Vote for a Vagina!

A vagina has not yet planted itself on the seat behind the desk at the oval office.  The oval office!  

A vagina with a skilled woman attached to it is running for that seat against a brute.  In response to decades of sexist attacks, overt and subtle, this woman has not crawled into a hole, has not given up, has not murdered anyone, has NOT made huge mistakes, has not given up her core principles.  She has constructed a persona that this nation can barely tolerate--somehow delivering a medley of intelligence, ambition, kindness, steadiness, and enthusiasm.  And in response, people hate her.   Young liberal people preferred an older white gentleman offering slogans, and deplorables prefer the Deplorable.  

A vagina with Eileen Myles attached to it once offered to plant itself on that seat.  More recently she promoted Hillary's vagina, got criticised of course, then tried to put it in context a little, defend her choice of language.  Not much, because that is not what Eileen does.  That is what a politician does, stammer words from that narrow window of acceptability, and if they play well, repeat them again and again and again.  And then, if you have a vagina, get attacked for not sounding spontaneous.  

Anyway, Eileen Myles is not a politician.  Here's what she can say:

...thanks to the combined force of sexism and ageism and the automatic likening of a woman to the moon Hillary remains primarily a reflective figure, just an accumulation of what anyone else wants….Who ever said abstractions are gender neutral in the English language? If it’s evil and menacing, and we’ve got to stop it, it’s a girl! 

What we see as Hillary is not Hillary.  It's who we are.  And dependening on what you accept, it's who we want to be or who we don't want to be.  Powerful or nasty.  Nuanced or untrustworthy.  Enthusiastic or shrill. And so on.  

Eileen, tell it.

I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation. There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.

Voting for Hillary is a baby step.  We need an actual body in the chair, not a media image or rejected projection but the actual physical vagina accompanied by the human who grew up with it.  

Please.

Vote for a Vagina!

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Related posts: Am I a Woman?  Insider Feminism