What are you still doing here??

You need to be HERE: http://theradicalhousewife.com/

And now for even stranger things...

I've been blogging as The Radical Housewife for a long time--so long that my first platform was on MySpace (remember MySpace? The hottest spot on teh interwebz during the Dubya years? Me neither). Things are a bit more complex nowadays, both online and in real life. Hell, my firstborn is in middle school, checking his chin and pits daily for signs of impending pubescence. It's time for a radical upgrade.

Watch this space, fans! The New & Improved Radical Housewife Blog is coming your way!

Strange things are afoot in Minneapolis

Why happening, Prince? Have we offended you? Consider:

Neal Krasnoff has closed up most of his blog, leaving behind only four posts: an "apology" for offending anyone with his SlutWalk rantings, his resignation from local Democratic Party leadership, and two posts from 2008 about.....ME! Read and chuckle along.

http://loyalopposition.wordpress.com/

The smartest reporter in Minneapolis, Andy Birkey, was named as a co-defendant today in the defamation suit being brought by Bradlee "gays should be jailed and/or executed" Dean against Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. Birkey is the writer who first exposed the links between Dean and local pols, including Tom Emmer and Michele Bachmann. MSNBC calls the suit "baseless." Duh. I hope the whole mess makes Birkey extremely famous. He deserves it.

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/07/bradlee_dean_suing_andy_birkey_minnesota_independent_rachel_maddow_msnbc.php

Did you ever wonder what kind of feminist you are? Well, a couple of Minneapolis women have figured it out for us (thank goodness!). I guess this was first written last May, but since I get all my information from Amanda Marcotte's Twitter feed, I didn't hear about it until yesterday. Now, I enjoy witty stereotyping as much as the next Angry Feminist, but these bitches put me in the Stay at Home Feminist category with Our Lady of GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow. If I see these two munching tots at Grumpy's, I will douse their filmy Forever 21 dresses with non-organic ketchup, may Betty Friedan forgive me.

http://www.philolzophy.com/2011/05/the-different-types-of-feminists/

FUN FACT! My kids have only two days left of summer camp. Things in Minneapolis are only going to get stranger!

Amy

She had me at "what kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig."*

I have always been drawn to women who balance precariously on the thin line between brilliant and crazy--women like Courtney, Judy, Sylvia. Women who embarrass themselves regularly. Women who say things that no one wants to hear. Women who are (to borrow a phrase from Eve Ensler) emotional creatures, yet somehow remain firmly in control of considerable intellectual and artistic power.

But a line that thin can be very hard to straddle. Like everyone who was knocked out by Back to Black, I hoped Amy could wobble her way through, making more brilliant songs for us like "Love is a Losing Game." NPR played a snippet of that song this afternoon and I started to cry.

RIP.

*"Me & Mr Jones," 2006. Watch Amy sing it live here.

What a male ally looks like

While I continue to sift through the fallout from my July 18 post, in which I asked male-identified folk to speak out to end rape culture, I invite my readers to enjoy a video featuring a fella I've admired for a very long time. In this particular clip, MY Senator (I love saying that) reminds Focus on the Family of the importance of getting your facts...erm, straight.

This is relevant to our rape culture discussion because when FoF saw the words "nuclear family" in a research study, they assumed it meant only opposite-gendered parents and used it to support their bogus claims. They were wrong. Similarly, when certain members of our population learned that a woman was seen drinking a cocktail with the man she would later accuse of rape (as Jamie Leigh Jones, who has worked with Sen. Franken, did), they assumed she deserved what happened to her. They were wrong, too.

To our male allies: a challenge

Two years ago, I participated in a MPRIG-sponsored panel on sexual violence during the University of Minnesota's Welcome Week. To their great credit, a large number of earnest 18-year-olds showed up to discuss an issue far less appealing than learning the forehand frisbee throw. During both the morning and the afternoon sessions, I heard a question that I remember from my own college days, asked the bravest straight male in the room: "This is really upsetting. Are women actually assuming I'm a perpetrator just because I have a penis?"

I'm sorry if it feels that way, I said. But don't blame women. Blame guys like Neal Krasnoff, author of the blog The Loyal Opposition.

Now I'm not saying that Neal is a perp any more than those college guys were, but I do know that he has a mean streak a mile wide, and he vents said meanness on his blog. Normally, I'm of the mind to let creeps like him be. Why send him the web traffic? But today, the circumstances are different than when he called me a "matriarchic supremacist" back in 2008. I can handle personal trashing, but when I read his new post about SlutWalk Minneapolis (called "If she dresses like a slut, and acts like a slut, is she really a feminist?"), I felt a response was necessary.

Last week I wrote a post about frustration with rape culture that was borderline misandrous, and I was called out as such by a secret fan of mine who linked to it on a Modern Radio discussion forum. Since Jawknee also mentioned that I am "great" and "super smart," I know that he must have seen my point: that rape culture curdles the souls of even sensible women from time to time. And Krasnoff's piece on SlutWalk Minneapolis is as soul-curdling a bit of rape apologia as I have read in a long time. Set your TRIGGER WARNING alarm, then read him here:

“Slutwalk” ideology is not about rape, as the protestors claim. It is about an attempt to abrogate the moral agency of women. It posits that women can behave as they wish with no consequences for their acts. ...dressing up in a club miniskirt, dancing and grinding with alcohol-fueled, hypersexualized 20-something men at a downtown club, then going back to their apartment with them to presumably discuss the Brothers Karamazov. Or travelling without niqab in Taliban controlled territory. Or holding raw meat out in front of a starving dog.

[caption below a photo of a woman, her bra visible, holding a "no means no sign"] Does NO still mean NO if this gorgeous Asian slutwalker does everything to say "f--- me"?

I hear quite a bit from straight men about how they aren't sure that feminism is for them, while at the same time bemoaning the guilty until proved innocent phenom mentioned above. Well, guess what? It's anti-feminist jerks like Krasnoff who are making your lives difficult, fellas. What on earth could make anyone feel comfortable comparing a woman to a slab of "raw meat"? Sexism. It's not confined to small-time weirdos on the internet, either. It's everywhere.

Help us end it, guys. We can't do it without your help. We need you to speak out against this warped view of the world. You are not dogs, and we are not meat. We are all human beings who deserve respect, safety, and freedom.

What's the saddest thing about a piece of writing like this? Neal Krasnoff knows rape survivors. He's friends with them, he works with them, he even has some in his own family. He doesn't realize this, though, because no survivor would ever share her truth with a guy him. Yet he takes to his blog and condemns these very women for failing to apply "reasonable judgment and common sense." I wonder how that goes over with the women in his life who were molested by family members and/or raped by their boyfriends, let alone the ones who were victimized after a night on the town. They have my compassion and pity. Neal? Not so much.

To those who would accuse me of misandry

...I give you one of my favorite scenes from "Some Like it Hot."

Trigger warning.

The bumper sticker announces that "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I'd like to append that thought. For women, if we're not occasionally homicidal, we're not fucking human.

I am having a Valerie Solanas moment. Known to most as the paranoid schizophrenic who attempted to kill Andy Warhol, thus earning a biopic portrayal by Lili Taylor (in action above), Solanas is often trotted out as an example of misandry in the feminist movement by those who seek to undermine our credibility. Solanas wrote in 1968's The SCUM Manifesto that "civic-minded, responsible" women had an obligation to "destroy the male sex." Countless women who would like equal pay and safety everywhere they walk STILL refuse to identify as feminists, because if they did so, they'd be seen as "anti-male."

I love men. I married a man, probably the finest person of any gender I've ever known. My firstborn is a beautiful boy for whom I would do anything, including give up my life if necessary. That goes for my sweet nephew as well.

But god almighty, there are times when I hate MEN so deeply I shake. I hate them. To be a thinking woman in rape culture is to know suffering so intense it is almost unendurable. It's not post-traumatic stress, it's PRE-traumatic, formed the moment that a male doctor pulled me out of my unconscious mother's body (as was typical in 1971), took a look between my legs and declared "IT'S A GIRL!"

I have never experienced sexual violence, but this is can be attributed more to dumb luck than anything else--not the unfashionable clothes I wore, the confrontational stance I took in the public, the self-defense class I aced, the well-lit streets I have walked. I am lucky, not "better."

Women with their hearts open live in both fear and pain. Women I know have been raped in their homes, in their dorm rooms, in their workplaces. They have been raped by their fathers, their brothers, their partners, their bosses. They were raped as girls, and they were raped as women. The circumstances around the crimes were different, but the attackers had WHAT in common?

If you said they were MEN, you're right.

If you're going to argue with me about women abusers, like Nancy Garrido, and how terrible it is to wish anyone dead, even a monster like her husband Philip, you need to go elsewhere. Go to People.com and examine photos of the Duchess of Cambridge's hats. Order something from Etsy. Flame Mark Dayton on the Strib.com, I don't care.

Allow me to experience, then move forward from, this rage.

FFI:

SlutWalk Minneapolis: http://slutwalkminneapolis.tumblr.com/

Rape & Sexual Abuse Center (Uptown Minneapolis): http://www.neighborhoodinvolve.org/

Aurora Center (U of M, Twin Cities Campus): http://www1.umn.edu/aurora/

RAINN-The Rape, Incest & Abuse National Network: http://www.rainn.org/

Abortion rights and the failure of "choice"

What follows is an excerpt from the original draft of The Radical Housewife. Before I slice it away, I thought I'd share it, in hopes you'll post me your thoughts on the matter. Note the second-to-last paragraph, in which I remark upon the twisted logic of what "pro-life" means in the Palinverse. It was disturbing when I wrote it, but it's even worse now that Bristol claims her virginity was "stolen" while she was drunk (for a discussion on why Bristol may have resisted calling her experience rape, read this piece at the Daily Beast). As if we needed another reminder of the power of words....

The late, great Shirley Chisholm wrote the following in her autobiography Unbought & Unbossed, addressing men on her staff who tried to convince her to avoid speaking out in support of abortion rights:

“Women are dying every day, did you know that? They're being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don't we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?”

Rep. Chisholm wrote these words in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, when dying from a botched abortion was a very real threat to women across the country, particularly poor women of color. Two generations later, not a lot has changed. Accessing an abortion is easy for well-heeled urban women, the vast majority of whom (as it was in 1970) are white.

In Shirley Chisholm’s day, the term “pro-choice” was used to remind people of the personal matter of the procedure. The “choice” to have the abortion should be the woman’s, centering the debate on the right to individual autonomy, a concept that Republicans claim to embrace. Senator John Kerry declared in a 2004 Presidential debate that having an abortion “is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God, and her doctor.” Oh, if it were only that easy, John!

God and doctors are often in very short supply when they are needed the most. If you get accidentally knocked up in Wyoming or Mississippi, you better pray as hard as you can, because your states have no provider at all. In fact, a 2008 report funded by the Guttmacher Institute announced that 87 percent of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider. That’s a big enough number to put in all caps: EIGHTY-SEVEN PERCENT! That makes getting an abortion seem less like a “choice” and more like a forced road trip.

Or a financial ordeal. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977 and reauthorized every year since, bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Rep. Chisholm worried that poor women would have to go to quacks; she didn’t realize that when they won the right access abortions from a trained doctor, they’d have to surrender their rent checks. The Hyde Amendment, predictably, reinforces the idea that wealthy women have the “choice,” but poor women don’t. And lest we forget, the poorest women are the ones who lack access to contraceptive information and services anyway, dammit!

When I demonstrated with over one million other people on the U.S. Capitol Mall in 2004, the event was called the March for Women’s Lives, which made some mainstream feminists gripe. Wasn’t it usually called the March for Choice? Not so fast, declared a coalition of poverty activists and health care groups for women of color. The word “choice” obscures the “real problems” that Rep. Chisholm talked about: racism, poverty, and other forms of pervasive inequality.

I no longer identify as pro-choice. How can I, when Sarah Palin congratulates herself for the “choice” to carry her Down’s Syndrome child to term? Bringing a special needs baby into a tightly-knit, financially stable family that has access to health care and other forms of support is no big whoop, except for the baby in question—Trig Palin is one hell of a lucky kid. So is Tripp Johnston, the child carried to term by Trig’s seventeen-year-old sister. All four of them appeared on a celebrity tabloid in the early days of 2010, declaring “we’re so glad we chose life!” That’s that sneaky, slippery power of language again! Can you imagine a headline that read “we’re so glad we didn’t have abortions!” I can’t either.

Remember chapter one? I don’t deserve a medal for surviving life with the colicky, special needs baby I had in the year 2000. Accidents of fortune gave me everything I needed, and my child reaped the benefits. I don’t care if Sarah and Bristol Palin keep on breeding; that’s their beeswax, not mine. But under Gov. Palin’s leadership, Alaska’s rates of domestic violence and sexual assault were twice the national average. When Palin ran for office in 2006, she announced (in so many words) that if her then 14-year-old were raped, she wouldn’t allow the girl to have an abortion—a very likely scenario, considering Palin’s vocal support for parental notification laws. In yet another nimble linguistic twist, Palin averred that the issue was one of “parents’ rights.” Welcome to Palinverse, where a pre-born fetus had greater bodily autonomy than a post-born teen.

Feminists of any/every Wave, listen up: “choice” is over. It’s done. NO MORE.

What the shutdown means for our children.

Happily, we spent our 4th of July weekend in the great state of Wisconsin, where booze is sold on Sundays and the lottery tickets flow freely! Whew!

In all seriousness, please read this article from Minnesota Public Radio News about how shutting down child care subsidies is already hurting impoverished youngsters, the workers who care for them, and the parents who count on these state subsidies to keep the jobs that are supposed to help them out of poverty. And a job is a path to economic stability far more reliable than the lottery--or at least it used to be. Now? All bets are off.

#mnshutdown

My state's government shut down today. 20,000 employees were pink-slipped, important social services have been cut off, and perhaps most importantly for a family with two small children who are traveling to Grandma & Grandpa's house for fireworks this weekend, all rest stops are closed. Why? An impasse between the Republican-controlled legislature and our Democratic governor over our state budget. Apparently it's news to the GOP that corporations and churches don't fix potholes. As Robin Marty just tweeted: "this is what happens when you elect a bunch of people to run the government who don't like government."

All credit to the fabulous Gov. Dayton, who is holding the line against "increasing taxes on the top 2% will make companies relocate to Sioux Falls" baloney (confidential to Kurt Zellers: I've seen Sioux Falls. Neither Target, 3M nor Medtronic is leaving for Sioux Falls). The constant refrain from conservatives is that our state needs to live within its means, yet they don't have a problem with funding the construction of luxury boxes in a new Vikings stadium. Seriously?

Image via Crooks and Liars

And of course, you know what the MN GOP prioritized this session, instead of job creation, health care, taxes and whatnot: MARRIAGE! Yes, marriage! Ensuring that state marriage law is hetero-only is apparently more important than, y'know, funding domestic violence shelters! I'll leave it to someone else to research the cruel, cruel irony of all of those legally married Minnesota heteros treating their children and one another like garbage. I'm too sickened to think about, it, let alone Google the statistics that would leave me in a sweaty, crying heap on the floor.

Summer vacation just got longer, hotter, and scarier.

Guest post at MOMocrats!

It is my great pleasure to announce that I have a guest post today on MOMocrats, a site dedicated to "raising the next generation blue." My fussier readers needn't point out my many beefs with the Democratic Party--we can all agree that liberal moms and kids are a good thing, yes? And let's be honest, MOM-berals just doesn't sound as good.

As is appropriate for a site whose goal is an army of progressive children, my piece is about the day my kids offended and appalled Michele Bachmann, then just a lowly state Senator. It's all true, I assure you. Also true is the story of the future Presidential candidate squatting in the bushes at an LGBT rights rally back in April 2005:

The full story on that 2005 rally, including more pictures, can be found in the Internet Way Back Machine.

Now it's up to you, MOM-gressives. Deck out your cuties in their best Planned Parenthood t-shirts and get out there. It's our duty to make candidate Bachmann so overwhelmed with queasiness that she vomits all over Glenn Beck at a campaign stop. Wouldn't that be delightful??

Are you happy?

I discovered the following print, designed by Alex Koplin and David Meiklejohn, in some of my random Tumblr travels today.

As someone with a temperament that can be described, charitably, as "sensitive" (and uncharitably, "pissy") I have done my time in therapy, and this poster boils down just about everything I've ever learned there. The fact that I still go testifies to how difficult the process of changing something really is.

Today, the day after Twin Cities Pride, it's also a useful guide for how to approach the miserable process of political change. The question might be reframed as "are you happy with current state of affairs?" A generation ago, it would have been quite bizarre to see major corporations throwing out Pride-branded swag to the crowds along Hennepin Avenue. Today, my kids have all the rainbow Best Buy and Macy's crap they'll ever need.

(I have no idea why my son looks like that. I wish I could say he's emulating the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who support social justice revolutions of the kind represented at Pride, but in truth, I think he's just pretending to hold up a stagecoach.)

Anyway.

Many years ago, someone (drag queens?) somewhere (the Stonewall Inn?), felt moved to change something (harassment of homosexuals?), and made a change. Today we are all reaping the benefits of their hard work. Why, there's even talk on Slate that the fight for marriage equality might spark in renewed interest in the Equal Rights Amendment!

Change takes courage, perseverance, and energy. It's hard. It stinks. I get a headache just thinking of all that change requires. But the flow chart asks: "do you want to be happy (with the current state of affairs)?" and honesty compels me to reply "YES."

After all, happiness is worth it!

I'm number two! ...or maybe three...

I’m number two!

I mean that figuratively, for the weeks of the Circle of Moms Top 25 Political Mom Blogs contest coincided with what is always the crappiest (ha) time of year: the dead zone between the last days of school and the first days of afternoon camp.

My children, who thrive on predictability almost as much as I do, go batshit crazy for ten days every June. For an avowed pessimist, it’s odd that I’m never prepared for this. As school winds down early in the month, I find myself irrationally anticipating sleeping in late, heading out to Lake Harriet for a swim, and doing all the “fun” things that we’re not able to do because we have a school schedule keeping us on the straight and narrow. On May 31, I should be calling the pharmacy to bump up all of our meds, but I don’t until it’s past Father’s Day and the damage has been done, to our psyches and bedroom walls alike.

Indeed, the whole mess has taken a large toll on my (admittedly lame) career as a Political Mom, as I found myself utterly unable to juggle personal and professional responsibilities. Not only do I feel like a steaming pile of number two, I have the stamina of an actual two-year-old. Several months ago, I reflected on how my shy temperament complicates my life, in a piece called “The Trials of an Introverted Activist” that is finally seeing print in the current issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Sadly, the piece did little to exorcise the anxious, Piglet-like aspects of my personality; I remain a Very Small Animal, unconvinced of my ability to remain steadfast against the two Heffalumps screaming “I HATE YOU!” to me and to each other all day long. I just hope they care enough to publish The Radical Housewife after I’m dead, for that looks to be my smartest publishing strategy right now.

But things are looking up. I fell in love with Jersey Shore. Camp started rough (it’s never good to be phoned on the first day), but it did start. And did I mention that for a moment, I was a real number two?

Let’s back up a bit, to Monday, June 13, when the Circle of Moms contest officially closed, with the conservative Political Mommentator in first, followed by Veronica Arreola’s Viva La Feminista, Gina Crosley-Corcoran’s The Feminist Breeder, and yours truly, The Radical Housewife. It was suggested that it was really too bad that the Mommentator’s legions voted out of their concern, expressed by the Tator’s husband, that the “feminazi” Crosley-Corcoran might win instead.

Yeah, he went there.

Women on the right, I beg you: please do not tolerate the use of this slur. Ever. Do not allow the men in your lives to defend you by calling other women “bitches.” DON’T DO IT. Disagree with us about politics all you want. Call us loony, call us dumb, call us late for dinner if you want, but don’t put up with sexist stereotypes. They’re bad karma in addition to bad form. Circle of Moms agreed and disqualified Mommentator from the contest.

Then, inexplicably, Crosley-Corcoran posted on the TFB Facebook page that she was dropped from the contest herself, for somehow not being “political” enough. I don’t think they read her older posts, about raising her kids gender-neutral or her take on feminism and pornography, instead focusing on her recent posts about attachment parenting her VBAC newborn Jolene. What’s not political about that? In my confusion, I realized that with TFB out I was literally NUMBER TWO. Whoa.

But I don't want to be, either literally or figuratively. All cliches aside, I am honored just being in the company of some of my favorite online writers, including the two mentioned above, as well as Joanne Bamberger, Katie Allison Granju, Gloria Feldt, the collectives behind MOMocrats and Moms Rising, and many others whose writing I would not have discovered without this peculiar competition. Feminist mom writers are one hell of a group. I'm very happy to be in their company, and I'm grateful to all of my readers who buzzed over to the CoM site for the votes. Feminists are one hell of a group.

A group that includes Crosley-Corcoran, of course! In good news, it turned out that she wasn't dropped from the contest after all. In bad news, it's because she has a psycho stalker. * Isn't that just the way with moms? A little good, a lot of bad, all in the service of the toughest job you'll ever love and sometimes really hate.

*though I would like concrete proof that the stalker isn't a RWNJ. I'm conspiracy-minded like that.

"There is no power like my pretty power...."

Who said it? "There is no power like my pretty power...there is no power like my UGLY UGLY POWER!"*

The answer appears after this exclusive (!) excerpt from The Radical Housewife, in which I expound at length upon just one of the tensions existing between Second and Third Wave feminists--BEAUTY. And the lack thereof.

Like it or loathe it, a woman’s appearance means something. Whether you wear heels or Doc Martens, no “choice” can be made independently in a consumer culture. Free will does not exist. Such was the revelation I found in my college media studies curriculum after Professor John Schott handed us syllabi that would challenge our deeply held beliefs about soap operas, Madonna videos and Cover Girl commercials. Symbolic language? The object and the objectified? Semiotics? Jacques Derrida?!! What the fuck??

Let us cool our Prada boots while we return to the thoughts that began our chapter, a consideration of the second wave’s flaws. Betty Friedan opposed lesbian leadership in NOW for many reasons, one of which is how they looked. Many lesbians of the time didn’t sex up their drag the way Marlene Dietrich did—they took off their bras, let down their hair, and rubbed off their makeup. I see no problem with this, but remember: I was born in 1971. My cultural touchstones were the rough and tumble kiddos on Sesame Street, not prim maidens like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Once upon a time the sight of a woman in pants was so transgressive as to inspire revulsion: not because the pants were ugly by themselves, but because the act itself was so outrageous as to be unfathomable. Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing bloomers when she sensed they were distracting people from her suffragist message.

Her words didn’t matter as much as her clothing. Sound familiar?

Over time, the pants really did get ugly, and someone heard something from someone about the burning of a bra. The fact that no bras were harmed during the 1968 Miss America protest is a truth so persistently rejected that the story remains a long entry in the debunking website Snopes.com, right up there with alligators in the Manhattan sewers and death by Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola. The message was clear: FEMINISTS BURN BRAS. According to Newtonian physics, without the support of sturdy underwire, perky tits will eventually droop. According to the marketing department at Maidenform and the pages of Playboy, girls with droopy tits are gross. Therefore, feminists are gross. QED.

When I ask around for nominations for Best Feminist in America, no one names Friedan, who inspired the Second Wave, or Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who kick-started the first. Almost every single person will name Gloria Steinem. A fine feminist, to be sure: a powerful activist, writer, speaker, and thinker. But you remember her before all others because she is very, very pretty.

Much of the Third Wave has consisted of studiously breaking down this feminists-are-ugly stereotype, and not just because heterosexual feminist women were getting desperate for a lay. Women of the Second Wave who rejected consumer culture were brave in numbers. The times were a-changin’, and plenty of men were breaking down long-cherished beliefs themselves—resisting the draft and militarism, embracing androgynous hair and clothing, recognizing their part in perpetuating discrimination.

Reagan’s election in 1980 and the defeat of the ERA in 1982 brought all the marching to a grinding halt. The communal spirit of the Second Wave fragmented. Reaganites declared a new era of rugged individualism, of freedom. Not the freedom that comes from constitutionally-enshrined gender equality, though; this freedom was that of the lone cowboy riding into town with nothing but a knapsack and a gun, free to blast his way to prosperity in pursuit of the American Dream. There were no cowgirls in Reagan’s America. His pal Schlafly made sure they were all at home, boiling diapers over an open fire.

Second Wavers in Reaganland soon realized that opposing the forces of capitalism required a lot of difficult emotional work. To delve inward for clarity is much more challenging than, say, purchasing a finely woven shirt that telegraphs that confidence for you. If self-acceptance is available at Macy’s, in a Chanel bottle of beveled glass, then to the mall we shall go! Sitting in the lotus position is for suckers.

I call myself a radical in every sense, but even I gave into temptation and bought a bottle of Oil of Olay at Target. I stopped using it not because I suddenly realized that true beauty comes from within, but because the acids meant to slough off my aging (read: ugly) skin made my face break out in a rash, and rashes are not only uncomfortable, they’re ugly.

Betty Friedan suggested that liberal feminism, in which changes are made by working within the system, would result in greater gains for women. Which is more effective—the pretty power, or the ugly power? How to you obtain the power held by men—by taking it, or by convincing them to give it to you? Do you attract more flies (button or zip) with the sweetness of honey or the sourness of vinegar? Am I really the power player in my marriage because my husband’s salary pays for the Secret Powder Fresh deodorant and rounded-tip Tampax that he will never use?

Oh my god……I can’t believe I use DEODORANT. I want to smell pretty. So much for being radical.

*Come on, could that REALLY have been said by anyone other than Courtney "Pretty on the Inside" Love? She may not understand sobriety, child-rearing, or anything else about human relationships, but she sure as hell knows about power, baby!

This picture should be worth your vote.

I haven't posted as much in this space, but anyone who knows me well could guess that I don't give a damn about weiners (I'm a vegetarian) or Rep. Anthony Weiner (at least as long as Sen. David "I paid hookers to diaper me" Vitter remains in office). But I am not above goofing off with the carnivores' Wurstteller from Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit to make you laugh....and ask you for one more vote in the Circle of Moms' Top 25 Political Mom Bloggers contest.

Click on the icon below to cast one more vote before 5 pm PST tonight. I need to stay in the top five, people! Ask yourself: would the Jenny Erikson pose with two slimy German sausages to get your vote? The holier-than-thou nut who writes Little Bytes News? I think not! For only feminist moms know how to have this much fun. Check out Elliott's expression if you don't believe me.

Summer vacation has begun.

Since rising at six this morning, I have already endured a prolonged glowering match with the son, a screaming tantrum from the daughter, and a pitying glance from the husband as he dashed off for work so fast he could have been in warp drive. Currently, the time is 9:15. AM.

It's going to be a long three months.

Credit: Anne Taintor, patron saint of moms all year long

The evolution of an ally

An excerpt from The Radical Housewife, chapter four, shared in honor of the 12th anniversary today of my civil marriage with a fella who is not, fortunately, named Mattias Schwarz:

....neither youth nor hormones last forever. Somewhere around our ten year college reunion, everyone’s attention shifted from desire to domesticity, so it seemed natural that marriage would dominate our discussion of gay rights in the 21^st century.

Unlike the college come-outs and come-ons, Kelly and Gretchen came out by moving in next door. No one could misunderstand two women, a toddler boy, and a hyperactive mixed-breed terrier moving a truck full of furniture into a tidy Minneapolis bungalow—they were a family. For once, identifying as gay had nothing at all to do with sex. Hell, they were new parents, so we knew from experience that they weren’t doin' it! Instead, the story of their lives together was a lesson for Matt and me on a topic far less arousing: good old-fashioned civil rights.

The battle for same-sex marriage first made Minnesota headlines in July 2002, when our friendly, toque-wearing northern neighbors on the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Canada’s current marriage laws were discriminatory. Gay marriage was legal right in our backyard. “We could get to Thunder Bay in eight hours!” I exulted.

Kelly and Gretchen glanced at each other warily. “I don’t think so,” Gretchen said.

“But I want to buy you a melon baller,” I said. “Or a Jell-O mold in the shape of a giant strawberry.”

Kelly crinkled her nose with distaste. “Is that the kind of stuff you two got?” I told her that Matt and I opposed the idea of a wedding registry on principle. I went further and explained that so much of the modern American wedding constituted re-enacting traditions put in place when women were considered property to be handed from man to man in a ritual financial exchange. When Kelly regained consciousness, I returned to the subject of her Canadian marriage.

“Go ahead and buy us a melon baller if you want to,” Gretchen said. “Just don’t make us drive to Thunder Bay for it.” Her stern face told us that the discussion was over.

I cursed myself for weeks for being such a fucking idiot. The Happy Hetero just told two sensible adults that all of their problems would be fixed after ten minutes in an Ontario courtroom! I thought they’d be freed from discrimination once they signed a provincial paper, produced in a country not their own, that would mean less than nothing to the border guards they would encounter on their return trip, guards who would still log them as two single persons: one an American citizen, one a Permanent Resident. Nothing would change.

Gretchen, unlike Kelly, was not born in the United States. When we first got to know one another, she was studying madly for her citizenship exams, a series of quizzes on Constitutional trivia that I might have passed if I were still a 17-year-old student in AP American Government, but would definitely flunk today. “A test she wouldn’t have to take if I’d been a man,” Kelly grumbled.

Kelly and Gretchen didn't intend to offer me more than friendship, but they inadvertently gave me something nearly as valuable: an education in discrimination that this naïve straight woman sorely needed. For years, I thought that being an ally was about getting vogueing invites, ending the use of “gay” as a catch-all slur, and dropping my heterosexual assumptions. Through Gretchen and Kelly, I learned of the pervasive inequality that exists in state and federal law, the very legal system that Gretchen understood better than the average straight guy who was too busy scratching his balls to vote.

Kelly and I were both good American girls, born in the land of the free, rewarded with Social Security Cards and easily obtained passports. Had I fallen for a lederhosen-wearing Bavarian named Matthias Schwarz, instead of a professor’s brat born within a mile of UC-Berkeley, his road to citizenship would be assured. Kelly, on the other hand, had no such opportunity. She could not legally sponsor the citizenship of the foreign-born person she loved. “If we’re not legally married, as Kelly put it, "our relationship doesn’t exist.”

FFI:

Equal Marriage NOW

Minnesotans United for all Families

This makes me so happy.

I love this picture almost as I love these three beautiful, smart, amazing women. They followed my May 31 post's instructions to the letter and purchased the Reverb issue of Bitch at True Colors Bookstore in sunny south Minneapolis. They supported feminist media, feminist retailers, and feminist writers all at once! I bet they even went home and entered a vote for their favorite feminist mommyblogger (me, of course). Thanks to these three sweeties, I am content--a not insignificant achievement in the frenzied final days of the school year. Thanks, friends!

Daughters of the '90s, mothers to no one

Ah, the 1990s! I may be been a child in the '70s and endured adolescence in the '80s, but the '90s is when I really grew up. I spent the first twenty years of my life being what was expected of me: a fine student, an exemplary daughter, a sidekick to my dominant friends. If an unsettling rage occasionally bubbled to the surface, it was my fault for not playing my role appropriately. Girls weren't angry--girls were good. I identified strongly with fucked-up boy-men like Holden Caulfield and Paul Westerberg, though my cis-gendered hetero-normative temperament prevented me from imagining myself as anything but a grunge god's loyal girlfriend. I had no seething female role models save Sylvia Plath, whose example was not one I cared to follow.

Enter Courtney!

Now, one could make a convincing argument that like Plath, Courtney Love isn't a role model worth following, but in the early nineties, it seemed that the world might be ready to embrace a loud, smart, cranky, bitchy, flawed, contradictory, kickass feminist. Those were heady times! I loved (and still love) the riot grrrls with all my heart, but be honest: isn't Kathleen Hanna a little too perfect? She's the punk Anne Welles, while Courtney is Neely O'Hara, who, despite her many flaws, always says what she thinks and is the Doll you root for in the end. In the '90s, I finally learned to appreciate honesty over perfection. It doesn't make you popular--hell, it might not make you happy! But it's better than the alternative, to "fake it so real [you are] beyond fake," as Courtney warned. I remain flawed, but I'm no longer a liar, to myself or to anyone else.

I'm very excited that years of following Courtney's career have led to my first piece for what is probably the smartest magazine in the country, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. In "Nobody's Mother: Abandonment as Art in the Courtney Love Family Tree," I look at memoirs written by Courtney's mother, Linda Carroll, and grandmother, Paula Fox, to trace four generations of women who've been either unable or unwilling to care for their firstborns, all daughters. The article is not available online, so please support feminist media and yours truly by picking up the REVERB themed issue at your favorite local indie bookstore (True Colors here in south Minneapolis) or, failing that, your big box Barnes & Noble near Ms., Curve, and Bust. Your best bet? Getting a subscription for only $25. This feminist truth-teller thanks you.

Postscript: I've just learned that there are THREE different covers for the issue, featuring red, blue & black vinyl records. I got the black one in the mail, so I'm off to True Colors for the other two. My granddaughters, of the '30s, '40s, '50s and beyond, need to have them all!

Vote for your favorite feminist mom: ME!

I am your favorite, right? You'd at least put me in your top ten, beside Viva La Feminista, PunditMom, Gloria Feldt, The Feminist Breeder, MOMocrats and MomsRising, right? Right??

Forgive my fragility--since the Pre-Rapture "Marriage" Debacle and the Post-Rapture Northside Twister I've been just a mess of nerves. Minnesota needs some love 'n light right now, and there's no better way for you to show it than to vote for THE RADICAL HOUSEWIFE as one of Circle of Moms' Top 25 Political Mom Blogs. Vote every 24 hours to ensure I beat my evil twin Jenny Erikson.

The Radical Housewife

Votes:

43

ABOUT THIS BLOG	The Radical Housewife is dedicated to revolutionizing American family values one dirty diaper at a time. A writer, at-home parent, and activist serving her fifth term as president of Minnesota NOW, she makes righteous indignation fun.
URL	http://www.theradicalhousewife.com/
ADDED	2 days ago
AUTHOR	Shannon Drury
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Raptured!

It must have happened early, during my regularly scheduled Saturday afternoon benders*, for when I passed out...er, fell asleep that night, all was perfectly normal in the land of Minnesota Nice. When I woke on Sunday morning, it was to a totally different world. It wasn't heaven, and it wasn't hell (though I was, as the warning goes, fresh out of beer). It was almost as if I was in....

***POST-RAPTURE BIZARRO WORLD***

...not my home state, which as I declare as loudly as possible to to everyone who'll listen (and to many more who won't) gave the world Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey! A man who stated in 1948 that he wanted to his party and his country to"walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights." Who said "liberalism, above all, means emancipation--emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty." Music to my ears!

Late Saturday night, the Minnesota Legislature took the final step needed to place a so-called marriage amendment on our 2012 ballot. Same-sex marriage is already illegal in Minnesota, and the law has survived the "activist courts" which conservatives so deeply fear. The point of the amendment is to keep the Minnesota "Family" Council's coffers full and to perpetuate damaging stereotypes about LGBT folks and their children. Katherine Kersten, self-appointed Admiral of the Midwestern Morality Police, can write all she wants about how she and her cronies aren't bigots, but you and I know better--we read the testimony of Jennifer Roback Morse before the Minnesota Senate Judiciary committee, in which she declared that it is "brutality" for a child to be raised by same-gender parents. Smells like bigotry to me!

On Sunday, I tried to attend the Harvey Milk Rally in Loring Park (I was scheduled to speak on behalf of Minnesota NOW), but I made Matt turn the car around when tornado sirens began to wail. A mile or so north of the park, one person was killed, several others seriously wounded by the tornado that touched down, wreaking havoc in one of Minneapolis' most impoverished neighborhoods. The tornado that hit my part of town in 2009, by contrast, hurt no one at all and only made life messy, not dangerous--middle class, mostly white folk are never given a police curfew.

Post-rapture Monday? I got to hear that Tim Pawlenty is running for President because he's the one who can give Americans the "truth." This from a guy who cooked Minnesota's books and squeezed Minneapolis dry for eight years so he could tell the "truth" that he didn't raise taxes. I spent his two terms kicking myself for thinking that no one could be a worse representative of Minnesota governance than Jesse Ventura. T-Paw makes The Body look like ...well, Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey!

I don't know much about Harold Camping's theology. Tell me--do you think this what hell is supposed to look like for mild-mannered Midwestern atheists?

*don't be silly! This photo is by a winner of Regretsy's rapture photo contest. Though as a diehard Neely O'Hara fan, this is definitely the way I wanna go.

The letter that the Pioneer Press won't print

Mike Burbach, Editor: mburbach@pioneerpress.com

Mike Bass, Sports Editor: mbass@pioneerpress.com

As a reader unfamiliar with Joe Soucheray’s style, I cannot tell whether his May 19, 2011 column was meant to skewer the unenlightened readers who suggested he was somehow un-masculine for protesting the dangers of modern football, or whether he aimed to prove his macho bona fides via said mockery. Whatever the intentions of Soucheray himself, the message made by the print headline was clear: “No. I’m still a man, not a woman. It’s football that changed.”

I’m a writer as well as a feminist activist—I am not interested in policing language. Yet I am keenly aware of the power that words have, particularly in the hands of a major newspaper, to perpetuate stereotypes that are at best, irritating, and at worst, dangerous. Soucheray’s column and accompanying headline reinforce the message that for a presumably heterosexual man, there is no worse offense than to be called a woman.

Thanks to a half-century of civil rights progress, it is no longer considered acceptable to use race, ethnicity, or perceived sexual orientation as a slur. No editor would approve a headline that read “No. I’m still a man, not a faggot,” for fear of significant (and richly deserved) backlash. Why is gender still, after all these years, fair game?

Rigid gender stereotypes hurt everyone, from men who are prevented from developing emotional relationships with their children to women who are stymied by sexism in the workplace. As a newspaper that hopes to survive in the 21^st century, the writers and editors of the Pioneer Press would be wise to make decisions that better reflect our changing times.

Shannon Drury

President, Minnesota NOW