While there is much in the news to discuss, much of it inter-connected; and I have certainly spent the better part of the week collecting news articles, videos and links in preparation for a post addressing said issues, instead of spending time and energy fanning the “blame Islam flames,” I’m much more strongly compelled to lash out against what I see as the undue timidity of so-called feminist women in the face of coordinated attack, especially when confronted with forces lead by other women.
Lord knows I am not alone in my outrage about the all-too-predictable 
capitulation to the Right by our Mighty Morphin’ Majority Democrats for no Earthly apparent reason. Women everywhere are bitchin’ and moanin’ about the seemingly calculated attempts at the Stepfordization of American females. While I see this as the inevitable result of the efforts of that faction of the country’s politics now being fronted by the insidious Bachmann Palin Overdrive, the eager surrender of females on the Left, either because of faith in the illusion of the myth of political expediency, or due to belief in fantasies of sisterhood, unattainable even in legend and fairy tale, as being necessary for success, the end result is the same; when women buy into the “helpless second, weaker, yet, inherently evil sex” patriarchal theory as their self-identity starting position, women lose.
Leaders lead. They stake a position, articulate it, and invite others to join. 
Whether anybody takes them up on their offer or not, they proceed according to their plan. You cannot lead by consensus, or by whining about who doesn’t see things your way, thereby blaming them for your condition. Constantly complaining about other women who don’t support your vision, and how much you wish they would for everybody’s sake, is a masochistically masturbatory waste of time. If only “she” would think like “me,” “we” could do x, y, z, is a crackhead’s pipe dream. To take it a step further and fantasize that Utopian Nirvana can only be reached by aligning oneself with “her” anyway, regardless of the width of the gulf between your points of view, simply on the strength of shared anatomical features, is a crackhead’s delirium.
I DESERVE BETTER
“I!” “Me!”
Not “us,” whining about “them.” Each woman must empower herself to get pissed. Righteously indignant. Then, she must convince herself that she doesn’t have to take shit from any source, for any reason. Until then, women 
will remain impotent, sitting around waiting for somebody else to say what they think, and being disappointed when those women don’t do as they would have them do. Unless, and until we have a generation of women who can at least agree on that much, women won’t be able to agree on anything of import at all.
Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are all 
leaders. They’ve staked their position, taken their stands, and let the chips fall wherever they may. Whether you agree with, or support them in all or part of what they do is not nearly as important as the fact that their efforts affect you regardless. The fact that almost all of them chose to lead on behalf of unsupportable factions and positions on both sides of the male-dominated system of oppression does not lessen their influence, or impact, in the slightest. You may vehemently disagree with rightwing policy positions on abortion as recently articulated by Sarah Palin, but Michele Bachmannn’s lending her face to the TEA Party protest at the capitol to “scare Congress” against healthcare reform days before the vote
on the Stupak amendment, most certainly had an effect, and impacted the outcome, emboldening her compatriots in a public display of solidarity with her brand of conservative extremism, demoralizing her enemies in the face of the perception of daunting opposition. Nancy Pelosi most definitely rallied her troops to sell out their principles and take what she convinced them they could get, undoubtedly with promises to “fix it in post,” as they say in show business.
Yet, there are still women on the Left who will continue to ring bells and blow kazoos as they proclaim from the rooftops through megaphones for all to hear that our abortion rights aren’t going anywhere, and that the path to female empowerment lies through even more better sleepovers ’round the campfire singing Kumbayah and making S’mores with the Mean Girls along on the way through the woods to Grandma’s House of Happiness. This makes about as much sense as players in a Women’s Softball League trying to claim runs scored by the other side ‘cuz “we’re all girlz, after all.” That ain’t the way it goes.
True solidarity in any movement can only be maintained by shared perception of oppression. Whether the source of the oppression is singular is not nearly as important as whether or not those oppressed believe it to be so. As long as, for whatever reason, some in the group blame one source, others blame another, still others blame themselves, and a few see no oppression and thus blame no one at all, Kumbayah is always gonna be sung off-key by the group. However, one lone voice quietly singing its own melody and verse, can often be heard as a siren call by others, while the singer, whose motive is likely only to amuse and entertain herself, would probably be surprised and amazed to realize she was playing Pied Piper to so many of her disaffected sisters who heeded what they perceived to be her call and chose to follow in her wake. At any rate, a nation of individually self-empowered females would be a force to be reckoned with, regardless of their personal political, or religious, viewpoints and affiliations.
A couple of recent examples of what I believe to be timid feminism 
come to mind. One is Rihanna’s latest attempt at public image rehabilitation. According to reports and the You Tube video posted in my Vodpod collection, Rihanna is now claiming that her motive for finally breaking off her abusive relationship with the young man who “had no soul in his eyes” when he bit her during what she describes as a seemingly endless beating, is a desire to protect other young women in similar situations who might be led to their untimely deaths at the hands of their abusers if they followed her example. While being a proper role model for your fans is a noble sounding reason to do stuff, it’s a pretty crappy excuse for making good choices of self preservation. What about Rihanna’s worth to herself as a person? Isn’t saving her own life reason enough to dump the asshole without apology, or further explanation? Doesn’t that set a much better example for other women, young or old, who find themselves similarly afflicted with assholiness of boyfriend/lover/parent/husband/wife?
Manipulator/abusers are adept at undermining the confidence of their victims. They are also, quite often, mad. Not angry; crazy as fucking loons. Being locked/trapped in a house/car/apartment/great outdoors open space with such a lunatic can be intimidating and frightening to the point of terror enough to convince the strongest of humans that they are indeed helpless in the face of such uncontrollable, feature contorting, unprovoked rage, while prior and subsequent proclamations of love, and soul-bearing admissions of need can play upon the sympathies of even the most hard-hearted among us. However, there must come a time when the “victim” becomes either survivor or statistic, when he/she says, “enough! I deserve better.” Yet, that time might never come if said manipulating abuser has the luxury of reinforcing the perception, and reality, of an inherent inferiority complex, resulting from her socially imposed second class citizen status, upon his victim.
Imagine if civilian cop Kimberly Munley had internalized that mindset instead of the “fuck with me, I’ll shoot your balls off” John Wayne-esque 
mentality she obviously has. How many more people might have died at Fort Hood? How many more lives might be saved in general, if instead of the current “a female black belt will never beat an equally certified male,” happy crappy message our daughters receive today (often at home, and continually reinforced in the media,) most of them were taught, “maybe not, but she’ll kick the shit out of the average titty-groper in a bar, and have a fighting chance against your garden-variety body-collecting serial rapist/murdering asshole”?
I know this post might seem disjointed, uncoordinated and a little scatter-
brained, but, so are my thoughts, so I beg your indulgence here. However the next seemingly unrelated point I want to make concerns PUMA and NOW. Last summer, in a backlash against Obama-lovin’ Kim Gandy, PUMAs rallied ’round Terry O’Neill, and voted her, and her demographically nearly identical mirror-image board in. The conventional wisdom was that by sucking up to the Obamessiah, Gandy, et al. had sold out women, therefore anyone she endorsed was a fatally flawed, tainted, poisoned arm of Obotia, unfit
to be rewarded with even the tampon collection concession. However, it needs to be said that the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, potentially the most significant appointment in our lifetimes, happened on Gandy’s watch. Conversely, despite promises of bra-burning activism from her replacement, the current attack on women’s rights has elicited only a rather tepid response from the new president. What’s up with that? Could it be that 15 or so lobbying teas with the Pseudo-Feminist-In-Chief were more effective than otherwise credited, and, maybe even realized by the new team to be the way to go, an effective, if not the only, way to handle these throwback guyz? Is quietly cozying up to power always a sign, and unseemly display, of weakness, while writing sternly worded public letters is a muscle-flexing show of strength, if one gets your goal accomplished and the other…doesn’t?
I dunno, my head’s kinda spinnin’ off its axis of its own volition nowadays. I try to corral my thoughts into some sort of cohesive order and then some new piece of information prompting outrage of a different sort from a different source emerges, and I’m off a-chasing errant mental images hellbent on doing their own disobedient thing. I still say though, that if I were ever to launch a new Femocratic political party, Bachmann Palin Overdrive and their ilk would not be welcome or allowed. Keep your TEA Parties and anti-abortion rights speeches with their Nazi flag waving nutjobs on your side of the aisle, in fact, it would be all right with me if you voluntarily withdrew from the game altogether. But, since I don’t see that happening anytime soon, I’ll just say, as far as your “Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant are my sheroes, let’s save some fetuses for systemic abuse after they’re born, rah, rah, rah” cheerleading in support of feminine suppression by patriarchal oppression in perpetuity on behalf of the Keepers of the Status Quo Powers That Be goes, stick it where the sun don’t shine and sing Yankee Doodle while you lay back and think of England on your own.
I deserve better than you.
And, while I support women’s rights, unless and until someone honestly confronts, with more than lip service, the “white woman on top, black/minority women in baby-raising, housekeeping service” natural pecking order subtext of the American Dream, I’ll never be a feminist. Nor will I ever embrace the “help a brother out by declaring your independence to be his partner in the name of the Lord” definition of “womanist,” or the “sisterhood against your best interests” folderol of anti-feminism. I don’t need Pelosi, Bachmann, Palin, O’Neill, Alice Walker, or FLOTUS’ permission, or example, to define myself as I see fit. In fact, I’d happily tell them all to kiss my ass on Las Vegas Blvd in front of Caesar’s Palace at the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve, but I’m too much of a fucking lady to do that to women whose carriages are likely to turn into pumpkins at exactly that moment, probably squashing them all underneath, given their chosen, customary, scrub-side/undercarriage riding positions.
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In other newsbits I’ve collected, Michael Steele threatens his own guys, this guy says Steele’s guys love Obama, this guy proves Riverdaughter’s point 
about the Right trying to force the Left more to their side of Center, some more Wall Street guys got busted, unemployment’s at 10+ to damned near 20 percent, depending on who you believe, which makes me wonder how these folks are gonna pay for government mandated healthcare. Also, this guy accidentally on purpose ejected his own fool self from an airplane, a digitized photo of Lee Harvey Oswald with a rifle and a Marxist newspaper “proves” he acted alone, there are lots of Muslims in the military, and the FOX News hating Pretendident likes having lunches with “journalists” he approves of, right before he brushes off one of his “now is the time” campaign-era speeches to rally House support for any old kind of healthcare reform.
In more femi-centric news, this “lady” quits her Planned Parenthood job after watching an abortion on ultrasound, wannabe virgins again can buy a fool ‘em kit, a woman gave her infant to her babysitter to hide in a box under the bed, and babies cry with an accent.
Lastly, Sesame Street turned forty this week, which still makes it younger than I am.
*NOTE: I found the photo/portrait at the top at this site.
yttik, it seems that your agenda is to sell the notion that we can reach our goal by “changing the dynamic” and you propose (three times) that the method of generating this “dynamic” is to give the Republicans the reins.
You said – “I almost believe that it was having a Republican congress that aided” Bill Clinton in accomplishing great things.
You said – “We have a Dem majority, and look what has happened.”
You said – “a McCain win may have actually delivered better results.”
This is the con that I referred to below. This is the con that rightwing operatives are pulling all over the pumasphere.
Vote for women regardless of party? I say this is another con. I say vote for those who support women, wherever you find it. Look at what Al Franken did – he introduced the amendment into the Defense Appropriations bill that would deny defense contracts to companies like KBR that don’t protect their female employees from rape by their own colleagues. I don’t care what party they are – if I had to choose between Al Franken and Michelle Bachman, I’d vote for Franken. But if I have a choice between two candidates who both share MY values, and one is a woman, then for sure the woman gets my votes. But first I vote my values.
Do you think Republicans have taken up the call to vote for women because they value women’s values, or because they value women’s votes? Please. Enough with the con.
Whatever, call me a right wing con. I’ll simply add it to my bitter knitter, racist, loony leftie, list of lovely labels.
Women have spent close to half a century trying to get the ERA passed, trying to get abortion rights passed as an actual law in congress. Democrats have been paying lip service to these issues and in fact, benefiting greatly from their non passage. You need some women voters, just claim R’s are going to ban abortion and that you are the great champions. Meanwhile for damn near 40 yrs we’ve had nothing concrete to protect abortion rights except a somewhat weak supreme court ruling. To this day 87% of counties have no abortion services what so ever and women are required to travel several hours to access safe abortions.
The ERA, we’ve had to fight every year just to get the Dems to reluctantly put support of it in their party platform. We failed when John Kerry ran, the party claimed it had other priorities. The damn party always has other priorities, and hey, women’s rights as human rights is just not that big of a deal.
Insanity is about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s way past time to start thinking outside the box and looking at the big picture politically. Yes indeed if R’s were in charge at the moment, people would be marching in the streets protesting against the war, against the anti-abortion crap coming out of congress. That would be a hell of a lot better then watching everybody roll over and passively cheer as they are doing today.
One problem I see is that people approach politics as if it were a numbers game, if we just elect enough people from the correct party we’ll have the votes needed to pass all this wonderful legislation. The problem is, politics is a lot more complicated then simply getting a majority in congress. We have a Dem majority, and look what has happened. If you pull back and look at the big picture, a McCain win may have actually delivered better results. Liberals would not be sitting back about to roll over on legislation that damn near repeals Roe v Wade. If McCain had won, we’d be marching in the streets, protesting and demanding our rights, demanding an end to the war, etc.
It’s tough to explain in a few sentences, but when I talk about electing women in order to change the dynamic, this is the sort of thing I mean. We need to look at the big picture instead of narrowly focusing on one issue. That one issue being “how is that woman going to vote.”
Bill Clinton managed to do some great things with a Republican majority in congress. I almost believe that it was having a Republican congress that aided him, the dynamic that was set up by having the opposition run congress got people fighting, got Clinton motivated, and ultimately led to some pretty good legislation.
Do people really believe that the country would be worse off right now if McCain had won the election? I suspect not, simply because the dynamic would be different and people wouldn’t be snorting kool aid, they’d be wide awake and ready to fight.
Why just politicians, yttik? Don’t you think that if politicians, male or female, really believed that women would vote them out, they would be a lot less cavalier with our rights? If women don’t feel empowered enough to exercise the power we do have, what will really change with more women in politics? What’s to stop those male and female politicians from voting just as they did re: Stupak; the way the female Speaker told them to, if they know they don’t have to answer to the potentially largest voting bloc there is?
I agree that “how is that woman going to vote,” is the ultimate question, but its far more important regarding individual women voters than politicians, imo.
The World Economic Forum recently published their annual “Global Gender Gap Report”.
I noticed that though my country ranks 7 (out of 134 countries) in the overall ranking, when it comes to “Wage equality for similar work” we only rank 43! (Uzbekistan ranks 1, Gambia 2, Georgia 3.) This, even though we rank 8 in the “Women in parliament” category (Uzbekistan ranks 65, Gambia 105, and Georgia 124).
http://tinyurl.com/6pghel
(Link to the PDF is in the sidebar.)
I’m not advocating neither pro nor contra the 30% or 51% solution, but I find these numbers interesting.
Individual political principles can be modified over time because life is a dynamic thing. However, individual principles are core to your person, and don’t really change all that much. When you find yourself pulled far from your core principles, you have to stop and ask yourself…who have I been listening to lately, and more importantly, what did I compromise, to have wandered off so far from what I hold true.
The women of the GOP seem to be leaning toward endorsing the 30% solution, too.
Pryce is “Ohio Rep. Deborah Pryce, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference from 2003 to 2007.”
…and this seems to be going viral:
Nancy peddled women’s rights to gett he bill passed, is that simple enough, and women do have the vaginas dont they?
Pat, i read the scrambled piece. It covers a great deal of topics.
Im just pointing out where the blame lies, with the lies of the campaign speechs coming to fruition. It’s hard to tell these days
what the hell is goin on in dc because it is also a scramble up mess. While you avoid the part i wrote about this bill that will fine your ass whether you are a woman or man if you dont buy some damned insurance. Now, if you like that part, even as a man, will then i guess that is the way it is.
I take Hillary’s stand: Women rights are Human rights. In a perfect political environment we don’t have to worry about ANYONE’s rights, so the stuggle should be to reach that goals. I would like to add it is urgent more than ever.
Good post, Cinnie. That’s a lot of information, I hardly know where to begin. I guess this phrase, “capitulation to the Right” bothers me because for years I protested the spinelessness of Dems, even going so far and to help walk a giant puppet spine down a parade route in protest. Stop capitulating like jellyfish, Dems. But over time I’ve come to realize that Dems don’t cave in to right wing demands, they use that as an excuse to avoid accountability. They aren’t innocent victims of manipulation and wimpiness. They are just as for the war and as against women’s right as the most rabid Republican, they just don’t have to brass ovaries to come out and say that. I respected Hillary for never apologizing for her pro-war vote. She made the best choice she could at the time and she was mislead, but instead of claiming she was tricked and deceived like Edwards did, and instead of apologizing and pretending she was manipulated from a noble anti-war stance by troglodytes, she took responsibility and said the buck stops here. I am who I am, right or wrong, I did this and I am not apologizing for it. I’m not going to pretend to be an anti war protester while voting for record breaking defense bills like everyone else in congress does.
It was Dems who wanted the anti-abortion Stupak amendment. It was 40 pro-life Dems who wrote to Pelosi demanding it. People have it so ingrained in their heads that Dems love them that they have to spin facts. “Well, Dems only did that because of pressure from R’s.” BS, R’s oppose this bill because of conservative principles like small government and controlled spending. R’s could give a crap about an anti abortion amendment, and you’ll notice that even with that amendment all but one R voted against it anyway. That amendment was purely to cater to the prolife and conservative Dems who are fighting this bill, but of course nobody will admit that. It screws up the fairytale about Dems as the great champions of womens rights.
What women need to do is align themselves with women. Yes I know, Republicans hate you, Dems hate you, men hate you, and many women hate you, too. But that’s not the point. The point is to build gender power and strength in numbers. Obama wouldn’t be playing basketball exclusively with men if 65% of his cabinet was female. Dems would not be able to hide their pro-life amendment behind spin if half of congress was female. Pro-life republican women wouldn’t side with those boys, they’d be pointing fingers and calling them out on their hypocrisy, never mind that they share the same pro-life stance. The point being, the entire dynamic changes when the room is filled with women. They don’t even have to be women who share you values, just their presence changes the whole story.
I totally disagree with your conclusion, yttik, always have, always will. Women don’t need the support or presence of all other women before anything gets done. Like-minded women working to achieve their goals can be effective without compromising their principles for the sake of numbers. I think that to take that position is a potentially fatal admission of weakness, a losing position from the start. Women need to stand up for what they believe, whoever they are, whatever it is.
And yes, it was the Democrats who pushed the Stupak amendment, but it was their threat to vote with the Republicans that gave a small faction power.
“Women don’t need the support or presence of all other women before anything gets done.”
Cinnie, I’m not asking for the support of “all” other women. I’m asking for the 30% solution in congress. And until we do, nothing gets done. It’s kind of like having not one single black Senator in congress and yet pretending that it doesn’t matter because there are Democrats in there who will look out for people. Yes, well bunk, complete invisibility gives you just that. Not seen and not heard. Out of sight, out of mind.
Cart before the horse, yttik. Electing people to office is an exercise in power. And, as far as black Senators are concerned, black people ain’t into the believing is achieving mode on that, either. Yet, I don’t support voting for any old black candidate, especially a black Republican, to cosmetically rectify that situation any more than I support voting for women regardless of party or policy position.
carol: Not sure of what your point is here but then I usually don’t. Faith Based Initiatives is a staple of this WH so I am not in the least surprised by what they have achieved with Obama at the helm.
No one is excusing anyone here that I can see. Moving religion into politics is a huge blow to equal rights for everybody so please try reading the essay for once before you start making convoluted assumptions.
ummmm,. ummmmm you left out the catholic bishops that somehow ended up in the room with nancy pussypusher. That’s what happened.
None of the ladies you mentioned had a damned thing to do with Nancy’s cowing down to the catholic hiarchy. She sold her beliefs down the river to protect her baby so he could make history, hell
seems to me he’s the one pushing the damned agenda of not paying for abortions by merely not standing up, of course the only thing ive seen him stand firm on is his love for his muslim brothers, im tellyin you you need to address the culprits, but alas, it probably has totally skipped everyone’s minds that this is a takeover of more your money. Wow, we wouldnt want to address that.
Now, not only will it matter whether you have insurance or not, you will be fined if you dont. LOLOLOLOLOLO totally remarkable
Nancy Pussypusher? What the hell does that even mean?
The post was about women, real and percieved power, and its use, and misuse, by individual women, and the timidity of individual women in search of the security of numbers before they can wield any power of their own, no matter how counter-productive the embrace of enemies for the appearance of strength inevitably may be.
Even though, if you think about it, the spirit of rebellion and individual free thinking that made PUMA in the first place, argues pretty strongly against embracing anybody simply for the sake of advancing anything.
My thoughts exactly. Nancy Pussypusher? WTF?
Too fast at the typing this morning. Should have read “pro life agenda is out to kill”.
I am so sick of listening to those who say “we must put our differences regarding reproductive rights aside” if we are to unit since seeking a common ground with this group is a total “fail”.
Before there can be any common ground there must be equality for all women ahead of any other issue being discussed. When a woman loses her ability to make her own decisions regarding her body, then there is no room for discussion. The pro choice agenda is out to kill any form of reproductive rights and don’t be fooled otherwise.
They are a much needed arm of the patriarchal system no matter how thin you slice the cheese. Current “feminists” are fooling themselves into believing we can “do business” with this crowd and the votes for the Stupak Amendendment on Sat night proved this.
“[A] nation of individually self-empowered females would be a force to be reckoned with, regardless of their personal political, or religious, viewpoints and affiliations.”
What a great post, Cinie!
I might not agree with – or even understand … yet! – all that you are saying, but you sure make my brains work in overdrive. Thanks!
I reject the proprosition that anti-feminists are feminists. What a con. I reject the proposition that some magical percentage of vaginas in power will usher us into the promised land. Another con. Rage at the DNC for it’s misogyny? But no rage at the misogyny of Bachmann and the right’s agenda? Again – what a con. Move the left towards the right. Move women towards the right. Convert PUMA to an audience for the right.
The pattern of the confidence game is to first gain confidence, and then convince the “mark” to turn over their wealth to the one pulling the con.
here, here, LPB! Say it like it is!
I always knew the Republicans hated me. Then, last year, I found out the Democrats hate me. I’m not voting for people who hate me and think I’m subhuman and deserve less than the other half of the population.
One of the most important aspects of negotiation is to be able to walk away. No Incumbents 2010!