I want to thank the defenders of misogyny [View all]

[BainsBane]

for crystallizing in my mind what the true political struggle we face today consists of. For some time, I have experienced hostility for talking about my concerns about violence against women, rape, and human trafficking. I have not once posted a thread about women's issues without having it called flamebait, divisive, or trivial.
I have learned that no issue I care about has consequence to many here: misogynistic language, trivial; rape, exaggeration; inequality under the law as codified in the Hobby Lobby case, "hair on fire," human trafficking, "already illegal" and not worth bothering about.

Now I see that considerable numbers of people find it impossible to relinquish what they see as their right to verbally abuse women like me (no I am not speaking for all women and certainly not for the ones who prefer abuse to respect). There should be nothing controversial about the idea that human beings deserve to be treated with respect. All human beings, full stop. Yet somehow when those human beings are women, we are told respect doesn't matter.

This comes in the context of political discussions about which issues and segments of the population the party should represent. I have for some time witnessed a politics of exclusion, where a few seek to make the party smaller and smaller so that it represents only people who think and live exactly like them. The banning of a member, one whom I also liked and will miss, has become yet another opportunity to target feminists and women, even though it was a male administrator who PPR'd him. Feminists are again scapegoated by those who lack the courage to confront the people actually responsible for the banning. The fault must be uppity women who refuse to keep quiet and accept their verbal degradation by a privileged minority.

I have learned than when it comes to issues of gender, I cannot count on many of you to champion my rights. I have learned my rights are not merely inconsequential to many here, they are seen as something to target, to eliminate.

Many here have defined the electoral choices as between "Third Way" and "real Democrats' or Wall Street and Main Street. I reject that definition, and I might be more sympathetic to those concerns if my own were not treated with such hostility and contempt. For me the political struggle is about entitled privilege of the few vs. the rights of the many. I will not sit back while my rights are belittled and undermined. When I can't even count on people to treat me as a human being, I certainly can't trust them to make my rights a priority. I now know that I MUST focus on my rights because there are too many who claim to be on the left that seek to erode them. There is indeed an us vs. them, but for me the them is white male entitlement, a desire to take the Democratic Party back to serve the interests of the privileged few over the many. I will not be complicit in that. I will instead stand up for my rights as a woman because clearly they are under assault from all quarters.

I like Sanders. I agree with his policies on most issues, but I loathe the exclusionary politics I see emerging in support of him, likely through no fault of his own. Thanks to the defenders of misogyny, I have learned that gender does matter in a political candidate, as does a history of fighting for women's rights as I understand them. For that reason I will be caucusing for Hillary Clinton, and I may well campaign for her. The discussion over the past few days here and the refusal to concede that women deserve to be treated with respect has shown me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vitriol toward Clinton is the expression of an entitled few desperate to hang on to their own privilege. Clinton threatens male privilege, and that is ultimately a pernicious and deep-seeded form of power. If you all were challenging capital itself, I might set aside my concerns about gender inequality, but there is no such critique here. Instead, there is merely an effort to regain your own position atop the capitalist world order. You all put your own rights first, which is understandable. Now I will put mine first. I will cast my vote in opposition to white male rule.