My good friend and partner in crime Lisa Marie Basile is going to be writing a weekly column for us at GHQ, and I honestly couldn’t be more excited. Lisa is a writing and editing pro who interned at CosmoGIRL! last year, is working on a novel, and will be the editor-in-chief of our school newspaper the Pace Press next year. Not to mention, she can pen an amazing blog post. Here’s Lisa…

The Woman War

We’ve all heard it before: “If a woman were president, we’d have a war once a month.” And every time someone says it, they think it’s funny. They think they were the first person to say it. More so, they think it might be true.
It’s completely pointless to strip this unapologetically generalizing joke down. There’s nothing to understand beside the sad truth that today’s society is still allowing these sorts of seemingly innocuous types of things to be said. Sure, women have some degree of pre-menstrual syndrome. This means our emotions fluctuate because of hormones. This does not mean a female would wage war.

Do female-kind a favor and tell the next person who makes this joke that not only is it getting old, it’s a perverse lack of logic that really is more illogical than the hypothetical woman at whom it pokes fun. More than that, it’s not fair that women still have to defend themselves in positions of power or affluence because of their physical construction. “Vagina” is not synonymous with being “incompetence.”

With the political climate heating up watching Hillary Clinton run for president, inane jokes and excessive generalizations are being made now more than ever. If Hillary is seen as short or if she snaps back with an answer, she’s labeled a “bitch.” Behaviors are now being blamed on gender. With words like, “catty” and “bitchy” or “alpha female” (so now any woman who is in a power position is automatically an alpha female, as though the default female wouldn’t be inclined to be in a position of power?) always being thrown around, it seems the movement to further women’s rights and better their image is leveled off with ever-lasting misogyny.

According to an article in The Nation, “Race to The Bottom” by Betsy Reed, Hillary has been called a “she-devil,” said to have a “cackle” (the mark of a female witch) and was the victim of a reckless insult by Rush Limbaugh, who said, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”
If being able to run a country is hindered by the biological process of aging, then I’d say this country has been in trouble since 1789.

As someone who used to participate in political demonstrations with a group by the name of Students for A Democratic Society (SDS), whose members were mostly comprised of a wide range of left-spectrum activists, I learned something that can be applied to work of any kind: Persistence is the root of all change.

If society shrugs its shoulders at jokes and comments that are inherently debilitating toward progression of any kind (especially regarding gender) the problems will not only continue, they’ll be exacerbated by a consistent show of apathy. It doesn’t matter how small a show of negativity toward women it is – repeatedly taking the time to thwart these reactions and jokes is the only way that good will ever really come.

It takes repeating yourself. It takes years. It takes a whole lifetime. It takes many lifetimes. But the only war women are causing is the war of indifference.