blogs (like this one) that I read, but I am yet to find any good blogs or podcasts about Australian politics. I tried one called “Something Wonky” just the other day and it was terrible. Apart from having terrible speaking styles (often… pausing… after.. each… word) they were doing that exact “let’s laugh at the ignorant rural people” lefty thing that we were talking about here very recently.
Also, I just followed a link from their page to an article about Gillard by Miranda Devine. Her name is vaguely familiar, but after reading that article… she’s truly awful. A quote from her article:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/gillard_sexism_card_has_failed_to_trump_abbott/
Shows you don’t have to go to MRA sites to find misogyny. Admittedly it’s not as amusingly over the top, but as a journalist for a major newspaper, she has a lot more influence than someone like GWW.
But, back to my point – I loathe newspapers (partly because of people like Devine) so I end up less informed than I should be. Suggestions anyone?
Well I’d call this a win win situation, or at least a definite win for the ladies. Those against taxes going towards bc should think, in about 6 years, there just may be less students and demand for more schools and educators so less tax increases to educate and care for all those kids.