I admit it

I have a serious thing for Salt n Pepa, and I still defend my love for them even though I've graduated from most of the other music that I listened to at the time. Considering what SnP were, they started dialogue and provided an uplifting pro-women message in a mess of generic pop rap songs about gettin' it on.

Although I usually mock the hell out of any reality tv series, I was excited when I found out about SnP doing one. Although I never really thought about it, they sort of disappeared after their second album, and I wondered all of a sudden what happened to them.

I've only seen a couple of episodes because the new ones appear to be on Friday night
and I am WAY too cool for that biz, and the reruns are on Saturday afternoons when I'm usually either cleaning or working out or developing yet another hare-brained scheme to save the world.

But I watched an episode a few weeks ago that I wanted to talk about, especially given the way I believe/hope that conversations have changed as a result of the Democratic Party offering up two minority candidates for the highest office in the US.

Salt and Pepa agree to march for Jena 6 (linky linky linky), and Salt (who recovered from bulimia by finding Jesus and has since gotten married and started a family) brought her 8-year-old son along on the march. Somewhere along the way, he asked what a noose was, and Salt said, "Well, white people used to hang black people from them." I was horrified, and at the same time, I realised just how "white" I am: I have the luxury of feeling horrified. Learning what a noose was, learning how a white man can be provoked into using it on me, this was not something my parents ever needed to educate me about. But not so long ago, that was true for black people in our country, and we do ourselves a tremendous disservice to pretend that those days are gone and we've achieved equality. In a way, it denies the same humanity to which we claim everyone has a similar right.

I deeply resent those who suggest that based on my status as a woman, I am obligated to support Hillary Rodham Clinton. I live in a mostly post-feminist world: my mom was a raging feminist in the 70s (as much as a bashful Norwegian musician would be) and she raised me to have faith in my own talents and abilities, however others might judge me for my talents and abilities (sometimes, i think my attempts at licentiousness are way too subtle). I have an engineering degree and for the most part I've been immune to the discrimination horror stories that I heard from other women in similar industries. All the same, I've long maintained an attitude of pity towards those who would judge me for my gender, because I believe myself to be quite qualified as an engineer. That sense of pity doesn't stop me from pouncing on anti-woman ideas and emasculating the man in the same way he fears women will (sometimes I think the typical white man sees minorities or women as a pest or a threat, I want to tell them we're more afraid of them than they are of us, but instead I play into that reason for fear. it's homeopathic). I see it as my obligation to support women who are fighting gender roles in their choice of careers (I have a friend who wants to be a superhero comic book artist, which is a profession which may even have a worse male-to-female ratio than engineering), but there's more to the office of president than just defying gender roles.

In the world of spin that is politics, it is difficult to see who is ever telling the truth. But all my instincts tell me that she is at best, so battered from the Republican smear machine that she has lost her soul, and at worst, a fucking opportunist. Either way, I don't think she is fit for the highest office in our nation, and I don't give a flying fuck whether we share plumbing.

I know we have a problem with gender in this country (stay tuned for an entry about that) but electing a woman into office isn't going to "make the skies open" for women across the country. Anyone who believes that is as delusional as those who think if we elect Obama the country will suddenly right itself and we will use renewable energy and our economy will quickly rebound into another boom and racism will cease to exist, or those who think that if we elect McCain our disastrously managed wars will magically right themselves. There is not a single problem in this world that can be solved without the efforts of many.