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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Over at Salon, Amanda Marcotte expresses enthusiasm for secret ballots because of concerns that husbands are forcing wives to vote for Trump:

It's a useful reminder that secret ballots remain secret, even from nosy spouses. But that doesn't explain why the original tweet from Howell went viral, racking up over 8.5 million views and 14,000 retweets. As the comments under the post suggest, most people were envisioning a specific scenario: Thousands, perhaps millions of women, saddled with Donald Trump-voting jerks for husbands, who yearn to give their vote to Vice President Kamala Harris this November. "I think 'secret voting' by MAGA partners is a more widespread issue than most people think," one woman replied. Another man wrote, "As a poll worker, I have had to deal with husbands and fathers who want to join their wives or daughters in the voting booth to 'make sure they vote the right way.'"

She also thinks it would be good if wives used emotional blackmail to control men's votes:

Lenz said she "ended my marriage after the 2016 election" because "I watched someone who said he loved me vote for someone who had been credibly accused of rape and who spoke about women like they were trash." She implored women who disagree with MAGA husbands to ask themselves, "Why am I married to someone who doesn't respect my choices?"

Oddly enough, there is no mention of the issue posed by absentee ballots. These are the tools by which abusive spouses can use anything from cajoling to emotional abuse to outright violence to dictate the votes of those that reside with them. The only way to make sure this isn't an option is returning to the canonical secret ballot, which is in a voting booth where this is no option to show others who you voted for. Notably, this is a protection against other forms of coercion, such as from employers or caregivers.

Marcotte comes as close as I've seen anyone on the progressive side of things has gotten to acknowledging this problem, but somehow elides the solution to this fundamentally solved problem. Kind of interesting dynamic.

I think what strikes me most about the article is, well, how much it's about nothing? Just genuinely nothing. A friend of Marcotte's wrote something on Twitter that Marcotte found vaguely intriguing as an issue, which sets Marcotte off on a wave of wild speculations (there are a lot of maybes and perhapses in the middle!), and which she actually backs down from repeatedly:

Educating the public about their secret ballot rights is good, but don't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome. [...] Truthfully, I doubt many women want to vote for Harris and hide it from their husbands. Voting behavior, marriage, and identity don't work like that. People tend to be married to people they agree with politically.

But at this point, what remains of the thesis? Marcotte still finds 'the picture of a wife thumbing her nose at her MAGA husband by voting for Harris... arresting'? Okay? But that's... not news, or even a respectable thesis of any kind. That's just Marcotte imagining a thing that she thinks is neat.

...okay?

Good for her?

What's the actual content here? Marcotte really doesn't like the GOP, big shock there, and she has concocted a wholly imaginary fantasy scenario that she herself admits probably isn't going to exist, and written an essay about it?

I know pumping out an essay every week like clockwork must be hard, but still, this is really weak.

I have a friend in the industry. They can be pumping out multiple essays a day. And to be fair, we click on them.

90+% of “news” articles I see are of this form. Someone somewhere said something and now I’m gonna ramble about it a bit and cross-link a bunch of other ramblings.

No wonder ChatGPT seems like it will displace these jobs.

hahaha good ol Amanda Marcotte. I was reading this article today from a link, thought "wow this is some hot garbage," and didn't notice the writer. But when you point it out, I instantly recognize the writing style. I think I've had that experience several times over the years from her writing.

I remember in 2016 there was some talk about a "shy Trump voter" effect, because he kept winning polls but it was hard to find outright supporters of him among "normal" people. There was a reasonable fear that someone might support him, but keep his mouth shut for fear of the social consequences, if your spouse and coworkers were all liberals.

Like you said, it's more of an issue with absentee ballots or vote-by-mail. There, there's no privacy from your spouse, and you can fill them in "together." But I don't see why this effect would go the way Marcotte thinks, with an overbearing partriarch forcing the wife by violence to vote for Trump. It seems more likely to go the other way, with a herridan nagging her beta husband into supporting Kamala Harris.

I have despised Amanda Marcotte since before her tussles with the Scotts. She has always been one of the sleaziest, most intellectually dishonest, and just plain dumb feminist writers emerging from the early 2000s blogging boom, and inexplicably she and Jessica Valenti (almost equally dumb and dishonest) became the most successful.

Outside of anecdotes, it's hard to know how common it is for men to control the votes of wives or other women in their families.

This entire article is premised on something that there is no proof happens at all (in statistically significant numbers). Like, I'm sure there are some households with men who literally tell their wives and daughters how to vote, but the idea that this is such a widespread phenomenon that it might actually change an election seems flatly ridiculous to me.

Exit polling data shows a 12-point gap between how married and unmarried women voted in 2020, but a smaller seven-point gap between how married and unmarried men voted. Still, the differences aren't all up to men forcing their wives to vote for the candidate of their choice. Some are due to age and other demographic differences between married and unmarried people.

Notice how she says "The differences aren't all up to men forcing their wives to vote for the candidate of their choice" as if we should just take it for granted that most married women who vote differently than unmarried women obviously do so because their husbands make them.

There's also a whole range of ways men exert power over women that fall short of outright abuse. Educating the public about their secret ballot rights is good, but don't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome.

Indeed, we shouldn't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome. How does voting work where Marcotte lives, exactly? Every poll I've ever been to had very strict rules about not allowing other people to enter the voting booth with you, not even family members, and no way for an abusive husband to "check" how his wife voted. As others have pointed out, if she's really concerned about this, she should be arguing to do away with mail-in ballots (since such a husband really could force his wife to fill out her ballot "correctly" while he watches), but she won't do that because she's dumb and dishonest.

I don't dislike feminists and feminism as much as many people here, but Amanda Marcotte really comes pretty close to the caricatured archetype of a narcissistic self-regarding man-hating harpy for whom "feminism" means "Everything I do should be celebrated and anything that makes me unhappy should be banned."

I can't remember if it was her or Valenti who wrote the article complaining that she was sad that men no longer wolf-whistled at her, and then made it the Patriarchy's fault that this was a thing that made her sad.

Every poll I've ever been to had very strict rules about not allowing other people to enter the voting booth with you, not even family members

I was allowed in with my parent, when I was in elementary school and being shown how voting worked, but that's not really the same thing.

I don't dislike feminists and feminism as much as many people here, but Amanda Marcotte really comes pretty close to the caricatured archetype of a narcissistic self-regarding man-hating harpy for whom "feminism" means "Everything I do should be celebrated and anything that makes me unhappy should be banned."

I remember reading Salon back in the early 2010s when it was Dan Savage talking about whatever degenerate sex act he wanted to do, and Marcottes style was at odds with the prevailing writing style: angry, hypocritical, and honestly just plain stupid. The columns were bitch sessions about why everything bad that happened to them was the fault of a direct male actor, or something vague that ultimately traced back to an ever-expanding-yet-contradictory definition of 'patriarchy'. More men being bosses of company was the patriarchy, while ISIS was something exotic to be pitied. I just checked and her column on ISIS brides had 7 mentions of 'christian', with a total of 3 for 'muslim' and 'islam' combined.

Sadly, Salon, just like Slate and Vice, ended up ditching edgelord degeneracy in favor of boring self-congratulatory emotional indulgences. Everything is the fault of White Man Patriarchy, and in response to the shittiness of White Man Patriarchy I shall document my self-loathing as I try out a Fitness Bootcamp/wilderness scream session, where I am upset the first friend I made in 10 years (a gay activist) tried to hit on me.

She and Valenti (thats the 'I am no longer hot', and 'I drink male tears' lady) are probably the worst examples of hypocritical, boring and frankly stupid feminists who don't even have the grace to be readable or amusing in their staid rants. I also find that their self-portraits are so far removed from how they look in reality that the hypocrisy is something more to level at them, but there is ample reason to despise them without having to launch snide remarks on their presentation.

Sadly, Salon, just like Slate and Vice, ended up ditching edgelord degeneracy in favor of boring self-congratulatory emotional indulgences.

Hey, maybe they'll launch an advice column of ridiculosity. It's not all bad.

Refinery29 is where you would go for deranged women advice columns. Its still pretty decent, but it used to be alot more amusing when trashy hot messes celebrated semiconsensual sex acts instead of modern situationship bemoaning.

edit: sorry not refinery29, which is basic bitch white girl stuff. reductress is the unhinged goblin woman site, which is about babylonbee level funny. that may be insulting the bee, but i find their top tier hits dont quite make up for their normal trash.

Uh, looking at their front page, are you sure it's not satire? Like Slate advice was and is given earnestly, even if a lot of the people writing in to it were/are almost certainly trolls.

oh, yeah reductress is pure satire. as far as ridiculous advice columns go I am not sure if you can thread the needle of 'sincere advice' and 'funny writing'. if anything some of the reductress goblins give better advice for women than the screeds of salon, but admittedly salon is the lowest bar possible.

Slate was, apparently, giving serious advice during its peak hilarity; think an SJW opening a Dear Abby style column which got flooded with trolls trying to see how awful the LGBT person has to be to make him side against them.

I looked on X if someone asked her about mail in ballots but alas:

Interestingly, this may account for Trump’s softening position on mail in ballots. These would be easier for a patriarch to control, even fill in for the spouse, than a vote in a booth.

Not much else discussion on X though. But on reddit the link exploded and currently has 2700 comments! Of course you have to sort by controversial to get any contrarian opinion.

I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ? I guess it must be or how else can a party ask you to vote?

I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries?

Depends on the state. I think all three of:

  1. anyone can vote in either primary,
  2. independents can choose which primary to vote in (else, you're stuck with your own),
  3. and you can only vote with your own,

exist in different states.

I'm sure some people change their registrations to the opposing party for the sake of primaries, but that is probably fairly uncommon.

I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ? I guess it must be or how else can a party ask you to vote?

Every state has different rules about this. In Texas any registered voter can vote in the primary of either party, and which primary you voted in is public information. In California any registered voter can vote in a single primary and the top two advance to the general(this being California, that’s sometimes two democrats and sometimes a Republican and a democrat), and having voted is generally known but who you voted for is a secret. In some other states, voters have to declare a party when registering and can vote only in that primary.

one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ?

It is, at least in my state. Keep in mind that people sometimes register in one party to influence the primary, then vote for the other party in the general election. So you can't tell someone's true allegiance just by seeing which party they're registered under.

I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries?

In most states, yes, though some have "open primaries" where you can freely change your party affiliation.

Is that open information ?

Voter registration is a public record. Also presumably if you live in the same house with someone you're likely to see them getting mail from the party they registered with.

I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ? I guess it must be or how else can a party ask you to vote?

Whether you can vote in a primary without registering as a member of the party varies by state and even party, as does what hoops you have to jump through to get voter registration records (if getting it from the state).

Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.

They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided.

In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"? What would stop them?

If you believe that the republicans all want to enact Handmaid's Tale then it's pretty rational to not expect the procedure to stop them.

In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"?

No.

What would stop them?

A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.

To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.

Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.

Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?

It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.

The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.

Well, that was the assumption about Roe, too. And look what happened there.

I think that's in an inaccurate comparison on two levels.

  1. The ACA fundamentally gives people a direct financial benefit. Reference Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security - and their proportion of the budget each year - and its self-evident that direct cash / benefit programs are the stickiest in the American voting public. Roe guaranteed a right which, as personal as it was, is still ephemeral. A "right" doesn't show up in my checking account each month (or, in the case of healthcare benefits, prevent by checking account from going down each month).

  2. Roe V Wade triggered a multi-decade long popular counter-movement to its passage at the Federal, State, and Local levels that self-sustained and routinely co-opted politicians to support it. Where are the local anti-ACA chapters? The real interest in repealing the ACA is pretty much, at this point, the passion project of a few truly committed think tankers, lobbyists, and maybe a half-handful of Congressmen.

All that being said, I actually do hold out long term hope that the ACA will be overturned or sufficiently neutered on the grounds that, eventually, the cost will be plainly identified as major drag on all economic growth. I think this will happen when we get to deep boomer aging, where the Median boomer is now in that lifespan where they required constant and pricey medical care and/or assisted living. Combined with social security going bankrupt within the next 10 years, this will create such a stark revelation of "the old and dying stealing everything from the younger generations" that Congress (at that point rid of boomers almost by definition) will have to act.

Heh, I just wrote, "Congress will have to act." Maybe I am the asshole.

altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions

I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/464243-photographer-defends-wedding-photo-with-handmaids-tale-theme/

I mean, we have real misogynistic dystopia at home! (Or rather abroad)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68634700

It’s easy to forget that when the large majority of men suck, the large majority of women are unhappy. If you think it’s tough being a shitty loser man in a low-sex marriage, imagine being his wife and having to fuck him every month. Having to muster up the willpower to, essentially, let a man that you don’t want to fuck – that every fiber in your body is screaming at you to run away from – rape you, because you don’t want to break apart your family or lose your stability.

Many wives and girlfriends, simply put, do not want to fuck their loser men. But the alternative is worse. Breaking families apart, losing financial stability and all of the labor their men provide, turning their lives upside down – these women essentially feel like their lives are being held at gunpoint. They don’t want to have sex, but the men in their lives have power over them, and because these men have power over them, they allow these men to rape them. They don’t love their men – at least not in a sexual way – and are simply allowing themselves to be used for sexual release by someone who has power over them.

Women who are married to or involved with loser men feel like handmaids, from the TV show. No respect, no love, just monthly rapes because the alternative is worse. And this is why The Handmaids Tale speaks to so many women.

Like most fictional novels, The Handmaid’s Tale caters to its audience. Not too long into the book, the evil oppressor man who owns the female protagonist starts to become interested in her for more than just her handmaid duties. And, of course, there’s another man that she eagerly wants to fuck in between forced fuckings, who loves her back because, as we all know from Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and other such books, men always fall left and right an average woman for absolutely no reason whatsoever simply because there’s something so darn indescribably special about her. The book quickly turns from its dystopian commentary about America’s dark future into a tale of this woman’s hopes, dreams, and attempts to escape to a better life with a better man – directly speaking to its target audience of unhappy wives.

Remember, the majority of men are losers. Well, not really. They’re average guys. But in the eyes of women, that makes them losers. Most women are not happy with most men. They’re just whoring themselves out for money, labor, and stability. Meanwhile, they dream of an escape to a better life with a better man. And over time, these feelings take a toll. The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women because modern women literally feel oppressed by their men. On some level, deep down inside, they feel powerless, used, and raped by the men who love them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/6dyf0y/why_women_are_so_entranced_by_the_handmaids_tale/

Umm, if the women who watch the handmaid's tale find themselves identifying with the protagonist as an unloved sexual object, then perhaps it's not because they hate their husbands. Perhaps it's situationships, hookups, and casual dating- after all, the handmaid's tale's audience is pretty hardcore liberal/progressive and likely more onboard with such things, and women seem to dislike actually being in them even if they won't demand commitment before sex.

situationships, hookups, and casual dating

But those, as far as I know, aren't present in the novel/series at all, so the latter won't have a message that resonates with women who feel wronged by bad hookups/one-night stands/dates/flings.

Sex without love or commitment by men who treat the protagonist as property, however, is.

"Marriage is just a prostitution-exclusivity agreement that costs a lot" is a line I don't see used much despite its trivial truth for most relationships, probably because the higher-quality people tend to end up in marriages that claim doesn't hold for.

The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women

It appeals to Boomers and their children that uncritically parrot all of their grievances (and because "literally feeling oppressed" is both a fetish and a worldview that scores you political points). Meanwhile, modern women just don't get married since they're stable all by themselves (though their parents' policies have put this in jeopardy, that also applies to the men); if you're going to sell your body corporate pays better than domestic to the point that the two-income trap that tends to create puts women who aren't so modern in a disadvantageous position.

The book [is the standard pornography women consume with grimdark elements]

So basically, it's 177013 for women.

Hat tip for the hentai reference! The crucial difference in terms of social context, of course, is that 177013 never got the benefit of having a 5-season TV series with full normie appeal getting based on it. This is the reality of current society.

Man, that post is a blackpilled take completely divorced from reality.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published. Sure, very few women have ever actually read it, but even fewer men have - that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha. Horseshoe theory strikes again, I guess. Something something Hlynka?

The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives. But the tonal and thematic differences between stories like 50 Shades (or John Norman's Gor series, which has some female fans as well though it's mostly aimed at men) and The Handmaid's Tale are pretty dramatic. I haven't seen the TV show, but no part of the book makes it sexy or appealing even to men who like the idea of dominating women or women who like the idea of a domineering man. The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists. I can't say I can speak for Afghani women but let's say I have grave doubts about Dread Jim's belief that those women and ISIS brides are actually living in sexually satisfied bliss being literally owned by men who treat them as chattel. The women who are really into Christian Gray imagine a billionaire giving them his undivided attention and care - the point of the fantasy is that even if he's rough and controlling, he only has eyes for plain little ol' her, and they have super-hot sex, but then she's allowed to continue living her life as the cherished object of a rich man who's actually devoted to her happiness, not a religious fanatic who will beat her if she lets another man see her elbow.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published.

Well, I'm not a Westerner, so I'm not really qualified to comment on that. The OP claims "it's a popular book in hardcore womens' studies programs, but not too well-known elsewhere". The "hardcore" part is maybe unwarranted if I want to be completely fair, but otherwise I find the assessment correct. Maybe I should make the nuanced argument that it was relatively well-known among suburban middle-class Blue Tribe women / wine moms / soccer moms and generally women that are exposed to feminist doctrine.

that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

Well, I guess you're right, but that probably has a lot to do with recent cultural trends of SF, YA, fan fiction and similar literary genres being increasingly captured by feminists.

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha.

I'd say he argues that it's essentially true because feminist doctrine has become wholly normalized among Blue Tribe middle-class suburban women.

No, The Handmaid's Tale used to be famous mostly for being a work of dystopian fiction. Its feminist themes were quite obvious, but it wasn't just wine moms and women's studies majors reading it. I know a lot of other SF fans who did, for example.

Margaret Atwood has been a big literary name for years. She's written a lot of other well known books (and used to be known for writing sci-fi dystopias while sort of disdainfully avoiding the "science fiction" label).

I don't think you accurately capture the argument about why incels and manosphere activists believe the same thing radical feminists do (essentially, that the sexes hate each other and we can't really be happy with each other without reordering society in some way - both sides essentially arguing "the opposite sex must be put under our boot").

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It's a well known in certain circles finding that happiness, for American women, is correlated with traditional style marriages in a religious context. I'd like to see if the same finding holds true in Turkey, Iran, etc. In other words, Islamic marriages which are more contractual and put women on a lower level compared to men.

For most people here, "traditional style" marriage means something like "Husband is the head of household and primary breadwinner, wife takes care of the house and children, wife defers to husband in most matters but still has a voice and expects her needs and desires to be taken seriously, and should not be abused or cheated on."

People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures. The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.

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The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives.

It is important to note that the female fantasy is to replace their husband with the 6/6/6 alpha, while the male fantasy is to add the barely-legal bikini model to a harem with their wives. Men are polygamous, women are serially monogamous, because a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, while a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

why you think so?

If you're a guy who got dumped for a 6/6/6, you're now unmarried and free to look for another wife. If you're a wife who got sidelined for a bikini model, you're still married but receive only half (likely much less) of the commitment, and there's now one less woman for the rest of the men in society, statistically leaving one man completely without a match. It does look like the man's fantasy as you described it is the evil one.

What makes wanting an attractive and successful husband evil?

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Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

That's, uh, quite a take.

You know, I have said this before and I'll say it again: evolutionary psychology has a lot of explanatory power, but humans are not hardwired circuits of evolutionary psychology. We are not spermatazoa and eggs being inexorably guided towards union in our every thought and action by chthonic reproductive forces. (And if we were - if what women do is just their evolved natures - then how is it "evil"?) At the very least, you must acknowledge we all live on various bell curves, in which some of us adhere to the "modal male/modal female" behavior more than others.

Detached from evpsych "Why women are evil hypergamous whores" arguments, I think the moral claim that it's "more evil" to want to replace your spouse with a hotter spouse than to want to make your spouse part of a harem is pretty weak. Why should a man find it more objectionable that his wife harbors desires to fuck another man instead of him than a woman should find it objectionable that her husband harbors desires to fuck other women in addition to her?

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The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

Neverthless, it's true that Atwood's book never makes the sex seem appealing at all, and there's only a couple of instances of "sex scenes", if you can call them that. I haven't seen the show, either, but all the publicity makes it seem rather more culture-warrish than the book which, if I remember correctly, only contains one line about abortion (offhand remark by Offred that she can't even remember why everyone cared about legal abortion so much since in the book's present-day society everyone wants, more than anything, to be fertile) and scarcely more than that about gays or lesbians. It's really more of a personalized "what would I do if enslaved by a tyrannical society" thing than about the exact details of the society itself.

Atwood seems to have leaned into the narrative about it being modern-day anti-GOP commentary in recent interviews, but then again, she has just received quite a bit more of publicity than she had before and that sort of a thing creates an easy need to cater to your new audiences.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

You're right, my bad (memory).

I am not surprised that Atwood today is more willing to have it read as an allegory about the Republican Right, but at least when I read it in the 80s, it was more nuanced and less overtly contemporary culture war.

It’s effective because it’s pretty realistic. And by “realistic” I mean it’s basically what already happened in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 80s with the serial numbers filled off. Margaret Atwood used to explicitly say this, but she’s gradually memory-holed that in favor of the book being a metaphor for the dark days of Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a way for liberal women to freak out about the rollback of women’s rights in the global south, and fear that it could happen here too, without saying any politically incorrect things about politically protected groups.

The plain truth of the matter is that women's liberation as a concept was never politically normalized in any of those countries at any point of their history except for a rather small elite in the capital. There was no progress for the fundamentalists to roll back, realistically speaking.

But, how exactly? I don’t see how “Afghanistani social norms suddenly get transposed onto the USA” makes for a more realistic horror than most other horror stories available. In fact, the scenario as written is completely uncoupled from the reality of life in the USA. As pointed out in the Exiled article, the horror of most Americans is not “too much religion” controlling people, but the realities of corporate America. Which is to say that Corporate runs American culture and life to such a degree that most families are forced to kennel any kids they actually have within 8 weeks of having them so they can go back to being a duel income family and seeing the baby after 6pm on weekdays (until bedtime) and weekends. And the horror of living in decaying cities where you can get jumped by thugs but can’t protect yourself from them.

Except the handmaid's tale might be closer to what goes on in Islamic societies than it is to a hypothetical patriarchal Christian theocracy in the modern west, but it's still not particularly close. The only similarity is women not having rights.

The problem being that women “having rights” is really a subset of corporate control over America. What the rights mean, effectively is that women want to be free to work and have careers and be good little consume-product-bots. Freedom in the modern world is more of a brand than anything else. You’re free to choose what sectors of the economic engine you want to be a battery for, and which consumer demographics you want to buy the imagery of. But beyond that, we’re pretty constrained as more and more of the decisions we used to be able to make are things you can get unjobbed for saying where the wrong people can hear you, and your daily tasks are set by people in offices a thousand miles away. And your free time is spent watching whatever entertainment LA thinks is cool and of course must espouse Goodthink. Which is exactly why I think the fears of Christian Nationalism are not realistic— it would cost the economy too much money, and too many potential wage-slaves to have half of the American population shoved into kitchens to cook and clean. It would half the disposable income per household and thus fewer bobbles sold, less wine, fewer meals out.

I think the “fear” feels a bit like the wrangling over 50 Shades of Grey also seen at the time as a terrible misogynist novel in which women were shown the dark side of S&M and date rape. Except the main audience of the book was women who just couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Not because they were afraid of it or repulsed by it. It was because they wanted a man to make them feel like Grey made his woman feel. I get the same vibe from Handmaid. They want some outside events to force them to stop working their stressful job for a boss they hate while their baby hits all their milestones at daycare. They want a world where all they have to worry about is cooking and cleaning and hugging their babies. But since they aren’t supposed to want that it’s sublimated as horror. Wouldn’t it be horrible if they were forced into living like a tradwife? Don’t you know that Trump wants to do that?

From the excellent http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html

Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible—laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.

Thanks for confirming that the old Exile archives are indeed freely available online, at least in part. The observations in this article are even more striking when you consider that Dolan is pretty much an average economic leftist and feminist, as far as I can tell.

I've heard it said that Atwood intended the original novel as a satire on Iran, as a sort of "imagine if this happened here" sort of scenario - an interpretation that the TV show largely ignores, as I understand it.

I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

Because progressives fail the ideological turing test. They don't know what real life western patriarchalists think, believe, and advocate. The handmaid's tale is current thing horror porn, so it gets the nod.

Isn’t it more female sexual fetish and fear? Rich man can’t help himself but want the young fertile woman and takes her. And the flip side is the partner who is aging but can’t compete with the young fertile woman.

It taps into both female desires and fears.

I don't think that's it because 'super powerful rich dude just has to have the protagonist and won't let things like morals/respect for individual rights/her lack of interest get in the way' is already a romance genre and it doesn't seem much like the handmaid's tale.

I'm pretty skeptical.

There's definitely women with the general kink of being 'taken' (or assigned) by someone with near-ultimate power -- if you're a sub, there's a lot to like in a fantasy of being desired this sort of nonspecific way, where you're responsible for doing things but not making decisions, with clear and immediate and recoverable punishments for failure.

((Hell, there's guys with that kink, either in the 'oh do I want to be part of a harem servicing the guy/girl who will take up my control', or the rarer and more anatomically-implausible variants. For those interested in the former and not averse to m/m stuff, tatsuchan18's S4S series is a good, if sparkledoggy, glimpse for what subs are looking for.))

But it doesn't look anything like Handmaid's Tale, either the film or story version. Virtually no one in Handmaid's Tale is actually horny; 'legitimate' sex here is about power, most explicitly with the monthly 'duties'. The closest description to sexual enjoyment the books provide is one Wife who got more pleasure from holding her husband's handmaid down, and a brothel that ends up being much more for the one-pump-chumps than any serious desire or demand. The handmaids aren't even trophy wives. Rather than rules being consistent and the penalties being capricious(ly enjoyable), the rules are capricious while the penalties are permanent and ironclad.

It's horror porn. Atwood literally threw every misogynistic law or social norm that she had ever heard a rumor about into a jar, shook the jar a bunch, and wrote what came out. It's incoherent as such, even compared to a lot of the slave harem porn fantasies, but any intent for the work to be speculative fiction was stapled on at the end.

It's basically an erotic rape fantasy. Mocked by this meme: https://imgur.com/a/EGjKmW8

It was most likely inspired by Margaret Atwood hearing about how in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.

Of course the blue tribe women watching it couldn't admit either of those things. So they claimed it was a profound warning about Trump.

in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.

That all seems rather far-fetched.

There's a tendency to overstate the matter -- while parts of the Ottoman Empire largely ignored male homosexual behavior, much of the post-Ottoman Empire turned religious bans on homosexual acts into civil law ones, either under local pressures or Western ones; there were complex social and sometimes legal norms against 'effeminacy' that weren't quite a ban on gay stuff but sometimes got used that way; a lot of this is graded on a pretty heavy curve given explicit and enforced bans in Western countries in the 1950-1960s -- but they definitely had a dedicated western European fandom even into 1972-1973.

((Uh, not always in good ways. A lot of the western gay tourist culture used 'boy' in the sense of 'adult twink', and a number didn't.))

The various civil wars were a good part of it, various migrations (both in response to Israel and to refugee flight) another part, increasing Islamist fear/demonization of 'Westernized' culture yet another, both in relationship to homosexuality and for treatment of women.

It is fascinating to me that the same people who worry about Trump creating the Handmaid’s tale are the same people who support immigration from MENA

why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

Because right around the time Trump got elected, they came out with a show and it caught on with blue tribe women. That's really it. I think if the show didn't exist you wouldn't hear so many of those comparisons.

I have a hard time suspending my disbelief.

On the show, every few hundred feet along the sidewalk in built-up areas is stationed a Guardian (ersatz Gestapo goon) armed with a semi-automatic. There would have to be PLA-level manpower available to the regime for this to be possible. And you can't just give this job to any schlub; it has to be a fanatic who wouldn't hesitate to shoot his own mother or sister if she broke the laws (which include that women are no longer allowed to be literate in this society!)

I don't know if the book is better, but the show is awful. It just beats you over the head again and again about how evil this society is and doesn't ever really do much else. Which is a shame because there's the building blocks of a compelling alternate reality in there.

A more measured version that a) has an actual story rather than the main character just glowering at the camera like she's about to go and do something (but never does) and b) prioritizes making Gilead believable over making it horrifying could have been really interesting.

Instead we get nonsense like the "her fault" chant.

Honestly, that’s the modern rot of Hollywood. I don’t know why but they seem to believe that unless you hit the audience over the head with the message that the Evil Regime is Evil and has no redeeming qualities, the audience will miss the point. Maybe I’m odd for reading a lot of medieval and renaissance history, but even then when the Church was very powerful and the concept of human rights was 300 years away and they still didn’t create societies with no redeeming qualities. They cared about stability and their own wealth and power, they had to be strong enough to fend off rivals. But they didn’t really spend a lot of time dreaming up ways to oppress the locals.

there's the building blocks of a compelling alternate reality in there

Like what?

I liked the idea of exploring a world where fertility was much more rare and the way that changed society. The central concept of the fertile women becoming "handmaids" that were highly valued for their ability to bear children was genuinely interesting. But the women were treated so brutally that it kept taking me out of it - even if you're treating these women like livestock, you would still treat them like valuable livestock. I also would have liked to see the ideology and values of Gilead treated more seriously rather than as a fake veneer that no one actually believed in.

I think the book is better primarily because it doesn't overstay its welcome. Season 1 of the show is the story that's in the book, everything else is just made up by the show. So I think the narrative is stronger in the book because it is tighter in scope.

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

I don't suppose it's plausible in its totality, but Margaret Atwood's research strategy for the book was to combine cultural practices from real societies into a single place and time. So it's more grounded than many dystopian fictions.

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

Yes, softcore porn. It's 1984 meets 50 Shades of Grey.

That people still think pieces of paper protect them after all we've lived through in the past few years never ceases to amaze me.

Now granted, constitutions are a powerful kind of magic, but they too must yield to power. Otherwise you'd still be able to own warships unimpeded.

Let's say I get elected with a loyal enough congress. What exactly is stopping me from packing the court and reinterpreting the constitution to always have meant what I want to do? Precedent didn't stop Roe from happening. And it didn't require any amendment to straight up make up constitutional law this way.

Now sure, what can be done so can be undone so. But that just means whoever Calvinballs his way to dictatorship first wins. All that protects you is decorum and violence. Nothing else. Insisting on ritual is not going to change that.

But that just means whoever Calvinballs his way to dictatorship first wins.

I read this as "Whoever violates the constitution first gets to then do whatever he or she wants to the constitution."

There are so many assumptions - electoral, legal, judicial - baked into that statement that it is logically equivalent to "a wizard did it!"

A wizard being some FDR tier politician in this case.

Nothing stops you. But a loyal enough congress is a pretty big stipulation, especially when Republicans disproportionately seem to care about what the text of the Constitution actually says, and are used to having to worry about how things look for the purpose of reelection.

We really need a constitutional amendment safeguarding the supreme court, as that would make the particular avenue you describe significantly harder to pull off.

Let's say I get elected with a loyal enough congress. What exactly is stopping me from packing the court and reinterpreting the constitution to always have meant what I want to do? Precedent didn't stop Roe from happening. And it didn't require any amendment to straight up make up constitutional law this way.

in theory, separation of powers. The different branches of government are supposed to selfishly seek power for themselves. Congress is supposed to be constantly look to take power for itself, which stops the president from becoming a dictator.

In practice that kind of fails because most individual congressman just don't have any real power, so it's easy for them to give up power to the party apparatus in hopes of eventually becoming a senior party leader or leaving to become a lobbyist. But each individual Justice really does have a lot of power, so I can't see them giving it up voluntarily to a dictator.

In fairness, look at what some of our doomposters here believe: that the Democrats literally ignore laws with impunity because they are in control, so the Constitution is fake and gay and any claims that they can't do X or Y or Z are just cope.

It's not hard to believe that rabid partisans on the other side like Marcotte believe that Republicans can and will just ignore laws and everyone will go along with it because.

It's maybe a nitpick, maybe not - but there is a difference between ignorning laws and actually changing them in what would be plainly against the individual freedom concepts embedded in the constitution.

Ignoring or selectively enforcing laws (or, on another level, choosing to interpret laws in a certain way) is commonplace no matter who holds power in the executive branch. Congress and The President get to fight it out. The backstop to that has always been individual liberties - specifically those laid out in the constitution and, otherwise, those with deep precedent.

There is room for legitimate doomerism on both sides, but there is also, in my opinion, a difference between unlikely and fanciful. To take a Red Tribe issue of note; the idea that the Federal government could ever confiscate already owned guns is fantasy. The idea that they could make everyone register their guns or be subject to search is far fetched but plausible.

Marcotte and her ilk start with the fanciful and ridiculous as "legitimate concern" territory and then use a logical structure full of gaps and deeply nested assumptions to get there. It's a bad in product and process.

To take a Red Tribe issue of note; the idea that the Federal government could ever confiscate already owned guns is fantasy.

Can I be skeptical that this is so far fetched? Unlikely, sure, but all it would take is a 5-4 SCOTUS decision to claim the 2A does not confer an individual right to own guns. Right now, with the current SCOTUS lineup that won't happen, but give it a generation or two, some unlucky deaths/retirements, or court packing and we could quickly be there.

It may be bias on my end, but I also feel the more conservative members of SCOTUS who are textualists (and to a lesser extent originalists) are less partisan and more consistent with their rulings on the whole than the more liberal side whose motivating principle seems to be more about how they think society should be.

No, they can't. The federal government might be able to declare that they have the right to do such a thing but actually going and doing it is another matter, like deporting twenty million illegals. It's just not doable.

The glaring hole in the motivated reasoning is that if you believe that the Republicans are going to do a bunch of stuff that's illegal/procedurally impossible the second they're voted into power, then why would you believe that they would wait until they're voted in to do it? If they were going to illegally do it in November after winning the election, they'd just illegally do it now.

Stuff like throwing out the real election and installing their candidate anyway?

Someone who believes Jan. 6 was a failed coup doesn't think the Trump gang has been waiting.

That suffers from a similar failure of reasoning. To think that was a coup attempt requires a similar sort of video game logic to thinking that Trump (or Kamala for that matter) becoming president will somehow result in the constitution being abolished or massively amended. It's thinking that there's a magic chair that if you can just touch then the objective marker says "completed" and it plays the "overthrowing the government" cutscene. If the necessary pieces were in place for that to happen (meaning, the vast majority of the federal apparatus was already on board), then touching the magic chair would be unnecessary.

Failure of reasoning or not, it’s taken as desire to do the illegal/procedurally impossible. Holding Congress hostage is absolutely the kind of thing that leads to fantasy oppression.

For what it’s worth, I’m with @AshLael. The chair does matter because all the chairs matter. Every victory, legal or not, is evidence that the victor has more power. The will of the people, the Mandate of Heaven, the barrel of a gun, the right side of history—whatever says “these guys are winners.” You don’t get the necessary pieces in place without some of those victories.

No, the magic chair does matter. It creates a coordination point.

If you've got an army with the numbers to go and storm the opposing trench you still need a way to get them to all charge at once. If one goes on his own he gets shot to bits. Seizing control of the leadership can potentially give you that - you still need soldiers willing to obey your orders, but you can gain the authority needed to make them believe that everyone else is going to obey them too.

There's many examples of dictators who took power by exploiting legitimate processes before running roughshod over the law once in power - including the archetypal evil dictator Hitler himself. If Hitler loses the 1932/1933 elections - even with no reduction in real support, say because Germany had had a different electoral system - he doesn't pass the Enabling Act and he never becomes Fuhrer.

At the same time, the failure seems to illustrate that the Republican congressmen don't just always go along with everything.

Is that a hole? It's obviously easier to change a country illegitimately as the government than as the opposition. You have your hands on the levers of state.

Even with a Government trifecta the ruling party is most often gridlocking itself. Case in point: The Republicans failing in revoking Obama Care (after beating that drum endlessly) or the Biden Administration needing to compromise with Senator Manchin.

And for amending the constitution a 2/3 majority in both houses is needed. That is only possible for bipartisan issues which have a large consensus in population.

And for amending the constitution a 2/3 majority in both houses is needed.

Well, sort of. 2/3 of state legislatures can also call a convention which can propose amendments (which still need to be ratified by 3/4 of states to be accepted).

Just neurotic people looking for something to be neurotic about.

I guess them larping as Saudi women at least spares the video game and rock industries their tender mercies.

Anecdotally, Trump would benefit massively from removing spousal pressure on voting. This morning my dad joked to me that he'd like to vote for Trump to save me money on estate tax, but so much of my inheritance would be wasted in the resulting divorce that it wouldn't be worth it.

Far more women refuse to vote for tromp on moral grounds than men offended by Harris.

This was my first thought, too. I haven't read much of Marcotte ever, and certainly none in the about 10 years or so since Scott Alexander himself had made a blog post that referenced her by name, but from what I recall of her writing, she seemed to slot into a type of female 3rd wave feminist writer who tends to project all her own beliefs and insecurities onto men. One of the most well known bits of such projection is when it comes to dating, where some 30/40+ career woman seems confused why her great financial success and maturity isn't translating to romantic attention from high quality men and concluding that men must be so fragile as to be threatened by her success, instead of recognizing that, for the vast majority of heterosexual men, unlike for the vast majority of heterosexual women, a potential mate's career success counts for close to nothing relative to her looks, youth, and even her personality, which are things a middle-aged woman who spent most of her effort making it in the workplace hasn't been able to work on very well.

In this case, Marcotte seems to be projecting her own obsession with keeping the people around her politically/ideologically pure onto men, who she believes have even more power than her because of male privilege, without recognizing that this obsession with ideological purity, to the extent that they'd coerce them to agreeing with them, of their partners is not quite as common in men as it is in women*.

* This part is not proven and could certainly be wrong; I'm going off my own anecdotes and stereotypes, but I think this is a common observation by many men nowadays.

I think it's more of a Russell Conjugation, where actions that benefit the Democratic party are positive, while those that benefit the Republican party are sinister.

I remind my husband about all the bad things about Trump. He berates his wife about how terrible the libs are. I emphasize to my partner that if he really loves me, as a woman, he won't vote to take away my rights. He threatens to leave his girlfriend if she doesn't vote how he wants. I fortify my husband's resolve to vote against Trump when he gets tempted by bad arguments. He bullies his wife into voting against her own interests.

I'm not going to say I've never in my life seen a woman say something innocuous only to be snapped at by her husband who brusquely informs her that "we" don't believe that. But the idea that it is a crisis is just silly.

That sounds like probably a better explanation than there actually being any sort of difference in rates between the sexes. My own perception of difference between the sexes is also probably reflective primarily of my own social circles which I'm guessing is ideologically not too different from Marcotte's. It also occurred to me that this could be subculture-based rather than sex-based, where enforcing ideological purity of one's partner is important in Marcotte's social circles, and she's projecting that onto all Americans, including male Trump voters.

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I honestly have no idea and I could come up with tolerably plausible stories in either direction. I'll be continuing my quixotic mission of nudging people in the direction of understand what a secret ballot is and why they should care about it for non-partisan reasons. There just shouldn't be anything cynical or partisan about saying that it would be good if everyone voted their own conscience freely and in private without the possibility of coercion.

Yeah, more men bend over for their wives than vice versa.

Anecdotally, the typical republican woman hates abortion than the men. So, the chance of them voting blue is nil. On the other hand, democrat voting men have no such single-issue hatred for the republicans.

More women vote than men, so logically if anyone is convincing anyone to vote it would go that direction.

I mean, husbands wanting to vote for their wives does happen occasionally.

My grandfather was an elections judge and a local apparatchik for the Republican Party and told stories of Mohammedans trying to vote for their wives. I doubt this detail is included for some reason.

told stories of Mohammedans trying to vote for their wives.

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time.

This was the Dutch grandfather. His racial and religious prejudices were eccentric but legible by American standards; his terminology was often a bit off the wall.

I'm aware. I'm not being cynical or manipulative when I say that this is a very bad thing and is exactly why secret ballots are an important piece of social technology. Mail-in ballots enable coercion, manipulation, theft, and vote-buying. That this claim is controversial when it's mechanically obvious is a product of partisan propaganda.

This is a drum I've been banging for a while, but what struck me here was Marcotte walking right up the edge of it, even using the words "secret ballot", but not even mentioning the solution.

Sure, what I was pointing to was this being another case of evil white men that probably aren’t white in the real world.

I'm from Colorado, and I've had mail in voting for basically my entire adult life (the bill was passed in 2013), and I would be immensely disappointed if we ever got rid of it. For me, it is and was the status quo and I would not enjoy a change in the social contract because of some heady intellectual concerns.

I can understand some of the concerns people had in 2020, with sudden, massive changes to many states' voting systems, where there might not have been adequate provision in place to ensure that it wouldn't be a massive magnet for fraud and questionable tactics. However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue. I fill out my ballot, drop it off in a box under 24 hour surveillance, then check online to see that it has been received. It's all a very straightforward process.

There are certainly good arguments in favor of the secret ballot, but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period. Mail in ballots are more private than voting was in this period, but less private than walking alone into a voting booth, and I don't actually think there's a compelling reason to prefer one to the other. If gathering ballots is such a big concern, pass some laws regarding that, but leave mail in voting alone unless it becomes obvious that it is an issue in practice in a given state.

America had public ballots up until the 1890's

I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:

When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

The Australian Ballot was first introduced in Victoria and South Australia in 1856. Being adopted literally halfway across the world only forty years later is a testament to how compelling the idea is to solving genuine concerns.

I understand that you've had mail in voting for a decade and that you personally have not encountered any issues with it. But basically right before you got mail in voting, international pro-democracy organizations had all agreed that in-person secret voting was basically the only way to do it. If you expand your scope beyond an extremely-restricted, probably high-trust (and high-other-things) setting, there are plenty of reasons to significantly favor an actually secret ballot.

However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue.

On what basis? Vote buying is a common practice and coercion is common all around the world. On the contrary, I think the only thing that has prevented this from turning into a much more obvious mess in the United States is that it hasn't been the norm and the machinery wasn't fully in place to take advantage of such a vulnerable system.

...but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period.

Yeah, and vote buying was famously common! Notably, the husband-wife dynamics discussed in Marcotte's article weren't a problem yet anyway. I don't like Amanda Marcotte, but I think it's pretty obvious that she has a point about spousal coercion.

I think the reason vote buying isn't the norm is that it's basically illegal and more importantly, the amount it'd take to get any high number of American's to 'sell' their votes is pretty high. Yes, you can could get a promise from a bunch of people to sell their for vote for $100, but actually getting proof and such before sending payment would be a much more complicated scenario, when it'd be actually much cheaper and efficient to get more people to support you to turn out.

Whatever you'd spend on the former, is far better spent on just getting low propensity people within your own coalition to drop off their ballot in the dropbox or mail.

Yes, if you're a poor country and selling your vote can pay your rent for a month, that's one thing. America is too rich for that.

Are you familiar with walking around money? People don't actually need to be paid very much to do things. There isn't actually much of an attachment to political positions for most people.

Sure, getting people out to vote by paying them is one thing - but verifying they're actually voting the way you want is a whole other thing. Obviously, if you do that in a D+80 area, the few Republican votes you'd end up is worth it, but we're talking about payment for legitimately changing their vote.

The sorts of people who would vote for money aren't the sort that would vote republican, except in deep deep rural areas.

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That's the whole thing with mailin ballots + harvesting though -- if you weren't going to vote anyways, and some nice person shows up at your door to 'encourage' you to fill out your ballot, it's not too hard to imagine this leading to a conversation in which said person 'helps' you choose the right options. Which could plausibly lead to cash changing hands if this person is, say, co-ethnic and establishes some kind of trust relationship.

There are a lot of people willing to do weird illegal things for trivial amounts. Pill mills were paying their patsies like $100/mo.

and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period - though I understand the concerns that eventually led to the adoption of secret ballots in most of the country.

If one reasons that since it took so long for the secret ballot to invented, it is thus not that of an important part of democracy, same could be said of women voting. That was enacted even later, so it is even less crucial.

I agree that women voting is not an essential part of democracy, though I support women's suffrage.

I'm partial to the empirical arguments from Garrett Jones' "10% Less Democracy", which argues that if you look at indexes of democracy and compare them to a variety of measures of well-being, it is not the case that the most democratic countries have the best outcomes. There's some floor of democratic-ness above which outcomes tend to rise, and some ceiling above which outcomes become bad again.

I think fiddling with secret ballots probably isn't worth it, as long as you're empirically above the floor of democratic-ness with all of the other policies you adopt.

Also, machine politics was the norm for most of that era in any city big enough to be worth looting. The secret ballot helped make maintaining the machine more difficult.

It's not thinking, it's braining. Marcotte wants to talk about evil MAGA Republican husbands, and about the virtues of voting. But she's a party-line progressive, and the party line is that mail-in ballots are good and election day is outdated. So the whole middle of the argument is an empty void in which anything can be put, much like ChatGPT. Take the things you believe and permute them through sentences and paragraphs until you have something in the shape of an argument.

This is basically the description of most professional op-ed writers today. The smarter ones apply more complicated levels of augury. I haven't read Peggy Noonan in years now, but maybe she's still talking about the color of Trump's ties.

I think Amanda Marcotte does remarkably little thinking, and has very few morals, or at least what we used to call morals. She is the epitome of feminism, in as much as feminism is about "do whatever gives more power to women". She came to debate at my college while I was in grad school, and I was shocked at how I could be surrounded by people cheering against someone having compassion for men, and for someone who believes that it's women's duty to actively try to ruin men's lives. To be honest, I got more of the vibe from her that she was saying the things she said because she knew it's what her audience wants to hear, but I don't think that's an excuse for being a bad person.

Amanda Marcotte is a terrible person. Or at least she was a decade ago, and I doubt she's gotten better since. There's a reason that even Scott Alexander (who normally is very nice to even those with whom he strongly disagrees) described her as "a Vogon wearing a skin suit" or something to that effect.

This was my thought as well, but then it's notable that she still has an audience and a platform. That a problem can be identified does not mean that the problem is solved. Scott decried her during the fight over the soul of progressivism. To the extent that he had a side, they lost that fight, and Marcotte and her allies won.

I mean it certainly seems like a feminist ideological cheerleader doesn’t have to actually be winning to still have a job.

The only reason she was ever notable was because of her position and platform. Those remain unchanged. Scott paid significant personal costs for his opposition to her. What evidence is there that she has paid any cost? In what sense is she "losing" in any objective sense?

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