Okay. okay, hold on to your hats cats and kittens, we are about to have another feminist rant.

This spawns from a Facebook thing between the lovely women at Rock The Slut Vote and another well written fellow feminist Wendy Gittleson, who wrote a blog about the use of the words slut and vagina.

She is not wrong. Women are more than “sluts” and “vaginas” and the campaign is extreme and inflammatory. I happen to like it, but I have a flair for the dramatic. What got me typing a long comment response was when Ms. Gittleson responded to the RTSV ladies with this comment:

And I wish you the best, but I believe you are preaching to the choir. The women we need are the ones that see sisterhood with Ann Romney, and they’re already scared of the word ‘feminism.’ Slut and vagina are words. I have proudly called myself a slut at times. I’ve also called men sluts. To me, it’s never been a particularly offensive word, but it’s still just a word. Vagina is just a body part. I want to be respected for my brain, for my contributions to society. If I, as someone who has been following your movement from day one, have a hard time seeing the focus of your message, imagine how women who are afraid of feminism are feeling? It also begs the other question, why are we letting Rush Limbaugh set our agenda?

Oh, I went to typing at that. The RTSV responded with everything I would have said anyway.

Rush Limbaugh is such a small part of the agenda. The media is much more focused on him than we are.

No one is going to convert the women who are conservative, Republican or who support Ann Romney — certainly no amount of conversation, no matter how well-spoken or rational, will make any difference. (Isn’t it the GOP that is committed to converting and monitoring the morality of women? It is their party that pushes conversion, not ours!

We are not here to convert anyone, and it will never be part of our agenda. We are here to increase awareness, help ensure women are registered to vote, and to preach to the choir, keep them engaged, help them mobilize others, and make a difference in November.

We are two women, Kimberley Johnson and myself, simply finding our voice in the midst of the insane attack on American women. Together with our troops, we will all make whatever contribution we can.

Women are a huge, diverse group. Some women will never agree with feminism on any level. These are the same women who teach girls that it our responsibility to be chaste and proper. They teach girls that men are dumb animals who can’t control their base urges, but in the next breath teach girls that men are superior and should be dominant.

We teach them it is okay to be objects, to be regulated, to be marginalized, and to be abused. Girls learn that their most important value is in their sexual attractiveness, but they should never give in to those men they attract until they have sealed the deal.  We teach girls to accept weakness and insecurity in men and to be weak and insecure themselves. I have heard, in 2012, that women have to dumb themselves down and be less funny, powerful, and witty in order to catch a man. No one ever tells those women that the men they catch will be insecure and unworthy of them.

There are men out there who love intelligent, passionate, funny women. If you have to wait to find one, so be it.

I understand the hesitation to wave the banner of feminism. I was reluctant to answer it for a long time. But I got pissed off. That is what we need to do. We need to get pissed off. We need to write. We need to educate. We need to vote.

I am going to say this again, because this is vital for feminism. We need to stop the in fighting amongst women. We need to learn to respect each others choices. It is rough. We fight so hard to decide what is right for us. We struggle to defend our decisions against the rest of the world, and when we see someone making the opposite decision, we want to call them wrong.

How do we handle things like the beginning of the blog? Like they handled it. It was mature discussion about differences of ideas. We don’t have to like each other. We just have to acknowledge that we are fighting the same fight. There is room for all kinds of women in feminism. We just have to take a lead from the amazing Ani DiFranco and shut up and be nice. Focus on what needs to be done

This sums up my feelings on douchey politicians fighting to get all up in my lady business.

I’m a creature of the internet, and the internet is full of many many lessons.

1. Everyone is a moron, aside from you. Sometimes this feels very true, like when you see people arguing against evolution or global warming. There are so many times that I want to tell people that they are wrong and outline to them why they are an idiot. Will it do any good? No. Will it make me feel better? Probably. Is it a huge waste of time and emotional energy? Yes. Generally the folks who argue extreme points on the internet are arguing from emotion, not logic, or you are arguing from emotions, not logic. Read their point to try to see their side, but arguing, like resistance, is futile.
2. Everyone in the world is fat and lazy, including you. Have good self esteem? Go on the interwebz, it will fix that for you really quick. The internet called Megan Fox a cow, the rest of us are fucked.
3. You do everything WRONG. All of your instincts are wrong. Every decision you make is wrong.  Normal people don’t feel that way.
4. Everything give you cancer, and all of the food you eat will kill you. Bitch, your ass is going to die because you drank bottled water, but it will still die if you drink tap water. EVERYTHING will kill you.
5. You are a bad person. If you don’t read every website for every cause imaginable and give a way your dollars, then you are a terrible person, and the world is going to shit because of you. (On a side note, your dollars need to go here.)
6. Woman only care about fashion, how to land a man, and how to make our vaginas more pleasing. Men only care about sports and ‘hitting it and quitting it’ with that hot chick at the bar. If you care about something other than these things, you are abnormal.
   

   Never fear, here is some make-up for your vagina. It is ugly right now, and no one will ever love you or your vagina until you fix that.

7. Every news source is fair and unbiased; it’s their competitors that are slanted. I’m guilty of this. Fox News shouldn’t have “news” after it. If you want good quality reporting there is always The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
8. You are screwing up your child. Every decision you make is permanently damaging your kid, and you should have your reproductive organs removed for your crimes.
9. I’m not the only one who finds those shoes with the individual toes creepy as hell. Toe socks freaked me out enough, but the shoes make me deeply uncomfortable.  I’m pretty sure I should be in therapy.
10. We all are in need for medical treatment for something. You are not okay the way you are. Go fix yourself.

The internet reminds me of high school, except only larger, like if the entire world went to your high school. The very idea of it makes me need tranquilizers.

Okay, no really, I love the internet. I think there are a lot of beautiful things about the internet. Like this site, this site is definitely one of the beautiful things about the net. Honestly, we all know the internet is a vehicle for pictures of cats and naked people. Viva La Naked People!

Okay, my pretties, it is time for us to have another talk about that dreaded feminism thing.

I assume that anyone who reads this regularly is either a feminist, loves a feminist, or is a masochist that likes to read terrible rants about gender issues, so I’m not going to outline why we need to give voice to gender issues. (Though, if anyone needs a refresher, I will gladly give it.) I want to discuss the state of feminism.

We need to talk. *Pats seat beside her*

1. The patriarchy is bad. Inequality is bad. Some men are bad. Some men are very very good. Some men are insecure douche bags and need to have their ass kicked by a woman, but many men are well meaning. I think most of us understand this, but we are still trying to shake off the stigma of ball-snatching, man hating bitches. Maybe some of our focus should switch to educating, instead of just fighting.

2. We are doing half of “their” jobs for them. Women can be evil to each other, and we judge the hell out of each other. We need to stop. We want the same things; the right to be what we chose, be it a CEO or a stay at home mom. All facets of womanhood are beautiful, and we need to learn to embrace them. This goes double for mommies. You guys can be sharks at a time when you need each other most. Life can be a fight. No one is making it out alive. It is time to start helping each other.

3. We need to take the power of “their” slurs from them. Rock the Slut Vote is a brilliant movement fighting the war on women and demonstrates what I am talking about. Slut is hurled at us to degrade and marginalize us. I say we take it, along with words like bitch and whore, and use them like the middle finger. We give them the power. It is time to take it away.

4. Be kind. This relates back to number two. As a society, we look at kindness and nurturing as a weakness. We hold ideals of ‘survival of the fittest’ on a pedestal. So much of what is beautiful about humans, especially women, is soft and warm. We have to stop looking at it as a weakness. It feeds into the bullshit about everything female is weak and inferior. (Seriously, Kathleen turned me on to Eve Ensler on Ted.com. Go watch.) If we keep worshiping all that is sharp and selfish, our world will eat itself alive. We should be the ones who start the movement back to balance for everyone, not just woman.

5. Go vote! Tell our politicians to get out of our lady bits! While you are out there screaming, though, try and listen some, too. It makes for more progress.