Some people are smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud.
But then again, some people are also smart enough to know that you really shouldn’t have sex with underage girls once you’re an adult.
And in neither case would one of those people be Congressman Matt Gaetz.
(Ahem) Allegedly.
The human bobblehead from the Florida Panhandle — a guy who allegedly thinks Venmo is a smart way to pay for sex — is one of those guys who’s been failing up his entire life.
And through all of his mediocrity, from drunken college boy to drunken driver, to his stint as a politician, he’s been willing to tell us who he was.
This is a guy who created a point system for sexual conquests while he was a member of the Florida statehouse, with maximum points for bedding married female legislators.
Then, in Congress, he voted against a bill to combat human trafficking and showed nudes of women he’d slept with to his colleagues.
Because in the first case, well, proprietary interests, and in the second, because he’s the emotional equivalent of a 15-year-old boy who just got his first tugger.
But never one to rest on the laurels of his past hits, Gaetz is always looking for a way to ramp up the misogyny, and this week, the Supreme Court provided him with the necessary opening.
After the draft of Justice Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, Gaetz weighed in by asking:
Before plumbing the psychology of the kind of person who says something like this, a few thoughts, please.
First, I cannot believe Gaetz missed the layup here.
I mean, he had the perfect opportunity to make a Melissa Etheridge reference or add something about the women braiding their armpit hair, and he totally flubbed it.
Oh well, I guess the beer pong game was too intense for him to really think it through and maximize the frat boy snark before hitting “post.”
Second, the folks having the most challenging time on dating sites are not progressive women. It’s conservative guys. And they’re whining about it like the overgrown man-babies they are.
They’re the ones joining incel chat rooms and moaning to their gamer friends about how they can’t get laid.
And finally, as for the women who are probably the most concerned about the right to control their reproduction? They’re not lonely-heart “cat ladies” sitting alone every night but women who are decidedly having sex.
They’re the ones who are angriest right now.
Oh, they matched on Bumble, alright.
Probably with some asshole like Matt Gaetz, but who lied about their politics so that a woman would swipe right.
And if you were pregnant thanks to a guy like that, you’d damned sure want options too.
By the way, I said an asshole like Matt Gaetz because Gaetz himself would never be caught dead on Bumble.
You have to be 18 to be on there.
. . .
Now, as to what Gaetz’s tweet reveals.
A politician is rarely this plain-spoken. For that, we can thank Matt Gaetz, I guess, even though it probably wasn’t transparency that led him to offer up the thought so much as utter contempt for women as a group.
Gaetz and most right-wing men prefer women with only the bare minimum education.
Enough to know when to stay in their place, enough to plan meals for when their man gets home, but not enough to have options when that man decides to bang a 17-year-old in a hotel or does too much blow.
What does it mean, one wonders, to be “over-educated?”
I mean, other than having finished Junior year of high school, or as Matt Gaetz likes to call it: “a woman’s sexual peak.”
More to the point, would anyone ever say a man was over-educated?
Of course not. Only for women is “too much” education seen as a problem.
More precisely, it’s intimidating to insecure men like Gaetz and other MAGA-bros, for whom it becomes an immediate turn-off.
They don’t want to be with a woman who knows as much as they do (or more), who can out-argue them, or who might, God forbid, out-earn them.
They don’t want to be with a woman who doesn’t need them.
They want women who are dependent.
It makes them feel powerful and virile, even though holding on to someone with no other options isn’t exactly an alpha move.
Right-wing guys want women to whom they can come home at night and from whom they will receive uncritical adoration, no matter what they do.
They joke about cat ladies.
Meanwhile, what they’re looking for isn’t a woman at all. It’s a puppy.
. . .
With his tweet, Gaetz sent a clear bat signal from the darkest recesses of the reactionary psyche. He is broadcasting openly what virtually all right-wing men think.
Women are to be subordinate.
They are better off without degrees, let alone advanced ones.
They are better off just following the lead of men and doing what we say.
This is why such men think nothing of telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.
This is why they think nothing of men like Donald Trump admitting to sexual assault.
Or rather, they think about it quite a bit. They think it’s cool.
This is why MAGA men are the most dangerous and destructive members of our society, and why the rest of us — including those conservatives who genuinely respect women as equals — must stop them and consign their way of thinking to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.
And make sure predators like Gaetz end up in prison where they do.
I mean, if they’re guilty of course. Which, ya know…
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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.
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