We’re back to talking about the Overton Window.
Go ahead, take a shot.
Today I wanted to vent a little bit about something we all know is going on, but which often goes under the radar and gets concerningly little discussion outside of a handful of social media posts.
I want to talk about how the American right-wing is attempting to construct a narrative of rigid gender roles and social conformity.
I want to talk about how social media is being leveraged, both by real people and by bots, to push the Overton Window towards accepting hatred, oppression and violence as a normal and permissable aspect of our day to day lives.
I want to talk about how women and LGBTQ+ people in general are being held up as the scapegoats for society’s ills, the internal psychological threat to everyone’s wellbeing in the way that immigrants are supposedly the external, physical threat to their lives.
I want to talk about how bodily autonomy and freedom of expression are hallmarks of democracy, and how authoritarianism always desires to take those things away.
I want to talk about Constructing a Narrative, and how fucking terrifying it is that they’re starting to succeed.
We all know the story. A sexual assault happens; any kind of sexual assault. A woman at a bar gets drugged and taken away by a guy she was on a date with. Maybe she’s attacked while walking home from work.
Maybe her intimate partner decides he isn’t interested in taking ‘no’ for an answer and forces the issue.
No matter how it happens, it’s horrifying and the survivor’s life is forever different. She will never be the person she was before it happened to her, she will never see the world the same way. She may heal in time and be able to smile and enjoy life, but those scars will still be there.
Trauma does not go away.
By the way, guys, this applies to male victims too. Men can be assaulted and abused as well, and it is just as damaging to their mental and physical health. All survivors deserve to be heard and believed. Just to be clear. Man, woman, non-binary, trans or cis, it doesn’t matter.
Everyone can be assaulted, everyone can be traumatised, everyone deserves to be heard and believed.
But what happens after this is just as torturous as the assault itself.
It’s the societal response. The game of twenty questions that try to determine what she did to deserve what happened to her, or what she should have done to prevent it.
Well, why did she choose that guy? Why didn’t she guard her drink better? What was she wearing? Why was she out that night? Why didn’t she call a cab? Why wasn’t she in the mood? How long had it been since she gave him sex?
The question so rarely asked is this: why did he decide he could do that to her?
As of right now, the investigation has been re-opened and the facts are in dispute. But what we need to keep in mind is that if her statements are true and a gang rape took place, and I do believe her, it wasn’t just 7 men involved.
7 men allegedly participated in the assault, but the text messages about what was happening went out to the entire fraternity.
Not a single one of those guys who were in that group chat reported the assault.
Not one called the cops, not one told them it was wrong, not one of them made any effort on the behalf of the victim while she was being violated brutally after being drugged so she couldn’t fight back.
It wasn’t just 7 men.
And then you get the response from the school — two men expelled. Some temporary suspensions.
The rest of the frat got no punishment at all. The fraternity did close in 2024, but is that a consequence for the men involved?
And once again, society’s response is horrific. Many women call out the men, and rightfully so. But so many men online follow the same fucked up talking point list as they always do.
Why would she go to the frat party? Why did she go alone? Why didn’t she bring friends? Why did she drink? Anything to make it seem like it was her fucking fault that a group of men decided to do this to her.
The idea behind this is to make it seem like it’s her responsibility to not be raped, as opposed to the men’s responsibility to not rape.
By asking why she was at the frat house, they imply that there are certain locations where women do not belong, certain places where we should just accept that we aren’t safe and we should avoid.
The implication is that our world ought to be smaller than men’s worlds. That we should stick to the places we belong and nothing bad will happen to us. If we just stay at home in our kitchens, we won’t get hurt.
Statistically we know that’s not true, either.
Oh yeah — and the President of the United States was found liable for sexual abuse in court. Not to mention the Epstein issue. Is it any surprise women’s safety is in this state when millions of people decided he was a fit choice to lead the most powerful nation on Earth?
It’s not about keeping us safe. It’s about controlling what we do and punishing us for stepping out of our lane.
Sexism goes hand in hand with homophobia and transphobia. Any kind of phobia based around gender and sexuality, really.
Fascists love strict gender roles; it’s a way to enforce rigid rules of behaviour on people in a self-perpetuating way. If you tie morality to gender presentation and sexuality, the social stigma becomes a method of policing it.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, they went for Germany’s LGBTQ+ community first, alongside other political enemies of the party. I wrote about this extensively back when J.K. Rowling was trying to erase transgender victims of the Holocaust.
The entire point of authoritarian rule is authority. It’s in the name. It’s about keeping the population in line, following your orders, and running society along carefully managed lines.
Freedom of expression is not allowed because it gives people license to exist outside of those lines. Bodily autonomy is the enemy.
Women having the freedom to make choices outside of the home and people having the freedom to choose how to present, who to marry and fall in love with is a hallmark of open societies.
When those societies start to close down and democracy fails, those freedoms are often the first to be stripped away.
There’s a reason Trump’s authoritarian takeover was preceeded by years of the Republican party in the U.S. building up a narrative about LGBTQ+ people being groomers, sexually deviant and a threat to children.
It’s the Overton Window. They’re trying to make us seem evil so the masses will accept our rights being taken away without protest.
There’s a reason the right-wing is pushing so hard against women’s rights as we speak, against reproductive rights and even voting rights in the U.S.
It’s the Overton Window. Normalize the narrative, make it a topic of public discourse.
Control the marginalized, establish strict roles and rules, and viciously punish anyone who breaks out of them. We saw it in Nazi Germany, we see it in Russia, we see it starting to take shape now in the United States.
And thanks to the internet, it’s an ideology that spreads.
We all know how it goes. A meme with a snappy political comment and a funny picture gets shared online. It goes viral; a thousand likes, restacks or reposts, people copy the image and share it to their friends on another platform, on and on it goes.
It goes wild. People start quoting it in real life, suddenly it enters political discussions all around the world, because the internet is international and no borders are respected on social media.
And the culture shifts. Not just in the country where the meme was shared, but everywhere it travels from then on.
The Overton Window swings wildly online. The real world turns more slowly, but it follows all the same.
Memes are the modern day’s version of old school propaganda posters. The algorithm is the new information funnel. Propagandists have the easiest time influencing mass numbers of people these days.
The American right-wing is exceptionally good at leveraging this power.
We’ve all heard of the so-called ‘alt-right pipeline’ that channels young disaffected men — mostly white men, let’s be real — towards the right. The carefully managed network of influencers and political commentators and podcasters that nudge people down a cultivated road full of propaganda.
The left has not been nearly as successful at creating such a pipeline.
The internet is built to reward engagement, and negative emotions like fear and anger and hate induce such engagement and drive clicks faster than just about anything.
Fear sells, and that’s what the right wing feasts on. Fear of the ‘other,’ fear of not being good enough, fear of failing to fit in, fear of missing out. Fear of the unknown, of the unfamiliar.
Compassion for those who are different from you is less compelling.
They haven’t done this by accident; this is just one of many tactics used by the far-right in the U.S. to shore up their flagging support and entice voters to join their little crusade.
It’s right up there with closing polling stations in majority-Black and Latino neighbourhoods. Voter suppression is not a new game for them. Once again, I have a very passionate older article on the subject that I encourage you to read and share.
None of this is an accident. The Tradwife trend, the Manosphere, the Passport Bros, the rabid adherence to rape culture by those in positions of power.
They are building the society they want. Trump and his cronies, his supporters in the halls of power, the Epstein clients, the billionaires complicit in those crimes and expecting to avoid all consequences. Even the average guys raised in this culture who expect to be able to do whatever they want and get, at most, a little slap on the wrist.
They want the world to be their playground, and they want us silly little women and queer folks to shut up. They want us to be their servants again, the way it used to be.
But we live in this world too. And we don’t care what they want, do we?
That’s the beauty of getting a taste of freedom. Not many of us are willing to go back to the kitchen or hide in the closet anymore. Not when we know what the outside world can be.
We have the numbers on our side, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re sick and tired of being treated like playthings. We know what they’ve forgotten.
Solidarity wins.