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The finally-over primary season has made one thing crystal clear: pretty much everybody who doesn’t consider him/herself a feminist (and many people that do) has no idea 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.

 To many Obama supporters I’ve encountered, “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 often 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 said Obama supporters, but the blame also belongs to some Clinton supporters. 

You see, it appears that a slice of Clinton’s backers (now mostly calling themselves PUMAs or Hillocrats or some such stupidity) agree with the above-mentioned Obama people that feminists are thin-skinned man-haters who spend their days hunting for examples of misogyny.  These folks not only practice this weirdness, they excoriate feminists who dare use the label without adopting their framing.  It’s very similar to the situation Josh discusses, wherein a small handful of stupid people who call themselves “Christians” have managed to convince most Americans (and, consequently, most American Christians) that Christianity is only for those who like snake handling, speaking in tongues, and directing one’s prayers to George W. Bush.

Unfortunately for these people, feminism isn’t what they think it is.  It’s actually a pretty simple concept: feminism is the belief that women are equal to men, that they should be treated as such, and that we have to work hard to make that happen.  Yes, part of that is recognizing some of the more subtle instances of misogyny that pop up constantly, and, often, pointing them out in ways that may or may not be abrasive.  But it’s also a lot of other things.  Not to get all cultural theory or anything, but we’d really be better off discussing “feminisms,” since such a wide variety of approaches, many of which are contradictory, end up under the feminism umbrella.  The point is, just because one “feminist” does things a certain way doesn’t mean that any other (let alone all other) feminists do too.

Of course, the problem goes far beyond Clinton and Obama supporters.  The worst of it has always come from the mass media (despite what the PUMAs seem to believe, almost none of the bona fide misogyny that polluted the primaries came from Obama, his campaign, or the vast majority of his supporters).  Take, for instance, this gem, wherein Scott Martelle of the LA Times suggests that Obama is a closet woman-hater because he referenced Ann Richards’s famous quip from her keynote at the 1988 Democratic National Convention: “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did.  She just did it backwards and in high heels.” 

Here’s Obama’s remark: “[W]omen can do anything that the boys can do – and do it better, and do it in heels.  I still don’t know how she [referencing Hillary Clinton] does it in heels.”  Apparently, Martelle thinks Obama’s mention of heels will be interpreted by “some” (oh, that pesky “some”!  They’re so touchy!) as misogynist because, well, I guess because some women wear heels.  I’m really not sure what offense Martelle expects women to take, and I think that’s because he doesn’t either.  Regardless of whether or not he calls himself a feminist (I doubt that he does), I’m 100% certain that he doesn’t understand what feminism is, if he thinks what he’s doing qualifies. 

Most of the comments on his post indicate that most people are smart enough to see this as shameless conflict-mongering and nothing more.  But the problem is that “some people” (in this case, the PUMAs) will undoubtedly pick up on this and add it to the list of other dubious infractions Obama has supposedly committed.  These folks will once again use this comment as a litmus test for what they call feminism, and, sadly, lots of others will take their word for it.  The end result is that, once again, we’re letting crazy people define feminism for us, and more and more potential feminists will turn themselves off entirely to everything bearing that label because they believe that feminism is always already batshit crazy.

The trick of it is, I can’t, in good conscience, go around  denying that these assholes are feminists, because it’s not my place to do so, and if I did, I’d be guilty of what I’m criticizing them for doing.  All I can do is offer my definition of feminism as an alternative.  So here we are: there are assholes everywhere, and some of them call themselves feminists.  Beware of assholes.  Sorry, internet, that’s the best I can do.

3D Hologram Projection not just for blowing up the deathstar anymore!

porn loves the iPhone. the long-nailed and the fat-fingered don’t. (no worries, though — mash the touchscreen with your palm to obtain a special dialing wand from apple.)

there’s a lovely serendipity to the news sometimes. you absorb one mildly interesting bit of information, begin to digest and draw conclusions from it. then you notice another meme floating by, distinct from but related to the first, that complements and contextualizes what you were already thinking. then something else happens, something that harmonizes the whole thing in an immensely satisfying way.

for the last few weeks, newspapers and blogs have been peppered with little sidebar items about obama’s outreach to religious voters, including some mild expressions of surprise and curiosity at the possibility that he may actually be making inroads among evangelicals, of all people. punditical analysis has mostly been limited to the notion that jesus folk are pissed off at bush and looking to punish republicans for their failure to implement full-on theocracy; hence, they’re turning to obama the way clinton democrats were supposedly turning to mccain (so much for that theory). a secondary competing hypothesis held that evangelicals are merely susceptible to that obama magic just like everybody else — they grudgingly respect him, and even if they won’t vote for him, they’re not galvanized against him the way they were against john kerry.

there seemed to be some truth in both explanations, but there was still a piece missing. what does the obama campaign know that we don’t, that led them to court religious communities as their first step toward transitioning into general-election mode? perhaps more importantly, why does it seem to be working, without obama having to back off his socially progressive positions or cozy up to agents of intolerance?

that’s when i read about the new pew survey on religion and politics, which confirms something i’ve suspected for a while: faith and religious affiliation are fairly worthless as predictors of political behavior. in a study based on interviews with 36,000 religious americans, researchers learned the following:

- a plurality are Democrats or lean Democratic
- almost 3/4 self-identify as moderate or liberal
- a majority favor legal access to abortion in all or most cases
- a majority favor acceptance of homosexuality by society
- a majority feel that “government is too involved” in policing morality
- a majority, including 54% of evangelicals, take a dim view of adventurist foreign policy and want the government to focus on domestic issues
- a resounding 61%, again including 54% of evangelicals, favor tougher environmental regulation

in other words, the ideological views of the devout mostly mirror those of society at large — not so surprising in a country where 95% claim some form of religious or spiritual belief, including 78% who follow a christian tradition. the study goes on:

[M]ost Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States.

if these findings seem counterintuitive, especially to those of us whose politics over the last generation have been formulated more or less in diametric opposition to the brutal insanity of the religious right, it’s because we’ve been force-fed a false image of christianity and christians. and in our own way, we’ve been complicit with the robertsons and dobsons in propagating the view that christians are, by definition, backward and bigoted. this is the great crime and the great tragedy of our generation in the american political left: they told us that ‘faith’ was incompatible with science and equal rights and reproductive freedom, synonymous with imperial aggression and environmental destruction, and we believed them. to barack obama’s great credit, he didn’t…