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Senator Susan Collins of Maine walking to the Senate floor on
Friday. Her support of Brett Kavanaugh helped elevate him to the Supreme Court.CreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska on Friday. She broke with her
fellow Republicans and did not support the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.CreditJ. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
"After a confirmation process where women all but slit their
wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through
the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the
Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the
women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of
Maine, who held out until the bitter end.
These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the
dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the
patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol
wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters
to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.
They’re more sympathetic to Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who
actually shooed away a crowd of women and told them to “grow up.” Or Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose response to a woman telling him she was
raped was: “I’m sorry. Call the cops.”
These are the kind of women
who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped.
The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time
for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.
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But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters
and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some
insane hope of solidarity.
We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put
their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by
voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have
for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates
only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political
scientist at the University of Southern California.
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Women of color, and specifically black women, make the margin of
difference for Democrats. The voting patterns of white women and white men
mirror each other much more closely, and they tend to cast their ballots for
Republicans. The gender gap in politics is really a color line.
That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on
their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re
placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has
said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.
This elevated position over
women of color comes at a cost, though. Consider what Kellyanne Conway, a top
adviser to the president, said at a dinner last year for New York’s
Conservative Party. She suggestedthat higher birthrates are “how I think we
fight these demographic wars moving forward.” The war, of course, is with
non-white people. So it seems that white women are expected to support the
patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and
even minimizing violence against their own bodies.
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Recently, Ms. Conway even weaponized her own alleged
sexual assault in service to her boss by discouraging women
from feeling empathy with Christine Blasey Ford or anger at Judge Kavanaugh.
Ms. Conway knows that a woman who steps out of line may be
ridiculed by the president himself. President Trump mocked Dr. Blaseyin front of a cheering crowd on
Tuesday evening. Betray the patriarchy and your whiteness won’t save you.
The pedestal is a superior, if precarious, place. For white
women, it’s apparently better than being “stronger together,” with the 94
percent of black women and 86 percent of Latinas who voted for Hillary Clinton.
During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really
vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist
at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s
willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant
relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their
whiteness.
In the study, white women who agreed that “many women
interpret innocent remarks or acts as sexist” were 17 percent more likely to
vote for a Republican candidate. They were also likely to agree that
“blacks should work their way up without special favors.” To be sure, women of
color aren’t inherently less sexist or even without their own racial biases.
But unlike white women, they can’t use race privilege to their advantage.
This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in
the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news
conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have
complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are
very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are
incensed at what’s going on.”
I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their
privilege to the death.
But apparently that doesn’t
include Ms. Murkowski anymore. Maybe it’s because she comes from a state with
the nation’s highest rate of sexual violence, with a sexual assault rate three times the national
average, where prosecutors just let a man evade jail time after he
kidnapped a native Alaskan woman and strangled her unconscious, then
masturbated over her body. Maybe.
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Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge
about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my
rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge
Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.
The question for white women in November is: Which one of these
two women are you?
I fear we already know the
answer."
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More views on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme
Court
Alexis Grenell (@agrenell) is a co-founder of Pythia
Public, a political and public affairs firm.
· Oct. 6, 2018
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