Patronize Me

Really. I love it when you call us "mommy" and assume that because we were born with a vagina and a uterus that we are more caring and empathetic, that we will clean up corruption because, we are, after all, women and women are natural-born housekeepers, cleaner-uppers.

Fuck me, dead. What goddamned century is this? Are we ever going to get past one-dimensional stereotypes about women? Can we please get over the idea that as a woman, I'm automatically going to vote for a woman? Please. I have nothing in common with the women of South Dakota who pushed through the abortion ban; I have nothing in common with Condie Rice; I most certainly have nothing in common with Margaret Thatcher. So can we please, please, please STOP assuming that running a woman for an office is somehow going to get me to sit down and shut up with my whining about the fucking party already?
The latest entry in this discussion is in today's NYT, which begins its analysis with this sentence:

If the Democrats have their way, the 2006 Congressional elections will be the revenge of the mommy party.

Isn't that a cute lede? Doesn't it make you want to read further, to discover how the wimpy party, the one that has been emasculated by the tough-guy jargon of Dick and Bush, is now running a bunch of mommies to show how in touch it is with the real issues out there?

Because, you know, that "Year of the Woman" election we had in 1992 has really made it much, much better for women in general. And after all, so many of our women in Congress have stood up to George Bush. Hillary. Olympia. Maria. Mary. Susan. They have really showed him, haven't they?

Is this the Democrats' new strategy? Show me a skirt and expect that I'll immediately resonate with what's underneath it? And is the New York Times thinking that it is demonstrating some sort of street cred by borrowing the terms of the Republican party to describe this new batch of candidates?

The United States has a serious issue with whether it is man enough to kick some Muslim ass.

As historians of gender and those who have written about "Orientalism" have argued, one of the hallmarks of "us versus them" bullshit that frequently comes into play in times of crisis is the describing of the "other" as feminine--weak, easily penetrable, effeminate. There's a reason that sexual humiliation was used against the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. We wanted them to know what it felt like to be a woman, to be raped, overwhelmed, forced to fellate a man. Undoubtedly, the male and female soldiers who did these things felt "tough" as a result of what they were doing, felt they were asserting some kind of power that is assumed by the penetrating partner in fucking.

I've argued until I'm blue in the face that our failure to examine gender, to really examine gender and its connections to power, will leave us trapped in a system where we continue to perpetuate binary oppositions that never break us free of a top and bottom way of looking at the world.

This is not about men and women. This is about power. 20 years ago, I had great hopes that the work being done by feminist historians such as Joan Scott was going to open up a new way of looking at the way that power operates in the world. Instead, I see us further retreating to some ancient view of masculine and feminine that leaves us all diminished as human beings.

So, fuck the idea that I'm going to vote for a woman just for the sake of voting for a woman. If she does not have the leftist(there, I've said it. Fuck the center) credentials I'm looking for, don't fucking waste my time.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |