Salon has a silly piece published yesterday discussing a petition which condemns the identification of married human females and reproducing human females as “wives” and “mothers.” They define the use of these terms as “retro rhetoric.”
In the wake of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union, a petition is taking him to task for his habit of framing women’s equality as a struggle to protect the rights of “wives, mothers, and daughters.” The campaign was inspired by one line in particular from last night’s speech in which Obama said, “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace and free from the fear of domestic violence.”
A totally righteous argument, right? But the petition, which has 716 signatures at the time of this writing, says that this sort of language is “counterproductive to the women’s equality the President is ostensibly supporting.” It goes on to explain, “Defining women by their relationships to other people is reductive, misogynist, and alienating to women who do not define ourselves exclusively by our relationships to others. Further, by referring to ‘our’ wives et al, the President appears to be talking to The Men of America about Their Women, rather than talking to men AND women.”
[…]
On the Daily Kos, McKenna Miller — a man, or rather son — makes an excellent comparison to rhetoric about gay rights, “The reason to fight homophobia isn’t because ‘you’ve got a gay friend,’ it’s because it’s simply the right thing to do. The reason why a woman is valuable isn’t because she’s someone’s sister, or daughter, or wife, it’s because of the person she is unto herself.”
That last line sounds ironically pro-life, which I’m sure the author didn’t intend, which serves only to underscore the left’s ideological dichotomy. There is a blatant lack of respect here for the female sex, the ultimate betrayal of the feminist movement, which is that women must deny the basics of who they are and how they’re wired to be judged by masculine standards to determine value.
The most amazing thing about this article however is that it shows leftist feminists are waking up to the Democrats’ war on women. They’re pandering to us while referring to us in “retro rhetoric?” No way. They’re talking about paycheck equality despite studies disproving the myth, in spite of the President not walking his talk? He’s talking about women on the front lines but not really? Democrats preach female equality as women are the hardest hit by his policies? The administration talks of protecting women but plays Connect Four with the fraud-prone VAWA and making moves towards disarming women?
If you want to talk about “retro rhetoric,” let’s discuss “paycheck fairness,” or really, any number of these outdated expressions publicly debunked yet still used to incite certain groups of women into specific voting patterns.
