Pay up!

My last post was about putting your money where your mouth is, liberals. I am very proud of the fact that HipMama magazine published my essay "On Choosing Water" for their recent community issue, #43. I know that my fans (all two of you) are used to seeing reprints of my stuff online, but not this time.

Everyone knows that the internet and the economy are killing independent print media. HipMama is about as grassroots a publication as you are ever gonna find, and it needs your money now more than ever. If you can, please subscribe. If you can't, do me a solid and at least kick in five bucks to purchase the issue with my essay in it. The transaction is easy, safe, and totally painless with a PayPal account. I know you have a PayPal account because you've been snatching up all of those Ginger Spice dolls I've been bidding on.*





I should mention that I didn't get paid for my work, so I don't have a financial stake in this. I just believe in HipMama's mission of sharing stories from a new generation of progressive families, folks who don't look like, think like, or parent like Kate Gosselin (thank gawd).

Remember when you order that my issue is the one pictured above, issue #43. Thanks.

*just kidding. I have three Ginger Spice dolls already, mint, NRFB, so I'm totally not sweating it.

It happened.

Matt warned me that listening to Rush Limbaugh, even for research, would warp me utterly. He predicted that my brain would be washed, little by little, until one day I would find myself in total agreement with him.

That day is today.

Not only did I agree with Rush Limbaugh, I caught myself shouting a "HELL YEAH!" to the obnoxious voice booming from my dashboard. You see, El Rushbo was making the point that President Obama talks a great game about the worth of public institutions, yet he uses his own money and power to opt out of them. For example: Malia and Sasha attend a very expensive private school. I don't like this. I think when kids are as little as the Obamas, 11 and 8 respectively, the best lessons they can get are about how to get along with the different kinds of kids in their community. Obama could send the country a powerful message about his commitment to public education by enrolling them in a public school (Sidwell Friends, no matter how highly ranked, is not teaching those girls calculus yet, so you can spare me that "academic standards" baloney).

In a column I wrote last year, I included the following:

...at no time did my husband and I consider a private school. We live in Minneapolis purposefully, and our commitment to this community extends to our son’s education. As he grows older and his needs change, perhaps we will re-evaluate. But we’re convinced that the only education a young kid needs is how to get along with other people. There’s no better place for that than in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

As anyone who has seen my Blogger profile picture knows, I attended Edina High School, a suburban school that gave me a world-class academic education but failed at presenting any kind of diversity, be it racial, socioeconomic, political or what have you. My best friend during those years was a fellow liberal dreamer, and we vowed that we would never subject our children to that kind of privileged, ivory tower kind of shit. Fast forward to when the rubber should have hit the road, and she announced her plan to send her children to an exclusive private kindergarten. I mumbled something like "are you sure that's such a great idea?" but the look on my face said: are you fucking kidding me? What the fuck is the matter with you? Your precious baby is too good to play tag with poor people? That's about the time she stopped returning my calls and e-mails in a timely manner. Loyal readers of my old MySpace blog (archived here for your reading pleasure) know that last fall she refused to accept my Facebook friend request, which triggered a lengthy meditation on our friendship, which led to her writing a letter in response that reeked so strongly of bullshit I was relieved be rid of her.

I give you this sordid tale not to complain some more about a friendship gone down the toilet, but to reiterate that RUSH LIMBAUGH IS RIGHT! If you're a good old fashioned liberal, the type who gives enough money to the DNC to get your picture taken with a supposedly liberal dude like Barack Obama (like this mother of privately educated children does), or if you happen to be Barack Obama, you need to put up or shut up. YOU NEED TO SEND YOUR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL. Or else you are a big fat phony, and Rush has every right to ridicule you.

Hell yeah.

Handsome devils

I made such a big stink yesterday about the fact that my TV boyfriend Jemaine Clement was nominated for an Emmy award that I gave Matt pause. "Wait, wait," he said. "You only like him because he's funny, don't you? You don't actually think he's attractive, do you?"

My goodness, whatever could you mean? Said Matt, "he's kinda weird looking."


"Hmm, let's see," I said, mulling this over. "What do I find physically attractive? Messy dark hair, brown eyes, hipster glasses, scruffy sideburns, broad shoulders.... mmm....get over here and give your wife a big kiss."

Hear me ROAR! (maybe)

Below is the text of a new e-mail to our membership prepared by the brilliant Mary Ann Gaspar, Minnesota NOW's secret weapon. In this e-mail, I am not the cranky housewife who just cracked open a sorely needed Coke Zero after being yelled at all the way home from the pediatric dentist in Roseville: I am Minnesota NOW! Yeah! I share it here because it makes me look GREAT. I wrote the text about why I'm a member, but all credit for the design goes to Mary Ann. Damn, she's good.

You can view the message here.

Addendum: while the Constant Contact images looked fine when I previewed them, when I published the post they looked like hell. As if I needed another reason to feel grateful for Mary Ann. I am hopeless at this kind of thing.

"A feminism that works for all women" by Erin Matson

A feminism that works for all women | Commentary | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

Ain't she sweet?! She mentions justice for women caregivers! That's my girl!

Shared via AddThis

What I wrote to the NOW state presidents

[Addressed to a state president who is worried about what Palinistas & PUMAs have done to our organization]

You have written a heartfelt essay on the place of our multi-issue approach in NOW's history and future. It is important that we take a step back and remember why this approach is so crucial to our organization. What better time than after an election cycle to reaffirm what NOW is all about?

But in the message immediately before that one, you wrote that [a state president] missed the point of your many posts on the subject of BJ Kling. I think she and the other supporters of Feminist Leadership NOW have understood your viewpoint very clearly. You are using Kling as a tool to impugn the character of Terry O'Neill, and by doing so, you are casting doubt upon her slate's ability to put NOW's core principles into action.

I understand post-election bitterness very well. To be candid, if FLN had lost I would be cooking up some conspiracies of my own. I would blog until my fingers fell off about the suppression of NOW's financial records.

But FLN won. By eight votes. Which is the number of voters from Minnesota who arrived in Indianapolis with the sole intention of handing a leadership position to our trusted friend and former state president Erin Matson. We're a gang who have been at odds with national leadership in the past, including our hope that the PAC would endorse Al Franken for our U.S. Senate seat. When they didn't, we knew that a vote for FLN was the only way to exact revenge.

Does that sound silly? Far-fetched? In [a former national leader's] words, "bizarre"?

A previous poster wanted to know the new leadership's take on this "controversy." I asked Erin if she was reading these discussions, and she said yes. But she added that she was far too busy packing, moving across country, settling into life in DC, and planning for some intense ERA action in her new job that starts today.

In sisterhood,
Shannon Drury
MN NOW

What feminists do for fun

Which of these would you peg as my most feminist act of the day?

Shopping at Amazon/True Colors bookstore, the oldest feminist bookstore in the country

Purchasing a wicked T-shirt featuring Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes by KM Stitchery at store above

Giving this shirt to Erin as her goodbye present before she ditches flyover country for her hot new job in DC as National NOW Action Executive Vice President

Blasting Bratmobile's song "Brat Girl," about attacking date rapists, as I pulled up to a crew of teenage doofuses thumping to some typically obnoxious tune about bitches 'n' hoes on the way home



Yeah---blogging about it! I knew you would say that.

Sarah Palin, mocking me as usual.

You're doing it to me again, Sarah. I have piles of work to do, and only another two hours of Tuesday quiet to do it. Yet everywhere I turn, it seems there is more to say about you. All the NOW insiders are still kicking up dust over what you mean to, y'know, the movement. Do you represent everything feminism has been fighting for since before I was born? Or are you the second coming of the apocalypse?


All of this would be so much easier if you weren't, y'know, a Republican. You have the magnetic charisma of Madonna, the adorably kooky tendency to go off message like Courtney Love, the all-American good looks of Sandra Bullock. Why, I could love you! Yes, I could!

But you and me, Sarah, we're too different to make this work. Laying aside the abortion issue (though it pains me to do so, but I'll try to do as Amy Siskind suggests), you are a classic conservative who supports small government and I am a fan of Western European socialism. There, I said it. Israelis and Palestinians will agree before we do.

That doesn't mean that I think you should be the target of sexism. No way. I applaud you for enlightening a few of the really stupid people who thought ballbreaker gags about Hillary were funny. Your familiy is your own beeswax....provided you don't trot them out as political props, in which case they are as fair game as Maddox Jolie-Pitt.

But could you just join a think tank or something and be quiet for a while? Could you keep the Tweets to a minimum, please? I can't think about all of this. I got shit to do.

A response to "This is Not My Feminism"

What follows is my comment to an essay on HuffPo written by fellow NOW leader Lindsey Horvath. HuffPo has the magical power to link all my commenting smartiness to my blog, which is delightful news for my two fans who want to be kept abreast of everything I'm up to on the internets.

I don't know why they linked to this weird picture, though. It's not Taylor Momsen in full Courtney drag, pretending to shoot herself in the head--it looks like the other teenage singer named Taylor, the one who sings country and dates Disney actors who claim to be virgins. Yet another post for another day.




First off, I must announce that I am a huge Courtney Love fan. HUGE. When Courtney donned her so-called "kinderwhore" look in the early '90s, it was a very conscious statement on the oppressive virgin/whore, girl/woman, ugly/pretty dichotomies that all women confront. She didn't name her first record "Pretty on the Inside" for nothing. Ultimately, these divisions took their toll, but that's another post for another day.

I love Courtney doing this look, but not Taylor. Similarly, I love Madonna's early '80s, belly-baring, pop tart image, but not Britney's. What changes the game? The fact that Courtney Love and Madonna were both adults in full control of their own personas. Britney Spears and Taylor Momsen are children, play-acting at sexual roles with the active participation of the adults around them. What in the name of Michael Jackson is this 15-year-old doing on stage in her underwear? Where are her parents?! Jeez!

To me, the feminist message here is about control. Teenagers who lack control will try to seize it any way they can, in ways that can be hazardous to their physical and mental well-being. Our culture tells children that they are sexy, but denies them access to intelligent sexual information. 15-year-old girls can vamp it up onstage or in the high school hallway, but when they try to access contraception they are stymied at every turn. It's no wonder they react in ways that drive grownups crazy.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Dead celebrities.

Celebrity deaths for which I actively mourned (that is, cried):

Princess Diana
Her life and death were a tragedies of truly epic proportions. To not cry over her sons sadly marching behind her coffin was to have no heart!

Paul Wellstone
My god, I cried for days. Everyone in Minnesota felt like Paul belonged to them. To perish with his wife and daughter, in a plane crash no less (one of my neurotic fears) made terrible news that much worse.

George Harrison
This man wrote "Here Comes the Sun." If that isn't a gift to all humanity, I don't know what is. I would have cried when John Lennon died, had I understood what it all meant--I was only nine years old at the time.

Kurt Cobain
This man wrote some classics himself, yet died in misery and pain, unlike George. I have great sympathy and compassion for those who succumb to intractable mental illness.

Michael Hutchence
Never wrote a classic, but had a hand in some quality, brain-numbing pop. I was a big teenybopper fan of INXS in my pre-punk, junior high days. His death was pretty weird, too.

Bob Stinson
Merely a local celebrity, yes, but a man of great, raw musical talent who fell victim to his addictions. I attended his funeral, sneaking in the back so I wouldn't take a seat from any of the Minneapolis rock luminaries who came to pay their respects. It was one of the most moving and heartfelt services I've ever been to.

All this is to make clear that I have not shed a single tear for Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, that OxiClean weirdo or any other celeb who shuffled off this mortal coil in this very unlucky month. Sure, I spun "Off the Wall" on my iPod, and mulled over the consequences of our culture's obsession with child prodigies. Frankly, MJ's death made me think more of Judy Garland, the first of the child star flame-outs. Her handlers pumped her full of drugs too, and kept her performing long after she should have stopped to dry out. When she dropped dead in June 1969 at the age 47, a group of her fans gathered to drink a cocktail to her memory at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. When the police raided the bar, her fans said what Judy never could: enough is enough. The modern gay rights movement was born. Michael Jackson was more than likely a gay man, whose warped childhood kept him squarely in the closet, unable to form relationships with consenting adults. Thanks to his abusive parents, the benefits of Stonewall passed him by.

Can the death of any celebrity affect change? There was talk, the the wake of Anna Nicole Smith's overdose, some rumblings about tightening restrictions on doctors who overfill celebs' prescriptions. John Lennon's assassination didn't do much for the cause of gun control. In the wake of Wellstone's death his colleagues were sufficiently moved to pass the Wellstone Mental Health Parity Act, which could help young people much less famous than Kurt Cobain gain access to the therapies that could save their lives. Troubled guitarists less gifted than Bob Stinson might be able to find the rehabilitation program that could keep them clean and healthy. Maybe.

It's unlikely to happen, but I do hope that the spectacular crack-ups and flame-outs of child performers like Judy, Michael, and their logical heirs, Britney and Lindsay, give people a moment's pause about what the American culture machine does to talented children and the parents who want to use them.

God forbid Kate Gosselin discovers a singer in that bunch.

One patch in the quilt

I am thrilled to report that the good ladies at the Minnesota Women's Consortium have seen fit to add me to the blogroll on their own blog, Equality Quilt. This makes me very happy. The MWC does great work in connecting like-minded women across the state. I respect them tremendously.

I might have to start watching my language, now....

New essay in skirt! magazine

A Feminist in the Family
Published July 1, 2009

What a team!

The picture below was taken in October 2008, long before three of these people got their new jobs. It seems like a lifetime ago that we four were just a motley collection of U.S. Senator, bestselling author and comedic actor, advertising copywriter, and housewife.




From right: Senator-elect Al Franken, National NOW Action Vice President Erin Matson, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, some housewife