Fencesitter sparks hateful backlash from the right

[Lenona]

That's right. Just for not having kids YET.

As one person said, she was respectful in the video and didn't put anyone down - but she's getting hate anyway.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/was-childfree-woman-enjoying-saturday-came-culture-warriors-rcna103581

This caught my eye - that is, the last sentence:

...He, in this case, is Matt Walsh, a conservative media provocateur who posted Mazur’s video on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to his more than 2.4 million followers, stating that she is “too stupid to realize how depressing this is.” Other conservative pundits piled on. Some on the left came to her defense. Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, argued with former Trump adviser Stephen Miller about it...


So I looked that up that debate. Btw, when I clicked another link, it turned out that one of her defenders was...David Hogg.

Anyway, here's the (short) debate.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/stephen-miller-mark-cuban-childless-woman-debate/

And if I could be there when Walsh or Miller made their nasty comments about Mazur's pleasure in watching TV, I would say: "you know, you're right. She SHOULDN'T be spending her days on watching TV. She should be reading lots of good books and improving her mind!"

I'd love to see their faces...

[Lenona]

Well, a national affairs correspondent at The Nation - Jeet Heer - spotted Matt Walsh's comment too.

But the problem is bigger than some people think, as Heer points out. (Oddly, I didn't see any comments. Katha Pollitt's column has a place for comments.)

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/taylor-swift-single-women-right-wing/

"The Right’s Latest Target: Unmarried Women
"Archconservatives find single women threatening, and they’re trying to browbeat them into submission."

Excerpts:

...Swift released her first album in 2006, before she turned 17. At 33, she’s become a media juggernaut comparable to Elvis in the 1950s, the Beatles in the ’60s, or Michael Jackson in the ’80s. And like those earlier celebrities, Swift has become a divisive cultural figure. Her legion of fans—a predominantly female group of enthusiasts known as “Swifties”—are relentless in attacking any criticism of their idol that they view as unfair.

Swifties now have their work cut out for them, as a mouthy section of the American right, which recently has had doubts about Swift, has decided to target the singer-songwriter with invective. In early September, The Federalist posted an article by Mark Hemingway titled “Taylor Swift’s Popularity Is a Sign of Societal Decline.” The article is largely taken up with invidious comparisons between Swift and male musicians like Paul McCartney and Tom Petty, arguing that Swift is narrowly and narcissistically focused on breakup songs about her former boyfriends.

Hemingway’s article enjoyed renewed attention in late September, when Swift was rumored to be dating the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, himself unpopular on the right for appearing in an ad urging viewers to get their Covid booster. The Federalist’s CEO, Sean Davis, posted Hemingway’s article on Twitter with the blurb “Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks.” Roger Kimball, the editor and publisher of The New Criterion, a cultural journal that claims the poet T.S. Eliot as part of its intellectual lineage, felt compelled to elevate the discourse by adding, “Also, she is homely.” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA tweeted, “What will break Kelce’s heart first? The COVID shot or Taylor Swift?” Strikingly, the anti-Swift comments are all bullying, designed to insult rather than persuade.


...As Edith Olmsted noted in The New Republic, Swift’s Instagram advocacy on September 17, National Voter Registration Day, led to a 115 percent increase in 18-year-olds registering to vote compared to the same day a year ago. “Swift’s call for her fans to register to vote was distinctly nonpartisan,” Olmsted wrote, “but it’s the youngest voting cohort that’s demonstrated the sharpest opposition to Republicans at the polls in recent elections—so much so that conservatives have increasingly called for the voting age to be raised and for polling places to be removed from college campuses.”

More unmarried women voting poses a particular threat to the GOP. In 2020, a whopping 63 percent of single women voted for Biden over Trump. This is bad news for the Republican Party, since the number of married people is declining. The share of households headed by married couples declined from 55 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2020.

In his broadside against Swift, Hemingway made a telling reference to a far less famous victim of right-wing browbeating, the podcaster Julia Mazur. Hemingway compared Swift’s lyrics to Mazur’s message in a viral TikTok, which he paraphrased as “it’s great being 29 and unmarried and childless.” Others on the right attacked her in much nastier terms. Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire complained...

..Comments like this led Zach Kessel of National Review to warn his fellow right-wingers not to conflate “conservative” with “jerk.”

Kessel’s observation is worth pursuing. In the age of Trump, conservatism has indeed become jerkism—a politics of pure browbeating and intimidation. In the sordid world of pickup artists—professional misogynists who continue to have an increasing influence on the right—the idea is often promoted that women are best controlled by “negging.” In other words, by constant insults that destroy their self-worth. The right is trying to neg strong, confident women like Swift and Mazur, who are simply trying to enjoy life....

[Lenona]

Of course that would piss off the anti-choicers because
they are less about pro-life than about female
promiscuity,

Me:

I kind of doubt that.

(Mind you, I REALLY hate to say that.)

The reason I'm saying it is that, again, in highly conservative/religious communities, young men and women alike who refuse to find mates AND refuse to become religious or conservative missionaries, tend to get treated very badly even if they don't HAVE sex lives. (Unfortunately, liberals aren't too kind to heterosexual men who refuse to get married either. Liberals tend to forget that if women have the right to stay single, so do men.)

What's more, if a man and a woman are both over 60 and having a premarital (not adulterous) affair, unless they're well-known as pillars of their church, are the conservative church leaders really likely to "out" them as sinners?

Most of the time, I suspect, the leaders don't really care about those couples. What they ARE opposed to is young people taking control of their own futures by not having babies, whether through abortion, birth control or celibacy.

Childfree singles often have more money - and they vote. Many people see childfree WOMEN, with their political power, as more terrifying than childfree men - but who knows why. Both have the power to change society greatly, as the childfree Ralph Nader did. (As anyone knows, he's had no shortage of enemies in Big Business.)