I Do Not Think Marsha Blackburn Has Read 'The Stepford Wives'
Or seen it.
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn popped by Fox News to discuss “How Did Republican Women End Up Like This?” Rebecca Traister’s latest New York Magazine article on the inherent contradictions of being a Republican woman running for office and trying to look could-kill-a-puppy tough while also giving Stepford.
Asked by Martha MacCallum what she thought of the article, Blackburn claimed to have “laughed all the way through it” — apparently so fervently that she failed to comprehend any part.
Blackburn said:
“Martha, I laughed all the way through this article because I thought the Left absolutely requires submission of women to their ideology, and their goal is to really erase the lines of gender. And they would love to be able to do that, but they require that you submit. And if you ever challenge them, if you ever push back on them, then they are going to cut you out. They cannot stand strong, conservative, independent-minded women who really like being female, who really like being a mom, who really like being a woman. That does not fit their template. You know, I look at the Left sometimes and I say they are the Stepford Wives of the Leftist ideology because you have to come right into lockstep. You cannot deviate if you’re going to be a female leader on the Left.
You know that thing where, in interviews, you’re supposed to answer the question you wish you were asked rather than the question you actually were asked? I feel like this is what Blackburn is doing here, but with criticism of conservative women.
Absolutely no one gives a flying fuck if they “really like being female.” Marsha Blackburn could get up and bust out “I Enjoy Being A Girl” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song and the most she would get out of me would be a scathing critique of her singing voice that had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not she drools over dresses made of lace.
Similarly, no one gives a flying fuck if they want to be wives and mothers. You will notice that in all of Wonkette’s many critiques of Marsha Blackburn, not one had anything to do with her being a wife and mother. Being a senator who just so happens to be a raging bigot? Sure! We’ve got lots on that. But I didn’t even know she had kids until I looked it up a minute ago.
In fact, I can honestly say that I have never criticized anyone for being a wife and mother. I am, however, quite enamored of Blackburn’s assessment that we are Stepford Wives, as it makes it pretty clear that she has never actually read that book.
The idea that women on the Left are in lockstep is hilarious. Sure! We’re all on the same page when it comes to someone like Marsha Blackburn being terrible, but we disagree on things literally all of the time. In fact, we are quite famous for it. I regularly disagree with other feminists and other people on the Left, but not in the same way I disagree with Marsha Blackburn, because mostly we are not saying hateful things. Which is what the primary issue is with her and other conservatives.
MacCallum’s response, naturally, was to “tolerate my intolerance” the whole thing.
“Yeah. I mean, the irony to me has always been that they talk about supporting women, but they only support liberal women. I mean, they should just say that up front because, yes, they are not supportive of women across the board. They are only supportive of women of one political ideology.”
No, we’re not supportive of women who advance terrible and cruel ideologies just because they’re women. That would be stupid. Feminism is not a cheerleading squad.
That being said, I fully support Marsha Blackburn having all of the rights. I believe she should be able to vote, to have her own credit card, to open a bank account, to have a job (though I would certainly prefer she not be a US senator) — that doesn’t mean that I, or anyone else, is obligated to cheer for her when she does and says terrible things. If we did, then all of the stupid things that Republicans say about “identity politics” would be true.
The thing is, in Traister’s article, she also notes the careful lines women in the Democratic Party have felt they had to walk in order to be “electable.” And there are a lot of them! In fact, I have long said that the first female president will probably be a Republican because Democrats scare easily and spend way too much time hemming and hawing about what will hypothetically scare other people. A woman ran for president and lost, which means we are very likely now looking at four decades of running the central-castingest old white men we can find “just to be safe, because what if a man hears a woman’s voice and finds it ‘grating?’” Generally speaking, there’s no good way to be a woman in politics and Traister acknowledges this.
The difference is that we’re at least aware of these issues and work to change them, whereas conservative women just kind of Phyllis Schlafly it out and try to pretend there’s no conflict. They want to build careers and platforms for themselves by feigning the Stepford, and it does not always work out all that well for them. It also doesn’t work out so well when they try to do it for real.
A good example of this is Lilly Gaddis, the unmarried “trad wife” who briefly achieved some notoriety last week (and lost her job) after using the n-word in one of her videos. She really thought she was going to be immediately catapulted into an exciting new career as a cancel-culture darling, only to be criticized by many of the horrible men she had hoped to impress for being a single mother and for not looking sufficiently WASPy. The poor dear.
The contradictions Traister points out are becoming more difficult for Republican women to manage, as the base grows increasingly radical. It’s no longer enough for a Republican woman to run for office while praising “wives and mothers” — a lot of these men don’t want to see women running for office (or even voting) at all, and will get mad about the fact that they are not staying at home caring for their husbands and children. And this is who they have to please. They created a monster and now they have to contend with it.
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Since we're talking Marx Brothers down below, I thought I would mention yet another misunderstanding I had about the world when I was young. At a tender age my father introduced me to the MB's movie "Duck Soup" that was, by happenstance, playing on the local independent TV station. And it was very silly, though there was quite a bit of humour that didn't land with me, but even I laughed at a good many of the jokes at only age 5.
This was not the great misunderstanding.
No, the great misunderstanding was that I watched the movie a couple more times after VHS was invented and the older I got and the more I watched, the more clear it was that this whole thing was very silly. The MOST silly. Like, the instantiation of the success of the modal ontological argument for the existence of a Maximally Silly Thing. And once I had come to the conclusion that there could be nothing sillier than, "Duck Soup," I somehow, in the manner of a child, came to the conclusion that this meant that there could also be nothing sillier than duck soup, or they would not have named the movie that way.
Fast forward to age 12 and I'm eating at a Chinese restaurant with my parents, the first to open anywhere near where I grew up, and there, on the actual menu, is duck soup.
I laughed and laughed and snorted my tea and said OW! and laughed some more. My mother wanted to know just what had me rolling in the booth, and I told her that the restaurant had put duck soup on the menu like it was an actual thing, and they must really love the Marx Brothers.
Reality, when it hit, was crushing and yet still incomplete.
"They kill ducks? For soup?"
9 years later I would be vegetarian, but that night I got an appropriate earful about how someone who eats animals isn't in a place to criticize other animal eaters for eating different animals, which made me think some, but also wasn't the point.
The point was that I had it so deeply ingrained that duck soup was too silly to be real that I thought that they were killing the ducks to eat in the soup *as a jokey Marx Brothers reference*.
It took another restaurant in another year for me to realize that this wasn't all a Deep Restaurant conspiracy to kill ducks in homage to the Marx Brothers, but that eating ducks for food was an actual thing, and had been a thing even before Technicolor film.