Dingus of the week: Sen. Katie Britt
Plus, first round of Dingus Madness voting begins!
This is the weekly dingus, the newsletter where I make fun of someone or something in the news making our lives a little worse. Then, I share some good things and what I’ve been drinking this week.
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And now, for our weekly dingus winner…
Last night, after President Biden’s State of the Union Address, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt delivered the Republican rebuttal.
This is the third year in a row Republicans have chosen a woman to deliver the rebuttal to the SOTU, because if your political platform involves treating women as less than human, you want a nice white lady to deliver the news. It’s political pick-meism at its finest. As our founding father Benjamin Franklin said, “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and an unthreatening white woman carrying water for the patriarchy.”
Britt’s speech was delivered from her kitchen, because that’s where she thinks women belong. Well, not her specifically. She’s going to the Senate to pass laws to force you into the kitchen.
A lot of Britt’s speech focused on sexual assault and human trafficking as a threat to the honor of women and girls. Basically, what Sen. Britt was cooking up in her kitchen was a pot roast of racism served with a heaping side of straw man. The point was essentially to white women feel like they and their daughters are under threat from those foreign men.
In reality, the biggest physical threat to American women is the men they marry and those closest to them. Essentially, perpetrators of sexual violence aren’t the unknown man lurking on the streets. According to RAINN, 59% of perpetrators of sexual violence are acquaintances and 34% are family members. The call is literally coming from inside the house. And the phone is ringing in Katie Britt’s kitchen, but she’s too busy cooking up a steaming hot racism to answer that phone.
Republicans are working oning to end no-fault divorce, which makes harder for women to leave their abusers, want to make it so domestic abusers can keep their guns, and should you get raped, you will have to carry that baby to term after Republicans take away reproductive rights. But yeah, sure, the border is the real threat.
Katie Britt wants you to know Amazon is shipping babies in cupboards.
Katie Britt read Stepford Wives and thought it was a great idea.
Katie Britt is running on a platform of bringing back lobotomies.
Katie Britt has some yellow wallpaper she thinks would look nice in your home.
Katie Britt just wants America to return to a time when men were men and women lived off cottage cheese, pineapple, and speed; had nothing but tiny waists and glassy-eyed stares; and served their Mr. Potato-head husbands like JESUS GOD INTENDED.
Also, just as a side note, if you are going to try to convince the women of American to get back into the kitchen, maybe have a kitchen that’s less ugly.
Dingus Madness!
First round of Dingus Madness voting is open! There are 16 matchups and you have to vote for each of them separately. (So scroll all the way to the bottom.) Per Beau Andersen, who put this together for us, the voting schedule is as follows:
Round 1 (32 Dinguses) - Friday 3/8 to Monday 3/11
Round 2 (Sour 16) - Friday 3/15 to Monday 3/18
Round 3 (Embarrassing 8) - Friday 3/22 to Monday 3/25
Semi-Finals (Feckless 4) - Friday 3/29 to Monday 4/1
Final Round (Dingusy Duo) - Friday 4/5 to Thursday 4/11
Remember to vote early and often and we will crown a winner of DINGUS MADNESS! Thank you, Beau, for doing this!
And now for something good:
I wrote an essay for Gloria about dating after divorce. Gloria's a weekly newsletter for women who aren't yet old, but aren't still young. I hope you love it!
Coding camps are teaching indigenous kids to save their language using AI.
Animals continue to be cool as hell. This is an amphibian begging its mother for milk. (Even ringed caecilian moms can’t catch a break!)
There are jobs! (Eggs still cost a million dollars, but hey, it’s getting better?)
SELECTION SUNDAY FOR MARCH MADNESS! And we are watching women’s basketball!
Romantasy is a growing genre. And we here stan a sexy fairy romance!
And my best thing of the week is how many of you I keep meeting at my book events. I love seeing you and hearing your stories. I love seeing how many of you are forging new lives for yourselves, building community, and fighting for happiness in a world that is stingy with it.
Buy my book This American Ex-Wife, which was an instant New York Times Bestseller!
What I am drinking:
I am sitting here trying to remember what I even did this week. It’s all been a blur and I’ve been having a lot of meetings and interviews and events and emails and work. And I am also thinking about the next book. I’ve been too busy to come up with new drinks or to even sit and relax that much.
But I did get to go to Chicago this week and have some beer with some of you all! And see my sister and brother-in-law and their new apartment. And drink some Chimay Red with them at Hopleaf. I had never had a Chimay before and it’s an amazing beer made by Trappist monks.
But I think my favorite drink of the week is all the Diet Coke that is sustaining me through this week. On my way back to Cedar Rapids from Chicago, I stopped at the DeKalb Oasis, which is a weird spot off the Ronald Reagan expressway, and got a sausage egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke. Which is, in my mind, the breakfast of champions. And then I had another Diet Coke on my way back to Des Moines, this time paired with a Subway sandwich (listen, haters gonna hate, but I needed a quick infusion of something green, and Subway doesn’t charge extra for veggies). Maybe the real treasure was the Diet Coke I drank along the way.
h/t to Caitlin for this song of the week.
One note for commenters....Please watch your comments. Just because you don't like a woman doesn't make misogynistic comments about looks and emotional behavoir okay. There is plenty to criticize here without resorting to looks or accusing a woman of being hysterical. Thanks so much.
The kitchen looked like a mausoleum. Not a single photo or cannister or dish towel or fruit bowl or cookie jar or...and the insulting fantasy that a US senator can work in Washington DC and still choose to frame herself as "America's Mom," is a political felony, an assault on women everywhere who know that working even 15 minutes from your house and raising a family means that every day you come home to a kitchen that isn't on fire is a good one.