Reality is more wonderful than any amount of irony and sarcasm I can cook up on this blog. Take, for example, this mysterious new candidate for the Senate from Missouri, one Courtland Sykes. After reading about his views I was sure that he, and his fiancée Chanel Rion, were made-up figures.
But Snopes says Mr. Sykes is real, in any case.
He has the most hilarious opinions about women's rights. This tweet summarizes his statement:
Here's GOP Senate candidate Courtland Sykes' spectacularly smug, retrograde statement on women's rights and "natures." This is what "tradition" and "benevolent" sexism are all about. Also, who doesn't want to come home to dinner? What an ass. He'll almost certainly win. pic.twitter.com/xTPQVa7MIw— Still Too Female (@schemaly) January 25, 2018
And retrograde his opinions are, indeed. He is roughly fifty years too late to argue that point, even when it applies to middle-class white women in this country.
But there IS one group which would utterly agree with him, and that's the most patriarchal school inside American fundamentalism, the school which includes the Quiverful, the school which disapproves of sending daughters to college, and the school which deems the value of women to be in their subjugated service to their husbands at home. That school, by the way, does NOT believe in any kind of gender equality.
So Courtland (Courtie?) is fully in touch with that part of today's fundie Missourians.
He is also in touch with those manosphere sites where "make me a sandwich, bitch" is viewed as the finest putdown to any woman. I guess we could put the two arguments about women's innate inferiority together to argue that first God created Adam and then, when Adam wanted a sandwich, God created Eve. And Eve offered Adam an apple.
Oh my. I love these kinds of weirdos. Note the adjectives Courtie uses about feminists: nasty, crazed, with snake-filled heads!
Well, that last part does apply to me. But wait! There's more: When he has daughters he is going to turn them into good housewives, perhaps with a tiny home-based enterprise on the side (would he have to approve it? chastity belt patterns?).
He is not going to let them become "career-obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils." You know, like, say, doctors, dentists, librarians, managers, politicians and so on.
Mmm. Mr. Sykes is very much opposed to Islamic extremism, too, which is funny because the ISIS guys would totally agree with his statement about women's rights.
I also loved the end of that statement where Courtie equates Hillary Clinton's loss* to Donald Trump with a clear sign that Americans want a world where women are sequestered from the public sphere altogether and where their first obligation is to have the dinner ready for their hard-working hubbies at 6pm on the dot. In other words, the end of any kind of equality between men and women.
I have no idea if Courtie is a viable campaigner. But his knowledge of feminism is terrible, as is the knowledge that his fiancée demonstrates on her website**.
What's weird about his rambling arguments is that he juxtaposes some sort of a nightmare picture of what he interprets as the results of more equal opportunity in the labor market with a nightmare picture of how he wants women to behave, which only seems to depend on what their husbands or fathers or brothers think is appropriate for them.
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* Remember that Hillary Clinton won three million more actual votes than Trump. Does that mean the reverse? That the majority of Americans are perfectly fine with women's leadership and other public roles?
** The way they both use the term "radical feminism" is utterly wrong. Courtie's hatred of women-with-careers should be aimed against liberal feminists, and Chanel Rion gets radical feminism totally and completely wrong, too.
Added later: Remember the Vagenda of Manocide? This guy seems to have similar primal fears.