Misogynistic politician is misogynistic!
I was born in 1969, brought up by idealistic, intellectual hippie parents who fought for women’s rights and thought they’d won. They taught me that girls and boys are equal and I could grow up to be anything I wanted. That I had the right to do whatever I wanted with my body and my mind. That I could love anyone I chose, or be alone if I chose. That I was born free, just like the sappy song my dad used to play for me on his guitar.
As a kid, I was an avid reader of science fiction and imagined the future would be this wondrous, enlightened utopia of science and reason. We all would wear togas and Lucite sandals. We’d zip around in our flying cars and meet up with our brainy friends to discuss complex and exciting new scientific concepts over protein pill lunches. Equality for all would be a given and we would laugh and shake our enlightened heads over how silly our caveman ancestors used to be about things like genitals, skin color or sexual orientation.
Obviously, that’s not what happened.
How is it that, decades later, long past the iconic year 2000, a basic human right like a woman’s control over her own body is still up for debate? How is it that the most irrational and hateful branches of religion are still alive and kicking while science is increasingly under funded and marginalized? And where’s my fucking flying car?
All jokes aside, I can’t help but feel a kind of hate fatigue, wading through the deluge of misogyny and willful ignorance that seems to fill the interwebs these days. I want to be angry, but most of the time I just feel numb and disgusted. I feel like the Marching Morons are winning.
What do you think? Will we as a society ever move past this superstitious pussy-hatin’ ass-backwards kind of thinking or are rational, compassionate people the ones that will end up loaded into boxcars on the old Dodo Express?
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faustfatale- Christa Faust
- Christa Faust
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In many ways, I think we still are, only with a sidestep into what Heinlein called "The Crazy Years".
Akins isn't just a little mistaken, his understanding of biology is entirely wrong. That he uses this to to explain a soundbite philosophy to promote public policy, was his simply speaking to a rabid sub-set of voters, who send checks. His apology doesn't address his philosophy, the underpinnings of his understandings, or how he arrived at his misunderstandings, how we came to misspeak. He simply "sympathizes".
Very noir: He's a horrible person, he's just said so with all directness, and hopes to dissuade people from holding it against him, while rallying a percentage of the population sure to arrive at the polls.
We'll get through this. No civics teacher, no sex ed teacher, no biology teacher would support his statements, so I believe, science non-fiction, will win out.
I think, they're losing, at an accelerated rate, and so they will say more and more extreme things, so it's going to be the Crazy Years in our lifetime. Utopia? Apocalypse?
I don't know, but we can vet apocryphal, like this, and we are. I hope Akins loses in the upcoming election, and by a wide margin, but then, I'd like to see the majority in Congress be women. Certainly, they could do no worse.
I hear you on the hate fatigue, and I think the only solace I find is that posts like yours let me know that it's not just me that is feeling these things...