Fems Bash Hippies in Fight for Super Left!

This gem is an article from:






A "Moscow-based Alternative Newspaper"

or

"The Newspaper that makes Jesse Jackson look like Trent Lott"

http://www.exile.ru/

There isn't much left to say about this article that it doesn't loudly proclaim itself, especially this glaringly obvious observation: She sounds like a typical college-minded female, recruited in front of the student union building by such a throng of unshorn Ani DiFranco diciple's, it's a wonder PETA didn't show up with red paint and an anti-fur agenda. The real confusion lies in the fact that she reads like a femi-nazi but wants to shop like Barbi... wtf? Ladies, you really are as complex as Cosmo says.

If you get past the first two paragraphs without laugh-barfing your lunch onto your keyboard, you need to cut back your medication. If you aren't actively fighting your monitor by the end of this thing, you are legally dead.

Anti-Consumerism Equals Anti-Womanism

By Naomi Wolf

Women struggling to survive the Bush backlash now have to defend themselves against a new foe: the so-called anti-Globalization activists whose noisy crusade against "Consumerism" is a thinly-disguised attack on one of the few communal women-centric rituals our culture permits: shopping.

Like fat, shopping is a feminist issue. Shopping is the one time contemporary women are allowed to indulge in the activities men take for granted: socializing, networking, negotiating and refashioning the Self. It's not about buying consumer goods, any more than the boys' fishing trips or bowling leagues are about catching fish or knocking down "pins" (and by the way, is it an accident that the bowling pins the boys so love to knock down are shaped like exaggerated female forms, with the small shoulders and wide hips male culture so desires and despises?)

Just look at women shopping, really shopping: you'll see the depth of feeling with which they consult each other, the way conversation slips easily back and forth like the loom of a shuttle knitting Penelope's web. As men always grumble, "shopping takes a long time," and may not yield any purchases at all. It yields something else. It yields sorority, or sisterhood -- a true sorority, not restricted to the blond and wealthy. I have walked the aisles of K-Mart as well as Nieman Marcus, and found the same warm sorority in these humbler shopping sanctuaries, only in bigger styles and lower-quality stitching.

And now a horde of bearded boys in badly-cut hemp trousers have begun smashing the display windows of the shops where American women find a few hours' refuge. Just look at the videos of "activists" attacking clothing stores and you'll see naked male aggression hiding behind clever slogans. Men throwing molotov cocktails in crude feats of strength. Men wielding clubs, smashing female images draped in clothing too subtle for them to price, let alone understand. Men in castoff Army clothes, indulging in a "Green" version of urban assault.

And here and there, hanging back, you will see their misguided, self-hating female collaborators, doing their best to look like their male Alpha-wolf leaders in deliberately unflattering hairstyles and cast-off biker and soldier garments. The sheer unattractiveness of these victims' style is itself the best evidence for the benefits of shopping -- benefits these women have chosen to forego.

What is clear is this: anti-Consumerism is misogyny. To hate shopping and all of its representations is to hate women.

As women cower against the crash of glass, pitifully trying to cover their heads with the tiny shield of a Gold Card, these Green stormtroopers destroy women's last safe inner space, their cultural vulva. And as these stupid boys spread their phallocentric terror under the guise of "anti-Consumerism," right-wing rich men applaud. With every Bloomingdale's mannequin beaten, terrorized and raped by these vandals, the male purveyors of far darker, more sinister fashions -- the burqa, the veil, and the miniskirt -- look on with glee.

In the West, these evil trendsetter moguls would see women reduced again to pinchable secretaries in short skirts designed to make all females over 15 look "old." In the Middle East, they hope to "sell" an equally cruel look: basic black. Head to toe. Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.

A world where women are squeezed into Barbie minis...or swathed in black blankets...is this the world we want? Shopping is about choice. And choice is what women demand. A choice of fabric, color and career. Shopping is a human right -- a woman's right!

And SHE grew up in Communist Russia. If you aren't sure Capitalism won the Cold War, ask this emancipated individual. Unfortunately, I don't think she's been laid since.

Fit this woman for a burka and a poppy field, she needs a little perspective.

stabby