Does it feel like America hates its women?

BONUS: You should watch All Her Fault on Peacock.

New York, United States. Published on January 24, 2018, Canon, EOS 7D. Free to use under the Unsplash License. Photo by Mirah Curzer.

Today, I just want to sit with the truth that this has been a brutal time for women in America.

What I keep returning to is the quiet tragedy of all these hundreds of thousands of Black women being told, not because they’re incompetent or unqualified or because the economy is bad, but precisely because they were perfected and polished to be the most capable, most qualified versions of themselves that they could be, and then used as pawns in a chess game of politics. Just like misogyny is not an intersection of oppression, it conspires.

But it’s not just Black women. It’s all women. We have now twice elected a man credibly accused of sexual assault, a man found liable in a civil case of battery of a woman, a man who treats women reporters, women voters, and women elected officials as playthings to be mocked. Piggies, garbage, whatever gets the crowd going. And he does it knowing full well that there is a culture that craves that very thing.

(Generative AI)

That same culture has learned to weaponize women, especially on the right: supporting the ambitious ones just long enough for the photo-op and then tossing them aside the second they actually ask for power rather than proximity. Marjorie wants a Senate seat. Elise is looking for a diplomatic post. Instead, they get a front row seat, watching the machine they served eat them up like it did everyone else. It is misogyny with a loyalty clause.

And the psychic toll of all this? Huge. We live in a country where women are told to work twice as hard, be twice as kind, and carry twice the burden, but are passed over by men who wouldn’t know how to write a job application, much less a considerate essay. Yet, we’ve seen other countries, even other authoritarian countries, elect women. Here we have two of the most prepared public servants of modern times, both felled by a man who couldn’t even stop campaigning during his own criminal trial.

And now we have a Secretary of Defense who is accused of sexual misconduct and war crimes in a country where the oppression of women is background noise.

So today, I just want to light a candle. Not just in mourning, but in witness. For every woman whose story was dismissed. For every professional who listened to and played by the rules, only to have the rules change. For every daughter growing up in a world that’s always debating whether or not she’s worthy.

More on that in the weeks to come. I just needed to say it out loud.

I just finished All Her Fault, and I wanted to let you know how satisfied I was to see a woman-centered drama about the quiet wars women wage inside homes dressed up as havens, and how it’s through real, gut-level female friendship that the two lead women can extricate themselves from the hands of the husbands who had slowly and insidiously tried to own them.

The series opens with Marissa (Sarah Snook) arriving to pick up her son from a play date, only to find he is missing and the woman who answers the door doesn’t appear to know who she is. The series is about lying, hiding things, the secrets we keep, and the things we bury. Symbolically, the mystery is a pressure cooker that slowly depicts how deeply the women are enmeshed in marriages that not only fail them but erase them.

(Generative AI)