Are women human?

Plus: a 1500-year-old hymn, aging and ageism, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here is this week’s post.

But first, a housekeeping note: I topped 1,000 subscribers!

Thank you all, and welcome to newer readers! I promised a giveaway to mark this milestone, so I’ll choose a winner at random and be in touch with one of you soon. And speaking of, if you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading:

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Are women human?

(via Gage Skidmore)

Back when I was active on Tumblr, I made thousands—probably tens of thousands—of posts. Most of those were not full essays or anything close to it, and I remember very few of them at this point. One, however, I do recall.

It must’ve been between 2012 and 2016. Then-first lady Michelle Obama was still very much in the national scene, and I believe Hillary Clinton, who was either already campaigning for president or transparently working up to an announcement, was pretty buzzy as well.

I started seeing some ugly memes going around right-wing Tumblr accounts, including among some of my own followers. (Tumblr’s conservative community, such as it was, still had a very Tea Party-inflected youth conservatism that was friendly to libertarianism, not like the populist right of today.)

I remember two memes in particular. One suggested that Michelle Obama was transgender, with a lot of wink wink nudge nudge about her husband. The other was a grid of flattering, softly lit photos of Republican women (selected for youth and beauty) juxtaposed with very unflattering pics of Democratic women (selected for age and more masculine haircuts).

Now, there’s a kernel of truth in the latter one. The tropes of Republican womanhood are a whole thing, and—as The Atlantic reported in 2012, in a story that might not run today—even the computers agree. But these memes were not doing mathematical analyses on the relative sex-typicality of female politicians’ faces. They were ugly. They were cruel. They were brazenly misogynist. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember I was angry.

At this point, I want to make exceedingly clear my understanding that many on the right vehemently oppose this garbage and that it is simply not true that conservative ideas about sex and gender necessarily grow from misogyny. Nor am I saying there’s no left-wing misogyny; there absolutely is, as J.K. Rowling knows well. So add all due caveats here; assume I assent to all your best what-abouts.

And yet, for all that, those memes were not a one-off. I believe writer Thomas Chatterton Williams’ report of seeing the same sort of thing about Kamala Harris already, because why wouldn’t it be true? They’ve already got the meme templates.

And then there’s the 2021 clip newly making the rounds in which GOP veep nominee JD Vance says Harris is exemplary of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable.” This, too, is cruel and bad-faith, and, incidentally, not going to tempt anyone to the pro-natalist camp. (And in case I need to burnish my credentials here, let me remind you of my several recent takes in favor of having kids.) You can critique Harris—maybe even with an argument about her childlessness, presuming it’s chosen, which I don’t think we know—without being sexist and unkind.

My most universal case for having kids

Or, if the words of the Republican Party’s second-in-command aren’t enough, let me direct you to the last 48 hours of engagement on the X account of Corie Whalen. “I’m a right-leaning woman who agrees with almost nothing the Biden-Harris administration has done, but the primal hatred and disgust Vance stokes in me transcends politics,” she wrote in a post sharing that 2021 video. “I suspect I am not the only woman of my vintage, so to speak, who feels this way.”

Her post has been deluged with malicious replies accusing her of being exactly the kind of miserable, childless, progressive cat lady Vance had in mind. But I know Corie in real life and can confirm she is, as she says, “a mom and former Republican congressional staffer who met her husband through Republican politics.” It’s not difficult to conclude that her reply guys don’t care about her actual biography or beliefs; they’re just taking swipes at a—well, I won’t repeat their term here.

The way the chips have fallen on issues of sex and gender in the last few years could make many women, especially married moms, into natural conservatives on these matters. I’m thinking of debates over public school curricula, girls’ sports, youth gender medicine, and so on.¹

But you know what most women don’t want to join? A movement in which it is acceptable—not normative, but in practice acceptable—to speak of us as nothing but manipulative and manipulable sluts who are malevolently ruining American politics. If the right wants to be the faction of reality on gender, it must fully recognize the reality that women are human.

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Intake

• Great Tales of Detection: 19 Stories Chosen by Dorothy L. Sayers

• “Have Republicans abandoned free markets?” by Emma Camp for Reason

• Via my colleague Daniel Silliman, a roughly 1500-year-old hymn:

O cross, hope of the Christians
O cross, resurrection of the dead
O cross, guide of the blind
O cross, way of those who have gone astray
O cross, consolation of the poor
O cross, bridle of the rich ...

• “He told Richard Nixon to confess,” by Daniel Silliman for Christianity Today

• “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be,” by Yuval Levin for National Review

• “Fun with Christian AI,” by

  matthew pierce

• “The power of the Catholic intellectual ecosystem,” by Onsi Aaron Kamel for Ad Fontes (h/t

  Marvin Olasky
  )

[P]erhaps as a result of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, or perhaps as a result of the mass apostasy of the mainline, conservative Protestant circles tend to have more, and more rigorously policed, theological and cultural shibboleths and smell tests. In some respects, this evangelical impulse is good: it can preserve something closer to the traditional position on Scriptural authority, certainly more effectively than the mainline can. But in other respects, this impulse fragments Protestants and ultimately destroys the possibility of forming networks of sufficient size and scope to sustain an ecosystem of intellectual life like that sustained by American Catholics.

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Output

New work:

• NATO vs. China | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

As part of CT’s print redesign, I created and am editing what I believed to be the magazine’s first-ever advice column, written by Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles. The inaugural edition answers (along with two others) the question I know every one of you is asking: Can a Christian do a beer run?

The idea is to answer questions that are either distinctly Christian in setting (e.g. the scenario happened and perhaps could only happen at church or a Bible study or similar) or which have an easy, obvious answer that is precluded by Christian ethics. So if you have a question you’d like answered by our columnists, send it to advice@christianitytoday.com. (Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.)

Newly relevant work:

Age is not ‘just a number’ (and other thoughts on Joe Biden’s debate showing)

• Can we make presidential elections shorter and less stupid? | The Daily Beast, July 2023

• It’s not ageist to want your senator in the Senate | The Daily Beast, April 2023

• Are Biden’s ‘first woman’ picks more patronizing than progress? | The Week, December 2020

• Rudy Giuliani and the challenge of aging well | The Week, October 2019

• Joe Biden, own your age | The Week, August 2019

[Biden has] created a bizarre simulacrum of endless—well, not youth, but certainly a long gone upper middle age. The combined effect of the tan, the teeth, the hair, and maybe Botox and fillers, if not a facelift, is on the verge of unsettling. We all know Biden is old, but he seems determined to avoid reminding us. Rather than admitting his vitality is, quite naturally, on the wane, Biden is trying to prove he can keep up with rivals young enough to be his children or even grandchildren.

• Trampling separation of powers is just as bad when Democrats do it | The Week, April 2019

• The unaddressed sins of Kamala Harris | The Week, February 2019

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1. Abortion is a complicating factor, of course, but outside my scope here.