Wingnuts are among the most entitled creatures on the planet. They meep endlessly about made-up oppression like the persecution of white Christian men, even though white Christian men have always been the most powerful group in the country. They feel entitled to validation by Hollywood elites and whine unceasingly about being disrespected by writers, artists, musicians, actors, etc.
But for my money, no wingnut entitlement is quite so annoying as the demand that feminists circle the wagons around a conservative woman who has spent her entire career helping powerful men denigrate and oppress women. Even if she’s legitimately a victim of sexism, it takes some goddamned nerve for a conservative woman to demand that the sisterhood kiss her boo-boo when she’s busily advancing a sexist goon’s agenda. She should at least have the fucking decency to accept the terms she’s trying to impose on the rest of us.
Making such demands based on a lie about sexism is even more galling. The latter spectacle has been on display all week, with liars and/or idiots misunderstanding a comic’s routine and shrieking like scalded wombats about a nonexistent insult to Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ looks at the WHCA dinner. Here’s a sample of an annoying demand for women to circle the wagons from another lying Trump mouthpiece:
Is an attack on one woman an attack on all women, or does it matter who the woman (women) are? https://t.co/hmQe9UQOJ8
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) May 1, 2018
Talia Lavin on Twitter wasn’t having any of Conway’s bullshit, and the multi-tweet smack-down response (rendered below in paragraph form) is a thing of beauty that not only vaporizes Conway’s dumb comment but gets to the heart of what feminism is with uncommon clarity:
no. you don’t get to work your entire life against women’s rights and advancement, work for the most poisonously anti-woman admin in modern memory, and then turn around and beg for faux-feminist solidarity.
Feminism means something. It is NOT a sugar-spun cloak of girl power. It’s not a pink ribbon on an expensive coat. It is a fight to be free. It is a liberation struggle and the wages of losing are death or worse. You don’t get to make me forget that. I will never forget that.
I will fight against anyone, male or female, who does not want me to be free. I will fight against anyone who wants womanhood to be a punishment. I will fight for my flesh and my blood and my soul to be free until I die.
Too many people think feminism is decorative, a sugar pill to be bottled and sold at a markup. I grew up in a religion that gender-segregated during prayer, that taught me my body was dirty and my mind inferior. I left. Feminism gave me that strength.
I have been raped and assaulted and groped and beaten, and I have had an easy life. So many women are suffering. So many are not free. And this is because of systems of power, political and social, that feminism’s white-hot core seeks to burn down.
We have to claim it. We have to own it. Feminism isn’t easy or simple. You can’t buy it and you’re not born into it because you’re female. You have to choose it. You have to take the power yourself. No one will give it to you.
A-fucking-men. Had the comedian at the WHCA dinner actually insulted Sanders’ appearance, feminists would have spoken up, even though Sanders, Conway, et al, are enablers and apologists for the grotesque sexist nightmare in the Oval Office. But their speaking up wouldn’t be what Lavin rightly calls “faux-feminist solidarity,” and it wouldn’t be out of any sense of obligation to those particular women; it would be part of the larger struggle for recognition of our full humanity. That battle goes on, regardless of the turncoat status of Sanders, Conway and every idiotic woman who voted for Trump.
Turncoats in the Battle for Women’s Equality Demand a Purple HeartPost + Comments (107)