For All the SUPER Women

For Robin Morgan, who’s toiled for decades for women’s rights … more from her below.

For Erica Jong, whose brave, bold and highly creative writings have inspired women for decades … more from her too below.

For Alegre, who works every day, raises beautiful children, makes time for her friends, and works her heart out every minute she can spare for the campaign — who tonight found the time to fashion this remarkable diary about women and the still-rampant sexism that, sadly, most middle-aged white men like Chris Matthews think is old news (but we women know all too well that it’s still alive and that it still HURTS and demeans and humiliates us):

I’m sure you all remember that old [edit - ok ok I know - it was Bowie!] Aerosmith song (well maybe some of you are too young) that ends with wham bam thank you ma’am”! You don’t have to be a 40-something like me to know what that means. Now I don’t take what the New York Post has to say seriously (ok it’s nothing more than a supermarket rag really), but when they include a headline about yesterday’s Chesapeake Primary with a picture of Sen. Obama that says WHAM BAM Barack Romps in MD, DC & Virginia I just can’t imagine that they meant anything other than that he’s …

Well you get the picture in all its disgusting slimy detail.

Guys we’re talking about a United States SENATOR here. We’re talking about someone’s mother – someone’s wife – someone’s daughter for crying out loud! We’re talking about a woman who’s dedicated her life to making this world a better place for us – especially for the children of this world and this is how they choose to report election results????

And people claim that sexism isn’t an issue in the coverage of this election. … READ ALL.

Here’s a part of Robin Morgan’s essay — “Goodbye to All That #2” — so powerful that it is still circulating around the ‘net, read and re-read by women who know all too well what Ms. Morgan is talking about:

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls.So.

Goodbye to the double standard . . .

—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.

—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.

—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.

[Susan's Note: Can you believe the acronym of Stone's group's name? If he had a group acronym name that disparaged blacks or Hispanics, the primarily white male MSM would be in an uproar! But it's definitely okay to do that to women. Without a peep of protest from the MSM.]

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. …

[...]

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
… READ ALL.

Here’s some of Erica Jong’s essay, “Patriarchy:1000, Hillary:0,” in Huffington Post today — as remarkable as her brave op-ed (“Hillary vs. the Patriarchy“) in the Washington Post last week:

Ever since I wrote an article in the Washington Post ten days ago, I’ve been getting love letters from women and super-smart men and brickbats from the Hillary-Haters. Unfortunately the Hillary-Haters are in charge. They monopolize the networks, the newspapers, the talk shows — both radio and TV. They are crossing their legs for fear of castration. They are wearing the body armor our troops never got. Or got too late to matter. They are determined that a woman will not prove herself competent as Commander in Chief.

What’s their ammunition? Oh, it’s simple. They call her Mrs. Clinton, not Ms. or Senator. They pull out those nutcrackers in the shape of her supposed thighs. They complain about her ankles — too thick. They complain on Fox TV that “White women are the problem” — (idiot boy Kristol, the brain-damaged scion of Irving who rose through nepotism like our unelected “president”). Then they say she has “baggage” — which could mean wrinkles, or her husband, or her daughter Chelsea whom they say she is “pimping.” Then they say she never divorced Bill — as if it’s anyone’s business. Then they moon over Obama’s rhetorical style. Then they make it appear that she’s a drone or a worker bee and has no royal jelly. Or else she has royal jelly and is queen bee. And that’s her problem.

[...]

I give up. If I have to watch another great American woman thrown in the dustbin of history to please the patriarchy, I’ll move to Canada — where they live four years longer than we because they have universal health care. Or Italy — where Berlusconi played at being Mussolini but life is sweet anyway and people take vacations in August and at Chanukah (Christmas or Diwali or Kwaanza) and Passover (Easter).

Ok folks, stick your heads in the sand like Maureen Dowd who thinks we’re not against women but just against Clinton “baggage.” Or Barbara Walters who seems to have forgotten how viciously she was attacked when she got her first million dollar contract — worth only half a million in Euros today. … READ ALL.

And here’s a bit more of Robin Morgan — it’s impossible to know what to quote and what not to quote because it is all so brilliant, so poignant, so real, and so DAMN TRUE:

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .

—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.

—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.

—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.  Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.  

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has. 

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement.  She’s running to be president of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Representatives Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Senator Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here. …

Read it all here.

Please do read it all. For your daughters, your wives, your sisters, your mothers, your aunts, your female co-workers and neighbors. And for your female politicians who face additional hurdles that male politicians never have to put up with.

Do it for all the SUPER women out there.