MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: The far-right fantasy of women in pain
You asked, and we're bringing back our briefings. Today: Why Trump wants to make pregnancy debilitating again, Judith Butler on beating fascism, and guitarist Mary Halvorson at the outer limits
Hey, folks. Many of you will remember the experiment we did some time ago, offering you regular short briefings. You asked, and we’re bringing them back, with some tweaks. The idea behind them is to boil a complex world down to a few essentials (a newsy item, a step-back reflection, and a diversion) and help you make sense of things, while feeling less crazy and alone. If you value this work we do, step up to become a supporting subscriber today. — AG
THE GIST: Tylenol, pain, and women as vessels
This week, President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made their big announcement about autism. They blamed the ubiquitous pain reliever acetaminophen, based on some creative misreading of a few debunked studies. But why? Sure, these guys and everyone around them are steeped in conspiracy theories, and they’ve fired all the scientists who could tell them otherwise. But there’s a simpler explanation for why they chose this particular target: As the author and philosopher Kate Manne writes, it comes down to the misogyny at the heart of the MAGA cause:
[F]or the likes of Trump and RFK and the MAHA movement as a whole, women’s suffering during pregnancy isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s the proper order of things. It’s natural. And all the better if the ways we suffer in pregnancy and childbirth and subsequently post-partum take women out of the games historically reserved for rank male dominance. That’s sexism and misogyny, and the patriarchal protectorate for you.
Pain medication frees women to do and be many things while pregnant. Without it, women can be locked into being what the right desires: vessels for the making of others, exclusively so. The pain is the point.
BIGGER PICTURE: Then they came for Judith Butler…
The University of California revealed that it had turned over information on 160 faculty, staff, and students to the Trump administration for supposed involvement in antisemitic activity — i.e., protesting the war in Gaza. Few of the names have been made public, but one of them is the prominent philosopher and critic Judith Butler, who happens to be Jewish. Last year Butler spoke to us about how the left can beat back the present authoritarian onslaught by taking people’s fears more seriously:
[M]ost people do live with an enormous fear about the future of our shared world, our shared earth, whether it's climate change or perpetual war, escalating war, profound and intensifying differences in wages and in the security of work…
And they name it a certain way. They'll say, "Oh, the migrants, or gender," or, "Oh, it's race," or, "It's the great replacement," or they're given all kinds of accounts for why they are experiencing fear and insecurity in the world…
What account are we on the left giving them? Do we acknowledge the fears with which they're living? Do we give them another interpretive framework?…
I think we have to be able to perhaps identify with the fears that people are living with and build from there so that they don't come to think that, "Oh, gender is what's destroying the family and my way of life.”
SOMETHING DIFFERENT: Chasing the future with Mary Halvorson
Avant-jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson has been a musician’s musician for a while now — she’s shared bandstands with pretty much every forward-thinking improviser for the last few years. Her last few projects have highlighted the fact that she’s a great composer of deep, lovely tunes that serve as inspiring springboards for improvisation. This week, Halvorson got her chamber jazz ensemble Amaryllis together at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York, to show off some of the latest from her expanding songbook.
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What account are we on the left giving them? Do we acknowledge the fears with which they're living? Do we give them another interpretive framework?…--> YES to this. If we could genuinely acknowledge the fears of the right AND the left and clearly place the blame for most of these fears where it truly lies - unchecked corporate power, harm, and gaslighting - wouldn't that help? Especially if we pair it with pushing for community connection, organizing, and power as a counter to corporate power (plus life-giving in its own right!). This is the movement I am trying to be a part of with GASLIT (www.gaslitbycorporations.com) but I am very curious about folks' thoughts on whether this is a narrative that can resonate across communities + whether there is another "account" we on the left could provide that would be more compelling (while still being accurate). Would love your thoughts on this!
Comments unrelated to today’s short and sweet AG post. Stream of consciousness, I guess. I would love to see No Kings day Oct18 to include No King Makers messaging as well. The supreme court’s thuggery created the king. They need to feel the heat. They’ve been flying under the radar with their illegal rulings. NO KING MAKERS! Lets out these thugs.
And another thing…perhaps magical thinking but I don’t think so. What keeps me energized is the thought that Trump is the catalyst for the leapfrogging change this country needs in this moment rather than shuffling slowly toward existential survival. We’ve just been baby baby baby stepping toward renewable energy, gunsense, and all the things that help us all do better when we all do better. This regime has clarified for us how much power oligarchs have and how corporations do not care about human beings. Without Trump, the greater part of our populace would not have thought about this. And we would still be baby-step-shuffling. For me, this is useful thinking and keeps me in the shallow end rather than the deep end.