The Atlantic: The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia

This feels like a particularly strange moment in history, but it’s one that writers seem to have anticipated: The past two years have seen a spate of works delving into the discombobulation of the present. During the early days of the Trump administration, readers sought out dystopian stories that connected the turbulence and the racism and the alternative facts of the 45th presidency with anxieties the world has had before. Over the last couple of years, though, fiction’s dystopias have changed. They’re largely written by, and concerned with, women. They imagine worlds ravaged by climate change, worlds in which humanity’s progress unravels. Most significantly, they consider reproduction, and what happens when societies try to legislate it. [...]

The novel that’s received the most attention over the past two years from women readers troubled by the news was actually published 33 years ago, smack in the middle of the Reagan administration. In 1985, as America lurched socially to the right in what was seen as a rebuke of the sexual revolution, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout. [...]

There were moments when life seemed to be doing its utmost to imitate Atwood. When Oklahoma lawmakers tried to pass a bill requiring women to get written permission from their sexual partner before having abortions. When the Trump administration sanctioned children and babies being literally ripped from their parents’ arms, and when the White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the policy of family separation was actually “very biblical” because it was enforcing existing laws. [...]

There’s no mass epidemic of infertility in Red Clocks, no impending threat to the existence of humankind. Male politicians simply take away women’s rights because they don’t think women should have them. They’re incapable of summoning the empathy to imagine what an unwanted pregnancy might feel like, incapable of imagining that women’s desires regarding their own bodies should take precedence over men’s opinions. Red Clocks is plausible because men’s opinions on abortion and assault and female bodily autonomy have always counted more than women’s. You don’t need to see elderly white senators on television, lining up to apologize to a man who’s been accused of sexual assault, to grasp how much.

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CityLab: Where Hate Groups Are Concentrated in the U.S.

The geography of organized hate in America is at once significantly concentrated and considerably spread out. On the one hand, hate groups are found in slightly more than 10 percent of U.S. counties (340 of 3,142), according to the study. But on the other, hate groups span the entire country, and can be found in every single state. While the heartland—stretching from the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—has among the highest levels of hate groups, the East and West Coasts have a high density of these groups as well, as the map below shows.

The study finds that, not surprisingly, the geography of organized hate is shaped by factors like race and ethnicity, education, poverty, religion, and political conservatism. Organized hate is concentrated in places that are poorer, less educated, less diverse, and whiter, more religious, and more conservative. But the precise extent to which these factors affect hate differs somewhat in different parts of the country. The maps below chart the connection between hate groups and these variables for the 340 counties that are home to hate groups. [...]

The study shows that while organized hate groups are concentrated in U.S. counties, no geographic region is immune to hate. Indeed, hate in America has a long, distressing history that cuts across America’s major geographic regions. The Midwest was a hotbed of white supremacy before the Civil War and is home to the Michigan Militia. The South and Southwest have long been centers for the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups. The Northwest saw a striking rise in white-supremacist groups in the 1980s. And the Northeast has had its share of organized hate as well: In the ‘30s and ‘40s, a wave of anti-Semitic and racially motivated violence hit what we now think of progressive states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.

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The Daily Beast: The Weird Science of Homophobes Who Turn Out to Be Gay

There are other studies that have come to similar conclusions. As Science magazine reported after Pulse, there is a “scattering of research” that suggests “some conflicted gay men might indeed be homophobic,” like a small 1996 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology that measured penile arousal and found a link between “homophobia” and “homosexual arousal.”

But the keyword in all of the above literature is “some.”

There is, at this point, enough research in this area to suggest that there may be something deeper to the armchair psychology. But the “secretly gay homophobe” theory is far from being a complete explanation of anti-LGBT prejudice in American politics.

Twenty percent of people who describe themselves as “highly straight” is still 10 percent fewer than the 32 percent of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage. [...]

As queer writer Lindsay King-Miller wrote earlier this year, “Making fun of ‘closet cases’ only reinforces homophobia” because it “underscores the idea that being gay is shameful and should be hidden.”

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