#365Feminist Selfie 1: Hair (specifically, body hair)

The brows are lightly waxed.
Because I'm half Armenian.

First in my #365FeministSelfie series.

I haven’t shaved for 23 years. I know, I know. Shaggy underarms are at the top of the list of Feminist Stereotypes, probably right next to “burning your bra.” You’d think I attended college in the 1970s rather than been born during that decade. 

I tried shaving, but after six years of gashing my legs and getting red, itchy rashes under my arms, I threw in the towel. 

Actually, the reason I thought that not shaving could even be possible was due to Pia, the Swedish exchange student who attended my high school during my sophomore year. Pia wore miniskirts, showing her long, white-blonde leg hair to God and everybody. Of course, within two months she had begun to shave as part of her acculturation process. But she had already made her impression on me. 

I’m going to say right here, because I know the first riposte this post will provoke, that I have had my fair share of sexy times with men even though I don’t shave. (I say only “men” because I doubt anyone is going to chime in on the comments with “No self-respecting hot lesbian would want you with that disgusting pit hair.”) Yes, Virginia, there are hetero cis-men who hit skins with women with body hair and either don’t mind or actively enjoy it. After all, ahem, I do have two children with my handsome, hetero cis-man husband. 

I am not alone in my alarm at American culture’s intolerance for body hair. Not because I think that all women should let their body hair GROOOOW FREEEEEE! I am not opposed to women (and men) who trim, shave, wax, electrolyze, or thread off some or all of their body hair. Bodily autonomy is a feminist principle. 

But I do object to a culture that excludes, shames, or punishes women (or men) who do not wish to participate in depilation. 

I never thought about how early this enculturation starts, until one day when my daughter’s friend, five years old, came up to me and whispered, “Most women shave off the hair under their arms.” She said it in the exact tone of an old lady admonishing another that her slip was showing. “I know,” I whispered back, and smiled. She shot me a look of mingled incredulity and distain and walked away. 

I am fortunate that the kind of places I have worked—queer-oriented public health, publishing, teaching abroad, graduate school—did not require a conventional [American] cis-woman presentation. I didn’t have to shave, wear high heels, or wear make-up. This is not to say I don’t groom myself (although my grooming has slipped a bit since my small children have transformed the simple ritual of showering into a major undertaking). 

I just don’t think women should be held to a higher standard of appearance—that is, one that demands more attention, time, and expensive products—than men. 

I hate that stock sitcom gag where a man rolls his eyes over how long it takes a woman to get ready to go out. On the one hand, the joke theatrically bemoans the vanity of women; on the other, it writes over the ways men have historically required women, as their property, to represent and display beauty and—by extension—wealth and class. Although most of us are no longer categorized as property, we can still be props—as adornment, as visual pleasure for the male gaze, as symbols of affluence, often in service to increasing men’s social capital. (And the methods of beautifying—the couture, the accessories, the jewelry, the shoes—simultaneously showcase yet hide the labor of those of far lesser economic and social status—mostly women, some even children.) 

My refusal to shave is one way that I opt-out of the expected time-consuming ritual of costuming for feminine performance. It’s my small, daily rebellion against this facet of sexism. By being “out” about not shaving, perhaps I can be Pia to another woman or girl. 

It is also an assertion of the importance of my pleasure, my time, and the integrity of my body. I have decided that men’s aesthetic pleasure does not rank above my bodily discomfort—pain from cuts, itching from rashes. I prefer to use my time doing something that gives me pleasure rather than removing my body hair. 

For some women, the removal gives them pleasure, and that can be a feminist act, too. 

But in a gender-equal world, every woman deserves the right to her own calculus. 

In Britain, women are going razor-free in August (i.e., Sleeveless Season) to raise money for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). So if you do shave but are poils-curious, you can experiment for a good cause.

And now, to cheer us all up, please see this Robot Hugs comic on the Body Policing Police. Enjoy! 

Feminist Quickies: My Own #365FeministSelfie Series

Tired Mama Working
Each word is its own feminist topic!
Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian

This winter has sucked. In spite—or perhaps because—of our record-breaking warm winter in L.A.,* my kids have been sick a lot, particularly with nasty coughs that linger and linger, sometimes disappearing briefly only to return with a vengeance.

During the month of December, it seemed that we all had one cold that we were simply passing back and forth between each other like some kind of high school basketball drill. Then in January, my grandmother (my last surviving grandparent) contracted a lung infection and spent about a month in the hospital, a forced confinement that made her lonely and depressed. Shortly after she was released, my son got sick again—this time with croup!—got better and attended school for a week, then caught another cold with nonstop coughing and was diagnosed with asthma.

I remember last week as one marathon viewing of the anodyne Canadian cartoon Caillou barely heard over the droning motor of the nebulizer. I didn’t see any of the episodes, mind you, because my eyes were fixed on my son’s upper lip, where I trained the hose spewing vaporized Albuterol.

So, I haven’t been writing.

I have been Facebooking, however. Ah, Facebook! The refuge of the exhausted, isolated mother, trapped with a sick child, yet able to participate in a quasi-social life stolen in five-minute snatches.

A few of my friends began the year pledging themselves to the #365FeministSelfie project, the brainstorm of Veronica Arreola. Arreola began the project as a rebuttal to a Jezebel piece describing selfies as a “cry for help.”  “Selfies aren’t empowering,” the writer scoffed, “they’re a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”

“But what about positive selfies?” Arreola countered. “Yesterday I saw a mom and her maybe-5yo-daughter taking a selfie.They were making silly faces and snapping pics. Those were memories being made, moments of love that both will likely remember forever.” She went on to describe other ways selfies could be feminist: “WOC [Women Of Color] rarely see themselves reflected in media, people over a size 4 are told to hide themselves, transgender persons want to be seen...”
 
I wanted to take part. Because periodically, someone has to write a clickbaiting column declaring feminism dead, again (too many links to embed, I’m afraid). The #365FeministSelfie project seemed like a way for women (and other-gendered people!) to simply and effectively preempt a 2014 Feminism Is Dead article while bringing up feminist issues in a new way. I wanted to be a visible mixed-race woman of color in the 365FeministSelfie roll call. But-

“A selfie every day?” I thought. “Ha ha ha ha.”

In February, my friend Jaclyn Friedman interviewed Arreola for her podcast. Together they were so convincing, I made for myself the more modest goal of a selfie a week.

Now it’s mid-March. I miss writing. I am having that kind of tired, sad, well-worn Cult of Domesticity feminist mom crisis that we all know. (Members of a parenting group I belong to—again, on Facebook—have titled our version Household Drudge, PhD... or MA, in my case.)

Since sustained writing, research, or even thought is quite beyond me these days, my goal now is to turn out a series of weekly quickie posts, based on my own #365FeministSelfie series. Tomorrow’s post will cover feminine performance, social capital, and body hair.

* Yes, I am sorry to rub it in your face, everyone suffering from the Polar Vortex. The downside, of course, is that we are going to run out of water this summer. Oh, and the earthquake this morning.

Are you participating in the #365FeministSelfie Project? What made you decide to join? Share in the comments below! And please subscribe to be sure to catch every post in the series. 

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty

  

Significance, Part 2

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1.)

About two weeks ago, I began a post I titled “Significance.” Then the jury in the Trayvon Martin trial came to their verdict, and I was unable to think of anything else for a while. 

I have been trying to pick up the thread of “Significance.” I have, in fact, almost 900 words of the original Part 2. But, for the moment, I have to scrap them all. I have been writing around what I want to say, because I wanted to keep elements of my personal history private. 

I started “Significance,” in part, to explain why I am currently a stay-at-home/sort-of-working-at-home-if-you-call-this-working mother. But I realize that none of this will make emotional sense unless I talk about the situation of my childhood. 

My parents divorced when I was 2 years old. They came up with a joint custody arrangement where I would spend four days with my mom, then four days with my dad. In the 1970s, divorce was still rare, and in addition to being one of the few brown kids at my school whose grandparents came from the here-there-be-dragons unknown lands of Armenia and Philippines, having divorced parents made me ... well, you can imagine. 

Unto itself, the divorce wasn’t that bad. I don’t remember when it happened, and I don’t remember a time when my parents lived under one roof. Living in two houses was my “normal.” I remember the aftermath, overhearing tense phone conversations between my parents. I remember being afraid when my mom cried. 

My parents married when my dad was 25 and my mom was 22. I was born the day after my mother’s 24th birthday, an age that seems incredibly young to me, considering I was a decade older when I gave birth to my own daughter. 

A therapist once told me that if I wanted to avoid a divorce, I shouldn’t marry until after the age of 30. “You need to know who you are,” she said. “You want to be fully formed as a person.” My mother was not fully formed when she married. Like many women, she essentially transitioned from her role of daughter to wife. So after her divorce, she started on the path to figure out who she was as an adult and what she wanted out of life. 

During this search, my mother didn’t mother me very much. Our closest times revolved around books and food. I can still hear my mother’s voice when I read certain favorites from my childhood to my kids now. And I remember my feelings of delight and belonging over several shared ice cream sundaes. But I also remember being alone, a lot. 

I don’t want to delve into unhappy details of my childhood. It is now in the past, and my mother and I have forged a new relationship as adults. In addition to her responsibilities as a professor, my mother is a loving and attentive grandmother to my children. 

I recently read the article that Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, wrote about growing up as the daughter of a feminist author and leader.* Not only does it sadden me to read about the ways she felt neglected and ignored as a child, but it also sickens me to see her words churned through right-wing sites like Breitbart and the National Review online as a testament to the failure of feminism. 

I want to be clear on this: my mother’s shortcomings in her duties as a parent were not because of work or feminism. I am a feminist, and my parenting is infused with feminist ideals of gender equality and radical redefinitions of masculinity and femininity. My parents’ divorce can be attributed, in part, to a lack of equality. My mother mentioned, as an example, familial and social pressures for her to regularly put on dinner parties where, of course, she would be solely responsible for cooking and serving—which is why the dish I associate most with her is instant ramen noodles. (My father, on the other hand, knuckled down with cookbooks and put a home-cooked meal on the table almost every night.)

I fully believe that a woman can work and also be an engaged and devoted parent. Indeed, for many women, the fulfillment of working makes them better parents. 

But I can’t quite escape that feeling of loss from my childhood. The wound is there, and it aches sometimes, like the scar at the bottom of my belly where my babies were pushed out of my body. 

So now, right now, when my children are small, when I am still the center of their worlds, I want to be here for them. I am not with them all the time—they go to preschool while I grocery shop, juggle the finances, do the laundry, tend the garden, take a nap if I slept badly the night before (e.g., wedged between my two thrashing offspring), read articles, talk on the phone, go to doctor/dentist/acupuncture appointments, schedule the plumber, prep for dinner, have a weensy bit of an adult social life, bang my head against my laptop while I try to write, and do all the things that are difficult or impossible to do with two strong-willed kids in tow. 

But all those hours when they are not in school, and it feels like a lot, I am here to play with them, read to them, keep them from fighting with each other, feed them, take them to dance class and swim lessons, talk with them, and, mostly, to hold them when they need to emotionally fall apart.

They will not be little forever, as every parent with older children reminds me. Later, they will have friends and activities, other interests and people to fill their time and share their thoughts with. And this is not what I want to do forever: tending to hearth and home and little ones. But for these few fleeting years, this is what I want. And I don’t see why that can’t be a feminist choice, too. 

(To be continued in Part 3.)

*Excellent feminist responses to Rebecca Walker’s article here and here.  

Significance, Part 1

Ben Franklin taught his younger sister Jane to read.
It's the other way around for these two.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

“The most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of Beings.” —Jane Franklin 

“The Prodigal Daughter,” Jill Lepore’s latest piece in the New Yorker*, is a meditation on mothers and their longings. Her own mother yearned for travel and adventure beyond the confines of her New England town. Jane Franklin, sister to Benjamin, wished to correspond with her brother with the fluidity and skill that he possessed. Ben assures his sister that, as a literate woman in eighteenth-century America, she is miracle enough; she continues to feel shame over her misspellings and her obvious exertions to express herself in writing. 

When I read Jane’s quote, I immediately teared up. My chest ached with what felt like an ancient injury. Why? I wondered. What was going on here? 

The lives of Benjamin and Jane Franklin tell a compact story of the politics of sexism made personal. Lepore sums it up neatly: “No two people in their family were more alike. Their lives could hardly have been more different.... He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.” 

The struggles of feminism, particularly second wave feminism, have been largely to change this narrative, to allow women to fulfill those frustrated longings: go out in the world, gain renown, participate visibly in history’s great events. 

As a child growing up in the late 1970s and the 1980s, I benefitted immeasurably from the second wave, but what I knew of feminism during my childhood was mostly this: my mother worked. 

My mother taught English and Spanish to middle- and high school students at the K–12 school I attended. She didn’t just work—she had found her calling. In addition to the fundamentals of English and Spanish, she also undertook to instill in them the ability to express themselves fully and accurately in writing and to think critically. She eventually became an English professor at a community college and found her niche, determined to help underprivileged students attain college degrees. Now, not only does she teach classes, but she has become one of the leaders of her college’s Puente Project, a comprehensive program to provide underserved students with mentors, writing instruction, and support to attain academic success. 

Over the years, many of her students have fallen into two camps: those who appreciated her unstinting efforts to get them to achieve above and beyond what they thought was possible, and those who found her an immense pain in the ass. 

I feel like I absorbed teaching through osmosis. My mother’s passion for her job meant that she has always shared her thoughts and struggles with me, and I sometimes watched her classes. The times in my life I have worked as a teacher—as a teaching assistant for writing during college, as an ESL instructor in Senegal, and a teaching assistant during graduate school—I felt that my joy in it, my comfort with it, and my ability to improvise in the classroom stemmed directly from her. I learned from her that my primary job was not to be my students’ friend, but to goad them to think, sometimes unwillingly, beyond their assumptions and received wisdom. 

I think I could have been a teacher, but for my chronic bouts of illness. During my years in graduate school, where we were groomed to become professors at research universities, the manifold ways that I saw how teaching was devalued, how it came at the end of a professor’s to-do list, far below research and the chase for grant money, discouraged me from pursuing a higher degree. (That we, in the United States, hold educators cheap is a discussion for another time.) 

What I have now is parenting. Instead of guiding young adults to unpack the cultural and political significance of performance, both artistic and quotidian, I am pushing my preschoolers to find alternative resolutions to their conflicts other than calling each other “Stupid.” 

So here I am, a wife and a mother, stitching together scraps of time trimmed from child care, household management, cooking, grocery shopping, finances, and my relationship with my husband to write. Looking at my life—absent my laptop, my preschool, the internet, the empty spaces where extended family and/or servants should be, the car, and my brown self—I ask: 

What is this, the Victorian era? 

(To be continued in Part 2.)

*Lepore’s piece is like a well-cut jewel: sharp, revealing, finely crafted, beautiful. Go read it.

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

I am wrestling with an unscheduled post on race, body acceptance, and clothing. My younger child also caught an unscheduled virus, which means I won't be able to write tomorrow because he will be staying home from school, and I blew through my babysitting budget last week trying to Get Things Done and fulfill my activist duties.

But I promised myself to only take last week as a hiatus, so here's a quickie.

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to not beat myself up all the time over not being a perfect parent. Yes, I've read plenty of articles on being "a good enough parent," and I am working on embracing my imperfections. I know, intellectually, that being a "perfect parent" is not possible, nor even desirable if it were possible, but perfectionism runs deep in my family.

For me, parenting is a daily struggle to rewrite old patterns of behavior and attitudes that stem not only from my own childhood, but that have been reinscribed over generations. I am learning about epigenetics, and it helps me to understand how we carry our ancestral histories with us, within our bodies. (I will write more, much more, on this topic.) It can make me feel overwhelmed, that I am trying to swim against the tide of depression, fear, and anger from two separate lineages that meet in me. But it can also help me forgive myself when I fail.

At her preschool, my daughter decorated a small journal for me for Mother's Day. It's exactly like the composition books they use at school to record their thoughts (either dictated to a teacher, or "written" themselves), except in miniature, the perfect size for me to carry around in my purse.

This is where I jot down my thoughts and ideas to explore and flesh out later. I glance at the inscription to give me courage and to inspire me to be the mother my daughter deserves. It is a gift that she gave me, and it represents what a gift she is to me. Parenting has given me focus and purpose that I was seeking before her birth. Not to say that I feel like I was born to be a mother, because mothering does not come "naturally" to me at all, but—to quote Talib Kweli—if life is a beautiful struggle, then creating and guiding the lives of my children is my beautiful struggle, in all its messiness, heartbreak, silliness, absurdity, complexity, and grace.

Guns and Anger, Part 2

So: More on that anger (continued from Part 1).

Less than two weeks before my kids were locked inside their school during a gun threat, Sarah Palin, addressing the NRA convention in Houston, accused President Obama and other politicians of using “the politics of emotion” following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, CT, to raise support for anti-gun violence measures. She said:

“Emotion is a good and necessary thing. Who among us didn’t feel despair, sadness, and that anger, absolute anger, after Newtown, and Columbine. We could use a bit more emotion, by the way, about what goes on every single day on the streets of cities like Chicago and New York. But here is the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Feinstein and Boxer, what those gals won’t tell you: emotion won’t make anybody safer. Emotion won’t protect the good guys’ rights. And emotion is not leadership. The politics of emotion, it’s the opposite of leadership. It’s the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. And it’s not just self-serving, it’s destructive, and it must stop.”

I am surprised to hear that Palin now cares about what happens on the streets of Chicago and New York, and while part of me is itching to unpack the racial implications contained in that sentence (“It’s those ghetto black people who cause gun violence, not the white ‘good guys’ like us!”—sorry, just slipped out), I’m going to try to stay on task and focus on the use of the word “emotion.” Robin Abcarian noted in the L.A. Times that the NRA seemed to have highlighted the word in their talking points for the conference.

I have certainly said things in anger that I regret. For me, the image of saying something in anger brings to mind a preschooler screaming, “I hate you!” And the proper response is not to say, “What?!? How can you hate your own mother?!?” but to sigh and say, “You sound really angry.” I know as a mother that my daughter doesn’t hate me, but what she is saying isn’t exactly wrong or untrue. She just doesn’t have the words yet at age five to articulate precisely the quality and degree of her anger towards me. Instead, she uses what she has.

When I’m angry, I express my thoughts and feelings in a way that is less delicate and more barbed than I would during a time when I’m calm. (Right, honey?) Issues that I have submerged can bubble over in a torrential release of grievances. Yet the actual things I argue over are not phantom complaints: finances, inequality in housekeeping or child care, miscommunications.

And no one can argue that gun violence in the U.S. is a phantom threat.

I detect in the way the NRA and other gun enthusiasts dismiss angry, “emotional” responses to gun violence a soupçon—or a ladleful—of sexism. In her speech, Palin named Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, but not Michael Bloomberg, and termed them “those gals.” (The best way to deflect the accusation of sexism? Have Palin deliver the message.) The words the NRA and their minions use—“emotional,” “hysteria”—are those typically deployed against women to discount or silence them. If stronger evidence is needed, any casual look at the comments to articles about Gabby Giffords will find the predictable invective: mannequin, whore, pet monkey, ugly, bitch.

Since writing my open letter on Facebook, I have joined Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I can only imagine that we are exactly what the NRA expects in a gun-control organization. And yet, as advocates for universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazine clips, and HR 2005, which would mandate personalized technology for handguns, we are not making an emotional plea, but rather putting forth the only solutions that have been scientifically proven to work. (Of course, I could strengthen this argument if the NRA didn’t block research on gun violence.) So sure, we’re angry, but not based solely on emotions, Sarah—based on the evidence.

So, who is employing “the politics of emotion” as defined by Palin?


 

QED.

(Tomorrow's post will be a coda: my huntin’ cousins, political barriers to change in gun laws, and thoughts on activism.)