politics

[Anna] wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.”

“The right wing has a Madonna-wh*** complex about its female voices,” Kaschuta says. “If you’re a good woman and if you stick with the program and tell us what we want to hear, then you’re very much with us and we’ll praise you and we’ll tell you you’re a beautiful angel and a credit to our movement. But the second you veer off script or say something that treads on their pieties,” she says, “you are suddenly pressed into the ‘wh*** category,’ and all bets are off.”

These two passages highlight why this fallout was inevitable. If you attract people to a movement based on being le edgy, contrarian, say shit to trigger people politics, then those people expect that they get to do that. If they get attacked and demonized the moment one of their “just telling it like it is” quips stings someone else on the right, then of course they’ll realize they don’t actually get to be contrarian and then leave.