The current online consensus is that the gender of the current presidential nominees marks an historic moment for presidential elections. What about women running for POTUS in 1872? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Anyway, Alicia Keys tells us all that “tonight is an incredible night for American history and feminist history“. Not to demean individual contributions, but it’s quite a fanciful notion that one woman, or person, can break the patriarchy by herself. The civil rights movement did a lot more to fight racism than Jackie Robinson. But according to Alicia Keys, “women are the answer.” It has to be this way if your theory is from the playbook of persons like Catharine MacKinnon, who says:
“In a world of sexual equality, war would not be recognizable because war is highly masculinized.”
This means, a fortiori, males are necessarily war-like. Even though the same theorists argue that gender is socially constructed. But let’s assume MacKinnon is right. If that’s true, then those dealing with war and other disastrous situations such as genocide should be in favor of having such a strong woman in charge of military operations. But here is Samantha Power:
“[Hillary Clinton] is a monster…She is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think ‘ergh’…The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
Then again, everyone has detractors. At the very least, a strong woman would keep wise counsel? Oops, she got the one that was war-like:
The goal is not just any woman, right? The DNC wouldn’t cheer for Fiorina, right?
Isn’t the ideal person someone with feminist goals who happens to be female? We don’t just accept all feminine verbage tout court, right? Or is all criticism from non-females necessarily sexist?
Some don’t accept all utterances as equivalent in value. As a result, the truth doesn’t elude everyone:
“You can’t change the world for women by simply inserting female faces at the top of an unchanged system of social and economic power” – Susan Faludi
That includes Hillary’s bff Madeleine Albright, who says:
“I’m not a person who thinks the world would be entirely different if it was run by women. If you think that, you’ve forgotten what high school was like.”
But wouldn’t electing a woman POTUS remedy at least some problems relating to gender? Not as much as you’d think:
“[Hillary Clinton] ignores the issues that affect working-class women. In fact, Clinton’s policies have made the lives of the majority of women phenomenally worse. Like the millions of women affected by welfare cuts, the war on drugs, or the anti-worker policies at Walmart.” – Elizabeth Schulte
That’s not just one author making this claim. It is widely accepted.
But how else does one fight the power? First, you seek out the truth.
“The absence of progressive women to compete with Clinton [is not] a thing that just ‘happens,’ as if by chance….for the Clinton voter [however, it] makes perfect sense. If you believe that our democratic system is essentially sound, then you can only blame sexist outcomes on the voters themselves. And if neither the polls nor political science supports the explanation, you end up having to invent insane rationalizations…It’s only if you’re willing to consider the possibility that sexism is systematic in our electoral system and party rules, and highly concentrated in our ruling class of oligarchs and party kingmakers, that you can begin to understand the actual obstacles to proportional representation. That approach doesn’t generate as many excuses for Clinton’s failings, but it does have the advantage of corresponding with the facts.” – Carl Beijer
Correspondence with facts is what the primary goal should be. If you get that wrong, everything that follows will be hokum.
limping retribution 