How the ‘war on women’ quashed feminist stereotypes

[iverglas]

3. I am totally off topic

But I can't see the name "Pat Robertson" without thinking "Soviet Canuckistan!"

He must hold the record for backfired insults. "Soviet Canuckistan" was immediately adopted by Canadians as our preferred national title. Canuckistanian at this website nabbed a name others would probably have wanted.

Google gets 220,000 hits for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Canadianism

(What, you didn't know there was such a thing as anti-Canadianism??)

The war on women up here so far armounts to cancellation of a couple of federal government programs, and another doomed attempt by a Conservative backbencher to pass something about abortion, this time an attempt to establish a committee to study the definition of "human being" for the purpose of homicide in the Criminal Code to find out whether maybe there isn't some science around these days that means we should change it. Nobody's too worried.

Obviously right-wing policies in general are hurting women in some specific ways, and the loss of things like the Court Challenges Program (to fund constitutional challenges to equality rights violations) is a blow, but we know you down there would be happy to have our problems.

Feminism actually never went out of fashion here.

What happens is the tipping point. You do reach a sort of critical mass where things just aren't going to go backwards, at least not in the absence of some revolutionary backward step. The US had not reached that point. Women's equality was just not sufficiently, and sufficiently strongly, embedded in the laws and policies and public spaces of the nation. Every little bit done in that direction, everybody's own personal contribution, helps.