Equality, men, is in your own self-interest

I read the other half of the Gaslit Nation podcast transcript about the coronavirus. I had written about the virus part of the episode last week. This part isn’t about the virus, but is about misogyny. Host Andrea Chalupa said:

If you look at the nations that have equality between men and women, they also rank as nations that are doing the most to fight the climate crisis, that are doing the most to stand up to corruption in their countries, the most economically sound, and there's a reason for that. When you treat each other like human beings, when you have equality, it's like all boats rise with that tide.

So you have to understand that equality, men, is in your own self-interest. And let me break it down for you why. When you had Hillary Clinton running and she was under this misogynistic microscope that no man in politics will ever have to be under in today's age, what you had were all these men just taking obscene shots at her. Holding her to unrealistic standards and beating the dead horse of her emails and all these things.

And as a result... Any little things she did because people make mistakes, people are humans. Any little thing she did was exploited and exploded and as a result, now, men of America listening, you now have one of the greatest misogynists who ever lived, Donald Trump, as President. And he is unraveling all of our environmental protections, he's hastening the crisis of climate change.

He's separating families, he's putting children in cages, he's undoing financial regulations to make our economy fairer and freer for everyone. He is an absolute existential threat to not just us as Americans, but to this planet and that is what misogyny got us. Okay? So if you want to be safe from Donald Trump then you need to attack what brought Donald Trump to power.

You need to attack misogyny in all its little forms. … That absolutely matters because it is part of a larger insidious culture that is all around us. That's in the air that we breathe and let me use a metaphor, plastic.

You may watch your plastic consumption but it's impossible because plastic's all around you. It's all around you and now it's choking our oceans, it's ending up in the stomachs of whales that are beached onshore. In fish, in sea birds, it's in the fish we eat, it's inside us. Our oceans are becoming a plastic soup. Misogyny is the same way. Misogyny is the plastic soup that is choking our democracy. That is how you need to think about it.