four more years! (I hope!)

[metaphortunate]

WHEW.

Looks like it got called while we were brushing the baby's teeth and putting him to bed. Well, you know how it is. Before election: feed baby, do laundry. After election: feed baby, do laundry.

And it looks like all the pro-rape guys lost, which makes me very happy.

It did start me wondering, though. That fact that you can't say the pro-rape Republican candidate lost, you have to specify which one. Now, as you know, the GOP ran a female candidate in the last presidential election, and they got their asses handed to them. I wonder if the party made a policy decision that trying to attract the female vote, or claim to be aligned with women's interests, or whatever the fuck they were trying to do with Sarah Palin, was a fool's game, and that this year, they were going to deliberately say the hell with women's concerns, we are going to demonize women and court only the male vote.

We'll know soon if anything like that happened, because if so, there's probably a lot of frustrated Republican strategists vowing tonight to never let any candidate mention another "women's issue" again. "Fuck it! You can't be for them! You can't be against them! From now on we're just going to pretend women don't even goddamn exist!"

Comments

[phi]

You forgot Linda "Emergency Rape" McMahon who also lost.

[veejane]

I would say "Eh??" but I'm not really surprised.

I believe the pro-rape candidacies springing up around the GOP are instances of unrestrained id rather than strategy. Crazy Eyes Bachmann, okay, she might be strategically out there, but Akin seemed to be blurting a deep-seated conviction that he'd been strictly told to keep secret, like a four-year-old who's in on a surprise birthday party.

I mean, one of the big, icky draws of Sarah Palin was her MILF factor, so.

[amaebi]

And that would be a change. Uh... :D

[metaphortunate]

Yo, maybe that's their strategy. Politically attack women so strongly that if they go back to just pretending we don't exist, we breathe a sigh of relief!

[jae]

I don't know. I guess I look at it from the other direction. I mean, think about what this means for future U.S. elections. It means that if you have horrifying ideas about rape and women's rights, you now have to keep those ideas to yourself if you want to have any hope of getting in. If you are a Neanderthal about rape, you have to pretend not to be. Even in the most Republican of Republican areas. Anywhere. There's nowhere you can march down the street and proudly proclaim your Neanderthal-ness.

Rape issues have now become a sacred cow in U.S. politics. This is a glorious, glorious thing, and it says so much about the U.S. and its political culture. I am totally impressed.

-J

[metaphortunate]

Well, I hope you're right. I really, really, really hope you're right! But I will wait to see what happens in the next few years before I conclude that you are right. One swallow doesn't make a summer, and all that.

[jae]

No, of course. And of course all the Neanderthals are still there, and they're still Neanderthals. But the message was clear and decisive in this election: while Americans might be willing to accept other kinds of Neanderthal-like behaviour from people running for office, you had better watch everything you say about women or else they will come and get you. The Neanderthals will heed that next time, if they want to win (and they do).

-J