March 27 - The Empress

A card of feminine authority, motherly care.

Like any system that thrives on bad binaries, the State, to reassure everyone that it's better to be Us than Them, has to wield both daddy's "masculine aggression" and mommy's "feminine protection."

When it came out earlier this week that the careless US administration had leaked military positions and plans to a random journalist by accidentally adding him to a Signal group chat, the worries online seemed to coalesce around what other information could, or had already, gotten out, rather than questioning if blowing up a random building in Yemen really has any practical connection to our "security" at all.

Mommies can make you -feel- safe, but they also discipline, imposing the rules of obedience to family roles that enable so much chauvinism and cover for child abuse. The idealization of mothers is just another turn in the wheel of reinforcing gender roles. Do we really need these mommies? Is their protection doing us any good?