Elizabeth Warren and the Angry Inch(-Long Masculinist Resistance)
In the mid- to late-seventies, when I was writing a lot of speculative fiction and being generally prophetic about a wide range of things (including specific Climate Change aspects that are coming to bear now in a suite of stories titled ‘Four Roads to the Centre: The Ranger, The Doctor, The Warrior and the Sage’), I posited that an African American man would become president before a woman of any race or ethnicity would. That bore out.
It certainly never would have occurred to me that candidates for the highest office and most powerful seat of government in the world would not be highly intelligent, well educated, with a proven track record of leadership and governance, and would exhibit no trail of serial bankruptcies, failed marriages, defaulted loans, widely publicized fraudulent dealings, settled criminal law suits, and sexual assault. What I didn’t realize then is that an illiterate, morally, mentally and emotionally defective man would also win over a highly educated, proven female leader, former First Lady, and former Secretary of State.
It also would not then have occurred to to that, given contemporary so-called ‘electability’ indexes, a Gay or Jewish man would also be found more ‘electable’ than a woman of any sexual orientation or religion. Anti-LGBT bias and antisemitism were so rife in 70s America that I would then have thought that even a woman might be found preferable as a candidate. I was, though more aware than most in terms of Eco-Feminist, multi-cultural, non-hierarchical, pluralistic thinking and understanding of the socio-economic-cognitive culture of patriarchy, simply naive as to the depth and breadth of misogyny abroad in the land.
I’m not struck by her particular style as she seems too schoolmarmish for me (I wanted Kamala Harris — loved her style), and in fact she is one, but I found out more and more about the tons of stuff she’s actually done as a lawmaker over the years and deeply respect her. That reservation on my part is sheer, shallow, stylistic bias — hard to get over but really just ego. She took down Bloomberg onstage on his sexist and misogynistic record like a warrior queen, effectively, dramatically and with marvellous stagecraft. Morally, ethically she’s exemplary, which is paramount, always of course but especially now.
She apologized for her one ‘sin’ of touting her family tradition of being proud of the tiny bit of Indigenous blood she has without technically having Native America legal status to the ones who matter, those being Native Americans, and they supported her in the aftermath and objected to her being subjected to racist slurs like Trump’s mockingly and depreciatingly calling her “Pocahontas” all the fucking time. She’s a Green, out-Feminist, intellectually brilliant Democratic Socialist, like enlightened leaders in every other developed democracy in the Western world. What’s not to love?
Over time, I began to know she was the most qualified one up there. I still had style quibbles to overcome, but that was MY problem. As Rachel Maddow describes in this clip, I, like thousands if not millions of other women, feel a little bereft at her seemingly inevitable defeat. This shit (internalized misogyny and gender bias) has to end. It’s really tired, hanging on by an inch, and ready to be tossed on the compost heap of masculinist history.
