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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30489 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 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.

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