Dare To Be A Feminist

The FOX spin machine was working overtime on October 21, and the goal was to convince every young woman that she isn’t smart enough to vote – because young, single women tend to vote for Democrats.

Sex, or fear of it, has been almost as important in the construction of this nightmare state as racism. Just as the legal gains of the civil rights movement were blunted by LBJ’s Safe Streets Act and the incipient “war on drugs,” the sexual revolution and women’s liberation were short-circuited by serial sex panics, police power in loco mariti, Victims’ Rights as a mask for vengeance and the conception of the Sex Offender as a new, utterly damnable category of human being. It’s significant that the police state’s expansion in the late 1960s–70s coincided not only with the blowing winds of freedom and conservative backlash but with the falling rate of profit. Twenty years on, with the welfare state exhausted, the punishment state found its greatest champion in Bill Clinton, whose neoliberal down escalator for the working class required a vast reserve army of unemployed. Capitalism needed the penitentiary. It always has. Old fears in new skins helped oil the machinery.

Clinton gave his violence program a twist of identity politics—enhanced penalties for violence against women, hate as an actionable emotion, child protection as a blanket for censorship and repression—but those who backed him were not simply gulled. For years before—and each side for its own reasons—some liberals had made common cause with some conservatives on policing sex. “Carceral feminists,” the subject of a fair amount of recent talk and scholarship on the roots of anti-trafficking campaigns, is an unlovely phrase, but it usefully denotes a social force that elided personal power with state power, eschewed the project of liberation—the goal of a radically different set of power relations—and took as its armor the victim’s mantle.

Last week, three Michigan Republicans joked in a photo that they "understand" women because they read fashion magazines. But the gag is proof of how deeply they hold women in contempt.

When conservative Ohio Governor and former Lehman Brothers executive John Kasich feels compelled to remind his fellow conservatives that upon entering Heaven, “Saint Peter is probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor,” you know poverty has reached center stage.

From the homilies of Pope Francis, to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's (pictured) inauguration speech, poverty and its close cousin inequality are playing starring roles in the current political discourse. The President’s 2015 budget proposal, released earlier this month, calls for a significant increase in federal spending on anti-poverty programs, and while these proposals are likely DOA in the Republican-controlled House, Democrats across the land have promised to campaign on the issue leading up to the 2014 midterm races. This year, then, appears little different from much of 2013: the spotlight on poverty shows no sign of dimming.

Del. Mark Cole's legislative aide said he is not planning on introducing the ERA legislation to be heard in the House committee effectively stopping progress on the ERA bill for Virginians and for our nation. This is unacceptable! We need to call and to keep calling Del. Cole and Speaker Howell. Ask them to allow a vote on the ERA bill HJ 12. The Virginia Senate bill passed with bi-partisan support 25-8. 

Tell your friends across this nation to call NOW!!!! One man has chosen to stop the path for economic stability for all women in the United States. Remind Delegate Cole and Speaker Howell that the number one issue for women is economic equality and women all across the nation are watching Virginia!

Del. Mark Cole (804) 698-1088
Email Address: DelMCole@house.virginia.gov
Twitter: @MarkColeVA

Speaker Howell (804) 698-1028
Email Address: delwhowell@house.virginia.gov
Twitter: @SpeakerHowell