If you vote for Obama, this is what you’re voting for (Reminder #12)
I’ve been reading other discussion boards where women are telling one another not to give to their usual causes, like Planned Parenthood, instead give more to Obama so he can win and take care of EVERYTHING. It’s like they’re preparing for the rapture.
Ah, yes. This has happened before. It is the standard answer to women’s liberation from the Left-Wing Division of Patriarchy, Inc.: “Now, now, shouldn’t we all be working for the common good? Shouldn’t you be worrying about things that effect everybody? Shouldn’t we all? Just trust us guys to handle things and you’ll get a fair deal.”
This is a promise, I note, that has never been kept.
The most salient instance of this particular shell game occurred early in the 20th century, when the socialist era in Europe got underway. The socialist movement theoretically embraced gender equality, and the pitch to women was that they should abandon their own movement and instead devote everything to socialism, because Socialism Would Fix Everything. ( “And shouldn’t we all be working for the common good?”) Activist women bought into this dream to a very large extent, and the women’s movement essentially died.
Socialism did not fix everything. It most definitely did not fix gender inequality. The real nature of women’s oppression was never examined, and the men running socialism had no real desire to give up their own privilege (or even examine it, for that matter). The women’s movement lost decades while leftist women put everything on hold for the sake of socialism, and they got nothing in return. That’s why the Second Wave of feminism was necessary — and it was 50 years in coming.
In communist countries where socialist philosophy became state policy, the situation, paradoxically, was even worse. In the Soviet Union, for example, the policy was for women to be equally employed in most of the same professions as men. But they still had to do all the housework and childcare. And of course they were still subject to the social bias and abuse that women endure in all patriarchal cultures. Russian women got the burden of equality — having to work the same hard jobs as men — but none of the benefits.
The Second Wave of feminism that occurred in the non-communist West was blocked from happening in Eastern Europe, and not just because of restrictions on political freedom. The Second Wave of feminism is still being blocked in those countries. That’s because the consensus there is still that socialism took care of all that stuff — women are officially equal, are they not? — and so the actual nature of women’s oppression still remains unexamined and unchallenged. The rates of domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, forced prostitution, and other abuse and exploitation in Russia are appalling. Public attitudes towards gender roles are literally decades behind even our own sick society’s.
Back in 1970, Robin Morgan (still in possession of her faculties then — which is a whole separate freaky sub-plot but damn, she was one hell of a feminist back in the day) wrote Goodbye To All That:
And that’s what I wanted to write about–the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what
Women’s Lib,as they so chummily call it, is all about–who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The tokenpussy powerorclit militancyarticles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more.**
Goodbye to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne which is the face of Beulah Saunders, which is the face of me which is the face of Pat Nixon which is the face of Pat Swinton. In the dark we are all the same–and you better believe it: we’re in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variations: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice–take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister—don’t you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.
**
I once said,
I’m a revolutionary, not just a woman,and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement’s eagerness to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterleft. But to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them)–or realize that you are one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting downthe crazy feministsto make themselves look unthreatening to our mutual oppressors. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change each day of your life right now—not in talk, notin your head,and not only convenientlyout therein the Third World (half of which are women) or the black or brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers. It hurts that Jane Alpert was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women’s Liberation. The backlash is upon us.They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and
struggle,to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers–to show ‘em we’re just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever‐image‐they‐now‐want‐of‐us‐as‐once‐they‐wanted‐us‐
to‐be‐feminine‐and‐keep‐up‐the‐home‐fire‐burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it’s being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of therespectablechain-swinging Motor City Nine. Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made—no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after.
Sound familiar? It should. It should all sound very, very familiar. In fact, I recommend you read (or re-read) the whole piece for a full-body frisson of déjà vu.
An Obama supporter represented his movement perfectly when he snarked on Tom Watson’s blog in June:
Oh well who cares if no majority Caucasian country in the history of the western world has ever nominated a black man before. It’s no biggie, some dude’s wife is much more monumental.
To be continued in the next reminder.
40 Responses to “If you vote for Obama, this is what you’re voting for (Reminder #12)”
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Jean says:
This is so sad. I’m not well-educated in feminist writers. I’d never heard of Robin Morgan until this election. To read her recent piece that eviscerated Palin was like reading something written by a gynophobe for a cool men’s magazine. It’s surreal to see that she once got it and could communicate it brilliantly.
Where’d it go? I didn’t see any lobotomy scars in her pic. Multiple personality disorder, maybe? Abusive spouse? Alien abduction?November 3rd, 2008 at 1:52 am EST -
Foxx says:
This post, and all our discussions recently, remind me of how messy the 60s and 70s were. Even among feminists there was so much socialism, so much we have to care about all people (=we have to care about men).
I don’t believe in “people.” There are women and there are men, and their interests are diametrically opposed. Caring about “people” means caring about male dominated groups and reinforcing their values.
So maybe if it feels the same we are starting a new wave. It will be messy, fits and starts, but we got somewhere last time.
Two things are important:
1) Radical ideas that frame the discussion.
2) Specific projects and demands that will mobilize women even if they don’t agree with all the ideas.One of the biggest pieces of unfinished business is blue collar jobs. A lot of those guys out there working on the roads and construction projects are being paid with OUR taxes. If the recovery (?) requires government projects, we need to be sure women are working on them.
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cellocat says:
Regarding the quote at the end of the posting, people have been so cowardly on the web. It seems like the internet has facilitated this huge wave of sexism, derision, and misogyny. It’s so easy to type away, especially when the person you’re insulting is just a name on a screen.
I suppose the silver lining is that there appears to be a stronger feminist community forming on the web too, as a result of all of this crap.
Violet, I deeply appreciate the summation provided by all of these “If you vote for Obama” postings. It fortifies my courage, will, and motivation to support myself in my vote, whatever that happens to be on Tuesday.
I guess I hadn’t thought we’d made enough progress to prompt a backlash. But by the strength of the latter, I’d say that there must have been more of the former than I expected. I’ll take that as a sign of hope for the future.
Unless the left has just adopted Bush’s pre-emptive strike philosophy….
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Briar says:
The problem with socialism isn’t socialism - it’s the failure to actually apply it to the patriarchy. It’s the failure of vision and courage to challenge the status quo between the sexes, engrained in all men and women of all political persuasions. But socialism doesn’t speak for the poor and dispossessed - it addresses the problem of the power imbalance present in every society. It looks at the relationships between social groups and pinpoints the source of inequality and injustice at a very specific location: the place where one group has power over another group and abuses it. So for a long time socialism busied itself with employer/employee legislation and with inequalities between ethnic and social groups - and had varied success in these matters depending on where it was operating and how ruthless and powerful the status quo might be. Not so much in the US, say, and quite a lot in Sweden. But what it didn’t do, or didn’t do methodically and at a high enough level, was challenge the imbalance between the sexes. Individual feminists might realise this and take it up, but feminism wasn’t, in any case, necessarily a leftwing movement, just as leftwingers were not necessarily feminists. (I would argue that only feminists can really be left wingers, because the male/female power imbalance is the key one in our society and the one most basic to engrained assumptions and attitudes. People learn to be sexists and socially unjust in the family. But that is another story.) So socialism failed with feminism, for the reasons you state. But to state that socialism has failed over all, as if America with its repetitive libels and misrepresentations of socialism were the world as a whole, is false. Look across the Atlantic and you will see relatively successful social democracies in action. America actually needs socialism - or a third party explicitly dedicated to social justice and the rebalancing of power in the community, which *is* socialism though Americans have been robbed of the conceptual framework to articulate this. As far as they are concerned, socialism is the Borg Collective, but less individualised. That’s the cartoon book level that political awareness has been reduced to in the USA. It doesn’t have a real left wing party, and that is why you have the current charade as one part of the employers/business party campaigns against another part - and women, everyman’s slave laborforce, get chewed up and spat out by both sides.
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Lisa says:
SOME DUDE’S WIFE???? Who raises these morons?
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qaz says:
“Now, now, shouldn’t we all be working for the common good? Shouldn’t you be worrying about things that effect everybody?
I cannot express to you Violet how glad I am to have found your website. Sometimes as a woman you think you are the only person to recognize this BS. I am not a writer, so I truly appreciate people like yourself who can put into words what I have been seeing/thinking for so long.
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kenoshaMarge says:
A sister that denigrates other women is no sister of mine.
Patriarchy can hold women down only with the consent and help of some women. So long as we are divided, they win, we lose.
Politicians have been lying to us about our “issues” for a thousand years, or more.
When will women, wake up and realize that their only power is in solidarity.
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qaz says:
SOME DUDE’S WIFE???? Who raises these morons?
Lisa, doesn’t that say it all.
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Alwaysthinking says:
Several years ago, my sister worked briefly for a small company that made widgets of some sort for computers. She quickly discovered how vilely sexist they were and that they also were running the company using immigrants, typically of Asian background, at fairly low wages.
She is not one to keep quiet when something smells fishy or when she is treated badly, so she soon told them how offensive their sexism was and left. (They actually needed her skills.) To some degree in the computer-related fields, this sexism was born and bred. Some video games also perpetuate this. Perhaps, these youngsters were actually raised by computers and computer games — rather than real mothers.
But, how,oh how, have the formerly great leaders of feminism, sunk so low as to keep subjugating their gender to the gamesmanship of people like Obama?
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octogalore says:
I like the example of socialism. When institutions or individuals who haven’t treated women as people, once they need our involvement, turn around and tell us it’s for everyone’s good, that’s a red flag. Socialism sounds good in theory, but handing over more power (beyond that needed to fund necessary programs) to a sexist body will typically guarantee status quo or worse in the future. I think sensibly regulated competition, given women’s equality and in some cases additional strength, needs to prevail if we want progress.
It’s too bad we don’t have the “solidarity” Kenosha Marge mentions. There was such a loud collective sigh of relief among friends of mine once HRC lost and they could be popular again — depressing.
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madamab says:
Violet - I received the following comment on my blog:
“Too bad having a vagina is more important to you than having a brain.”
Ah yes. If I were smart, like him, I would vote against my own interests tomorrow. I would vote for the misogynist man who surrounds himself with misogynists.
Seems like my vagina is smarter than his brain.
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Nadai says:
MadamaB, my answer to that is, “If you didn’t want me voting with my vagina, maybe you shouldn’t have spent the last year calling me a cunt.”out
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samanthasmom says:
I hope whoever kidnapped the real Robin Morgan will send the ransom note soon so that we can her back.
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madamab says:
Nadai - LOL!
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RKMK says:
Nadai, that is AWESOME.
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tinfoil hattie says:
Nadai, BRILLIANT!
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m Andrea says:
Nadai, please make a bumper sticker of that, and I’ll buy it. And a t-shirt. And a coffee mug. Seriously. Possible a 50 ft banner to drape across the front yard.
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orlando says:
The pattern began long before twentieth-century socialism. The French Revolution made great use of the contemporary campaigns to improve women’s rights by saying “join us and we will make everybody free and equal”, then once the new batch of men got their power they actually passed laws against women agitating for more rights, and guillotined a bunch of them, just to make sure.
The story of Olympe de Gouges’ life makes a great read. If by great you mean devastating. -
K.A. says:
So what are you all doing? I was going to go Green and vote McKinney, but the Dr.’s reminders are making me reconsider doing a split ticket. Another radfem had an interesting strategy whereby she only votes for women, regardless of party.
Who is split ticketing?
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Val says:
I read it very quickly, but I got the distinct impression when I read Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye #2″ that she would be WRITING in HRC??!!??
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Jean says:
K.A.,
I voted “Gynocrat” last Thursday. I can’t say that I’ll always vote for just women but it felt good to do it this year. I will continue to vote for the woman candidate, if at all possible, no matter what her party, in the future. I’m newly dedicated to the 30% solution.
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Foxx says:
I am so depressed. When it is a fait accompli tomorrow and this woman-hating thug is president, the gloom will be even deeper. It is a huge dark cloud covering the whole country.
I am sobbing for the loss of Hillary. A tragedy.
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bluelyon says:
I split-ticketed!
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octogalore says:
K.A: for McCain. Let us know what you conclude.
It was very sad not to be able to make the ballot again for some dude’s wife.
At my daughter’s ballet class this weekend (she is 4), she noticed an Obama poster the Obama-voting owner had hung up. It was photoshopped, showing him doing a dance with Sarah Palin. My daughter cried out: “That’s Obama!” The owner beamed, gushing: “wow, this is the first election where four year olds know the nominee, how powerful he is.” My daughter than said: “and Sarah Palin!” The owner’s smile died really quickly. I shamelessly prompted my daughter: “who do you like best?” She said “Hillary!” I told the owner: “now THAT would have been powerful.”
Of course, there goes my daughter’s shot at a good role in the winter recital… oh well.
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madamab says:
K.A. - I’m going split-ticket: McCain/Palin, then voting for women and Dems down-ticket.
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K.A. says:
Awesome, just wondering. I still don’t know what would be more effective to get our point across come 2012 and beyond.
What astounds me is how many people are willing to vote Obama, not because they supported him politically before, but because they want to “be a part of history” or “because he is going to win and they want to be a part of making that happen.” If you tack your vote onto whoever is winning to make yourself feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself, in a child-like attempt to glean some of that dropping-to-the-ground-crying-and-speaking-in-tongues euphoria Obama worshippers have cultivated in their exclusive ninny club, you are too stupid to vote. And a weirdo.
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Andrew F says:
I’ve been checking back here regularly, waiting for you to come your senses. But you’re for real, aren’t you? You really want to split up the liberal coalition.
The great news is that women across the U.S. will drown out this bitter faction. Women will hand this election to a liberal, women like Hilary Clinton - who believe feminism is about than the gender of the President.
God bless America, indeed.
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octogalore says:
OT:
A friend just sent me this link: http://palinpumawatch.livejournal.com/
Apparently it’s been set up to bash this site, the New Agenda, various commenters here including myself and many of you above.
WTF? Don’t Obots have better things to do than targeting feminists who aren’t sipping the koolaid?
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myiq2xu says:
“Too bad having a vagina is more important to you than having a brain.”
If your sexual organs define your existence and place in society, why shouldn’t they determine your vote too?
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Violet says:
AndrewF is the living illustration of what this post is about. Notice that he read the whole thing and still didn’t understand it. Think about that.
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Violet says:
But to state that socialism has failed over all, as if America with its repetitive libels and misrepresentations of socialism were the world as a whole, is false.
Just want to clarify that I didn’t say that socialism has failed over all; I just said that it didn’t fix everything. Socialism even in the first-half of the 20th century did a lot of good, particularly in terms of worker rights.
Socialism still has potential, and as a lifelong leftist myself, I’ve always thought we needed more socialism in this country.
But socialism is not a panacea. It’s also not the all-explaining worldview it thinks it is. Socialist men are still some of the most sexist asswipes you’ll hope to meet. Christ, just this past year I was on a socialist website where the men were railing about the “small-mindedness” of feminists who kept obsessing over the rights of women (half the human race) instead of acknowledging the plight of industrial workers in modern capitalist economies as a fundamental aspect of the human condition.
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Gayle says:
octogalore,
Don’t concern yourself with the Puma Palin watch site. I just checked out a couple of posts and it reads like it was written by a Kos kid.
Snark cannot trump reason (although they do try).
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Gayle says:
LOL! Check out the Robin Morgan thread:
“Women who don’t get with the “new agenda” are expendable. Not politically expendable — literally expendable.”
The New Agenda = Murderers!!
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julia says:
All of your comments make me smile!
I am surrounded by women Robin Morgan’s age, all of whom worked hard for women’s rights in the 60s, and all of whom are voting for B.O. Is this a generational thing? Did they get tired, dismayed, more conservative as they aged? I don’t get it - I get more and more radical the older I become.
I voted as many women on the ticket as possible. I feel good about it. I just can’t tell anyone.
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Shane says:
What astounds me is how many people are willing to vote Obama, not because they supported him politically before, but because they want to “be a part of history” or “because he is going to win and they want to be a part of making that happen.” If you tack your vote onto whoever is winning to make yourself feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself, in a child-like attempt to glean some of that dropping-to-the-ground-crying-and-speaking-in-tongues euphoria Obama worshippers have cultivated in their exclusive ninny club, you are too stupid to vote. And a weirdo.
That actually doesn’t astound me. The messianic tone of the Obama campaign has been a feature all along, and one that rather than being condemned has been actively encouraged, as opposed to that ‘wife’ who had the nerve to run for president herself. In a way its a sad side-effect of the Dubya years, that people are so desperate for someone else that they buy into the crap about how a vote for Obama is an act of redemption. Its also possible because of the extent to which Obama has wrapped himself in the history of Civil Rights, so that even though his politics aren’t really that similar to figures like MLK (except possibly the sexism), they’re enough for people to identify him as the culmination of it all, in a way ‘purifying’ the nation from past racial sins. And its actually acceptable to discuss this ‘history’ in public, so people do feel a sense of connected history even if its in actuality very manipulated. The history of sexism in contrast just gets denied.
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octogalore says:
Gayle –thanks.
Julia — one of those women is my mom. With her, while she’s actually gotten more radical in some ways as she has aged, she’s also gotten more easily guilted out. She’s convinced that voting BO is the “right thing to do.” Unfortunately, she was convinced of this during the primary as well.
This could be specific to her and may not even be correct, but I wonder if women of that period have had issues re race and have internalized guilt about it (whereas they don’t feel guilty for their own treatment as women, as they were the objects of it). Our family includes POC and my mother is conscious of ways she did the right and wrong things on occasion. I have also heard other women of her generation express feelings that they have not always been as sensitive to issues of race as they have become in later years. Whereas, growing up at a different time and in a more multiracial family and environment, while I cannot claim antiracist perfection, I don’t wonder about whether I am racist.
Does that have any relevance to the Morgans, Steinems, other women of this age? 2nd wave feminists have been regarded by many in the movement as not appropriately sensitive to concerns of WOC.
I am not suggesting that some of them could not have independent, principled reasons for voting BO, or that they are necessarily motivated by this kind of thing … but I wonder. Does that make any sense?
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Nadai says:
I’ve been checking back here regularly, waiting for you to come your senses. But you’re for real, aren’t you? You really want to split up the liberal coalition.
Oddly enough, Andrew F, I don’t much want to be in a coalition with people who call me a cunt. Crazy, I know, but there it is.
Women will hand this election to a liberal, women like Hilary Clinton - who believe feminism is about [more] than the gender of the President.
1. Neither McCain nor Obama are liberals, so I very much doubt it.
2. Your attempt at praising Clinton would be much more convincing if you’d bothered to learn how to spell her name.
3. How nice for you that the gender of the President is irrelevant. Get back to me after only women hold that office, and the Vice Presidency, and 80%+ of the Congress, and 70%+ of the Supreme Court, and 80%+ of the governorships, etc. etc. for more than 200 years in a row. I suspect you’d have a slightly different take on the subject. Or maybe not - you don’t strike me as the brightest bulb in the chandelier. -
CoolAunt says:
Andrew F says:
Women will hand this election to a liberal, women like Hilary Clinton - who believe feminism is about [more] than the gender of the President.
Translation: Women who believe women’s issues aren’t important are the women that are important to the Democratic party because they’ll vote for the Democrat misogynist and not the misogynist running against him.
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RKMK says:
That’s it. If I could, I’d write in Nadai.
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djmm says:
Great analysis and some great comments! “A sister that denigrates other women is no sister of mine.” Exactly! And a brother (meant in a gender, not racial way) who denigrates women is no brother of mine, either.
Ms. Morgan wanted to be revolutionary? Try treating everyone with fairness, dignity and respect, especially when they have earned it, but even when they have not. That is truly revolutionary, sad to say, and it was never mastered by some of the “revolutionary” guys she was trying to hang with. And if she ever learned that lesson herself (which one would think given her impassioned words), it looks like she has forgotten it. Still trying to look cool to the guys in the “in crowd,” huh? Good-bye to all that indeed. (And did she give a nod to Robert Graves when she took that title?)
djmm
