Country: Ur Doin It Rong
May. 15th, 2010 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tsukinofaeriiSarah Palin just keeps pissing me off.
First off, let me just say that I'm liberal and pro-choice, and I will never be against encouraging women to vote. Never. Their votes may go against mine in every way, and I may disagree with them so virulently that I can't even stand to share a room with them. I'm okay with that. They rally their votes, we'll rally ours. That's the game. So, in a way, Sarah Palin (loathe though I am to admit it) is something good. She gets attention and supports female politicians. She attracts women who maybe never stepped into a voting booth before. And kudos to her for it. I disagree with the woman on everything right down to her choice in shoes some days, but at least she's there and visible in a way most aren't.
Her latest appearance in the news (linked above) is about encouraging women to form conservative, anti-abortion feminist groups, and she does, as usual, by mischaracterizing the people who disagree with her. I'm used to that. But it's her "folksy" feminism that's tipped me over from "pissed" to "posting a rant".
Dear Sarah, stop pretending to be a country girl. I'm a country girl, and I want to tell you that you're not. You happen to own a home in the middle of nowhere. Bully for you. You also make a damned good living and can afford to jet around the nation bragging about how humble you are, which rather belies your "simple" roots. Being "country" isn't in the accessories or the street address, it's in the way of living and breathing. It's in the making do, and the saving up (even when you don't technically need to). It's in sucking up and doing for yourself, even while you're in pitching in when your neighbors or friends are in a pinch. It's putting your back into it, that damned idiot stubbornness that may result in bruises but it gets the job done.
Being country is working yourself sick to do what you have to do, and knowing that someone will have your back if you fall, because you've got theirs. It's community, it's family, it's support.
There's people who have never laid eyes on a cow who are country folk. You're not one of them. You back down. You give up. You pass the check. You may hunt, but you do it for sport, not because rabbit stew is damned good eating, and it keeps you through those times when the paychecks are thin. You wear the mass produced so-fashionable accouterments of country living, without realizing the irony of imported home-made goods. Terms like "hockey moms" and "mama grizzlies" trip off your tongue, but you've never had to make the choice between after school programs and your job (or watched your parents make it), you've never had to pick between your future or someone else's now, and I'll bet you've never had to break a little bit of your own heart to patch together someone else's.
And that's what you bring to feminism. That privileged, pasted on culture that borrows the pain of people who have been struggling for years and tells them what they're thinking. You paint liberal feminists as people who are "elitist". (As if being educated and well-rounded is a bad thing!) To you, they're people who have never had to work for it, never struggled, never been real in the way you paint yourself to be. And you say that these people, up there on their cloud, are telling pregnant women that they're not strong enough. That they can't handle motherhood and their own lives.
And instead of making these women strong enough, you'd rather pass laws outlawing the right to be weak. And you don't see the hypocrisy in this.
I wish women, all women, could carry through with pregnancy when it happens. I wish pregnancy were never unintended, or forced, or dangerous. I wish every fetus was perfect, and every baby was healthy at birth and through to adulthood. I wish every woman were privileged enough to have their career, their dreams, and a child. But that's not the real world. In the real world, pregnancy often happens at horrible times, in horrible situations. It happens to women who are frail, or women who were raped. It happens to women who are eating ramen every night because it's food or the rent. It happens to women who are barely holding themselves together emotionally, and to women who are so stark-raving terrified of their own bodies that just the thought of pregnancy makes them panic.
Anti-abortion laws, by themselves, don't make those women, those terrified, alone, poverty-stricken and abused women strong. Instead, they make them weaker. Those laws tell women that they're not allowed less than perfect models of strength. They're not allowed to put themselves first. They're not allowed to fail at this, or be frightened, or abused. And because they made those mistakes, because they weren't faultless and their circumstances weren't perfect, because the world stacked the deck against them, now they have to pay for losing a game they had no choice but to play.
You, Sarah, are co-opting my culture and my movement to do this. If you want to use the voice and position you've carved out for yourself to ask the question "when does life begin", which is at the heart of the abortion discussion, that's your right. I applaud you for asking it, even while I know we'll disagree on the answer. But don't you dare put my name on the club you want to use to punish women who aren't up to your standards.
Feminism to me isn't about all women are strong. It's about those of us who are helping those of us who aren't—hell, it's about those of us who aren't helping others who aren't, because we're all weak in our own ways, but together we can do anything. It's reaching out and holding each other up when one of us is shoved to her knees. Feminists are true country folk. And if you don't get that, then I pity you.
Note: As always, dissenting opinions welcome, but please keep it civil. I don't respond quickly (dial-up!), but I'll do my best.
First off, let me just say that I'm liberal and pro-choice, and I will never be against encouraging women to vote. Never. Their votes may go against mine in every way, and I may disagree with them so virulently that I can't even stand to share a room with them. I'm okay with that. They rally their votes, we'll rally ours. That's the game. So, in a way, Sarah Palin (loathe though I am to admit it) is something good. She gets attention and supports female politicians. She attracts women who maybe never stepped into a voting booth before. And kudos to her for it. I disagree with the woman on everything right down to her choice in shoes some days, but at least she's there and visible in a way most aren't.
Her latest appearance in the news (linked above) is about encouraging women to form conservative, anti-abortion feminist groups, and she does, as usual, by mischaracterizing the people who disagree with her. I'm used to that. But it's her "folksy" feminism that's tipped me over from "pissed" to "posting a rant".
Dear Sarah, stop pretending to be a country girl. I'm a country girl, and I want to tell you that you're not. You happen to own a home in the middle of nowhere. Bully for you. You also make a damned good living and can afford to jet around the nation bragging about how humble you are, which rather belies your "simple" roots. Being "country" isn't in the accessories or the street address, it's in the way of living and breathing. It's in the making do, and the saving up (even when you don't technically need to). It's in sucking up and doing for yourself, even while you're in pitching in when your neighbors or friends are in a pinch. It's putting your back into it, that damned idiot stubbornness that may result in bruises but it gets the job done.
Being country is working yourself sick to do what you have to do, and knowing that someone will have your back if you fall, because you've got theirs. It's community, it's family, it's support.
There's people who have never laid eyes on a cow who are country folk. You're not one of them. You back down. You give up. You pass the check. You may hunt, but you do it for sport, not because rabbit stew is damned good eating, and it keeps you through those times when the paychecks are thin. You wear the mass produced so-fashionable accouterments of country living, without realizing the irony of imported home-made goods. Terms like "hockey moms" and "mama grizzlies" trip off your tongue, but you've never had to make the choice between after school programs and your job (or watched your parents make it), you've never had to pick between your future or someone else's now, and I'll bet you've never had to break a little bit of your own heart to patch together someone else's.
And that's what you bring to feminism. That privileged, pasted on culture that borrows the pain of people who have been struggling for years and tells them what they're thinking. You paint liberal feminists as people who are "elitist". (As if being educated and well-rounded is a bad thing!) To you, they're people who have never had to work for it, never struggled, never been real in the way you paint yourself to be. And you say that these people, up there on their cloud, are telling pregnant women that they're not strong enough. That they can't handle motherhood and their own lives.
And instead of making these women strong enough, you'd rather pass laws outlawing the right to be weak. And you don't see the hypocrisy in this.
I wish women, all women, could carry through with pregnancy when it happens. I wish pregnancy were never unintended, or forced, or dangerous. I wish every fetus was perfect, and every baby was healthy at birth and through to adulthood. I wish every woman were privileged enough to have their career, their dreams, and a child. But that's not the real world. In the real world, pregnancy often happens at horrible times, in horrible situations. It happens to women who are frail, or women who were raped. It happens to women who are eating ramen every night because it's food or the rent. It happens to women who are barely holding themselves together emotionally, and to women who are so stark-raving terrified of their own bodies that just the thought of pregnancy makes them panic.
Anti-abortion laws, by themselves, don't make those women, those terrified, alone, poverty-stricken and abused women strong. Instead, they make them weaker. Those laws tell women that they're not allowed less than perfect models of strength. They're not allowed to put themselves first. They're not allowed to fail at this, or be frightened, or abused. And because they made those mistakes, because they weren't faultless and their circumstances weren't perfect, because the world stacked the deck against them, now they have to pay for losing a game they had no choice but to play.
You, Sarah, are co-opting my culture and my movement to do this. If you want to use the voice and position you've carved out for yourself to ask the question "when does life begin", which is at the heart of the abortion discussion, that's your right. I applaud you for asking it, even while I know we'll disagree on the answer. But don't you dare put my name on the club you want to use to punish women who aren't up to your standards.
Feminism to me isn't about all women are strong. It's about those of us who are helping those of us who aren't—hell, it's about those of us who aren't helping others who aren't, because we're all weak in our own ways, but together we can do anything. It's reaching out and holding each other up when one of us is shoved to her knees. Feminists are true country folk. And if you don't get that, then I pity you.
Note: As always, dissenting opinions welcome, but please keep it civil. I don't respond quickly (dial-up!), but I'll do my best.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 02:09 pm (UTC)Anti-abortion laws, by themselves, don't make those women, those terrified, alone, poverty-stricken and abused women strong. Instead, they make them weaker.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:24 am (UTC)Yeah. I just... Okay, there's lots of ways to frame the abortion argument that are perfectly valid. That's not one of them. (rubs forehead) Ah, Palin. I suppose someone has to create a demand for aspirin.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 10:45 pm (UTC)especially when it comes to abortions, i also wish that all babies could be that lucky but the real world isn't like that, it's always been a sensitive concept in my home, my mother was only 17 when she got pregnant with my brother and i know that she considered it, and i love my brother but i remember being 17 and i don't think i would have made the same choice.
On top of that both my mother and my sister have had miscarriages within the legal time for abortions and i honestly can't imagine thinking of those children as a fetus, i was young during my mother's and most of what i know about them is what i've been told, but with my sister i remember dicussing names and talking to her belly, even though she wasn't showing yet the child seemed real.
and that was a bit long sorry, what i am trying to say is that all those anti abortion people that i see i just don't think they can possibly understand what they're talking about, making the hard choices when money doesn't comes easy is not something you can imagine.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:44 am (UTC)Yeah. My mom had one before she had my brother and I. It wasn't strictly medically necessary, but it would have been stillborn, and she might not have been able to have another. 30 years later, my dad (who is pro-life in that unthinking way a lot of people are) still talks about what a "mistake" it was. >_> Mom seems at peace with it, though, but I think my dad would have a completely different opinion if it had been his body. :\
Sometimes, the hard choices come before there even is a pregnancy, when you find a career you love and realize that, for whatever reason, you won't have time to be a mother and a career woman. And sometimes it's just deciding that you don't want to, because that's not the life you want, the adoption centers in the USA are over-flowing, and pregnancy is not precisely risk-free. But it's very, very easy for those people who can afford daycare and university tuition to sit up on their high horses and tell the rest of us what's in our own best interests.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:45 pm (UTC)Edited Because I can fix a typo three times, and I still manage to post it typo'd. D'oh!
E/B2: (headdesk)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-18 10:30 pm (UTC)What terrifies me about politicians like Palin is that dehumanization (which is what I read behind her statements about how she's "real," since the conclusion from that is that others are not) is a standard tool in their arsenals. I think posts like this one and simply going out and being a positive example of what you want to promote are some of the only ways to resist that dehumanization--I have found very few people are able to look me in the eye and tell me that I'm not a person.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-19 03:00 pm (UTC)I have found very few people are able to look me in the eye and tell me that I'm not a person.
The trick, I've found, is in getting them to admit to what they're doing at all. :\ We are very good at marginalizing and excluding people who disagree with us without acknowledging that's what we're doing. (I think I pretty much just did it, actually, with the whole Sarah Palin =/= Country =/= Feminist thing. I want her out of my pond, dagnabit!)