Feminism, Heels, and Obama

skrelnek

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday June 27, 2008 · 5:58 PM PDT

2008/06/27 · 17:58

Longtime lurker, first-time diarist. Please be gentle!

The finally-over primary season has made one thing crystal clear: almost nobody (including many who call themselves feminists) has a very good idea of what feminism is. This has manifested on both sides of the Clinton/Obama divide, and continues to show up in the media pretty much daily.

I've been an Obama supporter since late 2007, and it seems like a handful of us think that feminism is a way of behaving based on dualistic and oppositional thinking (men and women are at WAR!!!) and hypersensitivity to the possibility of slights. The label "feminist" has occasionally been tossed out as an insult against overzealous Clinton supporters, which is unsettling. To a certain extent, this is the fault of incomplete gender awareness among some of us, but the blame also belongs to some Clinton supporters, and especially the mass media.

RSS