Friday, September 08, 2006

The Personal is Political and I refuse to let my womb play victim

In the course of 44 years of life as a woman, I have faced discrimination from time to time and I dealt with it by moving on. As in, over and above, or just plum mowing down whoever tried to hold me down or back. If the law is on your side; all else is just details.

I came of age in the late seventies. Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir were mother’s milk to me. But a funny thing happened on the way to achieving equality before the law regardless of sex. The agenda changed in the feminist movement, and no longer did I have a place, nor was I valued for my feminism because it was in the political mold of a Margaret Thatcher rather than in the sneering gender contempt of a Greer. We achieved equality before the law but Equality got replaced with a concept called "Equity" which is now considered political and economic social ‘justice.’ Don’t ask me to define political/economic social justice as I can’t keep the competiting gangs of legal thieves straight nor their rationale for being.

When I was young, I thought that feminism was all about a woman’s right to choose whatever innately suited her talents or temperament. I learned the hard way that unless you are choosing to have an abortion, unlimited sexual encounters with as many strange stray males that pass one by, or pursuing a career rather than choosing husband, family and motherhood – not only are you letting down the sisterhood but you have failed as a fully functioning self-actualized woman.

There is one exception to the motherhood role. Choose motherhood sans male and then your status is ennobled and you are once again revered. But claim that children need a father as much as a mother or that your experience of raising girls and boys leads you to deduce that male and female children brain’s process information differently right from birth, and your feminist credentials are rescinded. You might as well write "Traitor to the Sisterhood" in big red letters across your forehead. Oh, and get use to being called "Stupid Cunt, Slut, Whore, Harlot" by all those anti-sexist pro-feminista types of both sexes. There is nothing a progressive/feminista male loves more then free license to call another woman a "stupid cunt." I swear they positively revel in it.

But you know what is even stranger? To live in the land where successive government administrations insist on funding an organization who reputedly speaks and acts on my behalf but refuses to believe in the validity of my differing opinion; or even acknowledge that I have a voice as worthy to be heard or considered as any other woman’s.

Help end discrimination and the government funding of the Status of Women. Put your signature on this petition.

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

The whole concept of "social justice" is seriously deranged, a rare distillate extracted fron the actual body of civil life - from which once extracted the body dies. It's a chimera of faith-based sophomoric beliefs, an adolescent projection onto Society that cannot exist if Society itself is to remain.
Utopians believe in a trans-societal Big Happy Family World that totally ignores, as if it never existed, several thousand years of family actuality from the Biblical Joseph whose brothers threw him into a pit and then sold him, to the Renaissance Borgias, to Uday and Qusay Hussein and the Clintons of today.

Suzanne said...

What a fantastic post. YOU GO GIRL!

MissHailey said...

It really is very sad that some of these men use terms like "harlot", "slut", and "cunt" so freely.

If these are the examples that these women have of men no wonder they are so despite to have things like women's shelters and other services for abused women.

One day I hope that they learn that not all men behave that way.