Gloria Steinem has penned a syndicated opinion piece ranting against Sarah Palin. The San Jose Mercury News took a double dip on this one, printing it on Sept. 5 with the title, “Palin: Wrong woman, wrong message,” and again in the Sunday (Sept. 7) print edition as “Palin ploy won’t work: All she shares with Clinton is a chromosome.” Sarah Palin must have the editors at the Merc scared out of their shorts.
I blew off reading the article when it first appeared, after all Gloria Steinem is utterly irrelevant to my life. She is just another East Coast, elitist, snob laboring under the pretension that she somehow has the right to tell me what to think and do. I grew up as a daughter of the 70s Dazed and Confused generation, when the National Organization of Women was at its nadir. While our mothers were supposedly all living the Swingtown experience and ignoring their children, I and many of my friends were taken under the wings of older feminists. These women, trying to relive the dubious glory of their 60s bra burning days, encouraged us to fight The Man, be independent, not allow ourselves to be baby-making factories, and to storm the halls of the Captains of Industry.
True to the quote attributed to Ms. Steinem, “Evil is obvious only in retrospect,” my eyes were opened to the phoniness of feminism in the 80s. Now in their mid- to late-thirties, these NOW nags began popping out babies at a rapid pace. They somehow couldn’t divest themselves of the motherly urges programmed into those X chromosomes. After years of advising that children would only tie me down and ruin my career, one of them proudly told me she didn’t feel like a “real woman” until she got pregnant. This, after years of trying to convince us younger women that motherhood and family life were antiquated and outdated! Unfortunately for me, my biological clock stopped ticking earlier than most women’s, therefore no mid-life crisis babies for me. Several of my contemporaries, who bought into the free-sex and liberation lie, had so many abortions by that time that they could no longer conceive.
In a sad, satirical way my 70s and 80s experience with feminism is somehow captured in the 1987 movie Lost Boys. A generation of girls, left without direction when their mothers went to work or off to do their own thing, were like lambs for the feminists to seduce. As grandpa snorts in the Lost Boys, “There’s one thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach – all the damn vampires.” There’s one thing about feminists that I never could stomach – all the damn vampires. Bite me, Gloria.
Additional Reading:
- Why Democrats Fear Sarah Palin, by Patrick Dorinson
- With Friends Like Gloria Steinem…, by Rick Moran
- The Four Stages of Conservative Female Abuse, by Michelle Malkin.
Retractable Horns & Tail 