Me and EMILY: EMILY’s List Moving Women Forward

A record number of women were elected to the House and Senate in November, and that staid rabble is inching closer to “looking like America.” They all weren’t Democrats or progressive. After all, we have Old Guard G.O.P. cheerleaders such as Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), and House elevator monitor and Granny-from-hell Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). Foxx could get a gig without a name change as a stripper at Leisure World (emergency defibrillator available.)  One part of the government “by and for the People” after another  has begun to start looking like something more than a “boys club.”  It’s about time.

EMILY’s List is a women’s rights organization founded in 1985, which works for change in laws affecting women and to elect women to offices which they are frankly underrepresented in. Still.

The “boys” frankly haven’t turned out to be all that hot and studly when it came to governance. We aren’t talking about Newt Gingrich’s skirt-chasing acumen. That much ballyhooed Constitution was written nearly a quarter millennia ago, when founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson had to have a zesty probably-not-consensual session back in the women’s slave quarters before going back to the stress of scribbling “holy writ.” I swore to protect and defend the Constitution, not blindly worship it.

I’m a guy. I just checked during the last trot to the potty pondering those “prostate health” pills hawked on late night cable TV.  As submarines were an all-male province until last year, it took my first two dozen years on the planet to have a woman sailor to arrive in my shop. A decade later, I was one of two guys in an office otherwise populated by occasional skirt-wearers who weren’t Scotsmen. I have worked for many more women then men in the decades since without changing the chromosomes I was born with.  There’s still an ample level of testosterone. I have no plans to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be the next J. Edgar Hoover.

Entirely secure in my guyness, often to an annoying extent, I have no envy of the other gender’s lot. Many aspects of womanhood are frankly a pain in the butt, which I would “take like a man” and piss and moan about it.

Boys, we are outnumbered everywhere but in the halls of power. If we don’t adapt, we’ll end up like those extinct dinosaurs who $arah Palin keeps talking about drilling. (A scary thought, eh?) Conservative neanderthals who ran on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” instead pursued a legislative and regulatory campaign of “zygotes, zygotes, zygotes.” Zygotes they will never have to carry.  For all the myths about “penis envy,” there is a persistent and repressive fetish of “transvaginal probe envy” in several states.

Remember when failed Presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick “Gov. Goodhair” Perry (R) signed his state’s invasive anti-choice law, flanked by legislative leaders who were heavy on cowboy hats and light on estrogen? There was actually a woman in the background who looked like her last ovulation dated back to Woodstock. Virginia legislators show no sign letting up on their “War on Women.”

Women are not taking the misogynistic crap anymore. Conservative men should be comforted knowing there’s probably room in Marcus Bachmann’s “counseling” appointment book. For the rest of us, it’s karma; what goes around, comes around. Fairness is progress.

I joined EMILY’s List. It doesn’t make me any less of a man.


  1. What a terrific article!