Maura McAllister

The danger of post-Roe America is already here.

This is how patriarchy functions: by trapping us in our own bodies, simplifying the massive complexity of gender down to an imaginary binary. In this worldview, there is one gender that gets pregnant and another that does the impregnating, and the impregnators always rule the impregnated. Women exist purely for the purpose of bearing men’s children; thus, womanhood is wholly a matter of having a fertile uterus, and birth control or abortion or anything else that gives a woman control over her own fertility must be banned. Men, too, have a simple function: to subjugate women, in part by getting them pregnant and making them care for the resulting children while men work. Thus, men cannot prefer sex with other men, they cannot get pregnant themselves, and they cannot occupy anything but a dominant role.

So let me say this now, before the onslaught against feminists begins in earnest: I’m tired of defending why it’s important that women are represented at the highest levels of government; tired of reciting statistics or pointing out the policy impact when women actually do hold a critical mass of elected office. It’s absurd.