"No political figure would dare deny the saintliness of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; Betty Friedan's name is a political dirty word."

You mean the man who had endless affairs? And a rather terrible personal life? A saint? No, a human being, whose ideals came to be accepted in public life after his death. Since his cause has been deemed worthy, his private life is excused. As it should be...

All this proves is that feminism is further behind, and less evolved, and given less serious consideration then equal rights by skin color. Feminism, is a dirty word, butt of jokes, because it doesn't really exist, and significant number of folks don't believe in it, or even bother to give it lip service. Even if a politician didn't believe in civil rights, he would give it lip service, because it has a large enough following, lip service to feminism can be ignored as long, as it not to blatantly anti-woman.

What's worse is that it's not the movements he characterizes as being about police dogs vs. aprons; it's the oppression. The quote in full reads "Repression of blacks was the stuff of massive state-leveraged cruelty -- the police dogs and fire hoses -- while repression of women in this country was made of quieter stuff: bras, aprons and constitutional amendments." This is incredibly dismissive. He's essentially (and cavalierly) making an argument that the oppression of blacks was worse than that of women. Now, this is not a productive discussion to have. It just isn't. I don't think that a comparison can ever be made between two such different kinds of injustice, and I don't think that it's productive to try. But to so easily brush off the violence at the heart of the oppression women were fighting is both ignorant and disrespectful. Many women in the feminist movement were fighting for their and others' lives: against rape and domestic violence, most obviously, but also about the right to earn a living and control one's money and one's body, which are about as fundamental as can be. Bras were never at the center of that movement; women's lives were.

Depending on who you speak to, the idea that women - particularly those like Hillary Clinton - she with her Ivy league degrees and Law Firm pay checks, are oppressed, is a matter of opinion - in fact, if you read the right wing blogs, most of the "oppression" cited by feminists is an out and out lie - not made any better, IMHO, by the relentless shuffling of statistics to prove that educated professional women are in the same lot as poor urban people of color. Similar to the gay plaints of "oppression" - again, usually made by white folks with advanced degrees and heavy pay checks, America equates sexism with feminism with middle class crybabies; i.e., bullshit. Almost every city I know has a street named after MLK - usually in a black area of town - and usually prominant. Can anybody direct me to Susan B. Anthony Street? Carol Gilligan's Island? Gloria Allred Place?

No? I'll try Google Maps...

The question posed by the Washington Post is rather nonsensical. The two are not identical--nor are they antithetical. (See, for example, the rhetorical force of "the welfare queen," the stereotyped non-white woman who inspires great fear and loathing in our lawmakers).

But it is also silly to say that feminism has no foothold in America. Most of us experience its effects in everyday life. Almost everyone has a co-worker, many of us have female bosses which has to some extent changed the dynamics of home. Hell, there's a much better chance you are represented in Congress by a woman than 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or 1 year ago.

When my mother was in college she was one woman in a class of 200 in her freshman chemistry courses. She left college for a year after she got married because her husband got a temporary job at another university. She typed his dissertation for him. Today, I have a PhD, I teach classes with well over 1/2 women and all of my graduate students are women. To imagine this somehow happened without the political intervention of feminism is silly. Plenty of folks may harbor anti-woman sentiment--much easier to do in the anonymity of the letters section of Salon--but most people, frankly, have to live in a world that has been transformed by feminism.

I tend to find among students that they are more receptive to an argument about the constructed nature of race than they are relative to gender. So perhaps the author is correct in saying that Americans are more embarrassed to be seen as racist (given the self-evident brutality of slavery and Jim Crow PLUS the silliness of judging via skin color). Whereas sexual difference seems so innate and natural and violence against women tends to be more individualized. But that doesn't mean we have two separate and opposed categories of oppression that must face off against one another in the great oppression Olympics.

Sexism is not *like* racism or ethnic conflict, because it is internal to a culture, and internal to a family.

Racists do not, generally, fall in love with members of the other race, marry them, have children with them, build a family with them, and *still* oppress them. (And if they do, it's a side effect of gender roles more than a side effect of race roles.) Nor do the victims of racism generally fall in love with their oppressors and then actively collaborate in the oppression of themselves and others of their race. Nor do the victims of racism derive any benefits from racism such that they would wish to see the system perpetuated.

Although the fundamental category we divide humans by is male and female, before thinking about race or culture, the fact is that nearly every human values family and fellow members of their culture before "people who aren't like me". And men and women invariably are mixed together in family units, and exist in about equal numbers in every culture. There are very few cultures where men will work to the benefit of other men rather than to the benefit of their wives and daughters, at least not consciously. Men do not band together with men against women across cultures, women do not band together with women against men. Only *within* a cultural unit can men ally with other men against the women of that culture, and vice versa.

Usually what's going on is that people are working to protect the status of People Like Me rather than people of the same sex. Men sell out other men to maximize their own sexual benefit so often we don't even consider it noteworthy. In fact we would be shocked if it didn't happen. We make a big deal about the way women sell each other out to maximize personal benefit vis-a-vis men because we think of women as nurturing and non-competitive, so somehow it's news that women compete with each other and stab each other in the back for access to men and resources.

A woman of some means will collaborate in the oppression of other women because if she has played by the rules all her life and won the prize, ie, a rich man, it is threatening to her that other women want to change the game. Why, if women are all permitted to make money in the workplace themselves, then they might be expected to! And then a woman can't sit on her ass and let her husband support her anymore! What will the ladies who lunch ever do? Likewise, if one woman sees sex as something she sells at a high price -- lifetime support and financial security -- she will be threatened by a woman who sees sex as something she does as a recreational hobby, because the hobbyist's sexuality is of no *less* value to men and therefore threatens the sale price of the expensive woman's commodity. If the market is flooded by free goods then no one can get a good price for what they have to sell. So forcing other women into financial servitude to men, such that they must use the only thing they have left, sexuality, as a good for sale rather than a route to personal pleasure, is to the benefit of women who themselves want to be supported by men (or, worse, *have* been supported by men their whole lives, and are now middle-aged and no longer as "valuable" sexually but too old to learn to support themselves.)

The system doesn't exist to benefit men. It exists to benefit the men at the top. For the men at the bottom, who can't get women as easily, sexism sucks. But then feminists come along and define the conflict as one between men and women. This makes it awfully easy for the sexists to get men at the bottom to support their side, against the men's own interests, and leaves feminists shocked and puzzled when women turn on them and reject what they offer.

Racism doesn't have conflicts like this. There aren't large contingents of blacks who really think slavery was probably a pretty good deal and wish they could go back. But women benefit under sexism much more than blacks benefit under racism. This is not to say that women were never raped, murdered, abandoned to starve or forced into prostitution, humiliated, denied their dreams, and so on, but the model of essentially being a child your whole life, taken care of by a loving family member, is much more attractive than the model of being property of someone who probably doesn't give a shit about you personally. Some masters may have felt affection for their slaves, and vice versa, but the nature of relations between men and women make it *normal* for the oppressors and the oppressed to be in love, *normal* for them to be part of the same family unit, and as humans we have hardwiring to help us accept being cared for and denied adult rights by a loving family member. We all start out that way, ideally.

So it's a lot harder to see systemic oppression within family units, a lot harder to fight against it, and the oppression itself is mixed in with love, family and acceptance to a degree that makes people awfully ambivalent about it. You can't simply fight your oppression, because you're fighting the people you love. This is not true if you're fighting oppressors who are of a different race or culture and who are not related to you. And you are a lot more likely to benefit from a system where your family oppresses you than where totally unrelated people oppress you.

I would say that in terms of sheer pain suffered by the victims, racism is worse than sexism. But that makes sexism a lot harder to fight.