There is Plath's remark--"every woman loves a fascist"-- and some of Pynchon's deep embodied insights flatly stated , I suggest
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Mon Nov 12 06:29:47 CST 2018
"What is wrong with white women? Why do half of them so consistently vote
for Republicans, even as the Republican party morphs into a monstrously
ugly organization that is increasingly indistinguishable from a hate group?
The most likely answer seems to be that white women vote for Republicans
for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist. Trump, with
his raucous rallies and his bloviating, combative style, has offered his
supporters an opportunity to savor the pleasures of being cruel. It is
likely that the white women who voted for him in 2016, and who will vote
for him again in 2020, find this racist sadism gratifying. It is fun for
them.
But there is something else at play, something more complicated, in white
women’s relationship to white patriarchy. White women’s identity places
them in a curious position at the intersection of two vectors of privilege
and oppression: they are granted structural power by their race, but
excluded from it by their sex. In a political system where racism and
sexism are both so deeply ingrained, white women must choose to be loyal to
either the more powerful aspect of their identity, their race, or to the
less powerful, their sex. Some Republican white women might lean into
racism not only for racism’s sake, but also as a means of avoiding or
denying the realities of how sexist oppression makes them vulnerable.
In her book Right Wing Women
<https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/women>, the feminist Andrea
Dworkin wrote that conservative women often conform to the dominant
ideologies of the men around them as part of a subconscious survival
strategy, hoping that their conservatism will spare them from male hatred
and violence. It doesn’t work, she says. They suffer sexist oppression
anyway. But the strategy continues. “Most women cannot afford, either
materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings
of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry little
gods around them.” Participating in racism does not exempt white women from
sexism, as much as they might hope that it will. It merely corrodes their
souls in the process.
White women’s identity places them in a curious position at the
intersection of two vectors of privilege and oppression."
----put couple sentences into Google or
Bing exactly to get the whole larger article.
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