Uterus Rising
The Guardian’s Deborah Orr tells the unenlightened that Hillary Clinton should be elected president of the United States because she has ovaries and fallopian tubes, and that’s what really matters:
She’ll be the first American president who has experienced childbirth, or even admitted to wearing a bra… She’ll be the first president to have prompted the need for an answer to the question: who is that guy then, if he isn’t the first lady?
An opening for a feminist gag is what voting is all about.
I’ve never been a big Hillary fan. I don’t expect her to be the best president ever. In my book, anything more than competence would be a bonus.
Yes, if elected Mrs Clinton may be barely competent, and possibly much worse, but she would nonetheless be,
the perfect US president.
Why? Because Hillary is a she-person:
The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else. Anyone who doesn’t understand that, in this one respect, Clinton is an absolutely perfect presidential choice, is simply refusing to acknowledge reality.
You heard the lady. We must vote based on a person having the right kind of genitals. It “transcends all else.” Because the “perfect US president” is one whose merits, so defined, are an accident of birth.
Ms Orr’s Olympian logic has astounded us before. As when she insisted, based on nothing, that the entire nation – not just a tiny subset of well-heeled Guardianistas – is raging against the convenience of the local supermarket, where cheap food is plentiful and easy to find. Instead, said she, we’re spending our weekends in joyful protest at the nearest out-of-town farmers’ market, where securing a week’s food shopping is a more ambitious and time-consuming task, and much more expensive. And we’re doing this because – yes, because – “people don’t have as much money to spend.”
Readers may also recall Ms Orr’s grumblings about the fact that women aren’t choosing to appear on comedy panel shows in the numbers she, Ms Orr, would like. Although offering no evidence that women are being discriminated against by producers or audiences – and while inadvertently acknowledging the contrary – she nevertheless insisted that the “gender imbalance” in comedy panel shows is an “injustice,” and so something must be done. According to Ms Orr, female comedians are shy, fragile creatures and must be declining invitations to appear on lucrative, high-profile comedy panel shows because there aren’t enough women on lucrative, high-profile comedy panel shows.
According to the Guardian, “Deborah Orr is one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators.”
Gender box ticking trumps policy and competence. Good to know.
Gender box ticking trumps policy and competence. Good to know.
Apparently the “perfect US president” is one whose merits, so called, are purely circumstantial and symbolic. Because identitarian symbolism – happening to be female, or brown, or whatever – “transcends all else.”
It’s a pretty feeble and bewildering argument, even by Ms Orr’s standards. She mentions a few of Mrs Clinton’s many, many failings – while carefully omitting her more scandalous moral shortcomings – and says, “No doubt many people consider it wrong to believe that Clinton should be president ‘just because she’s a woman.’” And yet Ms Orr doesn’t offer anything of substance to counter that objection, beyond mumbling that “compromise is needed” and letting us know that Mrs Clinton has given birth.
Yet I guess forMs Orr Margaret Thatcher wasn’t the perfect Prime Minister despite having given birth/been a grandmother.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Voting against someone, just because they are a woman, is sexist.
Voting for someone, just because they are a woman, is not.
Classic leftist double standard. So open and brazen that they can speak and write it in public and not be laughed out of the room.
“The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else.”
Well, if by this you mean that the US President is largely a figurehead, I’d sort of agree. But I think that’s not how “symbolic” was intended.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Voting against someone, just because they are a woman, is sexist.
Voting for someone, just because they are a woman, is not.
I don’t think consistency was ever Ms Orr’s strong suit. She denounces “gender bias” in others while herself exhibiting a level of gender bias that’s hard to top. Apparently, gender trumps policies and competence because “men and women must feel equally able to enter public life” – and electing a female president simply because she’s female, even one who may prove inadequate and disastrous in the role, somehow serves that end.
The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else.
Aside from the fact that our presidents are elected and not appointed, Ms. Orr’s other mistake is not appreciating the true symbolism of a Hillary victory. Specifically, that the only way for a woman to get ahead is to marry well and remain mute during her husband’s numerous marital infidelities, while bystanders laugh at her.
I’m sure Ms Orr would be as equally gushing and uncritical if either Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin announced their intention to stand for election.
It worked so well in 2008, why not give it another try?
“Vote for this guy or you’re a racist” becomes “vote for her or you’re a sexist”
Curiously, Deborah Orr wasn’t that keen on Margaret Thatcher.
Only as a messianic extremist could Thatcher ever have succeeded as she did […]
in the 1970s it was the unions, not the Tories, who were eager to reduce the power of the state, and exercise power from their own fiefdoms instead. Britain at that time was more egalitarian than it had ever been before or since. Instead of building steadily on that happy position…
Ah, yes. That happy position of the 1970’s, when millions of working days were lost to (mostly frivolous) strikes, when we were “the sick man of Europe”, when the IMF had to bail Britain out as if we were some pathetic banana republic, when the rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead went unburied.
When brown polyester, Blue Nun, and Jimmy Savile stalked the land like a molesty monster of bad taste.
Those happy days.
But back to Mrs Clinton:
The US may have been offered a choice between a Bush and a Clinton before. But they’ve never been offered a choice between a man and a woman, let alone opted for the latter. Some Americans are more free than others: which, in the land of opportunity, is catastrophically appalling, a huge, oppressive stain on the world.
It’s catastrophically appalling AND a huge oppressive stain on the world. No, she’s not talking about ISIS, Ebola, or the civil war in Yemen.
She’s describing the terrible injustice that no US President to date has been to the ladies’ room. Unless it was Bill, up to his old tricks.
How can America complain about the treatment of women in other countries and cultures – which it does – when its own democratic system is so manifestly inadequate in this regard?
How can America oppose forcible genital mutilation, honour killings, and rape – when its own President… has a penis? 🙁
How indeed.
The US has got to start somewhere in addressing its historic problem with male hegemony
Err… why?
Are American women not the wealthiest and freest women in any major country in the world? Do they not live longer, have more spending power, and go to university in greater numbers than American men?
“Male hegemony” has worked out pretty well for the ladies so far.
Voting is not the same thing as liberty. Being ruled by a head of state with the same genital configuration as yourself doesn’t mean you are better or more wisely governed. Or even better “represented”.
Anyway, I think this “vote Hillary, because vagina” campaign may be doomed.
Barack Obama benefited from self-identifying as black. It won him a North Korean style majority of black votes, and huge numbers of white votes too, on account of how historical and hopey and changey it all was.
But despite the best efforts of feminists, women don’t automatically vote for women.
Hillary may well win fewer white female votes than Obama did, because women don’t necessarily like other women, particularly abrasive, bossy women like Mrs Clinton, who lives a multimillionare lifestyle yet cries poverty.
because vagina
That was very nearly the title of this post.
and electing a female president simply because she’s female, even one who may prove inadequate and disastrous in the role, somehow serves that end.
Credit to her for exposing so clearly the rotten kernel of so much modern western Feminist advocacy. Simply replace electing a female president with any elected or appointed position, leadership role, or acceptance to competitive higher education. That’s the gist of it. Screw results, this is about power. Real power, mind you. Not the well paid person in charge of guiding the camera-snake into the blocked up sewerage-mains on a cold and rainy winters day kind of power. We don’t need any more equality in those areas of life, thank you very much.
in the 1970s it was the unions, not the Tories, who were eager to reduce the power of the state,
Heh. And yet the unions’ foremost mouthpiece – the great Stalinist warrior Mr Arthur Scargill – openly declared his ambition to position the unions, not the electorate, as the country’s decisive political force, and thought himself entitled to topple elected governments and “abolish capitalism.” Such was his imagined prerogative.
Interviewed in the pages of the communist newspaper The Morning Star, Scargill said, “Capitalism is an obscene system that deserves to be overthrown.” Casually assigning himself this task, Scargill envisioned “the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” and, of course, state control of the media. This, he said, would all be part of an “irreversible shift towards a socialist system.” As Claire Berlinski notes in her excellent Thatcher biography, Scargill and his comrades were very fond of the word “irreversible” and used it frequently, not least as a euphemism for “no more elections.”
But hey, according to Ms Orr, they were “eager to reduce the power of the state.”
female comedians are shy, fragile creatures and must be declining invitations to appear on lucrative, high-profile comedy panel shows because there aren’t enough women on lucrative, high-profile comedy panel shows.
Or maybe they’re just not funny. Or at least many of them are not. I’m thinking of the Janine Garafalos and such, some at small time comedy clubs, where their entire routine consists of nothing but bitching. Which I suppose is to be taken as observational humor. Every year I send Janine Garafalos a Barbie doll for Christmas. Not all that funny, but still funnier than damn near anything she or her ilk have ever said.
“… in the 1970s it was the unions, not the Tories, who were eager to reduce the power of the state, and exercise power from their own fiefdoms instead.”
Oh, that’s a belter. This seems to be a favourite tactic of the Left right now, trying to make out that they’re the real liberals. “Well, in fact, Adam Smith was a revolutionary socialist, and Stalin was totally into free markets.”
In fact (you know, as in stuff that actually happened), the unions were using the power of the state to their own ends. Or did I just imagine the closed shop, compulsory collective bargaining, and wholesale nationalization?
As for “Vote Hill, because tits”, what happens next? They managed to get a third-rate nobody elected because he has black skin, and now they think they can get a manipulative, authoritarian, crook elected thanks to her convenient lack of a Y chromosome. After that, they’ve shot their bolts. How do they get the next no-hoper elected?
Obviuosly Ms Orr is ignoring the male dominated rapper culture where female gentalia is only and frequently described by their orfice (s).
Mark Levin coined the term “genitalian” yesterday to denote those who vote for a candidate’s naughty bits.
I’m not sure they want to encourange people to vote for Hillary’s naughty bits; the mental image alone is enough to put me off my feed for months.
“No doubt many people consider it wrong to believe that Clinton should be president ‘just because she’s a woman.’”
How about this?
It’s wrong to vote for a woman who has spent a large chunk of her adult life destroying the lives of women who accused her predator husband of rape and sexual assault.
What’s worse, ladies: Not believing the Rolling Stone UVA rape story, or making sure that any woman your skeezy husband molested can never show her face in public again?
Most puke-indicing scenario evar.
But hey, according to Ms Orr, they were “eager to reduce the power of the state.”
Apparently Arthur Scargill had a vagina that none of us knew about.
The feral cat in my neighborhood has “experienced childbirth.” Doesn’t mean she’s be a good president.
Come to think of it, she might make a better president than Hillary. Probably couldn’t be worse…
Could we sane Americans request that Ms. Orr stick to fouling up the UK government? Thank you.
Shouldn’t the complaint be that they are objectifying her, only focusing only on her sexual characteristics while ignoring her personality and character and all the little things that make her who she is?
Oh, that’s when someone else does it.
“because vagina
That was very nearly the title of this post.
Posted by: David | April 14, 2015 at 13:06″
You could have also stolen a title from Tom Clancy.
I think that ship has sailed, Mr. Sherman.
The depressing part is that you know that she is going to win the election, not because people will outright admit to themselves they are ticking the gender box, they will vote for her based on a vague image of “progress”. Given a choice between a republican man who will represent all of the outdated social structures of the past and the magnificent personification of equality she is, you know who people will flock to.
One of the most saddening things that I saw in the Obama election wasn’t that people were supporting someone that represented a party that I disliked, I probably would have voted Dem if I was American. It wasn’t that I disliked Obama either. It was that every person I saw interviewed never once mentioned party policy, they all just spouted “change” and “progress”.
You could see them performing the mental gymnastics in real time to avoid admitting they they voted for a leader based on race and image instead of anything else.
After that, they’ve shot their bolts. How do they get the next no-hoper elected?
The next one will be gay…after that there is transgender…and after that they can mix and match depending on which group has the highest special victim status that week.
Between Orr and her awful husband I think they are damaging leftyism irreparably. Not because they speak utter bollocks -which they both do- but because each of them, in their own way epitomise the smug, holier than though mocking tones of the urban liberal elite.
Will Self reminds me of a pious and infinitely slappable human version of Cowslip the rabbit from the Warren of Snares in Watership Down and if one can watch this dishonest, mocking, condescending and totally shitty performance by Orr without wishing she would disappear up her own smug arsehole, you are a better man than me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_3YNOCrwg
As for “Vote Hill, because tits”, what happens next? They managed to get a third-rate nobody elected because he has black skin, and now they think they can get a manipulative, authoritarian, crook elected thanks to her convenient lack of a Y chromosome. After that, they’ve shot their bolts. How do they get the next no-hoper elected?
First gay president, first atheist president, first BDSM president, first Hispanic president, first transgender president, rewrite history and call Obama a mulatto uncle tom so they can do a rerun of first black president, first Muslim president, first crippled president… there are many ways.
What’s interesting is that Ms Orr often struggles to finish her thoughts, let alone string them together in a coherent and convincing way. I get the impression she simply presumes the reader’s agreement and therefore doesn’t feel obliged to make a case of any substance. Questions are simply begged, as if self-evident, as if addressing basic objections were somehow beneath her.
And so, for instance, she denounces “the longstanding structural fact that the White House is open only to men” and says “this problem needs sorting more urgently than any other,” without ever establishing that this “longstanding structural fact” is indeed a fact. There’s no reference to female candidates of any party or any attempt to fathom reasons for their lack of success in any given instance. The cause, the only cause, is simply presumed.
That we’ve yet to see a female president is somehow self-evident proof that such a thing is “impossible” due to “male hegemony.” It just is, apparently. (Oddly, this all-powerful hegemony permits the flourishing of Mia Love, Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Janet Napolitano, Elizabeth Warren, Madeleine Albright, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, etc.) And this alleged hegemony is taken to mean that, “some Americans are more free than others.” This rather bold statement is never unpacked. We are, however, told that it’s “catastrophically appalling, a huge, oppressive stain on the world.” Perhaps there’s a case to make, but Ms Orr isn’t the woman to do it. Instead, she jumps to an unearned conclusion.
And this is “one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators.”
first crippled president.
Done that: FDR
“this problem needs sorting more urgently than any other,”
Really? More than crime? Or healthcare? Or welfare dependency? Or pretty much anything other than the possession or otherwise of a Presidential vagina.
Orr maintains that the “longstanding structural fact” persists despite the avalanche of legislation and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic from c. 1968 onwards which was supposed to counter this inherent discriminatory bias towards white male hegemony.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that her argument requires that she admits the redundancy of one of the Left’s cherished beliefs (i.e you can facilitate social re-engineering via legislation), because it would mean that most of that anti-discriminatory stuff has failed to make an impact on the social structures it was designed to change.
Funny how the feminist left hate Thatcher then, isn’t it? Or does being a female matter only if you’re first and foremost left wing?
Apparently the “perfect US president” is one whose merits, so called, are purely circumstantial and symbolic.
To be fair, we do have the precedent of Obama’s election to support that theory.
Bah. Other commenters beat me to both points.
Instead, she jumps to an unearned conclusion.
She’s a feminist. Writing in the Guardian. What are the odds?
Between Orr and her awful husband I think they are damaging leftyism irreparably. Not because they speak utter bollocks -which they both do- but because each of them, in their own way epitomise the smug, holier than though mocking tones of the urban liberal elite.
I think you underestimate the appeal of leftism. Joining a chorus of smug, holier-than-though mocking tones has appeal to a certain kind of mind. It exists on the right as well and has been mocked thoroughly through free societies, mostly from the left. This has in a sense immunized the left, and given their sway over the culture via media, academia etc. the vast majority of people, from seeing themselves in such a light. They are smug about their lacking the holier-than-thou gene. It appeals to minds who feel defeated and cheated. Real or perceived, and psychology today says there’s no difference, the feeling of having been cheated is trending significantly up. I don’t have to go full Goodwin to relate the dangers of such underestimating, though perhaps I just did.
She’s a feminist. Writing in the Guardian. What are the odds?
Well, yes. It has been known.
Incidentally, Ms Orr’s combination of vagueness and adamance reminded me of an exchange I had here years ago with a feminist who made similar assumptions about presidential candidates and “male privilege.” She got quite frustrated when I asked for evidence.
She got quite frustrated when I asked for evidence.
Nice bit of debating, David. 10/10 for patience.
So by this argument, Sarah Palin would have been a great president, with Ms Orr’s full support, because she has experienced childbirth far more times than Hillary.
10/10 for patience.
Well, I tried, though I’m not sure it got me very far. But it’s interesting how often that kind of thing happens. By asking for evidence, I became a bad person, a contrarian out to cause mischief. Because feminist boilerplate is apparently what “all reasonable people” believe.
‘Will Self reminds me of a pious and infinitely slappable human version of Cowslip the rabbit from the Warren of Snares in Watership Down’.
That’s a good analogy. I hope you don’t mind if I nick it.
His repulsive performance on C4 after the Charlie Hebdo/kosher supermarket massacres made my gorge rise.
Hoist away dear boy.
Indeed Self’s unctuous reaction to the Hebdo massacre was one of the lowest points in a long line of low points of lefty apology for Islamism.
The timing, the tone and the content of his apologia was vile.
“The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else.”
Oh my. Are we going to witness a leftist Assumption, in which Hillary’s vagina ascends bodily into Heaven, accompanied by choirs of angels? Or does this mean that angels are going to speak unto shepherds guarding their flocks, telling them that God has sent Hillary’s vagina to save us from the Koch Brothers?
But, Dr Cromarty, FDR wasn’t openly
crippleddisablednonambulatory.The graun have done this before – eg posting a raft of articles acknowledging that Diane Abbott was not Labour leadership material, but should nonetheless be voted for as she was female and black – unlike those more experienced and able and competant candidates who just happened to be white and male:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/09/diane-abbott-nomination-tokenism
I’m female, professional, qualified, able – I’m utterly mortified to be diminished and patronised in this way. I’ll look for employment on merit, ta v much, plz not to be insulting me by going on superficialities. Plus I’ve got sons – decent able youngsters who equally deserve to be judged on merit. Deborah Orr can take a running jump.
Yes, David, asking of some people for evidence seems to produce reactions reminiscent of a Bateman cartoon.
Shortly before I left the UK, I had a few opportunities to ask “How do you know?” Mostly this was in relation to CAGW. I am glad to be out, but do miss the reactions I received then.
But they’ve never been offered a choice between a man and a woman
As if presidential candidates are items in a vending machine presented by some shadowy power.
That aside, the statement is false. Democrats were offered up this very choice within their own party in 2008 and they voted for the dude. Are we all supposed to have collective amnesia about that now?
I suppose if—perish the thought—I were Deborah Orr, I too would be on board with someone’s being anointed to a position far beyond anything justified by wit or works because of having a) ovaries and b) a more accomplished and highly-regarded husband. After all, it worked for her.
‘ As Claire Berlinski notes in her excellent Thatcher biography, Scargill and his comrades were very fond of the word “irreversible” and used it frequently, not least as a euphemism for “no more elections.”’
I’m not so sure about “no more elections” since I think the implementation of the “irreversible” part involves brick walls, firing squads and the unwilling participation of capitalists. Once that deed is done, with regular ongoing corrective action, voting would proceed, probably with a union official present who would check each ballot paper before it is placed in the ballot box and make sure that every voter has properly chosen the name of the only (union-endorsed) candidate. If you don’t have anyone alive who can be elected instead of the union-endorsed candidate, that’s pretty “irreversible” – and you can still have your elections.
When The Indy, I think, ran a front page picture of Shrills on the front page the other day (hey, here’s news: a woman who has tried to run for Prez before and failed badly is going to try again eight years later when the man she couldn’t beat to the job is retiring. How about that!) it showed a grinning Shrills reaching out to shake the hand of a white woman, yet the caption to the photo was about this woman reaching out across America. Now while it looked like a table top rather than continent, I bet the leftoid who came up with that smart bit of wordplay got an extra pat on the back, if such fulsome praise is allowed at The Indy.
If it wasn’t the Indy I apologise, but it some meaningless trash paper or other.
>”How do you know?” Mostly this was in relation to CAGW.
I do like to ask people of the CAGW faith to tell me exactly what %age CO2 is present in the atmosphere. How an insulator makes something warmer…
It was that every person I saw interviewed never once mentioned party policy, they all just spouted “change” and “progress”.
Harold Saxon for president.
ba-da-da-DUM. ba-da-da-DUM. ba-da-da-DUM. ba-da-da-DUM.
Eeriest thing ever, given that the episode first aired in 2007.
‘If it wasn’t the Indy I apologise, but it some meaningless trash paper or other’.
It was the Indy. A paper that was actually set up 29 years ago with a commitment to hard news, and a determination to separate reporting from political commentary.
Witness the shitness.
As for Deborah ‘Chosen People’ Orr, I’d imagine that if Agatha Habyarimana made a run for the Rwandan Presidency she’d endorse her. Because vagina.
Would she be called VOTUS?
I dislike politicians. I find them, especially the life-long ones, unscrupulous to the core, phony, and generally ignorant of the world around of them while considering themselves the giant brains of the world who believe their connections make them geniuses. And Hillary is, of the brain dead twits who will be running for president, the worst offender of them all.
And Ms Orr is not alone in her lofty moral calculus.
If the calculus is that we need some dumb twat for President just because, I nominate Kim Kardashian. She’s better-looking and has the requisite parts.