There is Plath's remark--"every woman loves a fascist"-- and some of Pynchon's deep embodied insights flatly stated , I suggest

[Mark Kohut]

Here's the whole article by Moira Dunegan. (last time I send only a
section---in quotes---and give directions
AT THE BOTTOM on how to access the whole thing. You see, I say, had I sent
this, no one would have
read it. No one would have become engaged in a dialogue. I say.  (Some
other friends on the 'racism' narrowness, my my)

Thanks Laura.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/09/white-women-vote-republican-why

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 10:48 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Plath wasn't making a political statement about women, and Pynchon, with
> his predilection for very young women, is hardly a go-to source for
> theories about women of any race. His wonderful character Oedipa knows that
> excluded middles are bad shit. Republican=racist, Democrat = not racist.
> Nothing in between. Is that what you're saying? White women who vote
> Democratic aren't racist? I can conceive of white women voting Republican
> who are no more racist than their Democrat-voting counterparts. To say that
> white women vote Republican because they're racist and/or they adore a
> fascist seems presumptuous.
>
> Not everyone has their own, developed worldview. A significant chunk of
> Americans adopt the worldview of their places of worship, whether that
> means rabid anti-abortionism, single-minded votes for pro-Israel
> candidates, voting for Democrats so long as they're not gay, etc. Another
> very significant chunk boils everything down to what they perceive is their
> financial interest. Union workers voted for union-buster Reagan because he
> promised to lower their taxes. The super-rich will vote for Trump again
> because he did lower their taxes. Then there's us - educated, aware, who
> read and vote pretty much in lock-step with each other (barring the
> occasional Hillary dispute). The rest of the people are pretty much winging
> it, and not having been trained in logic, or even the necessity of logic,
> they come up with various voting strategies:
> "I hate black people, but Obama is awesome." "My friend said Hillary is a
> murderer." "Trump is a disgusting pig, but the Democrats will force women
> to have abortions." "I loved Trump on The Apprentice - it would be a hoot
> to see him in the White House." "My boyfriend said he'll beat the shit out
> of me if I don't vote for Trump." "What the hell, eeny meeny miney mo." "My
> union said not to vote for him, and I agree with everything they said. But
> they also say that immigrants work for low wages, and that NAFTA is bad. So
> it seems like voting for Trump makes a lot of sense."
>
> If you can speak about white women as a group then so can I, a white
> woman. So here it is: White women want Beto for President in 2020!
>
> Laura
>
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 7:30 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "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.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>