From a woman who gets it. Fuzzy Slippers knocks it out of the park.
"Projection. I say it often, but when it comes to "feminisms," it's something that I know only too well, having (much to my own shame) bought into 1980's "feminism" for much of my undergraduate and graduate careers. The whole point of feminism, we were indoctrinated to believe, was to . . . oh, blah, blah, blah, you know the schtick, "the personal is political," "gender is a social construct," "the domestic sphere is oppressive," "women will not be silenced," yadda yadda yadda. One of the main, arguably the only, tenant of this craziness is that women have the "right" to their reproductive organs, that the misogynist, white male-dominated western culture reduced us to "bare foot and pregnant in the kitchen" status and that we had an obligation to demand more.
Feminism, as I've discussed previously, was not originally about women being manly, shaped in the image of the revered and envied white male (that's just what it became); it was about actual equal rights in voting (suffrage), property ownership, and employment. It got twisted, savagely and unrelentingly, by leftists who understood that women, like black people and every other invented and segregated "group," could be manipulated to work against their own best interest.
"Women's health." We hear about this non-stop from leftists, and what they mean by that is always and only related to reproduction: free and frequent abortions and free birth control. When a leftist says "women's health," they never ever mean heart health or cancer prevention/treatment or . . . anything not related to abortions and birth control. Okay, sometimes they mean breast cancer and hand out pink ribbons. But that's it. Women, for leftists, are nothing more than the sum of their reproductive/sexual organs and the management thereof. They harp on about how "being a woman isn't a preexisting condition," but what they really mean is that it is, that being a woman means that our "health" is only related to how many abortions we've had and how easy and cheap (or free) birth control is.
In this relentless attack on women as human beings, leftists crank up a phony "war on women" based solely on who pays for abortion and birth control (both are legal and readily available to women in this country, they just want tax payers to fund it, regardless of our own personal and/or religious beliefs). But as the recent video from Smart Girl Politics notes, women care about the economy, the Constitution, and a myriad of other issues (aside: one of the things that turned me off '80's feminism was an article about "women's issues" that focused--and you can't make this stuff up--on things that "issue" from a woman's body. Reading that I became convinced that "feminism" was dedicated not to equality but to oppression, not to seeing women as people but to seeing them as "other"--the very thing that all the "isms" claim to reject but actually embrace--and exploit--with wholehearted and gleeful gusto.)
So, no, BO and leftists, you don't speak for me, not as a woman and not as an American."
"Projection. I say it often, but when it comes to "feminisms," it's something that I know only too well, having (much to my own shame) bought into 1980's "feminism" for much of my undergraduate and graduate careers. The whole point of feminism, we were indoctrinated to believe, was to . . . oh, blah, blah, blah, you know the schtick, "the personal is political," "gender is a social construct," "the domestic sphere is oppressive," "women will not be silenced," yadda yadda yadda. One of the main, arguably the only, tenant of this craziness is that women have the "right" to their reproductive organs, that the misogynist, white male-dominated western culture reduced us to "bare foot and pregnant in the kitchen" status and that we had an obligation to demand more.
Feminism, as I've discussed previously, was not originally about women being manly, shaped in the image of the revered and envied white male (that's just what it became); it was about actual equal rights in voting (suffrage), property ownership, and employment. It got twisted, savagely and unrelentingly, by leftists who understood that women, like black people and every other invented and segregated "group," could be manipulated to work against their own best interest.
"Women's health." We hear about this non-stop from leftists, and what they mean by that is always and only related to reproduction: free and frequent abortions and free birth control. When a leftist says "women's health," they never ever mean heart health or cancer prevention/treatment or . . . anything not related to abortions and birth control. Okay, sometimes they mean breast cancer and hand out pink ribbons. But that's it. Women, for leftists, are nothing more than the sum of their reproductive/sexual organs and the management thereof. They harp on about how "being a woman isn't a preexisting condition," but what they really mean is that it is, that being a woman means that our "health" is only related to how many abortions we've had and how easy and cheap (or free) birth control is.
In this relentless attack on women as human beings, leftists crank up a phony "war on women" based solely on who pays for abortion and birth control (both are legal and readily available to women in this country, they just want tax payers to fund it, regardless of our own personal and/or religious beliefs). But as the recent video from Smart Girl Politics notes, women care about the economy, the Constitution, and a myriad of other issues (aside: one of the things that turned me off '80's feminism was an article about "women's issues" that focused--and you can't make this stuff up--on things that "issue" from a woman's body. Reading that I became convinced that "feminism" was dedicated not to equality but to oppression, not to seeing women as people but to seeing them as "other"--the very thing that all the "isms" claim to reject but actually embrace--and exploit--with wholehearted and gleeful gusto.)
So, no, BO and leftists, you don't speak for me, not as a woman and not as an American."
Yay! Thanks, Hack :)
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure Fuzzy!
ReplyDelete