It seems like hardly a week can go by without a Republican woman making headlines for killing her puppy or raging out on the House floor or torching books with a flamethrower. "Don’t be weak and gay," exhorted Valentina Gomez, a candidate for Missouri secretary of state, in a recent viral campaign video. “Stay fucking hard.” It was not so long ago that Republican women were better known for their pearls and modesty and decorum, making their recent shenanigans all the more confusing. In this reported essay that is by turns terrifically amusing and a tad frightening,New York's Rebecca Traister lays out a grand unified theory for why Republican women are like this now, a question with major repercussions as we head into an election that could further reshape the lives of women across the country. “If the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion,” Rebecca writes, “they’re doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.”

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