The Unavoidable Pratfalls of the Feminist-Bro Coalition
A few weeks ago, my friend Lakshya and I wrote this piece about the electoral gap between men and women, and since then, I’ve been turning around a couple ideas around in my head and my friend Alex, who I went out with last night. really helped me put some of these pieces together.
This is one of the most famous passage from Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women:
What I gathered from this passage is that it’s profoundly difficult for women who rely on their personal relationships with men for their survival to be in slawart opposition of the patriarchy. However, I’d also add that it’s really difficult for women who highly value their personal relationships with men outside their families to be considered equals in feminist advocacy by their fellow activists. By personal relationships, I mean both romantic and platonic relationships and I’m absolutely including myself in this category!
One of the paradoxes of feminism in comparison to racism or homophobia is that women are never a statistical minority, which is what Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis was in The Second Sex (1949). The United States is about 70% white and is the most racially heterogeneous country in the world and yet, racial minorities are still often able to almost entirely self-segregate, flat-out avoiding deep personal relationships with white people. I know of Indian-Americans who have almost no personal relationships with people outside the Indian-American community, and this isn’t unique to Asian-Americans since Black Americans and Hispanic-Americans also can and often do the same thing. They work and go to school with those of other races but when it comes to dating, marriage, and intimate friendships, they simply don’t engage with the racial group in power, white people. Straight women (and bisexual women who are involved with men), who are the majority of all women, don’t have this option.
The uncomfortable reality is that tangible examples of women’s liberation, like that of all other marginalized groups, is only ever enshrined through personal and strategic alliances with their oppressors. However, since women are never a statistical minority, feminist activists are, maybe rightly, frustrated and infuriated at the concept that they constantly have to appeal their case in the court of the patriarchy. Martin Luther King Jr. worked in tandem with Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights movement was very conscientious of respectability politics and public perception since at the time of King’s assassination, the United States was 87.7% white. However, from the time Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 and when Roe was overturned in 2022, women have always made up over 50% of the American population. It doesn’t make logical sense, but the patriarchy is both global and seemingly eternal.
Look at it like this: when Dobbs v. Jackson was decided and Roe was overturned this past June, it became glaringly obvious that the Democrats’ current coalition is insufficient to achieve the electoral power needed to keep abortion safe and legal. When I saw the ads that won the Kansas abortion referendum in early August, keeping abortion enshrined in the Kansas state constitution, and read about the types of voters that made that referendum possible, something clicked in my head. The Democratic coalition that propelled Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to landslide victories, wherein the turning point states were won by millions of votes, is nonexistent now, which is why Hillary Clinton lost the presidency by 77,744 votes across 3 states (MI/WI/PA) and Joe Biden won by only 42,918 votes also across 3 states (AZ/WI/GA).
A group that propelled Clinton and Obama to landslide victories that evaded HRC and Biden didn’t vote Democrat after 2012, and I call this group the “Bros,” who are mostly apolitical men, who are the archetypal Obama→ Trump voter. They voted for Clinton because he was cool and played the saxophone on Arsenio, they voted for Obama because he was cool and ran on hope and change, and when it came time to vote for the cringe old woman and her cringier platform, they decided that the crude and crass former game show host who swore he would leave entitlements in place (and had a long and storied history of being pro-choice) was cooler. They’re by and large secular, often not college-educated, and mostly (but not entirely) white.
One key example of this group is Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, who took to Twitter after Roe was overturned to express his support for abortion remaining safe and legal. One part of me is like, cool the pro-choice side needs as much support as we can get since abortion is literally gone in half the country but quite frankly, as a woman, I don’t trust Portnoy and his ilk. Aside from the basic fact that they almost certainly support abortion being legal for selfish reasons (wanting to have sex without condoms and avoid pregnancy) and compare President Biden to Hitler, I know firsthand that Portnoy, and men like him, are extremely predatory to women. They see us as means to an end, and the more I think about it, the more I want to scream.
I’m not sure if there’s a conclusion to this piece beyond a state of minor but near-constant despair, but it feels like an unwinnable situation we’re stuck in and if anybody has any mitigation methodologies, my inbox is open. As I said earlier in this piece, I genuinely value my interpersonal relationships with men; on my way home this afternoon, I spent the entire 40-minute walk on the phone with my guy friend from college and we talked about like, his little sister’s new job, how I’m rewatching Game of Thrones, and the Texas-Alabama football game yesterday. However, it grates at me that in order to claw back our bodily autonomy, women like me have to form alliances with men like Dave Portnoy, who simply don’t care about our humanity one way or another. Alternatively, maybe that’s how it’s always been and I’ve just been blind to it.