You Just Haven't Noticed

[Content Note: Misogyny; video may autoplay at first link.]

Republican presidential candidate Ohio Governor John Kasich non-apologized yesterday for his pathetic comments about women leaving "their kitchens" to support him early in his career:

"And how did I get elected? Nobody was, I didn't have anybody for me. We just got an army of people who, um, and many women, who left their kitchens to go out and go door-to-door and to put yard signs up for me," the Republican presidential candidate said Monday, describing moments from his early career in the 1970s, during a town hall in Fairfax, Virginia.

...Kasich, speaking to CNN's Wolf Blitzer later on Monday, apologized.

"I'm more than happy to say, 'I'm sorry' if I offended somebody out there, but it wasn't intended to be offensive," Kasich said. "And if you hear the whole thing, you'll understand the context of it."

..."When I was a new candidate, I did what I do now, which is to have a lot of town hall meetings. But they weren't in town halls. They were in kitchens, they were in living rooms and a big chunk of the people that helped me in my early days and throughout my career, even up 'til now, have been women," Kasich said.

He then said, "Everybody's just got to relax."

Take a breath, ladies! You're getting hysterical!

Between this shit and Bernie Sanders' advisor Tad Devine saying "women are getting more and more involved in politics," I'm just utterly demoralized and angry by the indifference to women's political history in this country.

Men think they invited women to join the fray, and men think they deserve the credit for women's political work, and men think the biggest barriers to women's participation is apparently our preference for being in the kitchen, rather than the heaping fucktons of misogyny that is unleashed against a woman who tries to run for office.

Or any woman, anywhere, who thinks she has a right to a public opinion.

I'm exhausted with straight, white, male gatekeepers pretending there's no gate. That women doing things don't exist until we come to their notice.

Women have always been doing things.

That we were denied the right to do them doesn't mean some of us weren't. That we haven't been paid to do them doesn't mean we weren't. That we have not been recognized and rewarded and celebrated for doing them doesn't mean we weren't doing them all along.

That women were long (and in many places, still are) denied the opportunity to participate fully in electoral politics doesn't actually make it a new development.

Women have always been doing things. Let's not mistake men not paying attention to women doing things for women not doing them.