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

[Laura Kelber]

Sorry, I missed the attribution. My response, then, is to Moira.

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 12:32 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>