politics

Yep.

Andrea Dworkin:

“Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. ... They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. ... Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. ... Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.”

See also: right-wing women who are obsessed about trans women being rapists, drag queens and bathrooms. Obviously trans women raping women is incredibly rare. But they're a 'safe' and acceptable target for victimised and often traumatised women. Women who are too weak to criticise or attack the men who actually hurt them. Eg. JK Rowling is a victim of sexual and domestic abuse. The perpetrator was her husband. Instead of attacking straight men, she spends all day going on about trans women.

You see this kind of psychology in most (quasi-)fascists. It's sadomasochistic. Kiss the boot of those who opress you, hold those you hold to be below you in contempt and treat them accordingly. Of course, in reality right wing women have common cause with all the people they hate. Just like most right wing men have more in common with a poor black trans sex worker, than a billionaire.

As you say, it's hard to feel sorry for them. They're sabotaging themselves, their gender and their class. They're actively hurting those who could be their allies. It's partly self-preservation, but it's also vanity. They lie to themselves that they're not (fellow) victims.

TLDR: humans are weird.

conservative men only put you on a pedestal when they can use it to insult liberal women.

Also when they want to keep "known predators of white women" (anyone who isn't a white Christian) out/away. Though statistically they have no reason to fear the "competition", they are already the biggest predators themselves..

This is it. Every conservative imagines that they're at the center of the in-group. In reality, they're usually closer to the edge.

It's the Leopard Party mindset.

Can you have a calendar with hot women in it while respecting women?

Did you read the article? The point here is that there is a division in conservative circles, so talking about conservative men as a single group is missing the point.

The same division, presumably, exists among conservative women (albeit bearing in mind that in the USA men are more conservative than women) so there will be an alliance between pearl-clutching Christian women who decry the debauchery, and women who are feminist but for whom feminism culminated with the third wave, for whom objectification exemplified in a mildly raunchy calendar is something to, at worst, roll ones eyes at.

So by all means enjoy the division in conservative ranks, and hope that it splits their base and ruins their chances of victory, but at least understand what is going on properly. What you think of as "respecting women" is probably not what conservative women think of as respecting women; you're judging and understanding their beliefs through your own lens, in a way that makes you misunderstand quite badly.