You know, I really am so incredibly happy that young women are getting the picture about institutional misogyny. I am so pleased that you are such a good writer that you put together a well written, well researched and timely response to current events. Brett Kavanaugh is a POS and he looks like a pasty, white, privileged POS. Look at his wife’s eyes when she’s looking at him: they virtually scream, “And I have to go home with this lying POS!” I suspect eventually — and not in the far flung future — she’s going to decide, “No, I really don’t have to go home with that lying POS.”

You did a good job… As far as you went.

A few short years ago, when Hillary Clinton was running for President — the first time — then when she ran the second time — especially the second time, young women were writing these beautifully written, well researched and timely pieces on how she was just “not their kind of feminist.” The things she was drawing attention to were not relevant to their lives. Though, interestingly, the odd pontifications of a man even older than Clinton were simply fascinating, just couldn’t get enough of him.

Yeah, some shit had happened back in the sixties and seventies and some gals had had to take to the streets, to burn some bras, to get Roe v Wade passed, that some mothers and aunts — even grandmothers — had had to get militant with some husbands, fathers, senators, clergy — even some armed soldiers and law enforcement — etc. on behalf of the right to equal pay and the right not to be raped by your spouse. Several states didn’t even change the law making it legal for a man to beat his spouse with a stick — no larger in circumference than that of a broomstick — until the eighties. Water under the proverbial bridge.

All that needs to be said about institutional and corporate misogyny should be gleaned from the fact that it was not until circumstances necessitated two incomes that women finally were solidly entrenched in the work force in the late seventies. And once moms were empowered by being bread winners some men left, some women stopped putting up with bullshit they’d let slide for too long, and families of color in low-income and working class communities were crushed by that whole “getting tough on crime” nonsense heralded in by the Reagan administration that incarcerated so many working aged men.

It was only owing to the breakdown of the family and the necessity of a workforce that made women a force to finally be reckoned with. And it was that shift that moved the same inequities and violence that women had been subjected to in the home into becoming the inequities and violence they were being subjected to in the workplace. Cause if he treats his wife that way, he treats his secretary that way, only he does it on the down low. He pays her crumbs and just slightly grabs her ass or embarrasses in front of colleagues. Just slightly.

The working woman’s consciousness shift can, I believe, be traced back to a single collective “come to Jesus” experience. Female employees were still required to wear girdles and heels to work. That only changed after the NYC transit strike of 1980 forced tens of thousands of working women to walk — in some cases miles — to get to the job: that is when the ladies first said “fuck this shit” to the powers that be, took off the torturous underwear and the stilettos to hike to work. It’s been downhill for “the man” ever since.

But those men never forgot it: they went underground but they never got over it when your mothers and your aunts and your grandmothers simply put on their nikes, never again taking them off to come into the office. We used to change from sneakers into heels once we got there. By the time, though, that today’s professional woman got to the office, you’d all pretty much quit doing that too. And some of the boys — very influential boys — have never stopped resenting the shit out of the moment the ladies took their experience into their own hands.

To hear so many young women — especially and in particular white ladies — talk about it, that was in the past, we don’t need the “feminism” of Hillary Clinton cause we’ve transcended that. “Men don’t do that anymore, they’re more like us now.” So a whole lot of you assumed that you didn’t need Hillary Clinton’s wisdom gained of experience when she told you who Donald Trump was, and by extension, who Donald Trump would put in positions of authority over women’s — writ large — agency.

You had no context for the danger that is the foul lascivious, old, white, male patriarchy or what those woman-hating bastards will do to make very fucking sure that if you ARE going to drive them off to their graves sooner than later, they intend leave you ladies — the very specter of pure innate power that mortified them so profoundly — in such an institutional straight jacket that you will NEVER get full agency over your bodies, your careers or the existential threat to your very existence. They intend to laugh at you from their graves.

You all simply have seen so little of it that you had no concept of just how truly pathologically hateful a man can be, or how that particular pathological is exactly what has driven them so relentlessly to seize and keep POWER.

So you knew you were right. Hillary Clinton was just an “old lady” that many of you didn’t trust.

She told you straight up what would happen if Donald Trump was elected and still a significant enough number of young women held their breaths, didn’t vote, voted for a third party or frothed at the mouth about how wronged their guy was by the system, all because you couldn’t see the big picture.

And now you are giving us the well written, well researched, very timely pieces about the perks of this white asshole’s male “privilege.”

What did you all think was going to happen when you didn’t pull yourselves together, hold your noses if you had to, and vote for Secretary Clinton?

What responsibility do you think you have for this current state of affairs? Do you know what Christine Blasey Ford said when this first started and she didn’t want to subject herself to what she knew would be another assault by a bunch of middle-aged and old white frat boys? Because she forwarded the information to her representative for the investigatory file, thinking it would just be part of the investigation. She said, I will do what I have to do “but he’ll get away with it.” Nothing will come of it.

She knew. She did it because she had to but she was so over the need to keep fighting this particular injustice. A lot of us who’ve been through this aren’t that interested in this battle anymore. We know these guys — we vote against them — and we don’t want to spend another minute in the same room with them. Life’s too short.

Now you are outraged, horrified and indignant, and you just don’t know what the future holds…

Duh…