What A Woman Aspires To

I read the Huffington Post to keep up with current events. On Mother’s Day, I was treated to this article.

Let’s see, now that I’m 50, the most important thing for me to do is to be a MILF. If I’m not sexually attractive to teenage boys I might as well just hang it up and move into the nursing home.

What utter bull. Is this what the feminist movement was about, being sexy after 40?

My entire life I’ve wanted to be recognized as a person, with a brain. I wanted to be attractive, sure, but I didn’t feel like it should be the most important thing in my life. Getting old has almost been a relief (except for the arthritis, ick) because I have a secure and loving marriage and I don’t care about being attractive to anyone but my husband.

And let’s not forget the obvious, that there are a lot more important things for women to be striving for than looking like an anorexic supermodel. Trivial things like feeding families, being protected from domestic violence, equal pay for equal work, and so on.

Our society doesn’t have much respect for women, especially older women.

Women as Victims

Okay, now that Edwards is out I’m really going to step in it.

If, like me, you read blogs by Women of Color (most notably BlackAmazon), you’re familiar with the never-ending tension between White feminists and WoC.

Basically, it goes like this: White feminist says something dismissive about our issues, tells us to wait our turn, or says something that perpetuates a stereotype. Feminist of Color calls her out on it. White feminist cries “I’m not a racist! You’re being mean to me!”

By so doing, the White feminist puts herself in the position of Victim, and there is much rallying to support the poor flower of womanhood and much chastisement of the mean old Feminist of Color.

Seems to me, you can’t have it both ways. Playing the victim is pandering to patriarchy, where (white) women are fragile and need protection. Not the best path to empowerment, in my opinion. Yet it happens over and over. To me it looks like using privilege to advance.

Watch for this to happen, now that the Democratic primary is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary already capitalized on this when she cried, before the New Hampshire primary. Oh, wait, it’s already begun.

Obama has to be really, really careful. We know what happens to Black men who hurt White women.