Oh, Roe. Well, shit.
Did you know that doctors can’t just take organs out of a dead person and use them in the living? The dead person has to have left explicit instructions that their organs can be used that way, or their family has to make that choice. Same with living people. If I need a kidney and Gov. Bill Lee is a match, I can’t force him to give me his kidney, even if he’d be fine after the operation, and even if it would save my life.
We’re about to exist in a world where corpses have more right to decide what happens to their bodies than I do.
It sucks. And I feel especially horrified for all the people who could miscarry and find themselves under investigation. But this is all stuff I’ve been saying for years. Not just me. An ocean of Cassandras who can’t even enjoy our “I told you so” moment because it will be so devastating. And I see us doing all the things we always do. We tell our stories. We express our fears. We try to correct misinformation. We devastate ourselves trying to make others feel compassion for us. It doesn’t work, because they already know.  Our democracy works on compromise and each side giving a little. There really is no compromise between “I should have autonomy” and “No, you shouldn’t.”
But I get it. If you look at everything under attack right now — gay rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, racial minorities’ rights, etc. — there’s a common theme running through all these movements: What would it look like for me to live happily? And the common response to all these movements has been to curtail people’s ability to live in ways that make them happy.
Why? Here’s my theory: Incels are just saying out loud what many white Americans actually feel — that men deserve a hot wife who doesn’t ever ask anything of them and does what she’s told, and if they had that, then they’d be happy, but all these bitches and the men they’d rather date have ruined it for them and thus for all of society. This means anyone who is out here finding ways to live happily outside of prescribed social constructs is threatening to the worldview a lot of white Americans have. They’ve been asked to defer their happiness or completely deny it with the promise that conforming now will bring greater joy later.
Maybe some of these men would rather kiss Mark than Mary, but they feel trapped by the social pressure exerted by conservative white culture. Or maybe they just want to sing in the local choir but that’s “gay.” Or maybe they’d like to have long hair, but what are they, trying to be a woman?
The contradiction between being told to “man up” and squash every nonconformist feeling you have as the brave and proper thing to do, and knowing in your heart that you are too much of a coward to actually do the nonconformist things that might make you happy, has damaged multiple generations of white guys. And frankly, the same for white women. Why do white women hate “sluts” so much? Because a slut is just a woman who prioritizes her own pleasure. And bans on abortion let white women feel like sexually liberated women are getting their proper punishment.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all this came in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. White people who saw the videos of what led to those protests and who then participated in those protests and saw how the authorities reacted came to know viscerally that everything white people are told about the police and how the police interact with non-white people is a lie. And if what white people have been told about this is a lie, what else is a lie?
The thing about so many American societal pyramid schemes being built on a cornerstone of racism is that, if white commitment to racism starts to waver, a lot of other injustices find themselves on shaky ground.
So we have to stop teaching white kids about racism. We have to take back control of women. We have to shove LGBTQ people back in the closet. We must prop up all our bullshit, because God forbid we have to face the fact that so many white people have been conned into foregoing our own happiness for the benefit of our “betters.”
The thing that’s most frustrating about this multifront assault on people’s rights is that it feels nearly impossible to fight against them. Democrats’ great solution is to vote Democratic. OK, well, I’ve been doing that since I was 18 and here we are anyway. I can’t vote harder. Protest? People have been protesting. This is the backlash to the protests.
All these initiatives are designed to keep people trapped and afraid and feeling without options. The way to oppose them is to, metaphorically, open a speakeasy. Be the place where people find comradery and come up with solutions. Protect the weirdos. Be the enemy of these bullies. Be happy, in public, where everyone can see it. Screw them, dear readers.
Metaphorically, of course. Literally, they don’t deserve it.
