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.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
I’m not clear on how women are supposed to become more manlike by having abortions, since cis men don’t get abortions, and they are the overwhelming majority of men…but never mind.
I’ve learned from this that I am a flyover woman, in every way possible except that I’m a feminist who lives on the West coast. But I have kids! And I’m frumpy and religious! My hair is never coiffed! I’m always carrying something! And I’m a middle-school teacher, which can’t count as a high-flying career.
If “being a woman is synonymous with carrying something”, why do women’s clothes lack pockets? Checkmate, The Federalist!
Does she provide any facts to support these assertions? For example, on the “sanctity of marriage”: as far as I recall, Arkansas has a much higher divorce rate than California or New York, and one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy.
Weird, for her feminist women are trendy, prim and, to certain extent even, smart. Yet, for many feminist women are unlikeable ugly, fat slobs with tattoos are piercings. For yet another group, they are “man-ish lesbians” and for another princesses who have never done anything in their life beside studying liberal arts and having sex. At that speed, one of them might realize that feminist women are pretty god damn diverse and are all of the above and then some at the same time.
Short of anything else this argument is linguistically ridiculous. “Oven” is masculine in some romance languages, at least in French, “Le Four”. If you’re going to brainlessly use language to make baseless claims about half of the population, at least get it right.
OT: The newest attempt to resurrect TSR, Inc. by one of Gary Gygax’s sons has sparked some all-too-common hullabaloo when Gygax Jr. made an interview that was basically a Great Hits of Old White Guys Mad That Other Kids Are Allowed In The Clubhouse.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/ernie-gygax-on-new-tsr-wotc-beefs-trademarks-licensees-5e-more.680877/
The criticism has been followed with the usual bad-faith defenses, my favorite of which is claiming that rejecting LGBT+ elements is an attempt to “let fantasy be fantasy without injecting real-world concerns into it.” Because clearly nobody is trying to play in a fantasy world where their character can be LGBT+ without facing discrimination, right? That they mean “let fantasy be MY fantasy” could not be more clear.
There’s also bonus racism in the interview, because of course there is.
A rare thing indeed when I can read one of these through to the end.
Oh, right … looonnnng time lurker, you know the rest. Don’t have anything to add, just it’s a rare thing indeed when I can read one of these through to the end.
When I first heard the term flyover country it confused me a bit. Over here flyovers are a type of motorway bridge. So I just had this image that the middle of America was all roads. It did sort of make sense; there’s sayings here like ‘sleeping under the flyover’ to indicate societal and urban decay. So I thought it might be that.
Oh, dear. I’m afraid that just hearing about someone like me might make Ms. Gress’s head explode. I’m a fat, frumpy, mother of two who’s been married to her husband for 36 years, and at the moment I live in the most flown-over of fly over states, Oklahoma. Though I’d never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom, my youngest child was born on the spectrum back in the days before anyone really knew what that meant and she required a level of care that we damned sure couldn’t afford to pay for, so guess who stopped working until the kid was in high school? Hell, my husband and I are practically poster children for Traditional Family Values, and he, I , and both grown children are all feminists. And atheists.
And flyover women ignore the flyover Hispanic mothers that are doing the even less glamorous jobs of picking their crops and working in their slaughterhouses, for no money and injuries. They’d LOVE to work 9-5 at the WalMart checkout like White Flyover Women do, and spend cozy weekends with their non-aborted kids.
Of course they have talking points, mostly conspiracy shit promulgated by Cheeto Benito and his handlers.
@Podkayne: Obviously you’re supposed to move.
@Moggie: Pockets are one of the smallest yet largest differences between how men and women are treated. One day my husband had to wear a pair of my jeans (hadn’t done laundry) and he was aghast at the teeny front pockets and no back ones. I personally wear men’s jeans now, because pockets. Particularly during quarantine, so I could fit everything I needed into them rather than carry a bag that would get cooties.
One time a friend of mine won at a minor awards show, and she made her lovely suitable-for-awards gown, and we other ladies were admiring it and she proudly said “IT HAS POCKETS” and there were literal gasps, oohs, and ahhs as she stuck her hands into them. I may have said “we’re not worthy”.
And yes, the conservative areas have teen pregnancy and divorce rates greater than the coasts do.
@Another Laura: maybe you should trade houses with @Podkayne.
Hey now. Some of us fit this description without being fascist trad wives and I demand representation.
WTF did I just read? I assume this person is paid to produce this drivel, which is very depressing.
I think even flyover women would like to be thought of as more than gestational envelopes.
(goes on to condescendingly describe them as frumpy, out of the loop, and tongue-tied)
Readers get whiplash when you simultaneously reduce people to, and praise them for, their body parts. Are flyover women unjustly ignored, or should they shut up and get back in the birthin’ room?
@Podkayne Lives:
I thought it was pretty clear – men don’t risk pregnancy from casual sex, so women can be “more like men” by engaging in causal sex without having babies by getting abortions.
She seems to have forgotten the existence of birth control, or somehow thinks that abortion *is* the primary form of birth control for most casual-sex-engaging women. And probably also that desiring baby-free casual sex is a “man” thing, “real women” have sex mostly to make babies. Which, if true, I’m left wondering how men are supposed to be “real men” in her world.
@Allandrel
RE: TSR
WOW,that was yeah. But judging from the at least the 1st three pages of the comments a lot of people are not impressed either.
Dear Fake Geek Boys: you seem to be forgetting that Jennell Jaquays was involved with D&D pretty much from the ground floor as a game designer and illustrator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennell_Jaquays
“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.”
I’ve been thinking about the idea of consequences for women in right wing/manosphere circles because it’s something the MGTOWs talk about A LOT. Like how modern women want a life free from consequences, with the help of simps and big daddy government etc. And I realised in their minds appropriate consequences should be:
A woman being too overtly pretty/glamorous/dressed revealing/happily flirting = rape
Sex = pregnancy. Always. In every circumstance. As if there aren’t myriad ways to prevent it which aren’t abortions, even if none are 100% reliable.
Pregnancy without man around = no government or family support. Destitution. Social shame. Ideally death.
So basically the life of Tess Durbeyfield. Apparently it’s the only way to get us to behave.
Theses clown love to think they represent the “silent majority” when they are a tiny fraction of a sliver of a part of the general population.
@Allandrel : I have seen that TSR debacle from very far away. I was sad but not surprised to see that go awry.
TSR was a shit firm, who was quite mismanaged. Gary Gygax is a legend but his stuff didn’t age particulary well, and they were plenty of (probably mostly unintentional) racism in earlier D&D. I never heard of his son, so him suddenly remembering that his father created tabletop RPG looked more like a cash grab than anything else.
Well, that gif is a whole lotta NOPE.
And so is the incomprehensible garbage this lady is spewing, like WTF?
Yes, we all know conservatives never target their simple-minded base with empty catchphrases (Make ‘Murica Great Again!!!) or flashy flag graphics. Oh, and high-end advertising is CAPITALIST, which they definitely hate.
So whenever dudes pretend to be all chivalrous and carry something for a woman, they’re erasing her femininity? What about door-holding?
Orrr, it’s because men tend to treat women like objects and vice versa?
Yes, I can’t even tell you how many men have had unrestricted abortions. We really outta make them take responsibility.
@Allandrel
So I just did a speed read on that Gygax thing, and
What the hell??
Because I am a feminist and thus think about this sort of thing instead of accepting the received wisdom, I know that a man cannot eliminate the consequences of sex. But a man might ignore the consequences of sex.
Don’t really care much about gaming, so I only briefly checked it out of boredom. But I get the impression that Ernie Gygax thinks he’s owed the rights to TSR’s old games as part of his “cultural heritage” or some other weird group birthright-type thing where WOtC appropriated D&D from his family and friend group(s), and he wants to reclaim them. And also, his idea of “nonpolitical” is “semi-compulsive regressive cisheteronormativity with a dash of casual 1970s racism” which is, these days, a pretty openly political take. (It always was, it was just partially normalized by the culture and invisible to the average middle class white man back in the 70s and 80s.)
The author instinctively veers toward ranting against abortion specifically, while ostensibly talking about women generally choosing childfree lives, as in the stereotype of liberated successful career woman she writes about. I doubt she really believes abortion is the main reason why liberal women (and most conservative women) manage to not have as many as 5-10 children.
Likewise, pregnancy is described as “consequences of sex”, in classic anti-abortion language, even though in the context of the piece, it should be the consequence of being woman. Or at least the consequence of having sex while being woman. Supposedly, conservative women deserve credit for accepting this consequence, whereas men deserve to have sex without consequences, because that’s their natural lot in life. And then she asks why feminists see “male lifestyle” as superior and desirable.
Quite often conservatives recognize that liberal men also support abortion/contraception in order to avoid the “consequences of sex”, inasmuch as those consequences affect men in the first place. But then, you couldn’t claim that having consequence-free sex is an inherently male trait that women try to emulate.
@Snowberry
<blockquote>And also, his idea of “nonpolitical” is “semi-compulsive regressive cisheteronormativity with a dash of casual 1970s racism” which is, these days, a pretty openly political take. (It always was, it was just partially normalized by the culture and invisible to the average middle class white man back in the 70s and 80s.)</blockquote>
Indeed, this seems to be a very common idea, that “agrees withe my political asumptions” equals “nonpolitical,” and anything else is “political.”
Especially the aggressively political idea “people different from me exist and matter.”
I especially love it when these guys claim that a work that “used to be nonpolitical” has been taken over by the SJWs, and it is something like Star Trek or Star Wars that was always very political.
The Titanic
The Arizona
The USS Ronald Reagan
Are those women’s names?