It will probably not surprise you (given my part-time job of ranting on the internet) to find that I’m seldom at a loss of words. I will wax poetic at length about multiple topics, interject into various conversations, and rant endlessly. But sometimes rage can make me actually incoherent. One story this month made me temporarily unable to word. In Massachusetts, a 22-year-old woman is fighting for the right to not have to give her rapist visitation rights for the daughter she had. Because he raped her. …Yep, that is some quality incoherent rage right there. So since I’m too rageful to make this a cohesive narrative, let’s make this a List of Patriarchal, Sexist, and Other Types of Bullshit That Make Elle Mad About this Story.
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Whenever you’re in any form of activism, you spend a lot (a lot) of time explaining things to people that you have already explained many, many times. Because even though the majority of the people who are going to confront you on the internet (or in a bar, or on a street corner, or in your office, or in your dentist’s office…) about a social activism issue have literally all of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips and are perfectly capable of using Google themselves, they just won’t do it, and demand that you produce, on the spot, evidence for your cause or arguments about things like “why women and minorities deserve rights.” It becomes your job to educate people, rather than their job to educate themselves. And because these people don’t have the decency to gather together in one spot at one time and demand that you tell them things that they could discover for themselves, you end up having the same conversations over, and over, and over. This week, since Vani Hari and Kellyanne Conway were not in the same room at the same time (though really, they should be, because they both don’t believe in science and do believe in saying incredibly dangerous things) I get to explain, again, that being criticized for being a woman and being criticized while being a woman are different things.
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