Imagine a pro-vagina world

By Shannon Drury, Minnesota Women's Press

May 01, 2008

When I first started thinking about a Democratic presidential nominee for 2008 (sometime after the weeping stopped in November 2004), my criterion was simple: not another white guy.

I have nothing against individual white guys, mind you. My charming husband happens to be one, and before long my 8-year-old son will be one too. But white guys are way too entrenched. They've been running things since the dawn of humanity, despite a handful of anthropological studies that show matriarchies did exist, before patriarchies squashed them like bugs (lady bugs).

So imagine my thrill when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama looked like my party's choices for 2008. Joy! Rapture! Why, back in the old days of ought-seven, discussing the candidates was sheer pleasure. No one argued. Everyone gasped, oh my gosh, aren't we lucky?

Then the calendar flipped to 2008. I wore my Hillary pin at the new Richfield SuperTarget and got looks as dirty as I've seen in any campaign season. I attributed this to suburban conservatism. Imagine my surprise when at my precinct caucus, deep in the heart of the People's Republic of South Minneapolis, I felt the sting of being in the political minority. I haven't had that experience since I wore my homemade "Dump Reagan" pin to my classes at Edina's South View Junior High. Suddenly, political discussions were making my stomach ache.

Why? Was it so hard to have people not agree with me? What happened to the nicey-nice? Usually when I listen to Rush Limbaugh (for research, people), my heart sings when I hear a candidate like Obama labeled a "tax and spend liberal." Why did I feel so disappointed by his success?

I realized that I wanted a woman to be the nominee much more than I thought. I wasn't satisfied with Obama, who is not white. He's still a guy, and I am sick of guys.

Yet when I announce this, I am accused of being not only sexist but racist. No, I don't mean me personally, mostly because I am too mousy to stand up in the public square and talk about how sick I am of men in power (though my supportive husband encourages this). I should defer to the royal "we" here, because when Gloria Steinem wrote about the subject in a widely read opinion piece in the New York Times, you better believe my heart sang.

But many women writers in the blogosphere whom I respect and admire called the essay sexist. And racist. And they said very hateful things about women like me who support Hillary Clinton, including that they are sexist and racist. One blogger on Feministing.com called it "pro-vagina selfishness." [CORRECTION BY EDITOR: This phrase comes from a comment and was NOT made by a blogger on Feministing.com. See comment below from Feministing.com.]

Oh, dear. No more nicey-nice.

My daughter Miriam will be 3 years old in May. Let's imagine, shall we? Say Hillary Clinton is elected in 2008 (my best case), proves utterly ineffectual in office (worst case) and is defeated in 2012 by George P. Bush (whose mother is a native of Mexico). My daughter grows until adulthood with a woman president as historical fact, not a figment of her imagination. Any jerk messing with her self-esteem will get a sassy retort about President Hillary from my tough little girl, who is already known in her neighborhood for not playing princess. When my daughter puts on a tiara, she knows to be queen.

By all accounts, Barack Obama is almost as cool a guy as my husband and son. If he's the Democratic Party nominee, I will happily support him. But these days when I see him on camera, I'm always peeking over his shoulder, thinking: Hmm, that Michelle Obama is one smart and accomplished woman. Why didn't she run? Damn.

Is wanting a woman to run the show selfish? Yes. I acknowledge that it is. So is wanting 50 percent of the members of Congress and at least three more Supreme Court justices to be women. I also want 50 percent of the parents watching their kids at the park to be men. I want what any parent wants. I want a pro-vagina world for both of my children.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the campaign is that untangling gender, race, class and so many other of the big "-isms" is far more difficult than anyone thought. The shouters on both sides exhort us to vote blind to them all, to cast our ballots on issues alone. OK. I took one of those candidate surveys on the Internet and was given my perfect match: Dennis Kucinich.

Never mind.

Shannon Drury is a self-described radical housewife. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.

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How about focusing on the issues, and not race or gender. As long as the next president is black or female, you are ok with the folliwing: Moving in the direction of bigger government/more inept government programs, socialized medicine (why should I pay for someone else's health care? Wouldn't it be better to teach them how to be self sufficient instead of being dependant on the government?), higher taxes (jacking up the capital gains tax which would affect 100 million americans who own stock, hurting the very people they claim to be helping), a pro illegal immigration policy (which advocates breaking our laws... to get those votes of course), global warming nonsense (don't even get me started with this garbage), and my favorite, alternative energy. Our oil costs are sky high because of democratic blocks on our own ability to be self sufficient (i.e. nuclear power). Let's let China drill off our coast, but we can't. Let's not drill in Anwar so we can preserve a spotted owl or something. Anwar is a wasteland the size of South Carolina, and the area that would be drilled is the size of JFK International Airport... and it would vastly help us [1 million barrels a day, which is what we import from Saudi Arabia]. But no, instead we are wasting our time burning up out own food source making ethanol, which takes as much energy to produce as it puts out. Our economy cannot grow through conservation, and we are decades away from anything remotely equal to oil. Wake up and defer to common sense please. It's so pathetic to see people make decisions about this country's future based on the race or gender of who's in the white house.

I take it that in fairness you also want an America in which women are 50% of workplace deaths, 50% of battlefield deaths, 50% of executed felons, 50% of sewer workers, 50% of coal miners, 50% of Bering Sea fisherman, pay 50% of child support/alimony, get child custody in the event of divorce 50% of the time, receive on average no more welfare than men, have no more room allocated to them in homeless/battereds shelters than men, serve just as many years in prison for the same offense as men, and die on average no later than men do in general? Throw in that nursing, elementary education, tenured positions in Women's Studies departments, and salaried jobs at MS Magazine and N.O.W. all have to be no more than 50% women, and I might think you were consistent enough to be taken seriously.

A world in which women are...

50% of workplace deaths, = yes, but I'd also like to regulate industry so workplace deaths among men and women are less than they are now.

50% of battlefield deaths, = HELL YES! And also, where 80%+ of women in the military aren't raped by fellow servicemembers.

50% of execulted felons, = yes, but since half of 0 is, well, 0... I'm against the death penalty.

50% of sewer workers, = hell yeah, and while we're at it, trash collecters.

50% of coal miners, = well yes, at least until we've moved beyond fossil feuls, and yes, same goes for natural gas miners, oilmen, loggers, etc.

50% of Bearing sea fishermen, = DUH! yes, but I also want 50% of the people cleaning and cooking the fish to be men.

pay 50% of child support/alimony, = YES! But only assuming that women are making 50% of the money being made in the US (currently, women make 77 cents to the male dollar, which IS why men pay child support),and assuming that the primary wage earner in 50% of familes is a woman.

and get custody in the event of divorce 50% of the time, = YES, seems likely if we can get rid of patriarchy and the tendency (learned, not innate and not universal) of men to abuse and ignore children; and stop pressuring women into getting married; and allow women the bodily autonomy to make a choice about when they will bring a child into this world. Basically, the kid should go where the kid is safest and best cared for, the sex, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation of either parent should not be a consideration.

recieve on average no more welfare then men, = YES, but I'd also like to increase welfare in general; and my yes here is contingent on your previous two points, because people supporting children should get more welfare than people without them, and people who are paid less (mostly minority women at the moment) should get more welfare than people who are paid more.

serve just as many years in prison for the same offense as men, = YES, but I'd also like to do away with mandatory minimum sentencing of any sort, decriminalize posseession of drugs, legalize marijuana completely (and tax the hell out of it), actually convict rapists, and return our prison population to it's pre-70s size of 300,000 (its current size is over 2 million).

and die on average no later than men, = this would be nice, but is, in fact, your only point that is completely out of our hands. Certainly, I'd like men and women to recieve the same health care (and at the moment, men recieve on average more and better care), and certainly I'd like for no one, man or woman, to be murdered ever, (at the moment, women, and especially women of color, are a lot more likely to be murdered than men), and I'd like to limit accidents; and never preference gender, race or anything else in any of these cases; but when we die is ultimately not in our hands, so this is the one point I can't give you.

I will be as happy to see male elementary school teachers and nurses as I will to see female presidentS, doctorS, and C.E.O.S. On the day that these things are a matter of course, when no one raises an eyebrow at a stay-at-home dad or husband, or a woman cole miner, on that day, there will be no further need of feminists or Ms. magazine, except to historians.

I won't live to see that day, but I fight every day so that maybe, someday my many-times-great granddaughters and grandsons will.

I think your problem (and that of many other entitled men) is that you get offended and defensive when you see certain parts of feminism, and so you both (a) think you know what the rest is, without listening (and you're wrong, as I've just shown), and (b) spend so long sweating the details that you miss the point completely. Try engaging with feminists and hearing their own words and thoughts, rather than your fear and entitlement as they are refected in the words of women around you. Then we might be getting somewhere.

This is why radicals like Hillary and Barack Hussein must never obtain the presidency

Well, if we could elect just Hillary's vagina and not the rest of her, that would be fine with me.

50.9% of the US population is Female.Don't blame Men for the distribution of Congress Women are the Majority. ;-)

Ms Drury, In your household, who spends more time away from the family earning money? Because you are a self-described radical housewife, I'm betting it's your husband who sacrifices his time. And between you and your husband, who spends more of that money on personal care products the other won't use? I'm betting it's you. So, as has been the case for at least as long as we've been looking into such things, men earn money they don't spend while women spend money we don't earn. I'd say we come out the better in this deal. It's men, not women, who have endured the military draft, and I find it difficult to craft an argument that will convince a young man dying on a battlefield that it is he who is powerful--it is he who is running things. Yes, we were chattels, we were property. But men were expected to give their lives in defense of their property. Their lives were worth less than the property for which they were expected to die defending. Again, we come out ahead. The ceaseless plaint that women are powerless victims compared to men is what keeps us down. The feminist movement is vested in perpetuating this misperception, because if the real balance of power were acknowledged, the feminist movement would be over, and you would just be a housewife. Lisa Lundgren

If you don't support Obama, you must be a racist. It's the system you democrats have created. Now the Hillary libs are complaining about being labeled a racist. "The chickens have come home to roost", The great Rev Wright. ps:If you don't call him great, your a racist.

What if the first woman president is a conservative?

Shannon, no blogger at Feministing.com has ever called voting for Hillary "pro-vagina selfishness." One of our commenters did so here: http://feministing.com/archives/008363.html. Please issue a correction immediately - Feministing does not endorse any candidate. Thank you.

Key here, as stated above, is not that her candidates will destroy this country economically or that those policies will invert our capitalist system but she will vote for Hillary or Obama because they are not white men. Racist or sexist. Which one are you? In addition, I love what Lisa said above.

all liberals care about is identity politics. male, female black, white. they judge people based solely on skin color and genitalia. it sickens me to see what they have done to this country. the sad irony is when they get their way and the radical muslims take overy, she will be the one wearing the burka

This is the comment that I found so distasteful: "Your comment has been queued for moderation by site administrators and will be published after approval." Interesting when the press starts to delete comments that they do not believe in..... The key giveaway? "moderation"

The sexism is the author's statement "how sick I am of men in power." Note she didn't focus on particular men (Bush, Cheney) -- it's MEN she's sick of "in power." And she makes the absurd statement that she wishes Obama's wife had run. Wow! How pathetic. Let's just get any woman in there -- and the only two mentions are wives of successful liberal politicians. The sad part about diatribes like this is that the author doesn't bother to address why there are so few women on the national poltiical scene -- women don't run nearly as much as men. Why not talk about making elected positions part-time, like most were intended to be, to encourage women to run? But please, let's not pluck women out of thin air and say, "Gee I wish she'd run because she's a woman." And, yeah, I'd like to see more men have the choice to not be "the breadwiinner" (women would need to go along with that). And of course that includes shared parenting, doesn't it?

If this country is stupid enough to elect someone as corrupt as Hillary or a puppet like Obama, then I'll plan to move my business elsewhere. I'm sick and tired of the lazy bloodsuckers in this country sucking off the fruits of my labor. As with pre-WW2 Europe, idiots like Ms Drury are polluting the business environment to the point that it isn't worth staying ...and in case you haven't been there, many parts of the world have modernized and are very open to supporting new businesses. So after I've left and you get stuck with the bill for your idiocy, maybe you'll finally realize that you've Fu@ked yourselves and destroyed the great opportunity (the US) in the process.

You can have the best of both worlds and vote for Cynthia McKinney. Yeah, what if everyone who was focused peace and sustainability did just that...

it really sucks that most of your comments are angry bloggers who spend too much time on the internet. Mostly, a good example of the reactionary politics that don't do anything good (whether or not good points are made). I very much understand what you mean, but I think you have to keep in mind that many people of color are thinking the same thing about their childern in terms of Obama. All in all I think the most important thing any of us can do for the future is empower childern in posivite ways. otherwise, we really are screwed. thanks for writing this!!

I agree with you down to my bones. I just now read this post and admire (idolize?) your candor and courage. I wept with genuine sadness and, I have to admit, some bitterness, when Clinton failed to get the nomination. I then pulled myself together and supported Obama, continually readjusting my blinders as the vitriolic anti-Clinton rhetoric continued well after Obama secured the nomination. Having wanted Clinton to be the nominee and the president does not equate to being a sexist or a racist. To assert this is simplistic and unworthy of further comment. I never noticed Kucinich supporters, for example, being accused of racists because they were backing him instead of Obama.

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identity politics

Submitted by Kevin (not verified) on Thu, 2008-05-01 23:34.

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Imagine a pro-vagina world

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identity politics

50% quotas by sex..

@ Mr. Smith

This is why radicals like

Imagine a pro-vagina world

50.9% of the US population

It already is a pro-vagina world

Of course you are!

What If

Please don't misquote feministing

Key here, as stated above,

radical housewife

This is the comment that I

Pro-Vagina World

Australia looks awfully good

You can have the best of

it really sucks that most

Shannon for President

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