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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Episode 90

Sunday December 19, 2021

SPEAKERS

Soraya Chemaly, Sam Goldman, Chelsea Ebin

Soraya Chemaly  00:00

We can look at the United States and we can see the way white privilege and male privilege has operated and continues to operate in the outcomes of our laws… You cannot separate these laws from the idea that people want to control women and control their bodies.

Chelsea Ebin  00:15

Male supremacism, and misogyny have become a way of forging alliances between all of these anti democratic illiberal movements… It would be naive of us to not see how this gets reproduced on a broader scale around restricting people’s access to a broader array of political rights.

Sam Goldman  00:56

Welcome to Episode 90 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of this show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country.

Episode 90, Wow! Through this show Refuse Fascism has engaged, dialogued, and debated with a broad array of writers, scholars, legal experts, and people from different walks of life on the roots, nature, and trajectory of fascism in this country. Through our engagement and networking with people and social movements, we are forging understanding and relationships aimed at preventing the consolidation of fascism.

If we have to fight this fascist threat, we are glad to have you with us. Thank you for listening, spreading, joining the conversation on social media, talking about the pod with your network, sharing your thoughts, ideas, questions, connections, and art with us. Keep it coming!  And with a danger presented like never before, we do need you with us more than ever. Thanks to all who have given! It would be so beautiful to get 90 donations in celebration of our 90th episode, so please hit the Donate button at refusefascism.org.

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In today’s episode we are sharing two interviews relating to the fascist assault on the right to abortion and the re-assertion of violent misogyny that it is a part of. First you’ll hear an interview I did with Soraya Chamely author of Rage Becomes Her, followed by a recent conversation I had with Chelsea Ebin, co-founder and fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. 

But first, as we rapidly approach the one year anniversary of January 6, let’s talk a little about the developments from the January 6 commission. Addressing the nation in primetime, the committee vice chair Liz Cheney released a trove of new text messages and correspondence showing that the idea of just throwing out election results favoring Biden was already circulating among senior GOP operatives the day after polls closed, if not earlier, exposing new levels of coordination and determination to overthrow the election in January 6, and that major pro-Trump figures, including Fox News hosts and his own son, recognized how dangerous, deadly — and clearly pro-Trump — the insurrection was as it happened, even as they blatantly lied about it after the fact.

As Salon.com writer Amanda Marcotte tweeted: “The excuses generated by Fox News for the text scandal are further proof that they don’t lie because they are trying to fool anyone. It’s about training the audiences to be gaslighters, and to stomp out truth as the threat to fascism that it is.” The next day, the House voted almost entirely along party lines to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate, once more showcasing the near-total commitment of the GOP apparatus to the Big Lie and the whole fascist agenda.  

The longest sentence yet for one of the Capitol building invaders was handed down this week — a sentence of 5 years to a man who brutally beat a law enforcement officer with a fire extinguisher. Some are calling this some kind of justice, a change in course, but it must be said that if a Black man in this country in any circumstance beat a cop like this we’d be talking about something closer to 5 life sentences, not 5 years. It’s not just the inequality; it’s that these people are receiving leniency from the justice system specifically as a reward for participating in this effort to cement fascist rule.

Three retired generals penned an op-ed for the Washington Post this past week warning that the military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection. They wrote: ”As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk. In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.” They go on to say that “The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief cannot be dismissed. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.”  An unpunished coup attempt becomes a training exercise and a green light for their return to power. Almost a year later none of the leaders of this deadly fascist coup attempt have been charged with any crimes and many continue to occupy Congress, and one, Trump, continues to be the GOP’s frontrunner for 2024.

As many have pointed out correctly, in 1923 Hitler was lightly punished for an attempted coup (he was charged with treason, sentenced to 5 years in prison, serving only 19 months) and was in power 10 years later. Seriously, let that sink in.  But I gotta say this: when Hitler’s coup attempt failed, at least he got convicted. Amerikkka hasn’t even done that. And a year later it seems very unlikely that it will. Fascism is breathing down our necks. Now, here is my conversation with Soraya Chemaly. 

Sam Goldman 07:43 

I’m really angry. We have a situation in which for over a hundred days women in Texas have not been able to access an abortion (after six weeks of pregnancy) and anyone who aides them in getting an abortion can be hunted down and made to pay a $10,000 bounty and that’s been given the thumbs up by the Supreme Court a Supreme Court that just thirteen days ago indicated its likelihood to not only shred but entirely gut Roe v Wade (the right to legal abortion in this country) and I’m really fucking angry. And I’m made even more angry by the fact that I feel like nobody else is angry. And I’m like gaslit in this situation. And so I’m really excited to bring to y’all Soraya Chemaly she is an award winning author and activist who writes and speaks frequently on topics related to gender norms, inclusivity, social justice, free speech, sexualized violence, and technology. She is the former Executive Director of the Representation Center and Director and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project,  she has long been committed to expanding women’s civic and political participation. And incredibly relevant to today’s episode she is the author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. So welcome Soraya. Thanks so much for joining me.

Soraya Chemaly  09:12

Thank you for having me today. I’m delighted to be here.

Sam Goldman  09:15

Let’s pull back the lens a little bit away from my personal anger. One of the key features of fascism, as we’ve been looking at it, is this hyper-masculinity. In the same way that men can effortlessly suck up all the air in a room, fascism can suck all the air out of society. I was wondering, what do you think of this political atmosphere right now? Do you think it is a fair assessment to make that comparison? And secondarily, though, I really am excited for our listeners to hear from you on this. Can you share how your study on risk perception, that what you’ve been looking at can help us understand the current situation that we’re in.

Soraya Chemaly  09:55

Sure, those are two big questions. First of all, I share your anger and I share your anger at complacency. There’s the anger of the situation we’re in, and there’s the outrage that some of us feel about people’s complacency. Because if you have been involved in studying this or involved in being a clinic escort or a doctor, you know how long this has been going on. It’s been certainly since Roe gave women access. But in the last 10 or 12 years, there’s been a huge power push. We saw it in the state legislatures, which I think if you were a person who was covering state legislatures, and you talked about some of the frankly, just egregiously ignorant things people were saying in order to pass anti- women legislation, there was a lot of dismissing of those concerns over the years. I’m not particularly surprised, in other words, by where we are. The signs were very clear, and the plan to do this has been very concerted, well-resourced, deliberate, strategic.

Talking about anger, I think you cannot overstate the anger that very traditional, conservative, often religious women felt in the wake of Roe and the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the sort of shattering challenges to traditional gender norms that were happening during the 60s and 70s. There was a lot of anger and that anger reshaped the Republican Party, it made the Republican Party that we have now. I don’t find it that surprising. I also think that it does go hand in hand with the kind of macho fascism that we’re seeing around the world. We know that what we’re experiencing here is  happening in lots of other countries. We saw women in Poland go through this. We see women in other European countries. Surprisingly, there are South American countries, though, where there’s been a liberalization, which is quite hope inspiring.

We have high levels of macho fascistic activity in our country, and I think that has everything to do with risks, insofar as so much of people’s ability to assess risk comes from us. It comes from something called identity, protective cognition. There are so many interesting studies on risk and risk perception. And they implicate not the idea that there is an objective risk out there in the world, but rather, the idea that our identities, protecting those identities, protecting our status, informs the way we perceive risk or not. I think that what we know from decades of studies is that in the United States, and I’m being very specific there, because this is not true all over the world. But in the United States, there is a hardcore set of conservative white men who tend to be early adopters of technology. And they don’t see the risks inherent in a lot of technologies, anything from the risk of nuclear war and annihilation to the risk posed by free speech, ideologies run rampant in social media, to the dangers of oppressing women in these ways, They just don’t see those risks, and it’s not because they’re not smart people. It is their status. So, changes in the world that might threaten status.

In this case, again, we do have a very diverse population. It’s very hierarchical, and white men have tended to sit at the top of that hierarchy. Changes that threaten that, and I would include abortion rights, aren’t so welcome. Abortion is definitely one of those issues that really threatens people’s identities, so they have a particular response to that. And in terms of fascism and authoritarianism, that response is very strong. I think it’s completely inseparable from the relationship that is ever present between authoritarianism and gender roles, norms, identity, attitudes, behaviors — those go hand in hand. Authoritarians, always, always go after women. They might change the way they do that, but it always happens.

Sam Goldman  14:07

You know, I really appreciated that you were talking about the global perspective. I was thinking about the Democracy Summit, and you had Modi and you had Bolsonaro. You didn’t have Erdoğan. You had the leader from Poland. One of the places that I was thinking of as you were talking about the connection between the gender roles and how that is a real big part of that authoritarian push is Hungary. And some of the first steps that they took were along the lines of either gender identity or around what I would deem traditional gender roles and rights. Why do you think that’s so central?

Soraya Chemaly  14:45

Well, I think it’s control. If you think about Nicolae Ceaușescu and Romania, he banned all abortion and contraception, which automatically puts women in the most vulnerable position. So, in that case, you really could see what compulsory pregnancy — state-mandated compulsory pregnancy, which is institutionalized violence. If you think of Susan Sontag talking about fascism as institutionalized violence, you don’t really get as clear cut an example as that. So, I just think that you cannot separate these laws from the idea that people want to control women and control their bodies, that it has political value to people with power. Frankly, it has political value to men whether they care to recognize the privileges that come with that or not, I think it’s very clearly the case.

Sam Goldman  15:39

I just want to make sure that I understand correctly. When you say the power that men have, are you talking about the power that they gain from the control that they have, even though they aren’t the state, you know, an individual man isn’t the state, right?

Soraya Chemaly  15:53

If we think about nation states, right, and we think about the structure of nation states, deeply patriarchal, often very deeply misogynistic, in the implementation of laws almost all have male entitlements built into the structure of states and the law. So if you think about the United States, we can look at the United States and we can see the way white privilege and male privilege has operated and continues to operate in the outcomes of our laws. In the case of reproduction, this was something that now Vice President Kamala Harris pointed out very clearly: there are no laws governing male reproduction. But a lot of men just don’t think about the way that privileges and entitlements accrue to them, because they don’t have to think about this. They don’t have to.

In fact, even the right to abortion, as feminists are constantly pointing out, benefit men today in many, many ways. If you think about what happens in the society broadly, when women cannot control their own reproduction, we’ve already been there, done that. We see it every day. It impoverishes women, it takes them out of a competitive workforce, it makes it very, very difficult for them to have any form of tenure or concentrated effort in any area they might choose. In fact, it’s incredibly labor intensive and time consuming and physically exhausting to reproduce the species. The fact is that men who are surveyed in the United States repeatedly show that they don’t think about contraception, that they don’t think about terminations of pregnancies. That’s an entitlement, not to have to think about that.

Sam Goldman  17:47

100%.

Soraya Chemaly  17:49

That’s what I meant. 

Sam Goldman  17:50

Thank you so much for clarifying that. And now I’m angry again. I want to return to where I started, because I think it connects to what we’ve been talking about already. I stated at the beginning my anger, but I don’t think it’s just mine alone. I think that there are many people who are looking at women losing one of the most consequential rights for their lives, and that it is so close that you can feel it. They’re angry. I know that people are angry, and I want to feel like I’m not alone, that there are people that are angry at peoples’, I think you said, complacency. It’s not always just complacency.

I think it’s sometimes like a deep sadness, and accepting that it’s going to happen and then going to that sad place, because they know what the implications of losing the right to illegal abortion are. I’m angry that I don’t see other angry women that I know, that their anger is there. But I don’t see them, that the streets weren’t filled December 1 with women in at least thousands. That didn’t happen. That there aren’t people demanding abortion on demand and without apology. That the outrage that you could have a Supreme Court justice say, well, what’s the big deal — you can just get your child adopted? The lack of outrage over Brett Kavanaugh talking about a conflicting interest between a fetus and a woman. I feel like I’m made to feel like I’m crazy. I feel like that’s not a new thing: an angry woman is a crazy woman. But why don’t we see this anger as visible anger? 

Soraya Chemaly  19:37

First of all, we’re a pretty conservative country. We’re two countries at least. We’re many countries, but we’re very conservative. We have the most religious population of any of the dominant countries in the world. And those religions are very authoritarian. You have Catholicism and you have evangelical Protestant religions, and I don’t think you can separate those faiths. I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic school throughout my whole life and through college. You can’t separate the ideologies of your faith from your political stance. It’s virtually impossible, even though we like to pretend that’s what everyone’s doing all the time.

The inherent authoritarianism of those faiths bleeds into everything, particularly this issue, which we insist on calling a social issue. In our country, we still call abortion a social issue, as opposed to a human rights issue, a violation of our human rights, an economic issue, a deliberate oppressive policy that hurts women and their health and wellbeing across the board. We just keep thinking of it as a choice that women make, selfishly by the way, they make it selfishly. And we put it in that little social box of choice and we walk away. That’s how we dealt with it. That’s a real flaw. That’s a real problem. We are very religious, very authoritarian, very conservative.

I think that what happened with the election of Trump was that people who felt comfortable, people who felt like we’re fine, women here are the best. I can’t even tell you as a writer of the last 12 years, and I was a writer 25 years before that, that sense of American exceptionalism, particularly when it comes to women, is powerful. When Trump was elected, it really, as we know, shocked people. It really shocked them that this man was so evidently predatory and aggressive and sexist and flaunting it — that one videotape, for people who saw it or were paying attention or heard about it. I was stunned by how many people did none of those things, like they’d never heard of it, never seen it. It just didn’t even register for a lot of people. I think people were stunned. I think these are people who, by and large, thought that the work of feminist protest was over or wasn’t necessary.

Sam Goldman  21:54

There’s not a good equivalent to compare, like with men, right? There isn’t, because there’s nothing that their bodies — I don’t know, if their guns got taken, or they had to get a vaccine, the rage…

Soraya Chemaly  22:11

Or, they have to get a vasectomy. I mean, we have a problem with overpopulation, and we’ve decided as a society that that’s by far the cheapest way to stop growing the population. China didn’t force men to have vasectomies, but it had a one child rule. It’s a full circle between enforcing abortion the way they did, and refusing abortion. There is no difference in the end. It’s just the state saying what’s going to happen to women and their reproduction. What I find interesting, even in our legal framework, is that again, we never talk about this. This doesn’t come up because it’s so profoundly embedded in our thinking. The rule, like the rule of viability, that sense of there being two separate people and that they have equal rights. That entire framework is based on how men experience reproduction, as separate and outside of themselves, and that’s not how a person who’s pregnant experiences pregnancy at all.  We don’t even have a language to describe, we don’t have an epistemology, we don’t have a theory of reproduction to describe what it means to be both one person and more than one person, you know, one person and maybe eventually two people or three people. We don’t even question the fundamental premise of the notion of separate individual selves that goes into the reasoning of a man like Gorsuch.

Sam Goldman  23:33

I really appreciate that breakdown. I get all the demoralization. People have been through so much. Even though people have been through so much, I feel that if we were to enforce vasectomies tomorrow, the outrage would be everywhere. Why is that the case? But you don’t see that with women. 

Soraya Chemaly  23:52

I think that’s just the state of patriarchal existence. To me, it’s not that complicated. The other fact, too, is there are a lot of liberal progressive men, and just as many completely conservative, authoritarian women, I back away from any sort of essentialism. You know, women don’t grow up outside of the culture. We’re not born into feminism. The way that women experience security and safety and, eventually maybe power, is virtually always vicarious. It’s always vicarious, and so to threaten that relationship that makes those things possible is serious for a lot of people. They’re dependent and they don’t want to talk about their dependence. Again, I think this comes down to identity. If your identity is built around a certain type of worldview, a certain type of relationship, you’re just not going to want to challenge it or upset things because it’s scary.

Sam Goldman  24:49

I think that makes a lot of sense. We see that playing out in many ways beyond abortion — the way that people view something like a vaccine, their worldview and their their sense of control and agency being tied into that.

Soraya Chemaly  25:02

That’s exactly right. The thing about a better vaccine, too, of course is — this to me comes back to your question about men and vasectomies. But that idea that the skin is being broken and yourself is being penetrated by something and that is a threat to the self. It doesn’t apply to women in the same way. It doesn’t apply to women the same way, because we’re inherently thought of as penetrable and porous and functional. An abortion, the regulation of abortion, is functional whether you’re in China or here.

Sam Goldman  25:37

I’ve never thought of it that way.

Soraya Chemaly  25:39

Well, think about the way transvaginal, five, six years ago. A lot of us were writing about what essentially comes down to a state sponsored sexual assault when you take a 12 inch transvaginal probe and you tell a woman that she has to go through this procedure for no medical reason at all. If you just walk people through the experience that a woman has: the humiliation, the shame, the anger, the frustration, the discomfort. It’s mind boggling to think men would be subjected to something like that, that you literally can’t compute. Actually this just happened; I saw it on Twitter. This is very interesting. It’s been a long-standing conversation about women and the insertion of IUDs or uterine biopsies. When those things happen, women don’t get any kind of anesthesia at all. And of course, for colonoscopies, people do. And you gotta say, why one end and not the other? Well, and we know why. There’s no mystery.

Sam Goldman  26:46

That’s interesting. One of the things that you do in your writing in your book is talking about the positive role of anger. I like to move toward some hope. What do you think is the positive of women being able to tap in and actually feel and express their anger?

Soraya Chemaly  27:07

I think we see the positives all the time since women were the vanguard of opposition to Trump. From the day that people started to understand, they led protests, mail-ins, political activism, fundraising. That was all anger, all driven by women who channeled their anger into political activity. I’ve never joined a feminist movement, and I belong to many, many different types of feminist movements and networks and activism. Anger is always involved, and yet they are places that are filled with enthusiasm and imagination. You have to be able to maintain a positive vision of the future to do any of that work. The anger is all part of that. And again, we were talking about the rest of the world. I have been watching America slide into this terrible, terrible situation for decades actually. And I am genuinely heartened by what women in the rest of the world are doing.

Sam Goldman  28:06

Are there places in particular that you’ve been paying attention to?

Soraya Chemaly  28:09

We talked about South America, I think what has been accomplished there in the last year or two, particularly as it pertains to this issue, is quite remarkable. You know, we’re talking about colonialism, Catholicism, authoritarianism, on the left and right. This is amazing that these women have managed to get these laws changed. Of course, there have been tragedy after tragedy after tragedy along the way, but it’s quite a positive sign that this has happened. And again, this is something that will have intergenerational impacts that we won’t know, we won’t really see for a long time as will what we’re going through right now.

Sam Goldman  28:50

Absolutely. As we close out our chat, what do you think we should be doing in this moment? You can speak in terms of cultivating the positives of our anger or you could speak to any other aspect that you think is important, but what do you think that people in particular women who are listening and are concerned right now?

Soraya Chemaly  29:14

First of all, I think that we need to hold men accountable for participating in this conversation. For example, Susan Collins, she’s the focus of a lot of ire because she could have stopped Kavanaugh from being confirmed, and I am pissed off at her. too. But you know what? She is one woman in a party that functions like a hybrid fascist state. If you just looked at the GOP in the United States and you looked at the representation of women, we would rank about 130 to 233, right alongside Mali. That’s what the GOP is like. So we’ve got this one woman who’s irritating, yes, got it, check, badness. But all these men did this, and I don’t know why we’re focusing on her. Okay, I mean, I understand. But in fact, they should understand women’s human rights. They should be held accountable for upholding the law. They should be the ones, not just her.

I think the same thing stands in life. We keep expecting women to fight this battle. We simply don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough institutional power. We definitely don’t have enough religious power. We don’t have political power. There is power at the top levels of universities in the US. If you look at these numbers, the higher up those pyramids you go, the fewer and fewer women of color. You literally cannot find a Black woman in that stratospheric space. My question really is, what are we going to do when we’re talking to men, and those men might be brothers, or fathers or spouses or sons, or students or peers at work, so they don’t just check out anymore? Get totally checked out. It’s like, it has nothing to do with them.

Sam Goldman  30:53

Have you found any personal success in those conversations?

Soraya Chemaly  31:00

You know what? What I have found is that aging is a gift. And I don’t mind being the person who makes other people uncomfortable anymore. For the longest time I did, and I don’t, and it doesn’t mean that I’m cruel or rude. It just means that I’m pretty honest. I say exactly what I mean. I don’t give pat answers to questions. If someone said to me last week, Hey, how are you? I’d be like, I am fucking pissed off. That is how I am. Because look at what is happening in the Supreme Court today. That may make some people back off. But then, to your point, I would say, And why aren’t you? Can you explain this to me, please? You know, at least the dinner parties aren’t boring. You know, you can barely see people these days in person, but when you do it might as well count. If you’re gonna see people, make it count. 

Sam Goldman  31:40

I think that is a perfect place for us to end. I want to thank Soraya so much for joining us and sharing your expertise, your time, your perspective with us. And I want to know where you would like people to go and find more things from you. We will definitely link your book in the Show Notes. If there’s other places, yeah, obviously.

Soraya Chemaly  32:28

I think probably for people who use Twitter, Twitter’s always a good place. I’m @schemaly. I do have a website, but it’s really more just a repository where I keep things. But I always share what I’m writing in Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. So that’s probably the best.

Sam Goldman  32:44

Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Soraya Chemaly  32:46

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s delightful to talk to you.

Sam Goldman  32:49

As Sunsara Taylor, a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism and co-host of the RNL Revolution, Nothing Less show recently wrote, “Already, fascist mobs are invading every sphere of public life. They’re threatening school board members, public health officials, election workers and more. The Republican Party has not only purged itself of anyone who firmly opposed the violent coup attempt by Trump supporters on January 6. It has been moving aggressively to so thoroughly corrupt the election processes that they will either win regardless of the popular vote or be able to unleash violent mobs to nullify an election they lose. A win for them in decimating abortion rights would accelerate their momentum.”

I’ve been reflecting about how our rage is constantly derailed, domesticated, largely by those we are told are “really on our side.” I’ve been thinking more about this question and why we don’t see more angry women filling the streets. I think it’s because so many have been listening and looking to leaders in the Democratic Party who try to extinguish our anger, or those who pretend to exist for women’s interests but, bottom line, subordinate them to the needs and interests of the Democratic Party. They tell us to look at the fascist majority Supreme Court and then tell us to vote harder, rather than call us to reject the legitimacy of such institutions. They tell us to take a beat and buckle in for long incremental struggle to reverse laws when we should be listening to the women of Mexico and Argentina and elsewhere, where despite tremendous odds stacked against them from overtly aggressive patriarchal governments, they’ve shown us how to stand up in society-shaking outpourings of mass fury against abortion restrictions and WIN.  

When instead of listening to that voice inside of us that is saying 5-alarm fire, we are listening to those who are saying it’s not that serious. Just donate, set up transportation networks to the Democratic-controlled states where abortion would still be legal, and it’ll be okay.

Fuck all of that. Get angry, get furious, get loud, get uncompromising. Get in the streets!

With that, now listen to a recent conversation I had with Chelsey Ebin, co-founder and fellow of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. Last month she wrote an article titled “Texas Legislators Don’t Just Want to Ban Abortion,” published by the Fair Observer. To help us gain a deeper understanding of the assault on abortion rights and what this assault can tell us about the fascist movements plan for the future, I’m joined by Chelsea Ebin. Chelsea is an associate professor of politics at Center College, a co- founder and fellow at the Institute of Research on Male Supremacism, and a fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. Welcome, Chelsea. So glad to have you with us.

Chelsea Ebin  35:59

Thank you, Sam. I love that I’m an assistant professor, wish I were an associate but 

Sam Goldman  36:04

I am so sorry.

Chelsea Ebin  36:05

Don’t correct it. I’m so happy to have it be bumped up rather than down.

Sam Goldman  36:11

Yeah, I’m happy to promote you anytime.

Chelsea Ebin  36:14

I appreciate it.

Sam Goldman  36:15

I really appreciated an article that you wrote for the Fair Observer around Texas SB 8, the abortion ban.. One of the things that you wrote in it was, “It is clear that SB 8 is an assault on the rights of pregnant people that is informed by and reflects the logic of white power and male supremacism. But the law goes further, it is also an assault on the very framework of liberal rights. On one hand, SB 8 is a continuation of the anti-democratic turn within the American right. On the other hand, it is a repudiation of liberalism. Taken together, these two aspects of SB 8 highlight what the Texas abortion ban can tell us about the radical political project of the American right.” I am hoping that you could talk to us a little bit more about those two aspects, the anti-democratic turn and the repudiation of liberalism that you see embodied in SB 8. 

Chelsea Ebin  36:17

I’ll start with the anti-democratic turn. I think that SB 8, we look at it just very strictly on the numbers of how the law was passed. We see a legislature that’s not representative of the demographics in Texas. It is sort of a pseudo-democratic system whereby a majority of white men are passing legislation that affects constituents whose voices are not accurately reflected. Of course, Texas has also been at the forefront of passing new voting restrictions. So the state legislature is very clear about wanting to constrain the democratic will of Texans.

So on one hand, I think we see it there. We also see it as illiberal because it is looking to strip a certain number, or certain groups, of Texans of fundamental rights of their constitutional right to sexual privacy, and by extension to abortion. When we put these things together, what we see is an assault that will only further undermine democratic representation. The more we constrain people’s rights to be autonomous, self-governing subjects, the more we also see constraints on democratic governance, because those people don’t have the same access to be autonomous.

Sam Goldman  38:35

I think that is really helpful in terms of seeing people’s ability to participate in society fully. Part of making that all possible is being able to decide what happens with your body, and therefore how that affects your whole life trajectory. I think that a lot of people don’t understand how central abortion is in women’s ability to participate in society, including the political decisions that are made.

Chelsea Ebin  39:03

It affects people who can experience pregnancy at every possible level. It constrains potentially their educational choices, their economic choices, and I really see these assaults on abortion. I think they’re going to be followed very closely by assaults on access to contraception. We can see the writing on the wall and it’s coming. But I see these as attempts to assert control and regulate the choices of people who experience pregnancy across all sectors of their lives. Even something as basic as voting. It is very difficult for some folks to get to the polls, if they don’t have access to childcare or if they are responsible for working in a profession that doesn’t give them time off to go vote. You can imagine a future that’s not too far off, where people who experience pregnancy, because they don’t have the option of choosing whether or not to be pregnant, will, by extension, not have all of these other options available to them. Very quickly that will result in a society that is even more unequal than it currently is.

We know that these kinds of abortion bans disproportionately impact women of color, immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, and poor folks — those people and those groups who don’t have the ability or the access to travel to procure an abortion, or to receive guidance on how to self-administer a termination. So, it seems like it would be naive of us to not see how this gets reproduced on a broader scale around restricting people’s access to a broader array of political rights.

Sam Goldman  40:53

I think that’s really essential. I see restrictions, bans on abortion, as really an act of state violence. There, to me, is no world in which abortion is restricted that doesn’t do tremendous physical, emotional, and psychic violence to women. Those of them who become pregnant turn them into baby-making machines, your body being hijacked, your safety, in particular, as it relates to domestic violence, their lives, social standing, lifelong relations, and so much more being decided for them. To me that is an act of violence. 

Chelsea Ebin  41:31

I think that it quite literally can turn into an act of violence that’s accompanied by life or death repercussions. I had a student this semester, who wrote a really fantastically researched paper on Black maternal mortality, reading through the statistics she had compiled. Yeah, we are asking people to undergo an experience that can and very often does result in death. It’s not hyperbole to say that forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term is an act of violence and carries with it huge, huge risks.

Sam Goldman  42:12

When abortion is illegal, women die. It’s not just the deaths that are caused by people seeking out termination through illegal means. That is also very often through those who go through the pregnancy and maternal mortality from that. So I think that’s really helpful to help us have the broadness of mind and thinking about this. We talk on Refuse Fascism a lot about this triad, if you will, of misogyny, the most vicious, aggressive, violent reassertion of misogyny, this American first chauvinism, the xenophobia and white supremacy as this triad that is foundational towards this fascist movement, and what this movement foments and relies upon.

That said, when we use the word fascism, what we’re really getting at in terms of their end game is that if consolidated, there’s a total elimination of democratic rights and rule of law. So that is what we’re talking about here. I want to talk to you about the centrality of this hyper masculinity that we see. Yes, we see it in all fascist movements. But there’s a certain particularity here in the American expression of it, because of its — you talk about this elsewhere and I know that you’ve studied it — the role of the religious right in shaping the fascist movement in this country. I was just wondering if you could share any insight that you have to help us understand, why is this masculinity so important, this version of masculinity if you will, really misogyny? Why is that so central, as both a cohering mechanism and as a mechanism for this movement to advance and gain momentum?

Chelsea Ebin  43:55

So, part of what I spend my time doing is working with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. A lot of the conversations I have center around male supremacism. One of the things that is really evident is that male supremacism, or we can call it misogyny, is the sort of center of the Venn diagram between white nationalist, Christian supremacist, other ethno nationalists who may or may not self-identify as white supremacist. I would say that the ethno nationalists also by definition are white supremacist, but there are folks who would quibble with that and want to distinguish between the two, and male supremacism and misogyny have become a way of forging alliances between all of these anti-democratic illiberal movements. Each of them, I would say, comes to misogyny or male supremacy from distinct and overlapping routes.

I work mostly on the Christian Right, and there we see patriarchal traditionalism being the primary conduit to developing an ideology of male supremacism. The ideas of male supremacism get grounded in a reinterpretation of theology in order to assert male headship, basically submission, and sort of imposing essentially a set of gender roles. All of this is done in the service, of course, of asserting the supremacy of men over women and forcing women into roles that are obedient, submissive, and subservient to the roles of men. For white nationalists, we often see male supremacism tied into conceptions around the supremacy of the white race, but also the need to control women’s reproduction in order to ensure the survival of the “white race.” Here you get the sort of replacement fears and desires to control the bodies of women who may produce children that don’t comport with the vision of a white ethno state. So, I think on both fronts, we’ve seen controlling women’s bodies as being a means of achieving supremacist goals, certainly for those who are broadly xenophobic, controlling population as another means by which this overlaps with the white supremacist. I find it difficult to distinguish between the white supremacist and other forms of xenophobia, but they’re all sort of dancing the same dance.

Sam Goldman  46:36

I definitely agree with that. As you were talking, I was thinking about Madison Cawthorn. It’s not the first time that he’s said something like this on the House floor, but he basically is talking about “women as earthly vessels”. What the? I’m trying to do an episode on abortion where I don’t use the F word, and it’s very hard for me. The F word being “fuck,” every episode I’ve done on abortion. I can do whole episodes and other things and then abortion and I just “f this,” “f that ,”every second, so I’m trying hard, y’all. Yeah, earthly vessels. And then there’s Josh Hawley blaming, I think, liberals for destroying masculinity, because we define (it’s very us/them that’s why I’m saying we) all masculinity is toxic, and therefore men don’t have courage and assertiveness and they’re driven to porn and video games and a life of idleness. And it just got me — not only are they victims, but they are victims for not being able to be “courageous” and “assertive.” In what world does this occur?

Chelsea Ebin  47:54

It is the sort of paradox of the supremacist who claims the identity of victimhood occurs across all of these different groups. Sociologist Mitch Frobrier identifies it in white supremacists, and in my work I try to extend that frame to thinking about Christian supremacists. All these male supremacists are fixated on asserting that it is their right and their do in life to be superior, and any attempt to thwart that turns them into victims. In some of the men’s rights activist communities that we’ve looked at you see this really blatantly spelled out on online discussion boards. It’s really what they’re articulating over and over and over again, is that women are conniving and devilish and have captured the state. So, we should reject and refuse the state because it is a tool for women’s wildly and subversive way, at the same time as women are inferior or stupid or helpless and need to be dominated. And it’s like I’m sorry, buddy, help me figure out…so women capture the state and use it against you as some sort of bludgeon. And also, they are so insipid, vapid and incompetent, that they need to be dominated by you.

Sam Goldman  49:20

That doesn’t even meet its own internal logic.

Chelsea Ebin  49:22

No, but there is a way in which it gets reconciled. It’s that we should be superior, we should have control, any loss of that control and any sort of loss of that status and privilege is an assault on us, thereby we are victims. So, reasserting our superiority is just self-defense. This is something the right does a lot. The right says, Oh no, no, we’re just trying to hold the tide against progressive activism. This is just backlash. In so many ways, the right actually claims backlash as a defense for its agenda. It’s not that the right is trying to impose fascism, the right is just trying to stop the progressives and the liberals from doing too much and getting too crazy. So, that logic, I think, like there is an internal cohesion to it or coherence because it’s a way of justifying and obscuring the radicality of what the right itself is doing and these various different rates.

Sam Goldman  50:22

Yeah, I see it as like a collective gaslighting.

Chelsea Ebin  50:26

I like that, that way of explaining it. Yeah, collective gaslighting. Mainstream media coverage, New York Times and The Washington Post have been really problematic around the assault on abortion. It’s as if the legacy media outlets learned nothing from four years of the Trump administration, and they’re still trying to have both sides. It’s like, no, no, I’m sorry, really, what you’re trying to say is that people who experience pregnancy are not entitled to the same rights as those who cannot experience pregnancy and you are creating two different classes of citizens in your country. And those two different classes, of course, disproportionately map on to those who are already historically oppressed, marginalized, and underrepresented.

So why are we presenting this? But really, we need to talk about both sides of the abortion debate. And no, no, we don’t. Either we’re committed to a liberal framework of rights and to democratic governance, or we’re not. I was part of a conversation yesterday where someone used the term “illiberal democracy” and “liberal democracy,” and then was Well, maybe it’s not just illiberal, maybe it’s like ethnocratic liberalism. I was like, I’m sorry, I have to stop you. What does that even mean?

If we draw these false equivalencies between one thing that wants to uphold people’s ability to participate equally and equitably in society, and another thing that wants to impose hierarchy and authoritarian dictates on some people and not others. We can’t compare them if they are operating in the same political vocabulary, same political worlds. I would say I’ve been very frustrated reading coverage around abortion. I think that what it is accurately and adequately capturing is that misogyny is so deeply entrenched in our society, that it is not — what’s the expression, like a 5-alarm fire or whatever? It’s not actually that big of a problem for Texas to subvert the supremacy of the Constitution and run roughshod on the rights of people who experience pregnancy, like we’re okay with that by and large, or at least we’re willing to debate it, which I find really frustrating and problematic. It shouldn’t be up for debate.

Sam Goldman  52:51

A hearty, hearty amen to everything that you said. I think this is a crisis, but you wouldn’t know it. If you opened up any mainstream paper, it would seem like, oh, well, there might be a lively debate, this might be something that is generating a lot of controversy. Not that we face a situation where not only is a state able to subvert the Constitution, but the Supreme Court says, keep at it. And hold on a second, because we’re gonna make it a nationwide effort. Basically, we’re gonna greenlight all the copycat laws that are down the pipeline, and come June, we’re ready to take away the right to legal abortion in this country. And then, for the main press that people look to, to not even talk about in plain and simple words, what that means is infuriating in my mind. They are no different from the logic expressed by Kavanaugh, where he talks about, well, it’s a difficult situation because there’s the woman and there’s the fetus and we’re trying to balance these are two different — fuck that!

Chelsea Ebin  54:10

Yes, fuck that.

Sam Goldman  54:13

It is a pregnant person, a person, not an incubator, a person and a potential for life that is subordinate to that person. that is part of that person’s body. There is only one perspective, and that’s the perspective of the pregnant person and what they want to do. And until we start calling it out, as they are a movement for female enslavement, they are nothing short of that. All these other arguments, they actually train people to be complicit. They train people to normalize what nobody should be normalizing. 

Chelsea Ebin  55:10

I think that there’s a general resistance in the legacy press, and I would say, among people on the whole, to recognize just what treacherous waters we’re in, and just how fragile America’s political institutions are now. We are raised on a steady diet of believing that the Supreme Court defends our rights. And I’m so sorry, there was a 20 year period of the rights revolution, where the court did expand and uphold people’s rights. That 20 years should be viewed alongside the over 200 years where the court actually has been a tool of capitalism and a tool of white supremacy and a tool of maintaining the oppression of historically underrepresented and marginalized groups. The courts do not want to save us.

Sam Goldman  56:03

I feel like we need it on a neon billboard, on like every highway. Anyone that wants to get on that. Any listeners?  Courts won’t save us. That would be perfect.

Chelsea Ebin  56:14

That’s really hard to wrap our heads around that. I think it is hard to be staring down this tunnel and not see a light at the end of it. But I think the reality is life is going to get a lot harder for a lot of people. In some ways you were talking about how folks who are sort of brainwashed into this, I think so much of it actually has to do with this longer gameplan of the right to change the way in which people are educated. I taught Roe versus Wade this semester, and at a certain point, I looked at my classroom and I was like, hold on, when I talked about the trimester framework. Do you all understand what that means? And my students were like, No, I’m okay. I had a small handful of students who understood that pregnancy lasts 40 weeks and that viability was reached with medical intervention somewhere between 24 and 26 weeks, but you probably need a fair amount of medical intervention there. They just had no conception, no idea of this. I’m like, Yeah, this is what abstinence-only education has wrought.

This is what the systematic defunding of sex education programs has produced — a generation of young people who can’t really conceive of what this loss would mean to their experience, because they haven’t been educated about what the experience of pregnancy itself is. As a result, they’re much more amenable to ideas like fetal heartbeats. I find myself yelling, it’s an electromagnetic pulse. It’s not a heartbeat. It’s just like a little blip. And it doesn’t make sense to them, right? They have no conception of what a fetus looks like as it’s developing. I think in their minds, it’s like a fully formed little person. We’re just waiting to open the door on someone’s stomach and out is going to come this little creature. It’s like some cells in the beginning that’s really a blob, and it stays a blob for quite a while. Even after it’s not a blob, it’s still dependent on the pregnant person whose body is carrying it and therefore that pregnant person’s rights supersede because it’s not a person yet. It doesn’t have rights.

Sam Goldman  58:30

Exactly, exactly. As we start to conclude our discussion, I wanted to circle back to something that you’re talking about when you don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, and you don’t see hope. I think we’re faced with a situation in this way that we haven’t faced before — the level of danger and threat that we face a fascist movement in this country that already has a trial run behind them. They have learned from their missteps, a movement of millions, tens of millions of revanchist-fueled followers who are ready to do whatever it takes to bring this male supremacist, white supremacist, if you’re not American you’re not good, world to fruition, with all the horrors that entails. That is true. All that is true. And if all you see is that, and the threat and the danger, then I do think that it can bring you to a place of despair, especially if you think that you’re gonna keep playing by the rules.

I think that everyone who cares about the lives and future of people who can become pregnant in this country, and I’ll say women especially, because this movement, who they care about is the oppression of women, those who don’t identify as women that become pregnant are subhuman already to them. And that’s despicable and disgusting. I think that so long as we continue to believe that we can keep playing by the rules, while they set the rules on fire, we are going to lose. Anyone who tells you that you have to buckle in for the long game, which is what the New York Times Editorial Board was saying, you know, they had their decades of organizing, we need our decades of organizing, how many bodies are you willing to accept dead? How many lives are you willing to accept foreclosed while you build up those decades of organizing, because that’s the reality of what it will mean. And I think that we need to start breaking out a little bit about hoping and relying on some political proxy to do what’s needed.

Whatever platform we have — you do tremendous work in academia — everybody has a role to play in this. People need to re-tap into their power. On the flip side, there’s also some folks in the women’s movement right now that are really making me angry. I don’t want to step over that. I’m primarily angry at the fascists, don’t get me wrong. But I’m also angry at those who are telling people fairytales right now, and saying, we have the abortion pill, we’re going to be good, y’all. We just got to get more people to know how to use the pill, and we’re gonna be there for each other. It matters whether abortion is legal. It matters. The abortion pill is not going to be a good match for a fascist state. You know, I’m all for the abortion pill. Thank you FDA for lifting the restrictions and making it easier for people to get their hands on it. If you have any thoughts, we can close out by also hearing about some of the work that you’re doing, some of the work that the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism is doing, or wherever you want to take it. 

Chelsea Ebin  1:01:49

I agree with all of the things you just said. I should give a disclaimer and say that my partner says that I’m like a dark rain cloud with a vascular system, because I am very pessimistic.

Sam Goldman  1:02:00

I think that’s a beautiful description.

Chelsea Ebin  1:02:05

I’m owning it. I’m just like I would embrace it. I’m better with it, it works for me. But I think that like so much of what I see is people forecasting the best case scenario being that we have basically two countries, blue states where you have access to abortion rights, and where you can vote and have your vote be counted in a meaningful way. And red states where you don’t. And blue states where you have government that’s invested in public health, and will impose mask mandates when necessary, and red states whether or not. There’s a big part of me that is like, one, how is this your best case scenario? And who are you leaving behind? And how was that best case scenario not also a white supremacist fantasy, because of the folks who will be left behind like the folks who won’t have access to move to one of these states where they will be protected.

So I find it really troubling and really problematic when so-called good intention liberals are like, well, it’s gonna be okay, we’ll just be in California and Oregon and Washington. And so you want to just forget about all of the immigrants, all of the people of color, all of the poor white folks who are going to be harmed? It is such an elitist fantasy that can be your best case scenario. Where I do find some hope — and I’m going to sound like such a cheeser —  is in my students. I love teaching. I love my students, whether I agree or disagree with where they’re coming from. I find them, as a generation, to be really thoughtful. Their sort of rejection of the Trump years has been to want to not reproduce some of the most odious parts of this new fascist movement. So I do find some hope in my students and in their perception on things. They’re like a deep embrace of intersectionality across the political spectrum. They get that in a way that I think so many folks who are older millennials, or Gen Xers just don’t and continue to struggle to comprehend. I do think, though, that we need our eyes wide open when we think about what our options are going forward.

The court is not going to save us. It is open season on protesters. The Rittenhouse verdict basically says yeah, you want to roll up to a protest and shoot some folks? Be our guest. We also know it’s open season on protesters because of all of the vehicular assaults that have happened, and the Democrats are just sort of watching this happen. Districts are being further gerrymandered in response to the census. I think we have this very short window where people do need to turn out and people do need to make a lot of noise. People do need to apply pressure, because if there’s not congressional legislation that secures the right to vote, there’s not congressional legislation that secures a right to abortion and birth control. We need to know where this goes next. I think that it’s not just going to be a couple of decades of organizing. It’s going to be a couple 100 years of folks trying to dig themselves out of a really, really oppressive and dangerous place.

So it’s not a very happy forecast, I don’t think. But I don’t think the door slammed shut yet. I think there’s still opportunity and time to resist fascism. But I think we need to start calling it what it is, and we need to be aware of what that means. And we need to make it like pivoting to thinking about the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. We need to recognize the ways in which these different ideologies overlap and reinforce one another. And they are in so many ways co-constitutive and codependent. And again, right reinforces the need for intersectional organizing. It can’t just be a women’s issue. It can’t just be a Black folks issue. These assaults are going to affect everyone and they are going to affect some people more than others. We need to recognize that they are co-constitutive.

Sam Goldman  1:06:22

Whether they affect you or not, you should give a shit because you care about other people. People are always searching for well, how does it relate back to me? Enough with this individualistic toxicity. We got to be there for each other.

Chelsea Ebin  1:06:42

It’s so myopic, like white liberal fantasy that you’re just going to be safe if you live in New York or California. For how long? One, it shouldn’t be about if you’re safe, right? Because it’s completely morally bankrupt, morally bankrupt. But it’s also so naive to think that you’re just going to be able to keep living out your groovy life.

Sam Goldman  1:07:03

They’re gonna protect that little section. They’re gonna let that happen? No way.

Chelsea Ebin  1:07:08

No way. So it is morally bankrupt. And it is painfully naive, I think.

Sam Goldman  1:07:14

Well, I want to thank you so much, Chelsea, for joining us and sharing your expertise, your insight. I learned a lot and I know that our listeners are definitely going to, as well. And I wanted to give you an opportunity to share if people are interested in the work that you’re doing, interested in the work that the Institute is doing, what should people do? Where should people go to learn more?

Chelsea Ebin  1:07:38

Well, for starters, we have an edited volume of essays about male supremacism in the United States coming out in April. So please keep your eyes out for that. So really fantastic and strong collection of essays that’ll serve as a general primer. I think for folks who are new to the idea of male supremacism, you can go to our website, which is malesupremacism.org. You can always become a Patreon donor and help support us. Everything we do is volunteer, and we pour a lot of our hearts and souls into keeping the institute going. And so any amount like a $2 donation is always appreciated. That money helps us to bring together scholars, activists and researchers working on issues of male supremacism. So we do a summer school institute for activists and advocates. We do a lot of stuff for academics. Our goal really is to not just bring awareness to male supremacism as an ideology of oppression, but to really find ways of combating it. We don’t just want to study it for the sake of studying it. We want to study it because we’re really, really scared of what happens when this Venn diagram of white supremacists and male supremacists and xenophobic, anti semitic when they come together what that looks like. And as you’ve said so eloquently, Sam, it looks like fascism and no one wants fascism. Let’s not go there.

Sam Goldman  1:09:06

Let’s not go there. Thank you so much, Chelsea. You can find a link to the Institute in the Show Notes.

Chelsea Ebin  1:09:12

Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun talking with you.

Sam Goldman  1:09:16

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