Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’

Feminists: Here’s Your Problem

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

feminismFeminists just can’t get past the shock that women throughout the country view Sarah Palin as a role model. It’s fascinating to watch all of the soul searching, navel gazing, head spinning and venom-spewing. I’m frankly getting tired of writing about it. Can y’all collectively get over yourselves and stop repeatedly asking the same damn questions?

That lovely blog that started the maelstrom against Taylor Swift decided to go interview women waiting in line for the Palin book signing in Fairfax, Va. and incorporate the cover article on feminism in Newsmax this month. The author, Amanda Hess, forgot to mention that the Newsmax article was written by S.E. Cupp, a young female conservative. Since young, female conservatives don’t exist in feminist-land and are only the creation of old, white men in the GOP, she had to  snidely attack the women waiting in line:

In “newer feminism,” every woman’s choices are valued—no matter what those choices mean for other women. Schlessinger isn’t an enforcer of rigid gender roles; she’s a facilitator of women’s choices. Palin’s opposition to abortion rights and comprehensive sex education isn’t anti-feminist; it is her choice to deny reproductive choices to other women. Under this model, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis isn’t an exploiter; he’s a liberator of women’s breasts.

Umm…no. Joe Francis is a pornographer and will be to the vast majority of conservative women. But ladies — and I sincerely hope that Amanda Hess and her colleagues find this post– let me spell it out for you. Sarah Palin is simply a marriage of conservative values with the watered-down version of feminism that you gals sold in the 90s in order to save a crippled and dying movement. Until Palin appeared, no one on the right had represented a liberated woman “making choices for herself,” successfully balancing the family and a career, and enjoying a modern marriage with her not-so-metrosexual husband. You were operating under the assumption that the Gloria Steinem vs. Phyllis Schafly dynamic still worked.

Despite my staunchly anti-feminist upbringing, I’ve gotten familiar with the f-word. I worked for a quasi-feminist organization. Well, it’s an organization determined to train little feminists, but it gave me a solid crash course in all things liberal women. After I left that job, I decided to get to the bottom of this feminist issue. I had been blogging anonymously for nearly a year but had danced around the subject. After I moved back to the DC area, I dove into reading feminist theory, history and anything from the women’s studies genre. I was determined to understand what feminism was. The only problem was that feminists were asking that too.  Sadly for them, Palin arrived on the scene before they could reach an answer.

To understand it, let’s go back to the beginning. Hopefully, this history is familiar to most of you.

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The Libertarian Side of Global Feminism?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I’m hesitant to suggest this, but is there an emergence of economically right-of-center feminism on the rise? My current obsession has been to track this on the far right, but is it developing in other circles?

Since my college years almost 20 years ago, I’ve considered myself a feminist. It is usually assumed that feminists are left-leaning liberals, but I am a feminist who is politically to the right of center. So, at many feminist gatherings – especially as my politics have changed – I’ve often felt like an ideological version of the ’sister outsider’ outlined in the work of the late lesbian feminist Audre Lorde: theoretically part of the group, but a case apart. However, there are many other black feminists like me.

While abortion and LGBT issues are the focus of feminism in America, the economy and government intervention are concerns in other countries. Today, I stumbled upon this article about conservative black feminists from around the world. Now, right, left, conservative and liberal mean many different things outside of America, but the feminists mentioned in this article emphasize personal responsibility, limited government and capitalism.

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