In a recent LA Times column, Gloria Steinem, who in her youth made feminism a household word via sexy hairdos and short skirts, savaged Sarah Palin for being against abortion and for teaching creationism in the schools.
To the 74 year old Ms. Steinem, this is caving in to the “patriarchy”.
Ms. Steinem is not at all troubled by the hard reality that the next President of the United States could have been a woman if it were not for the fact that the real patriarchy of the Democratic Party undermined her campaign in every possible way.
Rather, in a paroxysm of delight over imagined domestic bliss in the Obama and Biden households, she wrote the following incomprehensible paragraph in support of their candidacy:
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
“Until men are equal in it”? What is that supposed to mean? “(W)ho suffer more because of having two full-time jobs” – what is that supposed to mean? That collecting two paychecks is a greater injustice than having the sh*t beat out of you, both literally and figuratively? Is she KIDDING?!
Gloria Steinem misses the point. The Democrats had an opportunity to put a woman in the White House and didn’t. The Republicans had an opportunity to put a woman in the White House and did
So, how does that make the Democratic Party the supporters of feminist principles and the Republican Party a stronghold of the “patriarchy”?
It doesn’t.
The leadership of the Democratic Party did just about everything they could to prevent Hillary Clinton’s nomination, from their failure to investigate charges of improprieties in the primaries to their refusal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations until their capitulation to The One.
In contrast, this past week, we saw the leaders of the Republican party, including the female Governor of Hawaii, defending Sarah Palin from daily if not hourly media attacks, including accusations of marital infidelity and speculation about the parentage of her youngest child.
Being pro- or anti-choice is not the most important issue for me. Ron Paul, to whose campaign I contributed, is also anti-choice.
What matters to me is that the Democratic Party had an opportunity to support a strong, competent, qualified woman as their Presidential nominee, and they simply could not bring themselves to do it.
Every woman who’s ever run for a leadership position against a male opponent has seen this pattern. It is so embedded in our culture that even a feminist icon like Gloria Steinem fails to recognize it.
Steinem and other Democratic apologists like Gail Collins, Eleanor Clift, Maureen Dowd and Judith Warner should be ashamed of themselves for caving in to the patriarchy’s expectation that they will punish the “uppity” Governor Palin by dipping her figurative pigtails in ink and throwing mud on her figurative Mary Jane shoes.
It’s bullshit walking, and they know it, but publishing being a rich old man’s game and these being hard times, I guess a girl’s gotta kiss a lot of patriarchal a*s to eat.