Elisa Mariño
3 min readJun 2, 2021

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I think the ones who get angry is because you are challenging the way they understand the world. I mean, there is a set of beliefs that said something like "women belong in the house. They are inferior. Now they use the word complementary, since it sounds better, but still think women should obey husbands. So "obviously" woman want to marry and have children. For that they need a men who provides for them, so they would find rich men attractive. And since they are the ones who want to marry, they should make all kind of efforts to be liked by men. Looking pretty, be silent but show interest in the men they marry, etc".

So they feel entitled to that perfect wife and when a woman doesn't follow the script, they feel like she is denying their right. Because for them to have a submissive wife that gives them kids, a woman should play the part (and love them or at least pretend she do). Since they like woman for their looks and they prefer younger woman, and many those young woman lean progressive, they are finding more and more difficult to find such wife. So they long for the "good old days" when women needed to marry, because they weren't allowed to have a career and many jobs weren't available to them and even to have a bank account they needed a husband or a father to sing. They rarely think that women back then might no be as happy as the men. Or that those perfect wives have told their daughters and grand daughters to study hard so they can have the opportunities they didn't. And that in a nutshell tell it all. Those women who supposedly had the "perfect life" they try to sell to the young women now, want something better for their daughters, not the same life they had. While the men do want the same for their sons... Interestingly, for all their love for their women, they never have really paid attention to them or their thoughts, never asked them if being a housewife made them happy.

So you rejecting them, is you rejecting the "perfect" life they long for, their parents "perfect" life. It is basically telling that maybe their father loved their mother, but that he lived way betters thanks to denying their mother opportunities. And denying the love of your life opportunities for a better life is not something a good person would do. The line of though it leads to is uncomfortable, so they need to "prove" that you are wrong, crazy, a bitch, envious, not intelligent, or well, whatever thing that makes you a liar/mistaken. Otherwise, they'll be selfish and sometimes even cruel and they want to see themselves as the "good guys". That is also why the conservatives won't see themselves identified in your list. They don't see the connection between denying someone public health insurance and basically condemning them to die if they get cancer and can't afford treatment. They don't see the connection between sending someone back to a country destroyed by the war (that the US might have caused) and condemning them to die. They see themselves as "compassionate christians" because they marched against abortion to "save babies" because in their heads, foetuses are babies, but immigrant babies aren't their responsibility, and the women who seek abortion are murderers even in situations where the foetus doesn't have a brain. And whenever you point out the fallacies in their narrative, they become aggressive, because the implication are "you are not a good person" and that they aren't getting their way this time.

also, the compromise they always talk about, when Trump called people to "come together" si basically progressives sucking up to them. Like the wife who is expected to keep loving her husband even after he hit her (they would call it tough love). Everything has its own internal logic, the problem is that it is based on false premises like women being inferior.

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Elisa Mariño
Elisa Mariño

Written by Elisa Mariño

Fiction is the art to tell lies to show truths. Politics is the art to use truths to tell lies.

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