Remember: They are not winning.
They are outnumbered, and the culture they want to bring back has been utterly destroyed. They are lashing out in desperation, causing all the harm they can, because they can, because that's the only action open to them.
They want a return to the time when women were legally controlled by the men in their lives, almost to the point of being property.
They're not going to get it. That oppression was founded on both women growing up not knowing things could be different - and on a host of legal situations that won't be returning.
Women did not have the right to their own bank accounts until 1974. That's not going away. (That was the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, passed by both houses--unanimously in the Senate--and signed into law by Ford.) Guess what happened when women could suddenly keep the money they earned?
THAT'S why they've been fighting to overturn Roe v Wade. We all know they don't give a damn about children's lives. And they don't actually believe a fetus is a child, or they wouldn't be paying for abortions for their mistresses on the sly, wouldn't be getting them themselves because "my situation is different."
Conservative men want women to be property.
Conservative women want someone to be obligated to take care of them and provide for them.
They want the myth of the Cleaver family from the 50s to be a reality... for well-educated, upper-middle-class white cis het Christian families.
And they are more than happy to destroy everyone who gets in the way of their fantasy future.
It can't happen. You can't get there from here. None of them even want what it takes to get there... they are, for the most part, comfortable, and they want the enriched diverse society that they've come to live in.
They want the increased production that comes from a happy, thriving workforce that pours creativity into their jobs. They want the health care advances that came from a multinational community of medical professionals. They want clean air in their towns, clean water in their homes.
They just don't want to acknowledge why we have those things.
(I am aware that not everyone has those things. I'm talking about the class of people who do, who have come to take them for granted, who think they are just "the way things are" and not gains we have fought for, that have still not been extended to everyone.)
Conservative women sure as hell don't want to give up their bank accounts. Conservative men don't want to go back to huge cars that get 8-11 miles per gallon.
They want the ability to choose between phone service providers. They want cheap phone service.
(In 1982, AT&T was required to split itself into several companies to break up its monopoly. And yeah, it's mostly re-merged now... but rates are lower. So much lower. In 1980, the weekday rate for a call across the US was 54 cents for the first minute. That's almost $2 in today's money.)
They don't want to admit that it's all connected. That women's rights and gay rights and labor rights and anti-racist policies and anti-harassment policies and social security and affordable health care ARE ALL LINKED.
They think they can remove one bit and keep the world they want.
They think they can erode a few parts of it, the ones that make them uncomfortable, and keep the world they want.
And some parts of them knows it. Which is why they're lashing out.
And it's going to hurt. People are going to die. Good, innocent people--children--are going to die because of the Dobbs ruling.
But they are not winning. Don't lose hope.
They are fading, and they know it, and it scares them. They know that public opinion is against them.
Someday, there are going to be six more graves that are memed as gender-neutral bathrooms.
Take care of each other. We have been through worse than this before, and we will win our rights back.
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