What I'm Reading, Post-Election

If you process by reading, too

I’m going to go offline next week for a long-planned and much-needed vacation, but in the meantime, I’m processing this shit by walking, by sleeping, by talking with people I love, and by reading.

Reading something doesn’t mean you agree with it entirely. It means it presses some thinking and mourning and feeling buttons. So here’s what’s been doing that for me — and I’d love to hear what’s been doing it for you.

1.) Angela Garbes, “Four Heated Discussions I’ve Had with My White Husband Since November 8, 2016”

“I want very badly to live honestly. I am angry with my husband for not understanding how hard it is to live in this body in this country.”

2.) Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy”

“I always believed that a conservative woman would be the first female president because of what social science says about gender and leadership. American voters demand compensating qualities — gun-toting, conventional attractiveness, religiosity — to accept a female president. Harris played that game, finessing that hybrid centrist conservative in a progressive package. That feels like a game plan for the many female candidates who will follow in her footsteps. It is less clear to me that Harris’s game plan can ever actually work for a Black female candidate.”

3.) Kate Manne, “Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference Toward Women”

“A lot will be said about whether this decision was about misogyny or about the economy. But this is a false contrast. Whatever the proportion of people who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris simply because she is a woman, this is a narrow and, frankly, antiquated conception of misogyny that I’ve been arguing against for a decade. Misogyny isn’t about hating or discriminating against women because they are women and thus attract suspicion and consternation. Misogyny is about exposing women to harm because our gender makes us beneath full consideration. Misogyny is primarily something we face, not something people feel in their hearts. Having to navigate a world where you can’t get a routine D&C after six weeks or obtain care for an ectopic pregnancy or have to carry a fetus to term as a raped ten year-old girl could hardly be one that is more hostile and hateful to women, girls, and indeed anyone who can get pregnant.

The misogyny of this election is not primarily about Kamala Harris, although that is certainly a real force, which I’ve been writing about from the day following the announcement of her candidacy. The main misogyny of this election is that many people will vote to line their pocketbooks at the expense of the basic health and safety of so many of us. Including me, the majority of my readers, my dear trans and non-binary friends, and my daughter and her entire female cohort.”

4.) Amanda Montei “It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Misogyny”

“So many people are going to kick into blame, attack, police, patrol, soften, normalize, hot take, lessen, rationalize—and try to rush us away from our anger and grief. I’m going to dwell in the pain and loss and obviously then I will keep going, as women always have.

We will strike in our bedrooms and in the streets. We will refuse. And we will keeping making art, and loving women, and getting divorces, and mothering, and talking, and feeling joy, and desiring, and having abortions, and taking care of each other—because we always have.”

5.) Garrett Bucks, “I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You”

“Of course I’m gutted right now. And while what follows is my way of processing the giant pit in my stomach, it may not be yours. As you sit in whatever combination of anger and heartbreak and fear and numbness that’s enveloping you right now, now might not be the time for a “what comes next” essay. That’s ok. I hate what you’re likely feeling right now, but I’m also grateful for it. At the core of our shared sadness and rage is a longing for a better world for all of us. We’re scared for each other. We’re angry on each other’s behalf. We’re heartbroken, not just individually but collectively. Those are devastating emotions, but they’re also beautiful ones. As I wrote yesterday, don’t listen to anybody who tries to massage or judge what you’re feeling right now.’

5.) Chris La Tray, “All Candidates, Once Elected”

“In the last year, where I’ve spent hours upon hours talking to probably thousands of people, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and draw connections to our shared humanity, particularly as it relates to where we stand on the spectrum of settler-to-Indigenous people. That is a global relationship. I’ve never wanted to make people feel guilty and now I’m not so sure about all that and this is largely what troubles me deeply. This last year and the willingness of so many people to overlook genocide has lit a different kind of fire in me. I’m trying to figure out what it is going to look like. I will say this, though: I will no longer seek solidarity or community with comfortable people living comfortable lives in comfortably unthreatened homes on stolen land who are unwilling to risk that comfort and convenience in service to the liberation of people forced to give up everything in service to all that comfort. It’s that simple.”

6.) Annie Lowrey, “Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost”

“The optimistic story for the Harris campaign was that, after a year of subdued price growth, the American people would have gotten used to higher bills and appreciated the earning power they gained from the tight labor market. Instead, anger at inflation lingered, even among tens of millions of working-class Americans who had gotten wealthier. This is not a purely economic story; it’s a psychological one too. People interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve. Going to the polls, voters still ranked the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as the No. 1 economic problem, and Trump as their preferred candidate to deal with it. In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.”

7.) Zak Cheney-Rose, “Trump’s Multiracial Coalition of Men is Here”

“Whether that means Democrats drive harder to the right, as they have in the past, or opt to more meaningfully differentiate themselves from the GOP remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that when people feel like the systems around them are broken, they might just vote for the person who promises to take them apart.”

8.) Ken White, “And Yet It Moves”

“A country that votes for Trump is broken in very complicated and daunting ways. Harris could have won in a landslide and 45% of the people voting for Trump would still have reflected a country broken in terrible ways. Moreover, any road out is long and rocky and painful. A Trumpist GOP has control of the entire government, the judiciary is dominated by judges who are Trumpist or willing to yield to Trumpism if it gets rid of Chevron deference, and state and local politics are increasingly dominated by extremists. The GOP is doing everything it can to rig the game to make it harder to vote our way out, and after four more years a stuffed judiciary will be even less inclined to stop them. The struggle to fight back is generational, not simple.

But nobody’s telling you that you have to fix everything. You can fix something.”

And if you haven’t read yesterday’s piece, I recommend the comments most of all:

“Yes, America still hates women. Yes. It sickens me.

AND ALSO, more than ever, it hates trans people and Black and Brown people. That, to me, is even scarier.

I say this not to engage in an oppression Olympics; that's useful to exactly zero people. I say this to remind us of all who is at stake here, and selfishly, because I am, too.”

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I’d love to hear what you’re reading to process, and I know others will too. And if giving helps you process the way it helps me:

Donate to your regional abortion fund here.

Find your regional resources for LGBTQ+ support — and links to donate — here.

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