Cotham’s cartoon would be macabre, if not for the whimsy in the googly eyes. Why do grand strategists of gender conservatism gain by taming women, traumatizing gay people and mortifying flesh? It makes the world seem manageable.
But don’t say poor people made you do it. RELATED: Advocate for abortion if you must. Who is up for that, really? But, as Baldwin explained, the raising of children? That tremendous danger? That tremendous responsibility? Facing this, without even the bare minimum of social support? It makes you not even want to bring a child into the world. Love as the truly committed, vulnerable, naked connection with another mortal, frail, miraculous human being is scary enough. Loving of children, raising of children.”
“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. This isn’t just for queer people - “the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really,” Baldwin noted. After all, we’re supposed to mortify the flesh, a doctrine which has led to untold horrors.” Goldstein asked him, “Have you got any sense of what causes people to hate homosexuals?” and Baldwin replied, “Terror, I suppose. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.” The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma.
“The terrors homosexuals go through in this society,” he said, “would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. James Baldwin named this in one of his last interviews, with the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein in 1984.īaldwin linked fear of homosexuality with the fear of human sexuality. Openly queer people regularly refuse this demoralization, despite the attempt to traumatize their sexual lives as well. In “The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America,” Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” tracks how the “war on terror” intertwined with gender conservatism to make gender traditionalism seem “normal and right.” To tame them seems a first step to taming an unruly world. Emancipated women become a symbol of everything maddening and unmooring about modernity. The subordination of women, and their reduction to their reproductive function, has been such a constant that it can appear somehow normal and right, while the upending of old roles seems to cause a disorientating chaos. The history of our species is, by and large, a history of male domination. Michelle Goldberg describes in her 2010 book “Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World” how political grand strategists use fear of sex: Spontaneity, joy, frivolity - the fruits of genuine freedom - are forbidden. The powers that are taking away abortion access intend for us to be scared of sex - which they want to be about pregnancy, not, say, orgasm. This is an apt portrayal of pro-life politics. Power means domination, or what good is it? And power is supposed to be demoralizing.
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The driver of the king’s coach gives the king side-eye. A speech bubble above the man’s laughing face reads “Har! Har!” “Go find out why a peasant is giggling at midday,” the king orders from his coach, scowling in the direction of a common man digging potatoes with a rake. It’s about women and bishopsįrank Cotham, a cartoonist featured often in The New Yorker, captured the political uses of demoralization well. It is demoralizing.įor some of the architects of this moment, demoralization is precisely the point. Today a scant percentage of women have affordable versions of either. In light of this, we were talking about the terms on which women have been asked to bring forth children. Wade, which would automatically put abortion out of reach of women in nearly half the states. Supreme Court had preliminarily voted to overturn Roe v. We were discussing the recent revelation that the U.S. She was not talking about war, mass shootings or the grim state of affairs in our society - though, there’s that. (RNS) - “It makes you not even want to bring a child into the world,” a friend said to me recently.