The Ya-Ya Sisterhood of the Non-Dangling Pants Parts

Ok, this is a response to J's post, which itself was a commentary to Emily Bazelon's article on Slate.

Here's the question. Do I, by virtue of having girly bits, feel some kinship with Sarah Palin? Do I, deep down inside, secretly want her to win (or at least do well) because she's one of us? Am I conflicted by the fact that I don't share a single personal value with this candidate, but want to vote for a woman? Am I anti-feminist if I don't applaud her ascent to power? Do I feel sorry for her because she isn't doing well?

Fuck.That.Shit.

Oh it's not that I don't want to see a woman succeed. It's just that I don't believe in a vagina network. My version of feminism isn't that women are pulling for one another, working as a group to overcome. Save the kum-ba-ya crap for church camp. Hey! I didn't contribute one of those 18 million cracks in Hillary's glass ceiling. IMO, that's not the purpose of feminism. The objective of feminism is to create a world where what's inside my pants ceases to matter unless I am actually using it at the time. This means that no woman should get a free pass to the front of the line. That means that if a woman gets to the highest level in her field, they shouldn't move the goalposts so she can, you know, serve as a role model. When everyone is allowed access to the same opportunities, how far we go is an individual endeavor. I'm not a feminist, per se. I just believe in equal opportunity.

Call me cold. Call me an anti-feminist. (You'd be dead wrong, but give it a go anyway.) I don't believe in double standards. There is one standard. If you are a woman and want to enter a traditionally male field, don't expect a paradigm shift to accommodate you. First woman entering the field? Little head's up for you. You are probably going to suck at it. You are probably going to be put down, second guessed, and judged more harshly than they'd ever judge one of their own. Is it worth it to you?

Ask Hillary Clinton that one. I think she'd say yes.

Maybe I'm insufficiently sentimental, but I have, without even knowing or understanding it, approached my entire life based on the idea that my gender doesn't limit me, excuse me, or condemn me. The only thing that truly limits me is me. I have met exceedingly few obstacles in my life that couldn't be driven over, around, or a detour found. Oh, I have experienced sexism. I just haven't allowed it to make a victim of me. I consider myself successful. Not a blazing light in the wilderness, but a little more than a bic lighter. A sea of bic lighters might make it easier to see, but it isn't the same as being the blazing light.

I know I'm going to hear it. The old "you're harder on women than other minorities."

Not really. Because I think the same should be true of all irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation, place of birth, yadda, yadda, yadda. I didn't grow up in this "let's give all the kids a trophy so they feel good" era. I grew up where accomlishment and recognition were earned. And not everybody made it. Sometimes I failed. Sometimes I succeeded.

I do not want to be judged by a woman's standard in a man's world. I don't want special accommodation. I want to know when I make it that I made it on my own merits. If I had to work harder, my accomplishment is all the more satisfying. And I don't mind that other women have to work as hard. Intelligence, competence, ambition, hard work, and a little luck. You have to have drive to achieve. You have to want it and never say die.

I didn't buy into Clinton's "I'm doing this for Chelsea" bologna, and I don't feel sorry for Sarah Palin because she bit off more than she could chew. I remember once I found myself in the finals at a summer swim meet. THE FINALS. Ok, so I was in the far outside lane indicating that I made the finals by the skin of my teeth, but there I was. And I swam my heart out. And when I finished and looked up, everyone else was already done. More than one girl was already out of the pool. I came in dead last. Embarrassingly last. Slinking out of the pool and hoping no one asks my name last.

Welcome to my world, Sarah Palin. Sometimes the competition is vastly superior to you. And you have to learn to be okay with that. And not because you are a woman, but because that's how it is. America is a tough town. You can believe in yourself all you want, but sometimes you just come up lacking.

Sarah Palin isn't getting my vote...not because I don't want to see women succeed. She won't get my vote because she took an end run around to the front of the line. She didn't earn it. Ok, so she's also a neanderthal in her thinking and grossly unsuited and unqualified for the job. That's just gravy.

I think I've lost my hillbilly cred

I grew up in eastern Kentucky. The foothills of the Appalachians. Honestly, if there is a hillbilly, by all rights, I'm it. Oh, I wasn't part of that destitute poverty that politicians like to point to when they don't want to export prophylactics to AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa but I did go to school with kids who didn't have indoor plumbing and by God, that's hill people for ya. I used "ain't" like a badge of honor. My idea of a summer vacation was a week at the grandparents' in West Virginia. My godparent was a McCoy. Of the Hatfields and McCoys. I have the accent that will never, ever, ever, ever go away. I am about as urban as Ellie Mae Clampett. Appalachia has left it's permanent imprint on me. It's like a limp. You learn to live with it. It adds character.

But I didn't realize how far removed I have become ideologically from "my people". Despite spending every waking moment in high school dreaming of getting the heck out, I never thought that I would one day be an outsider in my hometown. But it has happened...I have lost my hillbilly cred.

I know those people though. I know their pride and prejudices and the fallacies they buy into. I know how the high school boys read just enough about the civil war to pick up the "state's rights" argument and convince themselves that those rebel flag licence plates on the front of their Cameros don't really represent institutionalized racism. I know the ones for whom a label of gay accusation of "homo" is an invitation to an ass beating. I know how fathers sweat it when no boys seem to be sniffing around their daughters by the age of 15. I know people who use nigger among family and black people in polite company, but they always put too much emphasis on the word "them". Them people ain't like us. I know when the phrase "You ain't from around here, are ya?" is more than a gentle poke at an outsider and a downright indictment of alternative opinions. Back home, they don't much go for those newfangled ideas of gay marriage or interracial dating and equality of races, and they are more than slightly opposed to abortion and you need'nt make exceptions for rape and incest because those sorts of things just don't happen around here. That world is a small, safe, familiar place. You meet your best friend in first grade. People don't move away, they just die and a new generation moves in. You grew up down the street from the sherrif or maybe your cousin-in-law is a state cop and you have no worries in the world for the rest of your born days.

Well, I moved away and my world got bigger. It got a lot bigger.

In high school, my best friend was Rachael. Rachael will live out her days in our home town. She "admires" me for getting out and doing the things she only dreamed about. When I see her again, it's like not a day has passed that we were apart. I always thought it would be the same with my hometown, but it's not. I'm an interloper and it hasn't been comfortable in years.

I don't like to go home. It's not the poverty and depressed economy. It's the people. It's the racism and sexism and the unbearable stifling intolerance. I don't know when it happened, but I started looking on them as less. Folks in the mall shopping at Christmastime. Less. Folks in the restaurant. Less. I know they wouldn't approve of me and the things I do. The things I like. The choices I make. The only reason I can walk among them invisibly is because I lay low back there. I don't take my business home.

At the same time, I can't just accept the racism and sexism and intolerance and keep my mouth shut. I'd rather not go home at all.

Now when I think of home, I think Chicago. It's that skyline my heart yearns to see. I'm not sure if I'm an orphan from Appalachia, but I know where I feel most comfortable. Sweet home Chicago.

I am a Feminist from Way Back

My earliest memories are of Monroeville, Pennsylvania. We moved to the Pittsburgh suburbs when I was a toddler. My father, recently graduated from college, had gotten a job at US Steel. For a brief moment, it looked as though I wouldn't be saddled with the accent of my parents. Alas, it didn't happen. We moved back. Nonetheless, the first enduring memory I have was of the fallout when my brothers lit a bit of wooded area behind our rented house on fire. I remember Halloween that year. I remember visiting my grandfather's horses at a local farm there. Fleeting memories. We lived in the rented house while our house was built in Irwin.

What does all this have to do with being a feminist, you ask?

I attended my first birthday party in Irwin. I was in kindergarten. My best friend was my next-door neighbor, Gina Stewart, who in reality, was a spoiled, insufferable little brat. We didn't hang that much. I did a lot of playing alone in our flat, unlandscaped back yard or swinging on the swing set. But Gina and I went to the party together with my "real" best friends, Randy and Roger Oates (the twins), but of course a girl wasn't allowed to have boy best friends back then. In any event, I have no idea who the party was for. I do recall what seemed like endless row upon row of tables with paper covers, each with a place setting and a child's name, and a party hat. I found my place and my hat. It was a nurses cap.

A nurse's cap.

*rumpled brow*

A nurse's cap?

But I didn't want to be a nurse. Nurses sucked. Slowly but surely, it began to sink in. I had gotten a nurse's cap because I was a girl. The boys had policeman caps and fireman caps and doctor caps. The girls had nurse caps and teacher caps that I think had rulers and such on them.

I was being indoctrinated into a sexist society in kindergarten.

What amazes me more is that I refused to wear the hat. I rejected the assumption. If they wouldn't give me a police hat or a fireman hat or a doctor hat, I wouldn't wear a hat at all. I remember some female adult, possibly the mother of the birthday child, encouraging me to wear the hat. I flatly refused and it was dropped.

I'm sure the last thing a mother hosting 30 children needs is an irate four-and-a-half year old feminist on her hands.

It was quite possibly my first instance of social disobedience.

PS: Whoa! I can't believe I found this. Here is exactly what I'm talking about. The kid holding the baby in this video is wearing the hat. It is also from the 60s.