Long Live the King! Celebrating Diane Torr

By Kelly Cogswell

Sunday afternoon, I gussied myself up and was at the door putting on my red shoes when I realized I was still wearing puffy white athletic socks. I was going to a memorial at Dixon Place for Diane Torr, a remarkable artist, extraordinary human, and king of all drag kings everywhere who died in May. So of course I stopped and changed.

The first time I met Diane, we were both on the bill for a fundraiser at Jennifer Monson's Williamsburg loft that in 1992 did double duty as a dance studio and performance space called the Matzoh Factory.

There was nothing legendary about the encounter. I had to piss and she was hogging the bathroom. "Come on in," she said in her slightly Scottish lilt. "Don't mind me." And when I hesitated-- because I'd never met this slightly stocky woman in trousers and a man's shirt, squinting in concentration as she used eyeliner or something to draw on a beard on her face, or maybe it was a mustache-- she said, "I promise not to look."

I wasn't so sure. She had a wicked gleam in her eye. And as a newly minted dyke, nearly fresh off the bus from Kentucky, I declined the offer, and had to read my poems with a busting bladder. Of course I almost peed myself when she performed.

Diane did experimental dance, performance, and film, but that night, she was my first drag king, and her work shook me as much as the Five Lesbian Brothers whom I'd just seen not long before, and were so unapologetically raunchily, lustfully, and lesbianishly perverse that I blushed all night long. As for drag performers, I'd seen drag queens in their high heels and big hair at a gay bar in Lexington where there were rumors of knife fights. And then again in New York en masse the time I'd been caught in the middle of the Halloween Parade.

But Diane was something else. She crackled with an energy fueled in part by anger, sex, and more than a little mischievous glee as she crossed boundaries you weren't supposed to. A woman making dick jokes and pulling one out of her pants!? Impossible. How she strides across the floor! How her form grows in mass and density as her largely feminine body accepts the mantle of masculinity!

Her performance was alternately an exploration, a critique, and maybe, revenge. She ran away from a violent, alcoholic father, and got dumped in reform school for her pains, where she had to fight to be allowed an academic education. She never took "no" for an answer, and won of course, even going on to college. Then in Seventies London, got radicalized as a feminist and Marxist, and studied dance before she moved to New York in '76 and discovered the downtown art and performance scene. She wasn't the only one who worked as a go-go dancer to pay the bills, but she was one of the few to defend their rights.

All that was in the delight and power she claimed with every step in front of the crowd at the Matzoh Factory. Yeah, this girl from Aberdeen that was supposed to be a shop assistant or factory worker can put on a suit and tie and take up as much space as you, you fucking wanker. There's not some magic power in your body.

She was committed to sharing the experience through her drag king workshops, which she'd launched just a couple years before. She later renamed them "Man for a Day," when drag kings exploded in popularity, leaning more and more towards entertainment and humor.

As hilarious as she could be, her "Man for a Day" project, teaching women to pass, wasn't a joke. And certainly not just a "performance" meant to fuel the work of gender theorists, as that word "performance" increasingly minimizes the consequences of how we express gender. How we get beat up for it, raped, ignored, and marginalized.

At 5'3" she learned aikido to defend herself on the streets. In a clip of a documentary they showed at the memorial yesterday, she explained that part of the attraction of going out in drag was the vacation it gave her from being Diane. From being a woman in public. It wasn't just about danger. "If you walk into a room as a man, you are seen. Walk in as a woman, and you're checked out. By both men and women. To see if you are sexy. At least until you're thirty-five or forty, then you aren't seen at all." As a man though, she existed. Was suddenly human.

That's the gist of what she said anyway. I wasn't taking notes, and was suddenly overcome with loss at the sound of her voice in the room, her kind face. It is impossible that this artist, this groundbreaking human--is gone.

Make America Rape Again

By Kelly Cogswell

It’s not just a joke. The only upside to the Trump candidacy is how having a sexual predator as presidential candidate has inspired women to talk about just how frequently we are attacked and harassed.

One woman can just be contributing a perfectly harmless comment to a Twitter thread, and the next thing she knows some man is typing, FUCKING CUNT, FUCKING BITCH and getting all his friends to make death threats. Another is merely walking down the street, a hallway, a subway platform, and some man screams at her, or grabs her body, or shoves her wordlessly merely because she exists as a woman in a man’s world and she happened to cross his path.

The weird thing is that people rarely talk about these attacks as in the same category as racist aggressions, or homo- or trans- phobia. In fact, groups tracking hate crimes rarely even keep statistics on anti-woman acts.

Maybe it’s because rapists, for instance, are rarely seen as anti-woman. Young or drunk they're excused as normal red-blooded boys just overcome by normal sexual urges that got a little out of hand. That is why men are not to be tempted with short skirts, scarlet lipstick. Or public female drunkenness. Who can really blame swimming star Brock Turner for getting some when he had the chance? Later on, men who rape become outcasts, are considered the intrinsically violent, the “perverts” whose choice of female victims is almost beside the point.

In college, I remember being shocked when I read Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book, “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape,” describing rape as an act of domination which was all about power, not sex, even if men used their dicks to do it. For one thing, it was the first time I understood that all girls got the warnings my mother gave me, and also that this vulnerability, this violence was partly why all the presidents and vice presidents, almost all the representatives and senators and preachers and doctors and priests--were men. (And overwhelmingly white).

Brownmiller’s 1975 book also contributed to a growing understanding of how rape is used as a tool of terrorism, aimed at punishing and subduing whole populations. And why we see rape wherever we see war and civil conflict. Across different cultures and races. From the Sudan to Syria to the American South, both during and after slavery. If she made this leap forward, seeing rape as pure power, it may have been because she was building on work done by black women in the South who had already begun framing it as a civil rights issue when they pressed rape charges against white men who not only wanted to humiliate and paralyze black women, but shame the black men who could not protect them. Eldridge Cleaver was inspired to rape white women in revenge--first practicing on black women--before he had a later change of heart.

The problem with talking about rape as a tool, is that it begins to sound abstract. And erases women. Making the men seem detached and calculating almost as if there was no hate involved, and that rapists, and aggressors don’t hold inside of them a cache of fear and loathing that occasionally, or often, wells to the surface in violence and rape. As if Trump grabbed women by their pussies just to establish his power, and not in the joy of pure hate directed at our femaleness, and a desire to humiliate and destroy.

We don’t have many choices in how to respond. You can fight it every time and die of grief and rage. You can ignore it, even as you shrink a little having learned, as do all people of color in this predominantly white country, that the bodies we inhabit are vulnerable, don’t quite belong to us. The way an effeminate boy learns to shudder at the locker room.

But indulge this machismo enough, allow your culture to celebrate it, you get femicide, the murders of women like Lucia Perez in Argentina who was drugged and raped so violently the pain gave her cardiac arrest. The BBC reports that on average, one woman is killed there in domestic violence cases every 36 hours. Argentina adopted an anti-femicide law in 2012, with harsher penalties for men who kill women because they’re women.

By comparison, in the larger U.S., three plus women are killed every day just by their partners or ex’s. Many more every day are raped. The biggest difference is that last Wednesday people all over Argentina walked out of work for a couple hours in the pouring rain to protest against anti-woman violence. Signs read, "If you touch one of us, we all react," and “Not one more.” Protesters supported them in Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. I can’t remember the last time women in the U.S. have been outraged enough at murder after murder, rape after rape for us to take to the streets on our own behalf.

Election 2016: Misogyny and the Audacity of Plans

By Kelly Cogswell

I haven't written anything about the election yet. Hillary Clinton is running again and there's so much misogyny involved I can't stand it. And the sheer idiocy. My God, whole crowds willing to swallow any crazy thing their candidates promises whether it's Trump vowing he'll throw out immigrants or end gay marriage. Or Bernie guaranteeing a revolution featuring single-payer healthcare and free college, and pie, and the sky.

So for the record, Hillary yes. Bernie no. And post-primaries, any Democrat will do.

Don't bother attacking. It's clear my opinion doesn't matter. I'm a woman after all. Judged for my voice: shrieky. My haircut: bad, needs washing. My record: smudged. I mean, I've been writing these columns for such a long time, anybody can find dozens (out of several hundred) that prove I've been a delusional fool. Nope, I'm not at all clean, but at least you know what you're getting.

Like with Hillary. Who is competent, careful, and has a reasonably progressive (though smudgy) track record of legislation and policy. When push comes to shove most of her stances are similar to Bernie's. Though when it comes to women, she's better.

She hasn't just cast votes, she has initiated a lot of programs and legislation on the national and international level. She has worked for us, horse-traded even, and gotten laws passed and policy implemented. She's an insider, and I'm okay with that in a world where women are second-class citizens at best, in the worst raped, enslaved, mutilated, hidden, and murdered, considered less than human.

So she doesn't make the same rousing speeches. I'm thrilled that she's a policy wonk, an egghead, an annoying Hermione Granger before she bonded with Harry Potter and Ron over that enormous troll. She's the Obama we got after the election. Thoughtful, capable and tough. And willing to go bi-partisan even if the Republicans aren't.

Campaign 2008, Obama gave great speeches sparkling with the audacity of hope. He encouraged us with his deep mellifluous voice, Yes, we can do anything, even end partisan rancor. Behold! The dawn of the most perfect union is near. Difficulties, like queers, were swept under the rug, as he effectively mobilized the enthusiastic Occupy Wall Street sympathizers that were often so fucking radical that they didn't need plans. Plans imply politics. Politics imply compromise, the establishment, and that nut-cracking bitch Hillary Clinton.

I thought he was going to be a total, bigoted, ineffectual asshole. I was wrong. Once he got elected, he governed as a realistic idealist, getting the job done in spite of the vicious Republican pummeling. He pulled the country back from economic meltdown, compromising his purity in ways that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren no doubt disapprove. He named Clinton Secretary of State and she helped him repair the international relations destroyed by Bush. He evolved on same-sex marriage.

And because you can't reform health care by signing, or refusing to sign, a few documents, Obama willingly dirtied his hands with a complicated project of law. Not just mobilizing enormous teams of lawyers to draft a bill that would stand up to a constitutional challenge. But persuading members of his own stodgy Democratic party to accept it, along with a few of the opposition.

All of that meant a great deal of politicking, and compromise, the insider stuff Bernie says he despises. And if his track record after 26 years in the House and Senate can be relied on, I think we can believe him. Only Senators Ted Cruz and Tim Scott have scores as awful as his on the bipartisan index (Georgetown University). And without political skills, Bernie's the same as every white leftie guy ever, waving his nice clean hands a lot and shouting about income inequality. And getting nothing at all done, because in fact, class doesn't trump everything, particularly race and gender. And blab doesn't get you very far.

Nope, I'd rather vote for an imperfect candidate with a wider vision and a pragmatic backbone. Someone who can work with others, and is unafraid to evolve. And who will have an unimaginable impact worldwide as the first female president of the enormously powerful United States of America.

Time for you to inappropriately invoke Thatcher; declare Bern a better feminist than Hillary, (try googling Dolezal, Rachel); and list Clinton's failures, which always include "flip-flopping" on same-sex marriage, even though you voted for Obama, proud to put the first black president in the White House, no matter that he was then against marriage equality, and even campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush. And no matter that even working the adoring crowds, Obama was no Malcolm X.

Nobody expected him to be. It's enough that with Hillary we'll get a good, maybe a great president. And she'll be more than a symbol of what women everywhere can do, but an actual advocate.

I was in France the day after the 2008 elections and I remember looking around the subway at the people of color, and remarking how most of them were grasping newspapers with Obama's smiling, victorious face. And how they were smiling too, and standing a little straighter. It was extraordinary.

Hillary's victory will mean as much worldwide to women. Maybe more.

Muslim Women in France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

You see tons of Muslim women in Paris near the Institut du Monde Arabe on the fancy Left Bank. They're mostly young and scholarly, and charge down the sidewalks with colored headscarves, or black hijabs and abayas floating behind them like capes.

They remind me of young queers taking to the street in their uniforms of leather bracelets and Doc Martens with pink and black triangles on everything, part fashion choice, part remembrance, hopefully even, a symbol of resistance. Because sometimes, if you're lucky, you can take the sign and means of oppression, and transform it into a declaration of war.

Not always though. It's enough to imagine what those pink and black triangles would mean on New York queers if dykes and fags across the river in New Jersey were actually obligated to wear them, embodying discrimination. Then, would the Nazi's pink or black triangle on your Manhattan leather jacket be an act of solidarity, or stupid ignorance? Are we even allowed ignorance any more in our tweet and blog world?

The double-edged nature of symbols arises every time some American jumps into the debate about "the right" of Muslim women to wear a headscarf or body-covering abaya, usually reducing the complicated social debate, especially in France, to a matter of religious freedom. Women should do what they want. Anybody considering restrictions must be a euro-centric Islamophobe.

Besides the problem that such critics erase Muslims that are opponents of "covering," the truth is religion is the least of the matter. In Paris, anyway. On the one hand, you do have those mostly young Muslim women of the scholarly Left Bank wearing headscarves, abayas, and sometimes even the burkha, partly in religious devotion, but often it seems like a flag of cultural difference that they wave at the charging French bull in a big fuck you.

And if they were the only Muslim women in France, maybe I'd say fashion, religion, who cares? It's not worth wasting our breath.

Unfortunately, cross the real and metaphorical river Seine and those little fabric squares covering hair, or bodies, even faces, have little to do with god, or even culture, but misogyny in its purest form. A whole range of women are actively coerced by brothers, boyfriends, fathers, even sons into "covering" in public, and they enforce their will with threats, beatings, rape, and the occasional old favorite of acid sprayed in any naked female face.

Pressure to comply seems worst in the banlieus, in the suburbs, where segregation and poverty are at their most intense, and angry young men are looking for ways to assert themselves. But you see it often enough in the poorer neighborhoods inside the city--the women creeping down the sidewalks behind the men that effectively own them. Tiny girls already in scarves, veiled seething teenagers, and their future selves -- not stylish liberated women at the fancy Left Bank Institut du Monde Arabe, but sacks of exhausted flesh broken with childbearing and hard work. There's nothing sanctifying or empowering at all about the ugly black dirty drapes that hide older Muslim women as they stagger down the street.

When I see them I want to ban all the abaya, hijabs, and headscarves I see. And give a good hard kick in the balls to the young men and boys with their degenerate fathers sauntering several yards in front of the women they despise as trash. I also want to yank aside those Left Bank Muslim girls and remind them that the symbols they're obviously playing with haven't been fully transformed. Black covering robes and scarves may work as a nose-thumbing gesture to the predominantly Christian West. But as a tool against the mostly masculine forces that have imposed them, they're not doing anything subversive at all.

The logical conclusion of "covering" women is a mere 3485.1 miles east in Afghanistan where that piece of compromised shit Hamid Karzai is throwing females to the Taliban wolves in hopes of improving his election chances there. The Shiite Personal Status Law he allowed to pass into effectiveness in July allows husbands to starve their wives if they fail to obey sexual demands, requires women to get male permission to leave the house, tolerates rape if the rapist coughs up dough for the girl or marries her. It strips women of rights to their own children, granting sole guardianship to their fathers and grandfathers.

While this law theoretically only enslaves Afghanistan's three million Shiite women, a huge amount of Afghan women of all origins have protested because it is expected to have an impact on all future legislation regarding family and women's rights.

Given that reality, one thing at least is clear. That it's not more freedom of religion most Muslim women need, but freedom from the monsters that use it to keep them safely hidden and in chains.

Today, I Hate Men

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I used that title in my blog last month, and could have used it several times since. Why not? It gets your attention. Responds to the most common message out there, unspoken, and hidden between the lines, declaring, "I Hate Women. Always."

In South Africa, it's written large in sexual violence. Lesbians, especially, are raped to "cure" us of our sexual orientation, and keep us in a female's place which is somewhat lower than the sole of the masculine foot. On par with the worm. So often relegated below ground to the grave the violent deaths of women look like a slo-motion genocide. It's actually picked up speed since lesbian activist and former soccer star, Eudy Simelane, was gang-raped and stabbed to death last year.

The rapes and murders of all black females have accelerated in South Africa, though you wouldn't know it, what with the government and police responding with an inverse passivity doing almost nothing for dykes. Nothing even for straight females. Leaving rapists and murderers free to do their thing.

Carrie Shelver, an activist with women's rights group Powa, told Britain's The Guardian, to blame "the increasingly macho culture, which seeks to oppress women and sees them as merely sexual beings. So when there is a lesbian woman she is an absolute affront to this kind of masculinity." Call it what you want, the perpetrators are men. And I do hate them.

Like in Brazil, where there's an epidemic of stupid, vicious, criminal rapists otherwise known as fathers, stepfathers, brothers, grandfathers. Last month's big fuss over a 9-year-old girl who aborted twins after her stepfather raped her, wouldn't have existed at all if not for the fact that some idiot local priest summarily excommunicated everyone involved, including the doctors who performed the surgery, and the woman that tried to care for her abused daughter.

So the priester made the headline, along with the Vatican's jockeying afterwards. Only as an afterthought did The New York Times offer a report revealing that a sizable number of Brazil's legal abortions were for under-aged girls who had been raped by men in their family. Even younger ones are raped, used as blow-up dolls at six or seven, but don't turn up in the statistics because they're too young to get pregnant. No fodder for the anti-abortion activists and priests. No media hook.

Yep, today again, I'm hating men. Enough to be trembling. To fall silent. Thinking of all those little girls out there facing this man's world. Once, twice or a hundred times a day they'll be reminded of what they aren't. What they don't have. Or should be. Men will rape it into them, or beat it, or just sneer it in. Even me in my protected cocoon of enlightened societies and the verge of middle age, have a bull's eye on my face. There was that guy I chased down the street after he almost ran over me on his motorcycle. I called him an asshole. He came right back with words he meant to wound, "woman" "lesbian." Oh, and "foreigner."

After a couple minutes of that, the passersby laughing, with amusement at first, then discomfort, I wanted to smash his face in like they do ours, while shouting, "fucking man, fucking man." I wanted to rip his cock off. I didn't, though, just screamed and sounded ridiculous. Angry females always do. Ridiculous and shrill, not because of a naturally more high-pitched voice, but because that's the sound humans make when you thrust pins in their heart, stick bamboo under their delicate nails and grin.

There was that trial on the TV news a couple weeks ago. North African guy got a couple years in prison for spraying acid on a girl's face out in one of Paris's suburban housing projects, if I remember correctly. And on her upper body. He didn't like her uppity ways at the time, but is sorry now, and told her so in court when it came to sentencing.

He's not as sorry as the girl who had half her face melted off and needs the neighbor's help to put a pot on the stove and take it off.

All those men doing what they can get away with. You, too. Indifferent to the violence. Indifferent to our invisibility and silence. How many females write for anybody's press? How many sit in the Senate? How many run the investigations that solve rapes and murders? How many make the laws that bind us? Should we have to beg for equality?

Yes, apparently. You've done enough. Your conscience is clear. Which is why I write, and despite all signs, why I'm often at a loss for words to tell the truth. To rouse you. I so clearly need more. Hardware maybe. Steel-toed shoes at least for that well-placed kick to the groin.

Identity Politics, Bankrupt?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Remember that scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacka are trapped in the garbage compacter room and barely escape as it closes in ominously on all sides?

That's the perfect metaphor for Identity Politics 2008 -- all of us minorities trapped in a shrinking box of trash in which the crushing walls represent not just society, but community inquisitors demanding our qualifications. Are we gay enough, black enough, female enough to deserve liberation?

This week, the sacrificial queer was Mike Buse, chief of staff of Senator John McCain. Mike Rogers outed the guy on his blog, while encouraging a call-in campaign to the right-wing group Focus on the Family asking readers to "thank them for supporting John McCain even though he has gay Americans in high places on his staff, including his chief of staff."

You can imagine the outraged fundamentalists, the angry phone calls to the McCain campaign, all the homophobic hate generated against Mike Buse. Maybe next Rogers'll get a list of McCain staffers of color and encourage people to call the John Birch Society. Hell, why not call the Klan if it'll help bring down McCain?

Just a couple of weeks ago, a huge wave of so-called feminists unleashed their misogyny and hate against Sarah Palin, attacking not just her politics, but her very existence. Wendy Doniger's Washington Post article declared that despite her baby-producing womb, Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman..."

The National Organization for Women's Kim Gandy actually issued a press release announcing that "as the chair of NOW's Political Action Committee, I am frequently asked whether NOW supports women candidates just because they are women. This gives me an opportunity to once again answer that question with an emphatic 'No.'"

Apparently it's the "National Organization for Only Those Women Who Agree with All Our Policies."

I'm not above bigotry-tinged sneering myself, dismissing the 2000 Republican National Convention packed with black faces, and Bush's "Cabinet of Color" as mere sideshows to attract black and Hispanic voters to the Republican Party. I nodded in agreement when I heard Colin Powell or Condi Rice get called Oreos and traitors by other people of color.

At the time, it didn't bother me when black Maryland conservative Michael S. Steele was pelted with Oreos, called an Uncle Tom, and portrayed as a black-faced minstrel during his 2005 bid for U.S. Senate. No problem, said black Baltimore Democrat, State Senator Lisa A. Gladden. "Party trumps race, especially on the national level." Except when, as earlier this year, it's Jesse Jackson accusing Obama of talking down to black people and "acting like he's white."

Stanley Crouch, an African American writer, thinks the greatest threat of identity politics is that it blinds participants to context and interconnectedness. We don't see the national debt, the dangers of selling out to corporations or unions, or the problems of competing with China and India in the global marketplace. "Though they live in the United States, those are not their problems. Identity politics is independent of our common fate as Americans."

Increasingly, I think the greatest problem in identity politics is that most of the focus these days is on the "politics," claiming territory, enforcing ideologies, and excluding anyone whom the gatekeepers determine don't meet the one or two acceptable ways to be gay or black or female.

We dispense with "identity" any time it's inconvenient. In fact, we are disturbingly comfortable using tools of bigotry against each other like when activists like Mike Rogers (and Michelangelo Signorile) incited homophobia against McCain's gay staffer or when black Democrats throw race-based insults at conservative politicians of color.

Feminists refusing to acknowledge Sarah Palin as a woman incite misogyny against all of us and create echoes of those times dykes (and poor women, and women of color) have been excluded from the women's club. Frankly, NOW still prefers we pass. Mouth the right platitudes. Never admit to having shot at squirrels with a BB gun. Pretend that our primary issue is abortion.

I'd dump the cesspool of identity politics if I could. The conundrum is, to end prejudice, and make change in society, there's no other choice but to suppress our individuality and organize around that artificial "identity," even if the color of our skin, our reproductive organs, or sexual orientation hide nearly irreconcilable differences.

To succeed at all, we need to start from scratch, reject politics, reject hate, find our few inches of common ground, plant respect there.

All Hail, McCain

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

McCain did what eighteen million women couldn't. By choosing Sarah Palin to run as VP, he got Obama and the Democrats to retrieve women from the shit heap where we'd been dumped. At least for the moment.

Already her Democratic handlers had forced the accomplished Mrs. Obama to put on her metaphorical apron and play mom and wife at the DNC. Hillary even interrupted the roll-call detailing the success of her own historic candidacy to ask that Obama be named the nominee by acclamation.

John Dickerson in Slate, who had predicted that women would immediately roll over for Obama after the primary dust settled, was busy considering whether or not Obama could win without the votes of persistently disgruntled Hillary supporters. And his conclusion before Palin was yes. There were plenty of new voters, and while, he wrote, Hillary supporters aren't "all crazy harridans or racists" they are "snippy, irritating, and impervious to reason (Obama is lucky not to have them)."

Obama couldn't have agreed more. Pre-Palin, when Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee dared ask Obama to reach out to the millions of women that supported Hillary, he reportedly said nope. That would take too much time and he had to focus on McCain. Obama also sniped, "If women take a moment to realize that on every issue important to women, John McCain is not in their corner, that would help them get over it."

Thank you, Mr. McCain, for your unintentional service to America, and challenge to Democratic Party misogynists. Without your nomination of Sarah Palin as VP, advocating abortion and progressive Supreme Court nominations would once again be women's only visible roles. Fall in line, the Dems blackmail us, or you'll lose the little you've got. The only real issue for women, half the American population, is apparently reproduction.

That's like reducing questions of racism and the role of people of color in America to affirmative action. Or reducing queer issues to gay marriage, and ignoring that at the root of our fight for legal rights and equality is the desire to end homophobia and discrimination, in short, to win liberation.

Since McCain nominated Palin, it's been every so slightly harder for Obama's attack dogs to continue to dismiss disgruntled Hillary supporters as divas, McCain plants, or simply nuts. ie. Go back in the attic where you belong, madwomen. Suddenly our votes count, and attacking us endlessly means risking that women like me will either vote for McCain and Palin, or just stay home.

The problem all along has been that Democrats imagine women are too stupid or irrational to understand the stakes of this election. We're somehow oblivious to the Iraq War, the mortgage crisis and the disastrous economy, the schools that are falling apart, and struggling families. As if we aren't usually the ones picking up the pieces.

Who after all gets stuck pinching pennies while working the worst-paying jobs? Who still ends up with the kids when families fall apart? Women. And women comprise a significant part of the hardcore anti-war activists, the widows, grieving mothers, even vets. Surely it's not women that have long been recognized as the key to successful economies.

Every misogynistic sneer, every suggestion we females stick to questions of female plumbing tells us Democrats don't give a crap about what we think, and that we're not a valuable part of the economic and social recovery of the United States.

If Democrats are stupid and arrogant enough to believe that, why should we trust them and reward them with our votes? Why should we think they're fit to lead? Leaders build bridges, they don't burn them. And the Democrats have burnt plenty in the name of unity. Trying to force Hillary out of the race when it had just begun. Making us fight for a roll call to register the votes she won. Resorting to nomination by acclamation.

That's not unity. It's a tyrannical attempt to erase dissent, and above all, erase women. Women of all races. It was a black woman, Sheila Jackson Lee, that Obama told to get over it. Party Unity My Ass. What Democrats were aiming for was victory, sheer domination over Hillary. Like when one wrestler has the other down on the mat with their arm twisted out of their socket and their legs broken in several places.

Confronted with that, Sarah Palin is a better role model for young women (and queers) despite her conservative social views, than the likes of the retooled Michelle Obama. Palin took on the corrupt Republican establishment in her own state. She defeated oil companies. She may wear go-go boots and drop litters of babies, but she's a fighter.

Remember what that is? Queers don't. In this election, the Log Cabin Republicans have been totally invisible. And queer Dems have been reduced to jumping for joy because Mrs. Obama turned up at an LGBT delegates luncheon. You can take my uterus and shove it.

Gender-Bashing: What Hillary-Hating Meant

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Every day when I walk into the street, I take myself with me -- a personality shaped by so many years of living, clothes tired from the wash, this body with hips and thighs and breasts I didn't think about much until this electoral campaign.

Growing older as a woman, I've gradually faded from public view. No more construction workers waggling their tongues at me and grabbing their dicks. No more gropes on the subway. Or those long undressing sneers. Until I happen to disagree with some man and all of a sudden I'm nothing but, "This Lady, here" or a "She..." drawn out to emphasize that at the heart of my obvious wrongness is my sex.

That's part of why Obama gives me the creeps. It says something about a man when underpinning the blogs and op-eds and comments of his most ardent partisans was the simple fact that they didn't hate his female opponent as a politician; they hated her as a woman. Like they must hate me.

The bias began in the hard news coverage of her campaign, though I suppose you could find some other explanation for just why, when Clinton won a major state, it would still be Obama's photo eating up the space above the fold of the New York Times. Or why the writers trotted out so many adjectives and adverbs. Such a forceful, definitive and hopeful, unifying, transcendent man has never before been seen.

In contrast to that elevating blather, Clinton got months and months of op-ed pages and blogs describing her voice as that of a shrieking harpy, or nagging wife. Her hips were fat and childbearing and repulsive. Her style was schoolmarmish, whiny, overbearing, or castrating. What she needed was a good screwing by a real man.

Even now, the illustrious New York Times only raises it as a question, was there sexism in the media's coverage? What else explains the bias, the overt physical hatred? What else explains why nobody was assigned to analyze why South Park writers hid nuclear weapons in Clinton's cartoon vagina, and some profiteer in tune with the national mood started selling the Hillary nut-cracker online, showing her loaded with shark-like teeth between her legs? Funny, the inventor himself said he'd never do a version of Obama, it might cause comment.

He's getting at the ugly truth. How venues that would never, ever, under any circumstances tolerate sneering comments about somebody's Jewish nose, or somebody else's black dick imagine that in the 21st century female hips and voices and cunts are still fair game. Reduce Clinton to her parts. She'll go away. Which is what everyone wanted. The loudest mouths, anyway.

Not me. She could be my cousin, my sister, my mother, my aunt. Which is why she got such support, way beyond white women of a certain age that the biased media kept talking about. Didn't you notice the photos? There were girls in a rainbow of shades. Plenty of African American, and Latina, and Asian women weeping when Clinton finally threw in the towel. I guess they don't count either.

Ironically, many of the most vociferous Hillary-haters were women, including dykes. It breaks my heart. Criticize her politics, fine. Why not? She's far from perfect. But it's pure self-loathing to sneer at her flesh which is like ours even if we stick it into jeans and tee shirts instead of admittedly horrendous pantsuits. I wonder sometimes if misogyny explains why so many young dykes prefer to come out as boyz, or anything but lesbians, a word which echoes so horribly of women, of the female, and reminds us we're on the losing team.

So much for post-feminism. So much for the level playing field. We have a long way to go yet. Clinton put a couple million cracks in the glass ceiling, but didn't break through. Women barely exist in top jobs in business. In the military, almost every one of us is harassed by her male peers, and a full third raped or assaulted by the time we leave or get killed. Don't blame it just on the war. It's our culture. Step out of line they'll step on you. No wonder that in the heartland of America, girls are pledging their virginity, not just to Jesus, but to their almighty daddies.

Hell, I wish Hillary had a nuclear bomb in her cunt. And that she'd take it to Washington, and bear down with her child-bearing hips on the nation's face. If she did. If she landed on it with all her atomic force, maybe she could destroy the temples of dickness that have taught us women to sneer at ourselves, to hate high-pitched sounds. To see our soft bodies as hateful and ridiculous. Maybe then we'd stand a chance.

A Dyke in Sheep's Clothing

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

795 words.

The kids cry, the parents scream. You eat too much, and drink too much, and go home smelling so strongly of the barnyard that strange dogs follow you home.

That's the Salon de l'Agriculture in Paris, not so different from when I was six and left the Kentucky State Fair deranged from cotton candy, candied apples, bumper cars, and the dark strange smells of tobacco and cows.

This week, I went for an assignment I wrangled for my hometown paper. Nice work if you can get it, eating your way through the French countryside packed into a few square city blocks of convention center.

Besides, I actually like visiting all those animals in the midst of concrete and steel, at least once I choke down my antihistamine pills and my eyes quit watering.

I'm only one generation from the farm, and I remember making trips back to my great aunt's place and poking through the rows of corn that were taller than me, then getting put to work shucking it on the back porch.

I stepped barefoot in a cowpat once, and didn't squeal at all. It was cool and squishy and gross, but I was a better dyke then, and just washed it off without complaining too much, though yesterday morning I found some suspiciously crusty mud in the hall and didn't make a big deal about that either.

It's just recycled hay and the Salon was full of it. You notice right away. The smell hits you right between the eyes. After that it's the moos reverberating in the vast echo chamber of the convention center. Only later do you notice the slick spots you have to navigate around.

Keep going, the cows get bigger and bigger until each is about the size of an old VW van and pretty much the same shape. Imagine a Texas one with horns on the front, and a broken bag of fertilizer in the back and you get the idea.

The Salon features more than two dozen different cow breeds, the milk breeds, and the meat cattle, with and without horns, spots, bells. These French never lose a minute to instruct, so if you keep your eyes open there are exhibits teaching you all about them, from procreation to the hamburger on your plate. Or if you prefer, the cheese.

There was a hullabaloo a few weeks ago when it was revealed that one bull had done more than his share of fertilizing and half the cattle in Europe were related. That's bad breeding, from a genetically diverse sort of perspective, though unless I'm at a State Fair I tend hear the words more when I wipe my mouth with my shirt sleeve.

In fact, I thought a lot about good breeding when I got to the little pen with sheep. These days when I see them I want to ask, Are you a sister? At least that's what I think when I see the kids. A ewe doesn't get to the fair just on her looks. It's either how much wool or milk she produces, or the quality of the kids, lambs, I mean, (not the cute homo sapiens poking their hands through the bars).

Though after an afternoon looking at the breeding posters and displays, I have to wonder why anybody would invest in research to "cure" homo animals when so much fertilization is done artificially. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I did start to believe that Dr Charles Roselli's research in Britain is completely funded by the ultra-right wing in a plot to eliminate queers.

Which leads us to the irony that if our situations were reversed, and it was Paris dykes put there in the pens among other women, you couldn't pick us out by checking for an empty stall.

There's not much lesbian activism in France, but what exists is centered on adoption, the right to insemination, with a little marriage thrown in.

All we want to do is breed, breed, breed -- to such an extent I wonder if the urge isn't more powerful than biology, but part of the growing arsenal of lesbophobia and misogyny.

After all, not every straight woman wants kids. Why has it begun to define dykes now? Especially here, where society in general tends to be discrete about sex, your "private" life, but strictly enforces gender roles and still has a visceral reaction of repulsion to women doing what they shouldn't. Like running for President.

And while I think women should be able to adopt each other's kids, and get inseminated every spring if they want, I wouldn't mind seeing some young dykes take up space on their own account, burn a barn down, leave a hoof print on some deserving face.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.