Sunday, August 7, 2016
Word Count – 955

I am collecting other stories and sayings that fit this theme.
If you have a story, please email it to: mario@aprigliano.us.

a list of grievances . . . 1
I just need a door to nail them onto

It’s 240 years since the founding of the Republic, and a major political party has nominated a woman for President.

Culture

  1. The worst insult to hurl at a man is to call him a pussy, a bitch or a cunt.
  2. One of the worst things to say about a married-man is that he’s pussy-whipped.
  3. Effeminate men are despised, but butch women get a pass.
  4. Nun, witch and playmate – three categories for women.
  5. Women are the fairer sex; women are the weaker sex.
  6. A woman who has multiple sex-partners is a whore; a man who has multiple sex-partners is a stud.
  7. Women on Fox News are young and sit on couches in short-short skits with their legs strategically crossed. Men on CNN sit behind desks and can work well into their sixties; some are even openly gay.
  8. At the Rio Olympics, twenty year old Gabby Douglas, who failed to put her hand on her heart during the national anthem, and did not style her hair or face to everyone’s liking was widely criticized for being disrespectful, unpatriotic and un-American. But when Ryan Lochte and friends trashed a gas station restroom, fought with a security officer, filed a false police report and then announced to every news sources that they had been robbed at gunpoint, the boys got described in the mainstream press as talented kids having a night of fun. Kids having fun!!! Isn’t Lochte, the dude with the Blade Runner hair, in his early thirties? (Can you say “White male privilege?”)
  9. Rachel Maddow, in a speech at Rockefeller University, told of how male-interns think nothing of walking into her office and asking for career advice; female-interns have to be guided into career discussions. And even when Ms. Maddow engages a female-intern in a conversation about career options the young-woman tends to hang-back.
  10. We all know women go to college to find a husband and men go to college to find a career.
  11. When a woman marries, she gives up her last-name and takes her husband’s.
  12. Women are home-makers; men are bread-winners.
  13. Pregnancy and abortion are strictly women’s issue. Men are deemed absent from the moment of conception. Men are also deemed absent from the decision to abort.
  14. State and federal governments pass legislation ad nauseam restricting access to contraception and abortion. Pregnancies are heavily regulated and get a lot of pulpit time. But no one passes legislation to support family-leave, child-care or financial support for kids and teenagers. And American Catholics, with their history of social activism, have moved away from struggling urban families and into the suburbs. They also started to vote Republican.
  15. Viagra is covered by most health-care programs. But companies go to court to block legislation that requires them to provide contraception options. Texas has closed almost all its Planned Parenthood offices leaving poor women stranded for health-care. But no Texan lost his prescription access to Viagra.

Politics

  1. It took 144 years, after the founding of the Republic, for women to be given the right to vote for President.
  2. In the 2016 Presidential election, women are being told, “Don’t vote with your vagina.” Hillary is repeatedly accused of playing the woman-card.2
  3. I don’t understand why women aren’t unanimously lining up behind the first woman running for President. African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama; Catholics voted overwhelmingly for JFK; Bernie Sanders had a huge Jewish following. And yet younger women aren’t automatically supporting someone from their own gender-group.
  4. The second surprising anti-Clinton group works at the PBS NewsHour. David Brooks, Mark Shields and Ruth Marcus love to scold Clinton. (Are all three from paternalistic ethnic groups where women are first subject to their fathers and then subject to their husbands?) I bet the parents of these three pundits voted Democratic, but they’ve decided that a woman candidate must be beyond reproach; that a woman candidate must meet a higher standard than her male counterpart. I’m sure all three would reject the idea that they are holding Clinton to a different set of rules. And yet they don’t explain the complexities of the modern political campaign; they don’t generalize from their own experiences with technology; and they don’t try to put the email red-herring into context. (It was 3 out of 30,000 emails that had a small (C) notation.) No, they just scold. Imagine what they would say if Clinton refused to release her tax-returns. (Aren’t old Liberals great. Yeah women are important, but not important enough to be in the White House. Honey, know your place.)
  5. We associate scolding with women and holding-someone-responsible with men.
  6. At Trump rallies, you can see tee-shirts with slogans like Hillary sucks but not like Monica, Trump that bitch, Hillary for prison. And all the TV pundits pass on that form of anti-women rhetoric. The New York Times put together a video of the nasty slurs and extreme behaviors at Trump rallies. The behavior is violent and misogynistic. But it took Trump encouraging gun-owners to do something if Clinton wins, for mainstream TV to focus on the violence that Trump surrounds himself with.
  7. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted – .@realDonaldTrump makes death threats because he’s a pathetic coward who can’t handle the fact that he’s losing to a girl.
  8. In our obsession to sound neutral, modern and politically-correct, Americans suppress the fact that they dislike women. No commentator, no pundit, except for the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, has gone near the idea that the reaction to Hillary Clinton is really about our dislike of women. It’s no accident that Republicans nominated a hyper, fake man. Any woman who spent as much time as Trump does on hair and make-up would be dismissed as an airhead; any women who acted out-of-control like Trump would be immediately medicated and removed from public-view. Not Trump. He can peacock around all day spouting horrors and no one suggests that he’s crazy. The TV elite use words like unfit. He’s not unfit, he’s crazy in the clinical sense of the word. But let’s not forget, TV loves crazy. After all, Crazy = Ratings.
  9. Americans hate women bosses.
  10. People who have worked for Clinton say, “She’s warm. She’s bright. She’s charming. She has a great sense of humor.” And yet, the dislike of Clinton is so palpable that it has become akin to a prejudice.3

It’s within this context that Hillary Clinton must make the case that she is the best qualified candidate to be President; and that it’s OK to vote for a woman, for President.

1 – Martin Luther nailed a list of grievances against the Catholic Church onto the door of a chapel in Wittenberg, Germany;
his Ninety-five Theses became the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation.
2 – Voting like a woman – Creators Syndicate columnist Connie Schultz
3 – If Hillary Clinton were a man – Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen