Dear Feminists

Dear Feminists,

Hi!  I love you.

I just read this post over at Shakesville (about which I wrote this post).  In the comments, I wrote:

I was going to make a joke about filing everyone on that guest list under "People I Wish to Avoid."

But, really, people who spend that kind of money on Romney's campaign probably have a lot to learn about privilege and empathy, so shunning them won't do as much good as pushing them to become better people. So, maybe, instead of shunning them, it would be better to send them progressive feminist care packages.

And now I will spend my afternoon amusing myself by thinking of what I'd like to include in a progressive feminist care package. Would it be best delivered in a knapsack?

In response to that, Liss asked:

Could we deliver them in faux uteri labeled "here's your own to play with so you can leave mine the fuck alone?"

If we had a Get Your Shit Together package to send to people who are fucking up the world to invite them to join us so that we can make the world a better place that much faster, what would you want to put in it?  How would you want to deliver it?

We'd have to include books, or print-outs of blog posts, or magazine subscriptions.  But reading material is easy to scoff at and set aside.

Something that's helped me develop my feminism has been hearing individual people's stories.  It would be great if we could get more people (like the people pouring their money into Romney's campaign) to open up and hear real stories from real people's lives.  Enough stories from enough people to understand that individual solutions to systemic problems aren't good enough.

That would take a lot of people.  At least a busload.

Picture a bus pulling up in a campaign donor's driveway.  (In my mind, this looks a lot like Leslie Knope's bus pulling up in front of Bobby Newport's house.)  Picture a flood of people coming out.  People of all shapes and sizes and colors and backgrounds and ages and genders and sexualities.  All kinds of people, all of them progressive and fired up and ready to educate.  Picture them spending a week introducing the campaign donor to feminism, presenting him with an Introduction to Feminism package (in the shape of a uterus?), telling him about their lives and their experiences and their dreams and how all of that's been affected by the patriarchy.  And then they'll go off to take the next campaign donor by storm, while the ones they leave in their wake will stumble back into the world, dazed and wondering, eager little budding feminists ready to spend their time and money and political clout in progressive ways.

If you hopped off of that bus to speak with that campaign donor, what stories from your life would you want to tell him?

With love,
Frank Lee