Angry White Men

The beginning of the end...

As an on-line anniversary present for my Lovely and Liberated Wife, let me just observe that the entire GOP seems to based around the primal scream of Angry White Men.

The Todd Akin thing is really about his clarification.  He recently admitted that the whole "legitimate" and "forcible" rape thing is about all the lying that women do in order to get those sweet, sweet abortions.  I mean, who WOULDN'T lie in order to get their uterus scraped with a stainless steel surgical instrument.  I, myself, intend to lie about my bowels in order to get some awesome colonoscopies.  #winning!

The idea that there is rape and "rape" is really about sexual power.  In fact, the idea of acquaintance rape or marital rape is explicitly about power.  It is not about a knife held to the woman's throat, it is about her fear and panic in the moment.  The AWM are basically pissed that anyone could accuse a man of raping a women when there was no weapon involved.  Absent fearing for her life, a woman is just having second thoughts.

The thing is, that's just a post hoc rationalization for being a sexual thug.

The advent of available birth control did alter sexual customs.  And it made pre-marital sex more common.  But the fact that a woman MIGHT have sex with a guy did not mean that should WOULD have sex with a guy.  And for some, that confusion was just too much nuance to deal with.  Then, we add in the whole Biblical subservience of women to men, and the idea that a husband or boyfriend could rape the woman in his life is literally incomprehensible to them.

So you can't help but wonder if a lot of these "forcible" rape assholes can't remember at least one time where the woman left the room in tears.  "But I'm not a rapist!  Rapists are usually blah people."

I have no idea if Todd Akin will win the Senate seat from Missouri.  He very well might.  Because there are an awful lot of Angry White Men out there.  They are pissed about women, pissed about how they have jobs and talk back.  These AWM might not actually watch Mad Men, but that Don Draper guy sounds like the bomb to them.

The AWM is also pissed that there is a Blah person in the White House.  They are pissed that the Blah President is "gutting work requirements in welfare" and "giving health care to those people."  They are pissed that brown people are coming over and taking jobs.  They are pissed that woman are falsely claiming they were raped in order to have sweet, sweet abortions.

Now every example in that above paragraph is false.  It's a lie (except the Blah President).  Obama isn't gutting the work requirement, Mexican immigration is down, women aren't running around making up rape claims.  (Some are, but I guarantee more rapes go unreported than are falsely claimed.)

But facts don't matter when you're angry.  Only your anger matters.  The Nixon Presidency and The Tea Party are monuments to the efficacy of political rage.

I hope that the rage slips out in Tampa next week.  Like the Akin comment, the electorate needs to see the ugliness that is at the heart of the modern GOP.