total angsty ranting “without question”

Dick Cheney, harbinger of war, is the consummate patriarch: impenetrable, inarguable, in extreme authoritative tone. He’s all lies and taglines; the language is so rigid and fake-knowledgeable and the phrasing shuts out debate. He speaks with the condescending, firm voice of someone who has never been told he is wrong. He is very much of a pre-feminist era. Wyoming, for that matter —the “equality state,” where women were first granted the right to vote—is still a pre-feminist state, where the old constructs exist in blunt forms from playground to workforce. Always the tug and tow. With Cheney, Laura Bush, GW, as heads of state, as representatives and as roles—the psychic and cultural and even etymological effects the Bush Admin. has had on America may be as dangerous as the social and governmental ones. Related: I feel very much like feminism as a presence has been re-marginalized in the collective psyche. I’ve been reading important second-wave works—the vital proto-feminist ideation in Dworkin’s Our Blood and the mid-’70s American hetero gender-psychology in Dorothy Dinnerstein’s the Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise—and I wonder, what does it take for these books to cease being relevant? When will we be able to view them, bemused, as relics of another time? Will it take Cheney Freaky Friday-ing into the body of a 14-year-old girl for just one minute — for him to feel obliged to shush every thought and surpress every instinct — to know what it’s like to be amputated at the outset? He brought up Ob-Gyns in the debate. Can we send him into the waiting room of a Planned Parenthood on an open walk-in day, so he can see the frantic and beleageured throngs of women hoping for their pills or their yearlies; hoping just to land on the patient list for the day, much less hit the low-end of the sliding scale? Can we get Cheney up in the Planned Parenthood one time, so he can see that to be female, over 18 and childless makes a woman not just a social anomaly, but a freak of nature? And that to be female, have children and be reliably partnered is even freakier?