Feminism

I was having a short discussion the other day on Twitter about sexism and it seems that Natasha Chart over at MyDD, that bastion of feminism, has taken it out of context to make a point about sexism.

Lovely.

This is the comment I left :

So let me get this straight : You take a comment that was part of a whole conversation about how our culture imposes the tyranny of homogeneity instead of respecting difference and looking at diversity as an asset and you twist it to prove a point about sexism?

that conversation was about how aggressiveness and violence are not necessarily nature. that as a mother of two boys and someone who has taken care of many of my friends girls, i can see how their energies can by nature, be vastly different.

the issue is of holding male energy as the standard of what is good and by assertion, female energy being bad or weak. just as how whiteness is held up as the standard and everything that is not "white" then becomes diminished, poor, disadvantaged, underdeveloped, or plain old not good enough.

but you took that one quote and you built a whole post about how everything about this campaign was sexist attacks that cost Clinton the nomination.

we've had this conversation before online and am going to say it again, it's not the reason why. there's 100 reasons, none having to do with sexism, that cost Hillary Clinton the nomination.

get over it.

and, by the way, this link was sent to me. if you're going to quote me, have the tact next time of emailing me the link.

i take cause with how you present my words here.

there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING wrong not wanting to [be] like men and finding power in that.

I had to use Summize to go back on the twitts of yesterday and find the conversations I was having. I can identify 6 different conversations all revolving around different discussions of sexism.

One of them was with Shannon McKarney of EcoChic, who had this to say :

I wrote that piece last year+believe it more strongly now. Women have to become more "male" to be successful

That's where the whole discussion of homogeneity vs. difference started. That's where I ssaid that I strongly disagree with women needing to be like men to be successful just as I strongly believe this to be one of those sticking points for a lot of feminists of color.

The whole discussion of women vs. men pits oppressed people in many communities of color against each other. Yes, colored men can be sexist and even ruthlessly misogynistic but is that the root of our problems or is it a symptom of a larger structure of violence and exploitation that women and men of color need to unite against?

This has made my friggin' day :

NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC Endorses Senator Barack Obama for President

Washington, D.C. – NARAL Pro-Choice America, the political leader of the pro-choice movement with more than one million member activists in all 50 states, today announced that its political action committee is endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for president.

"There are few more tireless defenders of women's rights in this country than NARAL Pro-Choice America and I'm proud to accept their support," Sen. Obama said. "For decades, they have worked in the courthouse, in the legislature, and in the streets to make sure that women have the right to choose. This is a fundamental civil right that I've fought to protect in Illinois and in Washington, that's being threatened by Senator McCain, and that I'll be fighting in the months ahead to make secure today, tomorrow, and always."

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, praised both Sen. Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton for their leadership in standing up for women's reproductive rights throughout this campaign, but only one of these dynamic candidates can advance to the general election.

This article from Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler on The Huffington Post is electric.

The collaboration of these two women made me smile this morning. It's a small glimpse of nexus. Kimberle Crenshaw is a prominent African-American legal analyst on the subject of race (in other words, she does a lot of work with Critical Race Theory), and she also has written extensively on race, gender, and anti-essentialism. Eve Ensler is a white Jewish playwright and artist (a controversial one), well-known for her work The Vagina Monologues and the theater event V-Day:

V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of "The Vagina Monologues." In 2007, more than 3,000 V-Day events took place in 1,150 locations in the U.S. and around the world. To date, the V-Day movement has raised over $40 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, launched the Karama program in the Middle East, reopened shelters, and funded over 5,000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. The 'V' in V-Day stands for Vagina, Victory and Valentine.

In this article's current political and social context, it is perhaps the most embracing of intersection, the most respectful of the politics of young women, and the most reflective and hopeful treatise to the evolution and growth of the feminist movement in relation to the Clinton/Obama fracas I've seen in the past month.

i’m a free woman. and being free means you get to think for yourself, and you get to decide for yourself what to do. so i say i am not a traitor. no, i’m not a traitor. i’m just following my own truth, and that truth has led me to barack obama.

[...]

don't play me small. i am not voting for barack obama because he's black. i am voting for barack obama because he's brilliant.

OH SNAP!

When it comes to smackdowns, Oprah is the queen.

Via Baratunde.

Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL, just posted one heck of a classy endorsement to Barack Obama over at Huffington Post :

Senator Obama is not just prepared to lead as our beloved Teddy and Caroline Kennedy have said, he is prepared to lead in a way different than we have seen for decades. Not out in front with us behind him, but rather with us beside him.

And that difference is all the difference. That difference separates just any president from a great president; and right now, we need a great president.

Barack Obama will be that great president. He will bring us all together. And together, we will change our country.

During these past many years, we have lost the sense of what we could do together, who we could be, what was possible.

That's changing.

And Barack Obama is the one changing that.

With him, greatness is again within reach.

Now compare that to Glorian Steinem or even worse, to Marcia Pappas.

On a related note, Nez calls the energy and zeitgeist coming from the Obama camp 'sway'.

The National bureau of NOW has issued a statement of support for Senator Kennedy

Jill over at Feministe and Ann at Feministing have already responded to the ham-handed "Betrayal" memo written and released by the head of NOW in New York State, Marcia Pappas.

Talk a living example of the "unhinged feminist" :

For more information contact: Marcia Pappas, 518-452-3944 - 518-469-2661

Senator Ted Kennedy Betrays Women by Not Standing for Hillary Clinton for President
Ultimate Betrayal Felt by Women Everywhere

ALBANY, NY (01/28/2008; 1101)(readMedia)-- Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). They are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future or whatever.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation - to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.”

Jill has the total win of a rebuke :

Not only am I not a die-hard Clinton supporter,* but I work for Alternet, which is apparently on the release-writer’s Organizations to Kill list. I suppose I must have been psychologically gang-banged into whoring for the patriarchy — it’s the only possible explanation.

People tend to forget that Hillary and Bill Clinton come from the South. Christopher Hitchens, who has been flogging a book while flogging the Clintons, reminds us not only of that often forgotten fact. He also reminds us that it was Hillary who decided it would beneficial to hire then strategist to Jesse Helms, Dick Morris. Yes, Hillary Clinton hired the morally repellent Dick Morris, the PR & Marketing enabler of segregationist and white supremacist Jesse Helms.

Former President of Chicago NOW, Lorna Brett Howard explains why she left the Hillary Clinton campaign to join the campaign of Barack Obama. More specifically? She was disgusted at how the Clinton campaign lied about Barack Obama's record on pro-choice matters.

Over at YouTube this clip links to a Washington Post article that came out on the 18th of January, explaining the smear campaign waged by the Clintonites during the New Hampshire primaries :

Three New Hampshire Democratic leaders who signed a letter two days before the state's primary at the request of Hillary Clinton's campaign, attacking Barack Obama as soft in his support for abortion rights, are asking Obama supporters in the state to put the rifts of the primary campaign behind them and praising Obama for being "strongly pro-choice."

Of the two dozen prominent women who signed the critical letter, e-mailed by the Clinton campaign to a list of supporters and undecided voters, three have now signed their names to another missive asking abortion rights supporters in the state to come together and take comfort in the fact that all of the Democratic presidential candidates are firmly pro-choice. One of the three Clinton supporters went even further, saying in an interview Thursday that signing the letter attacking Obama was a "mistake."

Hi Ms. Clinton,

This is an awkward note to write to you. Although I voted for you twice to represent me as Senator of New York, from the first rumors I heard in political circles here in New York City, I was vehemently opposed to your running for president.

As I said to many party insiders in New York, this had nothing to do with your abilities and all to do with where the country stands now.

We are at a point in which our democracy is in shreds. Nothing has been so damaging to our democracy than the attitude that has fueled Washington all these years : That "The People" are just an inconvenient obstacle to the Washington elite's road to power.

This country needs a movement willing to tearing down the walls of dynastic entitlement that George Bush has built around the White House during his eight years of quasi-imperialistic rule. This country needs a leader and a party and the people to bring it back from the place where Iraq, FISA, New Orleans, Read ID, racist immigration laws, the sub-prime lending fiasco are all seen as just the consequences of doing business in Washington DC.

This country needs a healing period and a new start.

A Hillary Clinton candidacy would have made sense in 2012. 'Hillary 2012' would have given us 8 years of healing the country, of bringing it back to its democratic roots and it would given you enough time to distance yourself from the Washington corruption that made eight terrible years of Bush possible in the first place.

But no.

It's all about Billary.

Not Hillary and Bill, but Bill and Hillary.

Billary is the reason why it will never be enough for your husband to modulate his tone throughout the campaign. Your candidacy is looked on by many as the loophole that'll bring your husband not just back to the White House but also to the Oval Office.

Violet Socks over at Reclusive Leftist has written one hell of a take on the New Hampshire Primary title, The Secret Ballot :

“Obama,” she said to the leaflet people as she and her husband arrived to cast their votes in the primary. “We’re voting for Obama.”

Inside the booth she closed the curtain behind her. The ballot was the AccuVote kind, with a blank oval next to each candidate’s name. She looked at the list.

I HEREBY DECLARE MY PREFERENCE FOR CANDIDATE FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO BE AS FOLLOWS:

Read the whole thing NOW!

Pretty Bird Woman House, a refuge for abused women on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, has been a focus of some considerable blog effort of late (see, for example, here). This women's shelter had once been saved by the liberal blogsphere, but was then vandalized and was facing losing its lease. The liberal blogsphere stepped up to bat again. The goal was to buy the house outright for the person who ran the shelter and to provide a solid security system. It was estimated that the blogsphere would have to raise $70,000 to accomplish this. The timing was critical because Pretty Bird Woman house had received a Federal grant...which could only be accepted if the shelter still existed.

As of 12/30/07 I learned that the liberal blogsphere raised upwards of $80,000 to establish Pretty Bird Woman House as a lasting shelter for abused women. This was quite an accomplishment and Culture Kitchen played its own small role in it. To those who gave, or even just spread the word, THANK YOU! This was a true mitzveh accomplished thanks to hundreds of people from all over the country.

Of course, I never feel like our job is done. I am hoping that now that we have saved Pretty Bird Woman House and made it a lasting place of refuge, we can do the same for the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center on the Yankton Sioux Reservation.