The New “F-Word”

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