tallowood wrote Yesterday at 3:17pm:


It's interesting how women are actually viewed within MAGA and broader right-wing circles, particularly in the US.

It's always amusing watching insecure conservative men try to lecture everyone else about "quality women", as if they've uncovered some timeless truth about human worth, when in reality they're just repackaging a fairly bleak, transactional view of relationships and dressing it up as wisdom.

Because if you actually follow that logic through, it doesn't elevate women, it reduces them. Value becomes conditional, tied to youth, appearance, fertility, and compliance. It's not respect, it's appraisal. Not partnership, but asset management.

It's the same thing that underpins the mansphere logic, only they're even more insecure than conservative men in general.

And that's where the contradiction creeps in.

They'll happily sneer at left-wing women as "low value", career-obsessed, undesirable, fatties with purple hair, whatever the insult of the day happens to be. But at the same time, they're promoting a model where a woman's worth is inherently temporary, where she is, by definition, on a clock. Where her "value" peaks early and declines, and where loyalty is contingent on her continuing to meet a standard that time itself guarantees she cannot maintain.

Hence the obsession with preserving the aesthetic, Mar-a-Lago face isn't an accident, it's the logical endpoint of a system that treats ageing as failure rather than inevitability.

So to the usual suspects, I ask to them, are women valued as people, or are they valued as depreciating assets?

Because the framework they're pushing answers that question pretty clearly. The "good" woman isn't respected for her agency or independence, she's rewarded for fitting a narrow brief. And the moment she no longer fits it, whether through age, illness, or just the realities of life, the logic of that system doesn't protect her, it rationalises replacing her.

That or this new attribute is that she's facing execution.  A good woman is a dead one apparently...

That's not a bug in the ideology, it's the feature.

Which makes the constant attempts to deride left-wing women as somehow lacking in value ring hollow. At least that side of politics isn't pretending that a woman's worth expires the moment she stops optimising herself for someone else's approval.

You can't simultaneously argue that women should be judged on a rigid hierarchy of "value", and then act surprised when people point out where that hierarchy actually leads.

And that's before you even get to what happens when someone inevitably falls out of that ideal. The same system that flatters women into thinking they're exceptions offers them very little once they're not. The dissonance has to go somewhere, and more often than not it gets redirected outward rather than examined.

That's why most "karens" are conservative women who no longer meet the "quality women" mould, but still expect the exceptions to the general mistreatment of women from conservative circles be made for them and when it isn't they lash out at servers or checkout staff etc.

As Rebecca Larsen puts it, far more bluntly than most, the promise isn't just conditional, it's structurally designed to fail most of the people buying into it.