It’s rare that I find myself watching Fox News. It’s usually the commercials and the seduction of the clicker. But when I do, it sometimes stops me in my tracks.

Fox & Friends: “Do you know that Hillary Clinton’s website gets as many hits as a lot of porn sites?”…The conversation then degenerates into snickering and sidelong comments by Doocy about who watches porn sites. Gretchen hikes her skirt. The giggling continues. The motive is clear–provide subliminal connections between Senator Clinton and the lowest instincts of male viewers.

Another salvo in the growing war on women.
I vowed not to go back to Fox–even by accident–but I knew if I did I’d find more of the same. They discuss the upholstery on Senator Clinton’s couch in her announcement message, criticize Speaker Pellosi’s red cape. O’Reilly has almost totally abandoned politics for stories of cheerleaders and female middle school teachers gone bad. So have the others. Sex sells, especially sexist sex. It’s the politics of the decade.

This isn’t the place for a feminist “history of the world.” But I challenge you to read these quotes and tell me if they were made in 1934 or 2004. (Bracketed comments my own)

Dear…Women and Girls…when we think back on our parents, grandparents and great grandparents, there were many children in the house. It may have been crowded and hard financially, but we were happy, perhaps because there were so many of us in so large a family. But the time came when…a false teaching arose in the last century…The fewer people there are, the more an individual child can inherit from his parents…the terrible teaching of birth control, which [some] preached and the [common people] followed…

Are you selfish, unpatriotic women paying attention yet? Here’s the next quote:

[They believe that] only a determination among…women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a ‘military air’ and become ‘maternal missionaries’ will lead the…army to victory…Population is a preoccupation for many…who trade statistics on the falling white birthrate…Every ethnic conflict becomes evidence for their worldview…The motivations aren’t always racist, but the subtext of ‘race suicide’ is often there…out-and-out offensive against birth control…selfish white women…[do not] honor their duty to bear children for the nation.

The first quote: Dr. Groß, “Nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik. Eine Rede an die deutschen Frauen (Dessau, C. Dünnhaupt, 1934). It was the basis of the start of the Holocaust. The second, a cogent description of the “Quiverfull” movement today, from The Nation. Some say we are too sensitive to subtle hints of racism in the rhetoric of ultra-conservatives today. What would a Holocaust survivor say?

On a rainy day, try a little surfing. You can find emergent signs of anti-woman rhetoric all over the media. I don’t believe they are reactions to the rising power of Pelosi or Clinton, but rather a sign of the increasing paranoia of weak, white, undereducated men who used to dominate their homes and communities by sheer numbers.

On the simplest level, this is stupid. The Chinese have harnessed the economic and creative power of women. So have the Europeans. Are we to cut our potential in half?

On a moral level, it’s even more shocking because women are complicit. We’ve lowered the bar on what we are prepared to do to send the message that women are only here for reproduction. A Tampa woman is jailed after a rape and denied medication to prevent pregnancy. A woman in a minor traffic incident is denied help for a pending miscarriage, as police tell her she is “stupid” and doesn’t realize she’s menstruating. In both cases, it was a woman who was committing the crime against another woman.

The last time we took a long road trip I brought along an old tape of The Handmaid’s Tale. I wanted to raise my husband’s consciousness. The tape snarled, and I utterly failed at explaining to him how prescient that old book was. This is not a new technique. Demeaning women for political and  demographic power has happened again and again. But it’s a trend we need to note, and fight, in every context in which it appears.