The joy of feminist books
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011The sharp-eyed among my blog readers have noticed that a wee-little Amazon.com widget has been added to my page of late. This is only the beginning of my devious plan to sell out to corporate America so that I can give my dirty millions to feminist causes. For now, the list is a few of my favorite feminist titles as well as a great memoir by a friend (Sonya Huber’s Cover Me) and the book that has inspired my late-in-life freelancing career (Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead). I will add more once I learn how to do such a thing.
In the meantime, one of my feminist idols who hasn’t written a book yet but should (I may get her the guidebook for Christmas) recommended that I get schooled on one of HER feminist idols, the late Florynce Kennedy. You may know her from such phrases as “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Since I gain all of my knowledge from books, I requested Color Me Flo: My Good Life and Hard Times from the dusty stacks of the Hennepin County Library. I picked it up at my local branch yesterday and about dropped dead from joy, for THIS was the cover:
Have you ever seen anything so wonderful in your life? If not, take a closer look at her shirt: it reads BULLSHIT, ad infinitum. Yet as brilliant as the cover is, it’s merely a warm-up to the jewels that are inside. The gospel of Flo:
- “When I get all these mailings about sending money to the little starving children in Africa, I can’t understand how anybody smart enough to write that stuff can be so dumb as to not realize that’s not the way to make the change. How can they think that the way to deal with starving children in Africa is to have people who have already paid their taxes write checks, when all that tax money goes into the imperialist wars that bring about the misery in the first place?
- “A lot of people get upset when you say ‘shit’ or something like that. But do you realize that almost our entire country sat still while they barbecued people in Los Angeles, firebombed a house, burned the people to death?…and you see, this is part of the pathology of people who are so sensitive to some kinds of stylistic offensiveness, and so callous to real cruelty and brutality.”
- “It’s absolutely necessary in order to control people and get them to want to take the shit that you dump on them. You must make them think they are not entitled to the freedom from corruption or freedom from oppression….You must select something that is common to all people to establish the pall of guilt….if you can use sexuality as the modus operandi for oppression, you’ve got a rather simple way to get at the people.”
