“you get one pass”

LOL, I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re not wrong. I like that. 🤣

act white and straight

This is really what it comes down to. They don’t think of themselves as racist/sexist/homophobic because they don’t (all) reflexively reject someone because their innate characteristics. Instead, your obligation is to identify and adhere to certain cultural touchstones, political beliefs, and historical narratives. If you do that, then you don’t make them feel uncomfortable and you can be dissolved in their acid bath part of their melting pot. They’re also slightly more tolerant of people whom they code as weak or politically apathetic. Woe unto the person who thinks that you can be both different and assertive, though.

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

There actually is a strain of something not entirely unlike feminism on the right, sort of a trans-exclusionary impersonation of third- or fourth-wave. This is your Megyn Kelly or Nancy Mace. The “Boss Babes” mentioned in the article. They are still supposed to look a certain way and never presume to tell a man that he’s benefitted from privilege in any way, but they are allowed to compete in a man’s world within the guardrails. They’re permitted to be a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for less ambitious conservative women and a mouthpiece for those women’s concerns, so they’re allowed to be assertive and maybe even to have prioritized their own careers, e.g. Mace being the first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel. However, they’re not really supposed to look like anything other than a news anchor (the performative femininity is allowed to stand in for the feminine roles they’re deprioritizing), and they’re never allowed to imply that their choices should be the mainstream option. The more “traditional” life choices they can (appear to) cram in beside their careers, the more loved and admired they will be.

They are given a platform as “unicorns” and as a sort of pressure-release valve so feisty little girls in conservative households can be given a role model, but the notion that all women should be pursuing what they want without guidance and protection from a man is anathema, and every time someone like Kelly deviates from the straight and narrow, she will be unceremoniously slapped back in line.

If I’m in a charitable mood, I might say that given the worldview they’re indoctrinated into, they are sort of instinctively trying to make a life they can be proud of and show a different path to be an example, but the acceptable persona is so wedded to a particularly banal and unimaginative vision of the patriarchy that it’s impossible for it to be what some of them want it to be, and it’s no wonder some of them visibly chafe.

Kelly strikes me as someone who’s decided that getting her bag is worth whatever shit she has to put up with, and whoever she has to throw under the bus, to make that happen, but every once in a while the strain of doing so comes through, never so dramatically as when she left Fox News.

In a Hollywood movie, she’d be the minor villain who sacrifices herself for the heroes, but only in the last act after turning down several previous appeals to her humanity, and after her other options have run out.