THE PUSSYCATS OF GILEAD.

Rush Limbaugh used to crack wise about leftists (still liberals by his lexicon, before the split between corporatist and communist Democrats grew more pronounced) becoming wacky and stupid when they were out of power.  Here we are, with the people again voting for a gridlocked federal government: the House a special election or two from having a Donk majority, a Senate with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and a filibuster, and Donald Trump undoubtedly facing down Official Washington types in his own party, and it's enough to compel Rebecca Gordon (yes, dear reader, another Common Dreams contributor) to hoist her crazy cat lady flag.

I never realized before that men hate us so much.” That was the lesson drawn by one of my fellow organizers in Reno, Nevada, the morning after the 2024 general election. She’d turned 21 during the campaign, a three-month marathon she approached as a daily opportunity to learn as much as she could about everything she encountered. “Of course, they hate immigrants, too,” she added, “and I’m both.”

Welcome to Gilead.  "Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so."  Get your tubes tied, go on a sex strike, and break all ties with men.

No, really.

Before readers go all “#notallmen” on me, let me stipulate that my brother doesn’t hate me. Nor does his son, my much-loved nephew. Nor did my father, nor my high school or college boyfriends for that matter. None of them hated me then or hate me now. A few of them have, however, held — largely unexamined — beliefs about women’s essential inferiority in one realm or another. And curled within such beliefs like a secret infection lurks a bacillus of contempt.

When that contempt festers, it can poison the blood of a nation, provoking a fever of women hatred like the one that has emerged in this country since Donald Trump’s recent election. Perhaps the first drop of sweat appeared in white supremacist (and erstwhile Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Although even the liberal press has treated this dictum as if it referred primarily to reproductive rights, it’s clear that Fuentes and men like him are celebrating Trump’s victory as a referendum on rape.

Within a day, that post had 90 million views. Between Thursday and Friday of that week, as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported, online repetitions rose by 4,600%. Nor was Fuentes’s post unique. The Institute also observed that “Manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, in a post on X on November 7th, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.”

It seems as if it’s just a short step from thoughts of rape to thoughts of murder in Gilead. And a popular step, too. Tate’s post garnered almost 700,000 views within a couple of hours. A day earlier another Xer, Jon Miller, wrote, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say.” (And in case you don’t know, LMAO is “laughing my ass off” in text-speak.) Like Fuentes’s post, this one has received almost 90 million views.

Nor does what happens in the Manosphere stay in the Manosphere. As Vox reports, “Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”

And after sixty years of deconstructing bourgeois norms and calling it liberation, there's nobody left to defend those norms.

Like my young co-campaigner (for whom it took a second Trump electoral victory to fully grasp the depths of misogyny in this country), I was also in my early twenties when I first allowed myself to face just how much some men hate women. Until then I think I believed that men’s contempt for us was at least partly deserved. I did believe that we really were weaker, less intelligent, less courageous — in general, lesser. Perhaps history recorded the acts of a few exceptional women who excelled in some field or other, but the point was that they were indeed exceptions. The classic British writer Samuel Johnson had expressed this pithily some centuries earlier, when he told his biographer James Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

I attended a small liberal arts college that employed only two female professors. I had a friend whose history professor failed her because, as he explained to her, a woman shouldn’t be occupying a place in college that could have gone to one of her intellectual superiors (i.e., a man). Another friend succumbed to a professor’s sexual demands in return for a passing grade in his course. Others reluctantly slept with the male student gatekeeper at the college library — the price of snagging one of the most coveted work-study jobs on campus. I accepted these as unfortunate, but unremarkable realities. Such things might not be right, but neither could they be changed.

Then came the international explosion of thought and action that was the second wave of feminism.

It didn't turn out so well for anyone, including the women of the fevered brow whose contribution to the evolution of humanity is a new variation on hen-pecking.

Reading this reminded me of a saying popular in the heady days of the early women’s liberation movement: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Just as fish don’t need bicycles, there are some things women don’t need. And men who hate women are one.

Reap what you sow.