Note for new readers: Previous political writing referred to below is no longer available here, although I do have all of it archived. Also, I’m not linking to some of the sites referenced in this post, on principle. Anyone needing the source material, who can’t find it through The Google, feel free to email me for the specific links.
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Yes, I thought this post from last night would be enough. And no, I’m really not interested in doing much more in the direction of explicitly political blogging. And yes, I’m supposed to be working on a literary project. And no, I really don’t fare all that well when it comes to reacting to events as they happen (for which reason, the aforementioned project is autobiographical fiction set in the 1970s).
BUT.
Today is November 4th, and I made one last stop at the Palin PUMA watch blog, and I read this thread, and I started to leave a comment, and I went to publish, and it turns out my comment was twice as long as the form could accomodate. (NaNoWriMo people, you are laughing at me, yes? Because the word count that went into said would-be comment really could have gone into the book instead. Sigh.)
The thing is… I have really had enough of women who, in the name of feminism, viciously tear down other women who have the audacity to be supporting the only candidate for President who has a) a clear path to the office, and b) an unambiguously feminist agenda.
Over at Palin PUMA watch, there was discussion of anti-Obama comments at The Reclusive Leftist, such as this one:
I am surrounded by women Robin Morgan’s age, all of whom worked hard for women’s rights in the 60s, and all of whom are voting for B.O. Is this a generational thing? Did they get tired, dismayed, more conservative as they aged? I don’t get it – I get more and more radical the older I become.
palinpumawatch noted, with understandable sarcasm: Voting for the guy conservatives call a “radical liberal”…is more conservative than voting for the conservative… Sometimes snark really is the only response.
Following, then, was what I’d intended as my reply, but could not post due to the excessive character count. Guess I had a bit of pent-up frustration, huh?
***
Thank you, again, for nailing the fascinating (dare I say it?) patriarchal reversal of claiming “radical” cred for voting in the interests of a completely reactionary, antifeminist agenda.
It’s some fantastic hubris, much like that of specific Nader supporters who, in 2000, said they HOPED his candidacy would contribute to a Gore loss, and that the subsequent erosions of civil rights and liberties which might then be anticipated under a Bush regime might “teach the Left a lesson.” See? Everything specifically eight years old is new again! Only with gender and (variously covert) race-supremacist twists, ala the PUMA crowd. (Tangent: Remember when Phyllis Chesler was a kick-ass feminist authoring groundbreaking, bestselling books like Women and Madness, before she was reduced to breathless Islamophobic rants and issuing excited blog proclamations, McCain Supporter Attacked and Mutilated in Pittsburgh. It’s True!*)
Back during the Democratic primaries, I undertook a rigorous process to compare each candidate’s specific policy positions on a range of issues, using a number of sources. And I put them in a spreadsheet, and assigned values to each rating (this was unbelievably tedious, but, I thought, necessary), and in the end, added up each candidate’s winning points. Obama came out first, followed closely by Clinton and Edwards. I then decided, wildly enough, to support Obama.
Soon, I gathered that this made me a traitor to feminism (despite the fact that feminist issues had weighed heavily in the calculus on the candidates’ positions in which Obama had – however marginally – come out ahead).
It didn’t matter that in the same breath with which I’d endorsed Obama, I condemned sexist treatment of Clinton in the media; it also didn’t matter when I did a painstaking review of incidents of media bias (as documented by Media Matters) against Clinton versus that directed at Obama during the month of February 2008 and discovered – to my sincere surprise – that the level of bias against Obama was then twice that directed at Clinton. (Challenged by one Clinton supporter to name “a single instance” of media bias against Obama, I went on to name more than fifty – and was then simply ignored. Evidence, schmevidence!)
It also didn’t seem to matter that I stated repeatedly that in the event Clinton won the nomination, I would support her candidacy 100% and would be nothing but ECSTATIC to vote for her come November 4th.
And now, do these so-called Clinton supporters bother to listen to what their beloved candidate says? When she says we must elect Barack Obama?
No. Instead, we are given screeds in which, incredibly, the human agency and will of Hillary Clinton herself is treated as if it were non-existent; as if she were being forced by the Big Bad Democratic Machine to say these terrible awful untrue things, and… you know… GO VIRULENTLY ANTI-CHOICE PALIN! And “it isn’t about Obama versus McCain!” Etc.
It’s insulting to me as a voter and as a feminist – and specifically, as a feminist MOTHER, with two daughters who will enter adulthood in four and ten years respectively (an adulthood in which I want them to have basic dominion over their own bodies, pay equity such as that which McCain has been steadfastly against, etc.).
In the early stages of the primaries, blogs like Tennessee Guerrilla Women (now quite the Palin-cheerleading PUMA hub) were, at best, tepid in their appraisals of Clinton: “We want a woman to be president, but not a rightwing woman and not a centrist woman. What we want is a progressive president!” Only AFTER Edwards was out of the race, and the two candidates still standing were a black man and a white woman, did TGW commit SO aggressively to the cause of Clinton’s candidacy (in the process, transforming themselves into something nearly indistinguishable from an anti-Obama hate site). Then, after their white, female candidate lost, they chuckled among themselves when Obama’s opponent chose a radical right wing (and, of course, white) woman for his VP candidate. “The Democrats brought this, their worst nightmare, on themselves. They’ve taken the woman vote for granted long enough. In the future, the Democratic Party will take women voters far more seriously. And that is extremely good for feminism.”
The point when Reclusive Leftist joined, for me, TGW in having lost all feminist credibility was in some early comments about women who were supporting Obama, asserting that they found it “easier to root for an empty suit than a smart woman as long as the suit’s draped on a good-looking man.”
And I thought, seriously? You’re not giving any woman supporting Obama the credit that she might be able to think for herself, compare policy positions, etc.? Apparently not. She was willing to immediately dismiss such women outright, attributing the motivations of women supporting Obama’s candidacy, to mere vapid, fangirl expressions of sexuality. (Ah yes. You KNOW nothing gets me so hot as an “empty suit” – especially if it’s “draped on a good looking man.” Goodbye, critical thinking skills! Hello, voting with my vagina!) And then Reclusive Leftist went on to label such women stupid and insane, said in countless different ways that they ought to be on a variety of specific psychiatric medications, in addition to certain street drugs! (To wit, the following advice to so-called “Obamabots”: Calm down, take a Xanax, shoot some smack, do whatever you gotta do.)
Now I ask you – if that’s not crudely denigrating of women and of feminism, what is?
Obama and Biden are my unapologetic, explicitly feminist choices for the offices of President and Vice President. What we have here are (ironically kool-aid referencing), self-proclaimed guardians of a fringe, so-called “feminism” in which it is seen as logical to set up blogs with names like “Hillary’s Voice,” and then go on to blithely ignore EVERYTHING HILLARY NOW SAYS WITH HER ACTUAL VOICE. We have, also, a certain cult of victimhood which, while representing itself as feminist, is actually parasitic to feminism.
Most feminists I know, who are in clear possession of their faculties (and are not exploiting feminism as a cover and an excuse for racism), are actively supporting the Obama/Biden ticket.
I’ve been mostly silent about all of this for months, because it stunned me that women I’d thought so much of were capable of such visceral attacks on other women (and when called on that, conveniently dodging responsibility for same by, you guessed it, reversing the charges, conflating critical analysis with wildly destructive, specifically sexualized “bot” behaviors).
The polls here in Virginia open in less than 2 hours now. I can’t wait to vote my conscience, and for this 8-year-long nightmare to be over.
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* Of course, Chesler later changed the blog post’s title, once the hoax was confirmed. It was just so astonishing though – like, “Phyllis, you’ve been an expert witness on behalf of battered women in court, you have a doctorate, and you’re a widely published author. How on earth could you be so immediately credulous? Where did your famously sharp critical thinking skills evaporate to?”
