And I can’t make them want to

White women are still voting for the Republican candidate

Although women as a whole have historically voted for Democrats, white women have not. Instead, over the last 72 years, a plurality of white women have voted for the Democratic candidate only twice, in 1964 and 1996. On Tuesday, they once again went for Trump – just as they did in 2016 and 2020. But Harris made inroads with the group; she lost them by only 5 points, according to CNN. (In 2020, they broke for Trump by 11.) More surprisingly, Trump’s lead among white men also shrank, from 23 points in 2020 to 20 in 2024.

The Guardian

Mr T can’t understand why white women would vote for that man.

He can’t understand why any woman would vote for that man over a woman.

I can’t understand it, either.

I don’t understand the lack of solidarity, the blindness, the idiocy that would make a woman vote for her own oppression.

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But then, I don’t understand how someone I knew in college, who is smart enough to get a PhD in genetics, can also be a “young-earth creationist.”

(She also defines her primary identity as a mother. Her social media handles are all about “[the thing]_mom.” Damn girl you have a PhD in genetics but you think the most important and the most interesting thing about you is that you produced children?)

I don’t understand a lot of things.

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Apparently, some young Catholic women are starting to wear a veil in church.

I grew up Catholic.

I never saw a veil except on the heads of old women in Spain.

This – was not a thing when I was a kid.

But then, when I was a kid, we had altar girls. I was one of the first ones in my parish.

We thought we were making progress.

We thought we might actually see female priests in our lifetime.

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Mr T asked me again: Why would any white woman – any woman at all – vote for that man?

(Black women did not vote for that man.)

I think they’re angry, I answered.

I think they have a deep, seething, simmering anger that they don’t even know they have.

I think they are furious about the world and their situation but they live in a space where they are not allowed to acknowledge that fury.

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My friend J’s mother, who is in her early 70s, is envious of J. She is envious that J has had opportunities that she herself did not have. Her envy takes the form of anger at J, even though J is not the one at fault.

Her anger should be directed at the system, at sexism, at misogyny, at the patriarchy.

But that would upset her entire world order.

It’s easier to be angry at her daughter.

Mr T didn’t believe me that a woman could be angry at another woman.

I had to admit to him that sometimes, I get angry at young women who are doing cool things that were never an option for me.

I get angry that they have all these opportunities.

And then I unpack my anger.

And I realize what I really am is envious. I want what they have.

But wanting what they have shouldn’t mean I wish that them not to have it.

And when I look past that envy, I can convert it into anger at the system and gratitude that young women – at least for now – have it better than I had it.

But it takes work!

And part of that work is admitting that I am ashamed that my first reaction is anger and envy instead of gratitude and joy for them.

I truly don’t want them to go through the crap that my friends and I went through when we were girls and young women.

The next step is even harder – the step of realizing that my anger is actually at the system that wants to keep women from having equal rights and access. Because once you identify the true cause of the problem – well, you have to do something about it, don’t you?

You have to try to change the system.

And that takes work. And possibly alienating people in your life who don’t want any challenge to the current system because it serves them so well.

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I met a young woman who is getting her PhD in history and whose mission is to bridge the gap between evangelicals and the world.

Raised in an evangelical environment, she was homeschooled and wanted to learn everything when she finally got to college.

“I didn’t know about the Civil War when I got to A&M,” she said. “I was like Tara Westover, raising my hand and asking, ‘What’s that?'”

“The only thing I knew how to do was read and write. I didn’t know math or science. So I majored in English.”

She understands why evangelicals think they need to build bunkers and why they think the world is going to end soon and that understanding might help her reach them.

“I try to help people who are homeschooled understand that they are being lied to,” she said.

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Jill Duggar, one of the million children of that couple in Arkansas, says the same thing in her memoir. She realized that her father and the religious cult to which he belongs had lied to her.

That realization cost her connection with her family and her entire world. She and her parents were estranged for years.

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Saying the truth out loud is dangerous.

It’s easier to hide. It’s safer.

I thought being compared to a man was the highest honor

My grad school boyfriend – who asked my friend Deb out right after I left for a semester abroad may he forever be unhappy – used to praise me by saying I wasn’t like other girls.

“You think like a man!” he said approvingly.

I would smile and preen when I heard him say that.

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(You would think Deb would be a Former Friend after that, but months later, after he had ditched both of us, we were thrown together for some reason and started comparing notes and discovered he had lied to both of us, including using the same damn exact lines on each of us.

We decided HITA and restored our friendship, which is now decades strong.

I don’t know what happened to him.)

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“You think like a man!”

What does that even mean?

I did have the sense to ask him that question, as I knew even then, I thought the way I thought. Like – how could I think like a man? How does a man think that is so different from a woman? Is thinking connected to X and Y chromosomes?

He answered something like how I was direct and focused and logical.

I took it as a compliment, not interrogating him or myself further.

Male is the standard, right? It’s the lofty goal to which we all aspire.

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In my first job after college – at a Forbes 100 company, women were in competition with each other.

It wasn’t just the ceiling that was glass.

It was the entire building.

The entire city.

To move up, you had to kill the queen and replace her, as there was no room for more than one woman at any level of power.

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I realize now that this was completely the corporate strategy – indeed, a strategy used throughout history: divide the minority group and pit them against each other rather than their uniting to fight the true oppressor.

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We women never seem to realize how much power we actually have.

When my friend Denise was a medical resident, she worked in a free clinic in a poor neighborhood. She would see teenage girls who were sexually active but not using any kind of birth control.

She would beg them to at least use condoms.

The girls would tell her that if they asked their boyfriends to use condoms, the boyfriends wouldn’t have have sex with them.

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I lied.

I totally know what happened to the grad school boyfriend. He married a college professor – who actually looks like a really nice person – I wonder if she knows he’s a jerk – and he never reached his career dreams hahahaha.

If I saw him today, I would tell him, “No I don’t think like a man. I think like a woman because I am a woman. I am totally like other women. And we’re focused and logical and we’re done with your sexist BS.”

Not really.

I’m a chicken.

I would ignore him and hope he didn’t recognize me.

But I would roll my eyes and think to myself that he’s an idiot and I dodged a bullet.

Haven’t Rich White Men suffered enough?

The new president has ordered that government DEI programs be halted and has overturned LBJ’s executive order on affirmative action.

That is, the new president has taken action to ensure that women and minorities stay in our rightful places while Rich White Men can get back into their places.

Not like Rich White Men aren’t already running everything.

Not because the entire infrastructure of the entire damn world is set up to benefit them.

But because they are clearly the most qualified.

The smartest.

The most competent.

The hardest working.

The best of the best.

That is what they think.

They think they have what they have because of merit.

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So if DEI means nothing more than unqualified women and minorities are put into positions for which they are not qualified and where they would fail, why would Rich White Men even care?

After all, if they truly are the cream, they will rise to the top no matter what.

Right?

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Why are they so scared?

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They know.

They know that they do not deserve what they have.

They know their rich fathers bought their way into an Ivy and then introduced them to their rich friends who hired them and promoted them beyond their competence because well, Rich White Men want to pee next to other Rich White Men at the office and at the club and at anyplace, really.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they wouldn’t even be able to get a job at a 7-11.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they would never have had the grit and tenacity to improve their circumstances.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they would be nothing.

They know that they are not very smart and that they are lazy and that everything – EVERYTHING – they have – the power, the shiny objects, the bootlickers – is only because they were born to a rich father.

They know they are pathetic losers.

And they are desperate to hide that truth not just from the rest of us but from themselves.

They know.

(Is “go home” bad? Because I like being home)

At the grocery store, a woman and I stared across a space that was too small for both of us at once.

I stopped and gestured her to go.

She scurried and apologized.

“You’re allowed to take up space!” I told her.

She shook her head and answered, “Not too much.”

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I want to take up space.

I am so tired of the expectation that I should be small. That I am not allowed to consume space. That I should subordinate my needs to those of others.

I’m done.

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Mr T and I argue about this when we are walking. He maintains a hyperawareness of his surroundings, including what’s behind him.

If someone is walking behind us, he will squeeze over so that person can pass.

I refuse to think about who’s walking behind us.

If I am driving, I need to be aware not just of what’s in front of me and to the side of me but also behind me, but walking?

No.

The person behind me can do what I do when I am behind someone and want to pass: She can say, “Excuse me.”

But I am not going to live my life anticipating and reacting to what someone else might want.

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We were on the London Underground from the airport to town. The coach was getting more and more full, but the young man across us had a backpack on one seat and his legs sprawled open so wide that he took up a total three seats.

Nobody asked him to pull in his legs so they could sit. Or to move the backpack.

I probably would not have asked, either. For one, it was a foreign country and I didn’t know what the rules were, but also, this was 15 years ago when I had not reached Woman of a Certain Age Who No Longer Gives a Shit stage.

(I love this stage.)

I watched in fascination as new passengers boarded and stood rather than say anything to this scowling jerk.

I used to stand instead of asking someone to move a coat or bag on a bus seat or at the airport.

No more.

Now I (politely) ask the person to move the item so I can sit.

The purpose of a seat is for human butts, not for bags.

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I also have reached the stage of Saying Something to the seatsavers on Southwest Airlines.

Southwest does not assign seats. You board by group. There is no saving of seats. If you are in Group A and your spouse is Group C, you probably won’t sit together.

Yet people save seats.

Last time I was on Southwest, a woman near the front had her bag in the seat. I asked her to move it because I just didn’t feel like walking all the way to the back.

She refused, telling me she was saving the seat.

I didn’t care enough to fight, but I did say out loud that there is no saving on Southwest.

It was a moral victory.

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And as I write this, I think about Patriarchy Chicken, which I started playing years ago.

I wrote about it years ago.

When I was searching for the post, this one also came up: Another “Go Big or Go Home.”

Looks like I have a one-track mind.

Looks like I am still angry about this issue.

They lied to me. They lied to all of us.

Why did my high-school boyfriend, Shep, a white male raised in what I presume was a middle-class family, and I turn out so differently?

I admit it’s not like we were soulmates or anything. We dated for a few weeks and that dating consisted of going to see “Animal House,” spending an evening at a Panamanian casino (I borrowed a blue cotton sweater from a friend and I think I spilled something on it – I am praying that I got it cleaned before I returned it to her), and necking during lunch.

He broke up with me right before the prom and asked a girl from my gym class instead.

Wait. Did he even break up with me? I don’t even remember.

Anyhow he and his buddies spent prom night in a Panamanian jail. I don’t know why. Speeding, maybe?

He was not a catch, that’s for sure. (But he was a very good kisser.)

So maybe our paths always diverged. But we share some pretty significant background (dictatorships, colonialism) that, once examined, leads – or at least it led me – to interrogate what I was taught as a kid and to adjust my opinions.

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I’m trying hard not to posit that I am somehow superior and more enlightened and that I now know All The Stuff, but I think I can safely say that someone who votes for a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government and who thinks vaccines are bad is perhaps not a deep thinker.

Hence I will posit that I am, indeed, superior to an anti-vax felon voter.

I will also say that life and education is a journey and as much as I have already realized that I was so, so wrong about so many things, it’s possible that I will be wrong again.

If I am wrong, I will admit it and adjust my behavior, as I note in this post:

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Here’s the thing.

I have come to realize that so much of what I was taught in school is a lie.

Maybe not a deliberate misstating of the truth, but man did they leave out a lot of facts.

For instance, I didn’t know until a few years ago – despite an entire year of Texas history in 7th grade – that the Texas fight for independence from Mexico was because Mexico had outlawed slavery and the Texans said hell no you will take our slaves from our cold dead hands.

The Mexicans were the good guys in that war, y’all.

I was taught that the US was empty and that the land was there for the taking, not that it *had been emptied* by the genocide of about 90% of the population thanks to the European importation of disease plus deliberate relocations and killings.

I was taught that there were three races and that they were separate and distinct and different.

I was not taught what a sundown town was.

I was not taught what redlining was.

I was not taught that the GI Bill, which is how my father was able to afford to go to college, was not available to Black veterans after WWII.

I was taught – by inference – that only men did important things. The only reason I knew who Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisolm, Wilma Rudolph, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Blackwell were was because the base chapel had a small library with a shelf of biographies of famous women. I did not learn about these women in school. They were not part of the curriculum.

My college art history textbook, by HW Janson (in the image above) did not have a single woman artist in it when I took the class.

I didn’t know the details about abortion. I was raised to believe it was pure evil. I didn’t know how many pregnancies went bad. How many women were raped.

Or, even more importantly, how so many people want to see women controlled and trapped and want to take away our power to make probably the most critical decision we can make in our lives, which is if and when to have children.

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I didn’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know.

But.

Now I know I didn’t know.

Which means now I am responsible for knowing. For educating myself.

And that’s where I think Shep and I diverge.

Either he’s never realized he doesn’t know.

Or he knows and doesn’t care.

Because the world as it is?

It suits him.

Maybe sometimes it’s better not to know

Did you know that if you look up someone on LinkedIn – let’s say an old boyfriend from years and years ago, that person can see who looked him up?

So if you have had no contact with a boyfriend from decades ago but are just a curious, NORMAL person who wants to know how the story ends and you do a normal person lookup on LinkedIn, you could possibly look like a deranged stalker?

That’s why, I discovered, you change your settings.

And it’s why you start with Facebook for looking people up because there’s not a way to know who has looked at your profile.

And that’s how you discover that your (very short time, as you go through a short list of names) high school boyfriend has turned out to be an antivaxxer trumper.

How does that happen?

How does it happen that someone who you thought you knew – who seemed reasonable? – is actually kind of – stupid? (Someone you spent a lot of time kissing behind the portable classroom at lunch?)

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Shep – not his real name of course – Shep is not the first person in my life to turn out to be a trumper. I have several trumper relatives, including one who won’t get vaxxed because she thinks the vaccine will change her DNA.

Oh and she has a gay daughter who is married to another woman but yet, she voted for trump.

You don’t get to choose your relatives.

But what does it say about you when your friends are trumpers?

In my defense, this was in high school.

I paid no attention to politics back then. The only thing I knew was that the Panama Canal treaty negotiations meant that we had bomb scares at school, which meant we got out of class, and that the school bus drivers would go on strike, which also meant no school.

I was very happy with the situation.

This was also when Archbishop Romero was assassinated, just a few hundred miles away.

The staging for the recovery effort from the Jonestown murders happened just two blocks from where I went to swim practice every afternoon.

My neighbor flew the helicopter that took the Shah of Iran and his gold-laden suitcases from somewhere on the Panama mainland to the island of Contadora.

We lived in a dictatorship!

I was in the middle of world events but I never talked to Shep about them. They were background noise, issues my dad and his colleagues were dealing with. Why would I talk about my father’s work with my boyfriend?

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Shep no longer lives in the Panama Canal Zone – he moved to Texas for college, I think, and stayed there.

I also went to college in Texas and stayed there for years until being forced to move for a job.

I wonder how two people with such similar backgrounds – our big divergence is that he had lived in the Canal Zone his entire life and I was there only because my father was in the military and happened to be stationed there – could end up with such different mindsets.

How does someone who has lived in a dictatorship and knows the dangers embrace a presidential candidate who says he wants to be a dictator? How does someone who grew up in a country run by dictators write something like this in 2024?

 If you wanted to board a plane, eat at a restaurant, enter the country (legally), have a job, etc you must be vaccinated. Same thing for wearing masks. I know this is all in the past now but we should never forget the tyranny of our government or we’ll go down the same road again.

How does someone who saw the inequalities created by a colonial power vote for someone who wants to increase inequality?

Although maybe if you are on the colonial power side, you think these inequalities are OK.

And maybe if you are a white man in Texas, you think things are OK.

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Were there signs? Maybe. Who knows? We were kids.

But damn there are red flags all over the place now.

Shep shared this photo on his page last week.

He’s not talking about trump.

I don’t think I will be sending him a friend request.

Stay healthy we have work to do

This sweet boy is Duke. We are fostering Duke while he recovers from an upper respiratory infection. He is mellow and relaxed and just wants to sit in the box in the basement, although part of it might be because he is sick. He’s a stray, but was clearly someone’s beloved pet – he’s affectionate and lets me brush his belly. But he feels crummy because through no fault of his own, he is sick.

Don’t get sick!

I know you are all already vaccinated against covid, including all the boosters, and that you do not do stupid things like fly without a mask. (We mask anytime we’re indoors around other people – we’re not messing around.)

But did you know that because of certain stupid anti-vaxxers, who have decided that it’s not just covid but all vaccines that are bad, that we are seeing a resurgence of whooping cough?

That’s right. That disease that you thought existed only in novels set in Victorian England has returned. And it’s highly contagious. And it’s miserable. And even if you’re vaccinated, you can get it. (But presumably, it’s less bad if you’re vaxxed.)

It’s so contagious that when my friend’s 7th grade son got it, the doctor prescribed preventive antibiotics for the entire family.

PREVENTIVE ANTIBIOTICS!

You’re thinking, “But I was vaccinated against whooping cough/pertussis as a child! Hasn’t that disease been eradicated?”

We would laugh at the idea of a resurgence of old-timey diseases if we were living with normal, intelligent people.

But — you know.

Those People.

Anyhow, check to make sure you’re current on your DTAP (Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis). Who knew that it was something you needed boosted? But you do.

And be thankful that you are probably (if you are reading this) among the people vaccinated for smallpox. Who knows what craziness this new administration will unleash?

When will this senseless reign of terror against wealthy, privileged white men end?

What are we even supposed to do about these CEOs?

They don’t feel safe.

Every day, they’re afraid to go to work.

There’s nobody between them and a shooter.

Not even a substitute teacher, standing behind the door with a pair of scissors in her hand.

When will we do something about their pain?

HOW MANY CEOs MUST WE LOSE BEFORE WE ACT?

Maybe we could teach them to hide in a coat closet?

Maybe we could teach them to dial 911?

Maybe we could install metal detectors at the entrances?

Maybe we could have active shooter drills in the office?

Maybe we could arm the administrative assistants?

Every CEO is precious to someone and certainly cannot be replaced.

We cannot let them win

All I can think about is when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile in the ’90s – shortly after Pinochet had stepped down from being dictator but was still wielding power as a senator for life – and a Chilean woman told me that when Pinochet was running things, there was no rape – that women could walk the streets safely.

I just looked at her and started laughing.

No rape?

In a dictatorship that disappeared people?

Yes there was rape, I told her. There was rape. It just wasn’t reported.

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There was a movie years ago about a military coup. The first thing the rebels did was take over the radio station. (This was before the internet.) The most important thing for their coup to succeed was to be able to control the narrative.

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I think about these things when I read the sanewashing of that man in major media.

Don’t let them fool you. Read these wise women:

• Rebecca Solnit
• Heather Cox Richardson
• Amy Siskind

I also like

• The Guardian
• ProPublica
• Mississippi Free Press

(These organizations can all use your donations, BTW.)

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I asked a man in the Aldi parking lot if he was registered to vote.

He told me he had stayed out of politics for the past few years. “They don’t never do anything for people like me,” he said. “Look at these streets. Look how bad they are. My car gets ruined and I have to pay to fix it.”

I told him about how the Republicans had put such hard restrictions on the cities’ ability to tax that public services were underfunded. I said that I understood why he was frustrated. And then I said that we can’t quit – that if we don’t vote, the people who put that man into office will win.

And that’s what I have for now – I will not let them win anything else. And if they do, it will not be because I didn’t do everything I could.

The most important qualification for most jobs in America is a white penis

I’m taking a few weeks off to mourn.

But we will not stop fighting.

It took almost a century for our right to have a voice in our own government to be recognized.

Sometimes the fight is long.