The Girl Virus is about staying alive. Keeping each other alive. Learning to protect ourselves. Learning to value our own lives and each other’s lives. The physical, sexual and emotional violence committed against women is not acceptable. We refuse to ignore it. We refuse to rationalize it. We refuse to accept it. We refuse to let each other die.
R.I.P. Nancy Spungeon, FOREVER IN HER DEBT
From Licking Stars Off Ceilings 17, by Clementine Cannibal
Flo Kennedy. From Wikipedia: Once, to protest the lack of female bathrooms at Harvard, she led a mass urination on the grounds. When asked about this, she said “I’m just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”
The left’s failure to nurture and celebrate female politicians has had a significant effect on its policies. In recent years, Democratic majorities and progressive legislation seem to have been built on steady trade-offs of reproductive rights, culminating this year when the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to push through health care reform with a compromise on abortion financing.
Imagine a Democrat willing to brag about breaking the glass ceiling at the explosive beginning, not the safe end, of her campaign. A liberal politician taking to Twitter to argue that big broods and a “culture of life” are completely compatible with reproductive freedom. A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals’ shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female, who, unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women. But that will require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin.
If Sarah Palin and her acolytes successfully redefine what it means to be a groundbreaking political woman, it will be because progressives let it happen — and in doing so, ensured that when it comes to making history, there will be no one but Mama Grizzlies to do the job.
Gail Collins and Stacy Schiff discussed the Mama Grizzly phenomenon (movement?) in the Times yesterday. Naturally, they took some time to talk about those traitors, young women.
Every time I go on a speaking tour I get questions from sad middle-aged women who want to know why their daughters all insist they aren’t feminists. They might be planning to devote their lives to healing fistula victims in Somalia, but they won’t let anyone call them feminists because they think it means being anti-man, or wearing unattractive shoes.
THIS MAKES ME SO ALL CAPS! I have been hearing this from older feminists for twenty years. And seriously, Gail Collins, you have women who are feminist enough to come and see you speak, and to have raised daughters who are off healing fistula victims, but they weren’t able to convince their own children that being a feminist doesn’t mean being anti-man or wearing unattractive shoes? I’m getting a whiff of something I will politely call exaggeration here.
Statements like this tend to get lots of aggrieved responses from young feminists saying, “But we are here!”—which is true but which closes the conversation into a territory war over recognition and leaves out the people we should be talking to—the women who do not identify as feminists.
Painting a picture of non-feminists as morons who think it’s about hating men or wardrobe changes does two things—first, it neatly sidesteps the fact that a lot of young feminists actually have been criticized by older feminists for the way they dress! For real! Also criticized for: who they date, voting for Barack Obama, thinking strippers aren’t necessarily the enemy, listening to hip hop, getting married, and not subscribing to Ms.
But secondly and far more importantly, it ignores the very valid critiques of feminism made by a lot of non-feminists who object to feminism’s racism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and continued denial of same. It ignores the fact that there are women all over the world fighting for gender justice without calling themselves feminists. It ignores the fact that feminism has done a terrible job of making itself known as a force for liberation—the force that gave (American)women pants!—and instead mostly expends its energy on feeling aggrieved about not getting its due.
I love Gail Collins but we are talking about someone here who wrote a book called When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present that doesn’t even talk about womanism. It also has a 20-page index that doesn’t include “race” as a topic.
It does, however, have 8 entries under “shoes.”
nothing lays a body low like having yr asshole waxed
The good old early 90s.
Finally introduced Kara and Marie!~
#birthdaysuit
unrelatedly yesterday while my urologist was examining the vast wasteland of my junk she was like ‘did you do that yourself?’ referring to my econo...
“Ke$ha confessed that the ghost’s sex drive was too much to handle, and she decided to move out because she wasn’t getting any...
As arm party as it gets.
