Carrie Gress is a Fellow who doesn’t want to live like a man. Gress, a five-time mother and a fellow at a think tank called, rather generically, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has just published a piece in The Federalist celebrating what she calls the “flyover women” — the salt-of-the-earth, sometimes not-so-glamorous mothers who stand up against Cultural Marxism and “radical feminism” and jobs, if possible.
Ironically, Gress’ definition of the “flyover women” sounds at times like a series of insults:
Fly-over women are the moms and daughters and wives and sisters and friends the media overlooks because they are religious or frumpy or don’t have sexy day jobs. They are considered uneducated doormats.
But apparently these flyover gals have sort of cornered the market on babies, and that’s all that really counts: babies, babies, glorious unaborted babies.
What we will never see in the splashy pages of Vanity Fair, for instance, are the many happy women who buck the feminist narrative, loving, nurturing, consoling, clothing, cleaning, and adoring their numerous children without trying to live like men. …
They know the preciousness of a tender embrace from small arms, a little face learning to offer kisses … .
Weirdly, from someone with pretentions of being a scholar, Gress seems to think that this whole mothering thing is something that no feminist will ever experience, though in fact the overwhelming majority of adult women in American society eventually do get around to having babies; as Jill Filipovic notes in a recent New York Times op-ed, “86 percent of American women ages 40 to 44 are mothers.” And a lot of these mothers are feminists.
So what else besides baby love distinguishes flyover women from the regular ones? Here are Five Things I Learned About Flyover Women (and women in general) from reading her piece in the Federalist:
Flyover women hate Marxist fads like dialectical materialism and building the revolutionary party.
They reject all the latest Marxist fads, propagated with clever sound bites, high-end advertising, and popular hashtags.
Women love just carrying shit around.
She knows, as women have for millennia, that being a woman is synonymous with carrying something.
Women are boats and boats are women:
Women traditionally have been seen as a kind of vessel that transforms whatever it holds. We see it in the Romance languages, where words like “ocean,” “ship,” and “oven,” are feminine. This is why boats are named after women.
Flyover women are huge slobs — because of abortion.
Their bodies are often tired, hair not always perfectly coiffed, and nails rarely manicured. Their homes may not be camera-ready, their meals probably aren’t gourmet, and talking points aren’t ready on their tongues. But mostly, the issue is that they don’t believe in abortion and they do believe in the sanctity of marriage.
Feminists want women to become more manlike by having abortions.
Ironically, whether they know it or not, feminists’ unspoken premise insists men are superior to women and women must become like them in the pursuit of equality. Therefore, to be equal, women must be able to eliminate the consequences of sex, like men, and rid themselves of unborn children through unrestricted abortion.
There’s more weird stuff in there but I’ll leave it at this; my brain is already scrambled enough from trying to make sense of all this.
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Except they aren’t.
Let’s just take some examples from French.
Ship– le navire
boat – le bateau
Ocean – l’océan (masc)
Yes, “the sea” is “la mer” – feminine. In Latin though,mare is neuter.
Oven – le four
Ok, that’s three for three.
Funny… In German, another language with grammatical gender (and closer related to English at that) these words are male and neutral (der Ozean, der Ofen, das Schiff)… it’s almost like this stuff is constructed. You know, like gender roles… What’s less funny though is that this kind of language phenomenon actually has an impact on speakers. Like there’s a difference in how people perceive things as more feminine or masculine depending on the pronoun their language uses for a certain word. Hence there’s often a association of “male” with the sun in many languages, while the german sun is “female” and also perceived as such.
Other “things” female in German include: Weapons, bombs and violence. I wonder what that flyover woman would think about that…
Ships are assigned female pronouns in English because their launching is considered a symbolic marriage between the ship and the sea, the latter represented by King Neptune.
You know what her flyover women sound like to me? They sound like people who could stand to get a better deal.
Speaking as a leftist, folks. Back over to you.
“there’s often a association of ‘male’ with the sun in many languages, while the german sun is ‘female’ and also perceived as such”
Pretty much all northern European people, whether their languages are Germanic or Celtic, have a masculine moon and a feminine sun. J. R. R. Tolkien stuck to the same scheme when it came to ‘sexing’ his Two Trees of Valinor.
I don’t know about the Russians. I did notice, though, that in the <i>Despicable Me</i> movies, Gru (Russian) is identified with the moon while his girlfriend, Lucy Wilde, is identified with the sun.
Count me in as another harried slob who’s a feminist. Most of the time, looking elegant is not a priority. That was even truer when my son was little. In fact, becoming a mother made me a lot more of a feminist.
If anyone’s interested, I had a bit of a rant about pockets on Medium
https://medium.com/@sheilacrosby_4873/pockets-8cd3d02f925?sk=1e9b938f8acffea845aa8ea6d902c415
Hello all. Eight-year lurker here. Might go back to lurking again after this, but this struck a nerve.
I live in a rapidly growing town, in a very red part of a blue state. My family has been here for many generations. I am surrounded by assholes like the one who wrote that article, and more move here every day. They’re steadily paving over my hometown to make room for all the consumerist amenities their lifestyles demand. It is infuriating.
I probably didn’t need to tell anybody this, but in my experience the average bourgeois Diet Fash who reads The Federalist is nothing like what that article describes. Being a down-home, salt-of-the-earth, folksy American Gothic traditionalist is just a manufactured identity they latch onto. Most of them are rootless, cultureless, white-collar caricatures who work in the military-industrial complex and have never hoed a row in their lives. They move to my town, get a big stupid pickup and an arsenal of impractical firearms they might shoot once or twice, and then go around acting like they’re Just Folks. They’d be nothing but comical if they weren’t so dangerous.
Just needed to get that off my chest.
First: That’s not how language works. At all.
Second: agreed with @Mrs. Morely. Same goes for Catalan, another Romance language, in which all those words, plus “sea” and “boat” are masculine.
… el océano/el mar, el barco/el navío, el horno … I mean, come on! By this person Spanish isn’t a Romance language now????
How do they manage to lump materialism in with marxism? it’s like she doesn’t even have the basic understanding of Marxism.
Also, she doesn’t seem to understand how humans work.
ah yes, those romance languages and their feminine words, like in Spanish, el barco, el mar and el horno.
I had no idea that not having children and having paid work made me “a man”.
People like the author are typically transphobes who insist our gender identity is a matter of biological reality based on sex.
But apparently my gender is actually based on lifestyle choices / the lifestyle you lead?
Incidentally I never had children and actually that is something that fills me with great sadness – but not having kids has nothing to do with work or feminism or whatever buzzwords conservatives like to blame things on.
I just never met anybody to have kids with. That said I would never want to be a SAHM. Wanting to be financially independent is a key part of my personality. Yes dear author, woman can feel like that too!
Not only is gender in romance languages only barely correlated with biological sex, but the words for oven and ship in French are masculine. Also, vagina. Moreover, “latest Marxist fads” is hilarious. What could she even have in mind?
@ Pazuzu’s Petals
“big stupid pickup truck”.
Yeah, that reminds of one time I hesitated about asking a coworker if she would use her pickup truck to help me haul some stuff. I knew she was obsessed with her “baby” and had a lot of self image invested in being a country girl with a fancy pickup. Turned out although she was quite serious about keeping it clean, she enjoyed taking it out mudding and whathaveyou, so she was happy to help.
Most of the other people I know legitimately use their pickups for real pickup stuff like farming and such, but you can usually tell that at a glance when it is covered with dents and scratches, rusting out in places, and has the tailpipe held up with baling wire.
@.45
Sounds about right. Wear and tear is a decent indicator of use most of the time. I have a big ol’ diesel pickup myself, and it’s in pretty good shape overall but rarely clean. I use it for hauling things, and pulling things, and getting up my driveway when it becomes impassable. I gotta laugh when I see some dude tooling down the road in some shiny new contraption with a hyperextended cab, a 4-foot bed, and a damn Gadsden flag license plate. Like bro, your individualism is not as rugged as you seem to think it is.
Just thought to add – in Spanish slang vagina’s a masculine (el conejo) and dicks are female (la polla)
Also, chickens are male.
@Sheila : mostly same in french.
‘mostly’ because there’s half a dozen term for either, and at least one of the term for penis is masculine, even if most are feminines.
Pazuzu’s Petals, have you seen the model testicles that some of those shiny-unscratched-pickup-truck drivers like to adorn their hitches with? ?
@Bookworm: Occasionally I am tempted to go out there with a set of heavy-duty snips and “Please Spay and Neuter Your Pets” stickers and fix the vehicles.
@Nequam:
@Bookworm: Occasionally I am tempted to go out there with a set of heavy-duty snips and “Please Spay and Neuter Your Pets” stickers and fix the vehicles.
By an odd bit of synchronicity, this was yesterday’s featured Word Of The Day on a Livejournal I follow: https://prettygoodword.livejournal.com/845347.html
@bekabot
This leftist likes the way you think.
@Bookworm: oof, yeah I’ve seen them. They’ve always been thankfully rare around here, but they do pop up from time to time. Usually on trucks, but not always. Once I saw one of those ungainly-looking 3-wheeled motorcycle things sporting a pair. Seeing crap of that nature always makes me really grateful that I don’t have neighbors.
EDIT: I just remembered that a similar, um, accessory exists for the AR-15. Never seen that in the wild, never hope to.
Yeah, pockets are nice.
But the best (seemingly trivial) thing that happened for Mothers (who were women, by the will o’God) was the handicapped laws that required ramps, lowered curbs & other changes that made it easier to use a wheelchair and A BABY CARRIAGE in public spaces.
Mothers have been lugging kids & pushing strollers over curbs & cobblestones and up steps for at least 200 years and nobody gave a damn how hard it was. Babies were left sleeping in strollers on the sidewalk because it was too hard to get up steps into the stores. (Nowadays, you would be charged with neglect if you left a baby unattended outdoors.)
Nobody ever thought of passing laws to make life easier for Mothers, but they did for the handicapped, because women’s problems are invisible and it’s THEIR problems, not society’s, and they deserve to be inconvenienced anyway, because Eve.
@nequam: Your gib. I like the cut of it.
@Hypatia’s Daughter: YES!!! Curb cuts are a boon to everyone, but particularly women pushing kids in strollers. It must be much nicer for the kids as well, not having to fall off a giant cliff just to cross the street, or get hauled up another one. Wheelie luggage toters of any gender also like them, as do people who can walk but not lift their feet up high. Same with ramps, which are also good if you’re just tired. Even for the sacred old white men.
I had a broken ankle a couple years back and used all those everywhere, plus some elevators. (And men’s jeans, because pockets instead of purse is so much easier).