Fascism and Women
by Kate Wagner
Hatred of women is central to all fascisms. This hatred extends virulently, not only to the Other—whose women are routinely dehumanized, and deemed nothing more than breeders, parasites, and whores—but to the women of the fascist’s own in-group, who are relegated to the roles of wife and mother. The fascist woman must be beautiful, young, and pliant, while her male counterpart must be the pinnacle of masculine health and vigor. People who have bought into the logic of fascism walk among us as trad wives and chad-worshipping incels, influencers and streamers, wellness gurus and good god-fearing patriots.
For the fascist to signal health, beauty, and vigor to others, specifically to other men, he must be inclined to and capable of committing violence. With respect to women, the violence in question—and the substrate of gender relations under fascism itself—is rape. What separates our present fascist tendencies from those of the past are the startling and seemingly endless new permutations of rape, amplified by technology.
Rape, at its core, is the theft of a woman’s agency, beginning with her bodily autonomy. The acts of hatred broadly known as “rape culture” extend the same theft of agency into the social milieu. Men may rape women for reasons of sexual gratification, but still more often they do it for reasons of power, to express and experience dominance. Men rape women in order to destroy their selfhood, often across several axes—physically, psychically, socially. Hatred is the only word that can describe such life-denying and annihilative urges.
Any desire to destroy a woman’s life, to denigrate and/or extract gratification from her against her will, is rape in spirit, whether it is sexual or not. For example, current legislative attempts to disenfranchise or otherwise curtail the political power of women who take their husbands’ name in marriage, or the forced-birth movement’s belief that a woman should have to carry her rapist’s baby to term—both of these are embodied. They are life-denying and future-denying political strategies.
We can say that our new fascism creates its own vast, fast-moving constellations of rape, a mentality of oppression that is increasingly robbed of its taboos and celebrated openly in fascist-controlled media. This extends beyond sexualized rape and into its associated pathologies such as incest and pedophilia, the simulation of which have both become uncomfortable fixtures of mainstream pornographic content.
There is, however, a difference between rape as an ordinary aspect of patriarchy, taken for granted (e.g. that a man can permissibly rape his wife because she’s his wife, or rape a whore, because she’s a whore) and rape becoming a mentality, an entire culture around which norms are breaking down and for which its perpetrators advocate publicly, and openly.
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