Even Karl Rove threw in the towel today. Everyone but the misogynist who-would-be Chief and his entrenched minions see the hand writing on the wall. The axe will fall on November 8 and the United States of America will have its first woman president.
This will be an historic occasion, but that is putting it mildly, like saying that butter tastes nice. This will be a ground shaking, paradigm breaking, future making occasion. The last time we saw anything like it was…the last time we elected a new president.
When the United States elected Barack Obama, most of the nation grew up a little. Unfortunately, the election of the first black man to the highest office in the land served to lure out every right wing supremacist hiding under a rock and convinced a fair few who had walked amongst us to cast off their moderate mantle to go full tilt racist.
So, what will electing the first woman to the highest office in the land mean for our nation?
Politics aside, I expect that, like Obama’s election drawing out every white power troll, electing a woman will draw out the most latent, deep seated misogynists. However, unlike the election of a black man to the Presidency, I expect that the election of a woman is going to have serious impacts inside many of our households.
Unless you have a single household or a same sex household, you have a heterosexual household which means there is a man and a woman residing therein. For the women hating/fearing trolls, the election of a woman to the White House is going to be just too much for them to bear. While the ugliness of racism doesn’t often play itself out in the interpersonal relationships inside our homes, the ugliness of misogyny does. When Hilary Clinton is elected, that ugliness will become exponential behind many, many closed doors.
You don’t have to practice divorce and family law to know men who treat their wives like dirt. We all know them and know of them. But how about the multitude that we don’t know? How about those who carry on publicly as though nothing is amiss, but behind closed doors, the households are run like a prison camp with allowances allocated, friends alienated, choice of jobs forbidden, permission to leave the home required and sexual service demanded? Our Nation already has a crisis of family violence. What will happen when those men who, until now, were content to lord themselves over their women now feel provoked to exert their dominance in ever more expressive and sinister ways?
The violence, the venom that we see spouted at the woman who will be President will most certainly be turned against the most vulnerable, those wives of these hateful, weak, insecure men.
Racial victims of hate and venom and violence are largely confined to the public sphere. They can be seen by all; they can be videoed by bystanders. However, every woman-hating crackpot that has a wife has a ready made target, kept behind closed doors and drawn curtains. No one is the wiser.
It’s all about the abuse of power. But this time, power won’t just be abused on the street corner. The Nation won’t hear the last cries of “I can’t breathe.” This time the power will be abused at the dinner table and in the bed room, the muffled cry crushed under a compressed pillow. This time, the power will be abused in horrid, now private ways that will make every good man and woman cry out against the wretched inhumanity.
Will our Nation rise to the occasion, fight the injustice, decry the vulgarity of the misogynists’ philosophy? Or will our Nation remain mired in another false, “fair and balanced” assessment of violence wrought by those who cannot grow up at all.
People get ready; the onslaught against women is coming.