Taylor Swift's "Childless Cat Lady" endorsement of Kamala Harris exposes what MAGA men fear most [View all]

[ismnotwasm]

This is a pretty good article. It struck me, because I remember ten years ago, twenty, thirty. I remember ten years ago here on DU, when we were infested with “mens rights activists” —the precursor to the likes of Andrew Tate or Charlie Kirk or JD Vance.

I’ve been a feminist for many, many years and to see articles like this, basically saying “fuck the male gaze” is amazing. You know, we all walk in beauty. Some of it is of the farm. Some of it is of the military. Some of it is of the sciences. Some of it is youth or mothers or aging. We are reaching toward presidency, yet again. It looks like we will make it. Women are everywhere. As they should be. A long time coming. Such a long time. Hell no, we are not going back.

There's a flailing quality to this behavior of men lashing out because they can't force women to care what they think. Swift will almost surely wrinkle her nose and say, "ew," of course. But so will most other women.

It wasn't always this way. Even those a mere decade older than Swift can remember how much it was drilled into female heads that we should care for nothing more than male opinion, often with little discernment over what man was offering the opinion. If a man, any man, deigned to render judgment on your looks, your behavior, your waist size, your lifestyle, or the tenor of your voice, there was an expectation that you, as a woman, were to take his opinion seriously. Women's magazines were an endless stream of articles about what men supposedly "liked" and strategies to mold yourself into that form. Men in prestigious publications and TV programs were empowered to offer their behavioral prescriptions for all womankind, and women were expected to apologize for their failure to please the male gaze.

The moment I could feel that tide shifting was probably the Great Vocal Fry Wars of 2013. It started with the standard practice of men opining in public that women, as a group, are Doing It Wrong and must change immediately. Vocal fry is a normal vocal affectation — used by both men and women — where you drop your voice for emphasis. (NPR's Ira Glass does it a lot.) In the 90s, women were castigated for pitching voices "too" high for emphasis. In the 2000s, however, many women went low, instead. Men got mad about that, too. They yelled on social media. They wrote angry emails. They even did podcasts calling women who used low registers for emphasis "repulsive."

Instead of simply bowing their heads and begging for forgiveness, young women revolted. They pointed out, correctly, that they were previously forbidden from going high and now they aren't allowed to go low. They noted that there is no way a woman can talk that won't draw male ire. They concluded that these men don't want women talking at all. And a mass consensus among women began to grow: No one should care what men think. Talk how you like, and stop worrying about the opinions of random men.

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/12/taylor-swifts-childless-cat-lady-endorsement-of-kamala-harris-exposes-what-maga-men-fear-most/