Comments on: We Will Not Forget, We Women

By: Miss H

Miss H — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:20:40 +0000

I recently joined the National Rifle Assoc. and purchased a 10-22 semiautomatic rifle. I just received the NRA publication and read where one of our USA states had denied an 81 year old female, the 2nd amendment right of gun ownership, based upon the fact that she was “an old woman”. I guess if a rapist or thief breaks into her home, where she lives alone; she just has to roll over and take it; after all she is only “an old woman”.

By: cynic

cynic — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:24:27 +0000

Young women are being indoctrinated today by the entertainment industry and popular media to covet the shiny consumer clutter offered up in our department stores and shopping malls. They’re being programmed to think of themselves in the same fashion. They’re told to think of themselves as objects in a market; they’re conditioned to believe they must focus on their own external packaging to give themselves value and compete for the attentions of young men, who unfortunately tend to focus excessively on the external in the first place. Peer group pressure to conform to the false standards foisted on the young has become a highly effective tool of the marketing industry.

I honestly don’t know what will break the trend. Our whole damn economy is oriented toward compulsive, frivolous consumption and the hyping of imaginary value. What is happening to far too many highly-impressionable young women is part of that. Maybe the damn recession will be good medicine for us.

We clearly don’t agree where Obama’s pitch to the young fits into all of this. He might help snap them out of it. After all, something he said has managed to get their attention. That’s quite a feat. What matters next is whether he can hold it, and what he tells them.

By: lynn

lynn — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:39:56 +0000

Hi Susan- thank you so much for the work you do on the blog. I agree that Larry is amazing for the support he gives to women and to his writers. I don’t have words for how heartening it is to read others on this blog who share my feelings in this election cycle. In addition to the insightful and bias free election coverage, add to that the insight Larry brings to intelligence matters, the writers like Larry Doyle, and the posts concerning foreign affairs, and I say this is the smartest blog out there.

Thanks!

By: lynn

lynn — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:22:13 +0000

An interesting aside- If you remember the movie Contact based on Carl Sagan’s book? the movie used clips of Pres Clinton as the pres in the movie. In the book, the Pres is a woman. I read that the decision to go with clips of CLinton was because the producers felt having a woman Pres would be too controversial. & FYI, I think Morgan Freeman had played the part of Pres in a movie by this point, though.

By: lynn

lynn — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:12:50 +0000

I also viewed interviews where Palin stressed “starting from what we have in common.” From my own personal reading and viewing, as opposed to media-fed news, I felt Palin was not as radical as all the slander made her out to be.

By: Tina

Tina — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:42:07 +0000

FWIW, Mother Jones was against women having the right to vote.

By: Mountain Girl

Mountain Girl — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:19:05 +0000

Good article. I have been reading a book about Thomas Paine and his later influence on the Woman’s Movement.

I am so disappointed in our younger women today. They are unconscious. And their mothers encourage and support them. I have friends who supported Obama because their daughters, who the freely admit are not at all conscious, supported him. I guess they think, in some kind of reverse psychology, that supporting what their daughters want will somehow help them become self aware. I don’t know, but it disgusts me. Isn’t older supposed to be wiser.

By: NoBamaNoWay

NoBamaNoWay — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 02:32:43 +0000

yes, absolutely, the media is pushing the sexualization of young women. they are taught that being sexually “free” (some would say promiscuous) is the end all and be all of female happiness. hmmm, i’m not saying that women don’t like sex, but i suspect that it was men that came up with this new definition of “feminism,” and their marketing campaign for it has been quite successful.

as has been mentioned before, young women realize too late that their sexuality can only take them so far in this world, and that sexual freedom is a long way from true equal rights and respect for women.

By: HC

HC — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:55:30 +0000

I hear ya.

By: Sonic Ninja Kitty

Sonic Ninja Kitty — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:34:03 +0000

Elise, sometimes the person who best supports women’s rights happens to be a man. I have seen many females lately who claim to be ‘feminists’ who actually set women BACK. I don’t care what gender my feminist comes in. Give me Ed Rendell over Naomi Wolf and Ron Paul over that the woman who wore the c*** t-shirt. Be very careful about which women you promote, Elise–they are not all feminists!

Feminism to me is the support of equal opportunities for women. It does not mean men are shut out. A perfect feminist society does not mean women will be 50% of all the construction workers and men will be 50% of all the nannies. It means women will have the opportunity to do what they choose. You cannot force the outcome percentages–that would be a form of socialism.

By: arran

arran — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:15:57 +0000

I am a second wave feminist. As difficult as it was in the 70s for a women’s movement to evolve, I do have the upmost respect for Alice Paul’s work in the early 20th century when women activists were jailed.

I read many comments by younger women during the primaries who would say, “I’m for women being elected, but not this woman (Hillary).” I thought to myself that you’ll not see as gifted a politician, as intelligent a woman, nor a greater supporter of women’s issues as she is again for a long time. Not voting for “this woman” is a lost opportunity by women who aren’t conscious of what’s at stake. I teeter on the line of thinking that younger women will have to begin losing some of these hard-won rights before they become aware and unite in the next women’s movement, and of hoping women never reach that point.

The feminist blogs and the new PUMA movement give me hope. Many of these women are a generation younger, but their fierceness and determination are reminiscent of ours back when. They struck back when Ms magazine (Inaugural cover) got it so wrong. Maybe from you a new movement will spring.

By: somerset

somerset — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:07:58 +0000

I think Anne of Green Gables is an incredibly feminist book, especially remembering it was written in 1908. I hope girls are still reading it. I am beginning to think women were more feminist at all times than now except maybe in the 1950′s. I am curious to see whether an economic depression will wake women up or do they think they are going to get the road-building jobs? Poverty is cruelest to women and children…weren’t those hobos men who ran away from their wives and kids?

By: Kal

Kal — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:58:57 +0000

also classics:

Margaret Atwood The Handmaiden’s Tale (for those who can’t believe it could ever happen again)

The Stepford Wives — really reveals male views of women quite adroitly

By: Kal

Kal — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:57:09 +0000

And don’t forget Mary Wollenstonecraft’s (sp?) great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, written in response to the toxic patriarcality of Rousseau’s Emile.

By: Kal

Kal — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:54:32 +0000

Me too. The women’s movement in the US is closing in on its second century of visible political activity — beginning with the Grimke sisters dedicated fight for the abolition of slavery. None of this is new. Its all about how men have learned to control, belittle, befuddle, undermine, impoverish, and abuse women. Because keeping women as a highly-exploited underclass makes men richer, more comfortable, enjoy life more, and more secure, knowing there are others below them in the hierarchy. Reproductive rights and all sorts of other things are pieces of this, but the real thing is sexual privilege, the men-first mentality of patrifocal culture, and what it does to everyone else.

That’s why I see BO as basically just having a great old time on his own private plantation — now complete with a grand white house built right on plantation models.

I don’t see him trying to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. And the women in his family are too under his control to oppose him in any way on that.