The Democrats need feminists, now more than ever

The woman bloggers thing is fixing to rear its ugly head again. The kickoff post began here at Echidne's, where she discusses Kos's suggestion that merit-based blogging means that he doesn't have to make a special effort to get female bloggers onto his guest list. Pure merit means, I guess, that females have nothing special to add. I like Kos, I really do. But considering that he uses his own personal history to aid his unique perspective on the political situation in this country, he should be open to the suggestion that diversity is in itself a merit.

I also refused to take sex, race, or creed into consideration. Each writer was chosen on their merits. I am sensitive to the lack of female voices on the front page, but given the surprising diversity of the front-page voices at this site over the past two+ years, I don't feel the need to apologize.

I'm sick of this shit, I really am. The major male liberal bloggers out there do not do enough to make room for female and especially feminist voices. This isn't just a fairness thing. If they really, truly want to be the force that creates a cognizant voice of liberalism and a vision for the Democratic Party to outstrip similiar efforts on the conservative-Republican side, they need to make feminism a priority, not a side issue.

Let's be frank about this. These "moral values" and "culture war" things that keep blindsiding the big-league Democrats are neither about morals nor going unnoticed. It's a full-on war against feminism and the offshoots of it. And feminists, believe me, notice. My blog is completely taken over by exposing the anti-woman, anti-gay, pro-patriarchy stance of the right's culture warriors. Feminists notice and feminists fight. We know what's going on, and we weren't blindsided by this.

I hear a lot of bleating about countering the sexualized morality on the right by saying, "We have morals, too! We're against war and enviromental damage! And for working and making money for your work!" And that's a good strategy. But it's incomplete.

You cannot reply to accusations that your side doesn't have a vision of family and sexual morals with morals involving economic justice and war. Yes, those are moral values. But the war seems far away and economy too far out of control. Gender issues and family issues are things that are part of every person's life.

The punditocracy on the left, from TV personalities to the bloggers, treats these issues as "women's" issues--worth commenting on, but minor issues. Meanwhile on the right, opposition to feminism has been recast in Biblical terms. Now huge swaths of this country see their adherence to old-fashioned gender roles as the moral imperative of our time, and the fight to force this on others as a battle between good and evil. But most male liberal commentators and bloggers I read still ghettoize "women's" issues. They have no moral language to counteract the moral language that the right is using.

Feminists do. We have a fully fleshed-out moral perspective, a complete ideaology that can compete with theirs. But our perspective will never get to fight it out with the right-wingers as long as feminist voices are still relegated to a ghetto of liberalism.

Putting forth female and feminist voices isn't just a matter of inclusiveness. Liberalism and the Democratic Party will not survive unless they can put forward cogent and complete feminist arguments forward to compete with the anti-feminist ones. The Democrats lose ground with female voters every election as the Republicans get better at putting forward female faces to make their party more attractive to female voters. But the Democrats could counteract this in an instant by putting forward women who don't attack other women but speak in feminist, inclusive terms about the good of all women. Female voters then wouldn't feel like they were choosing between one party that has women and another party that has women. They would have a genuine choice between a party that has women and a party that has women that try to speak out for women's interests. That's the sort of genuine choice that can bring people back to the fold.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. There is no reason that blogrolls, group blogs, and the like shouldn't be 1/2 female. Tokenism is not working for putting forth a liberal vision where men and women both have a place in this society.