Rebecca Traister’s article, “Zombie Feminists of the RNC,” is a required reading just as much as Steinem’s piece in the Los Angeles Times.  Anti-feminist feminists or faux feminists receiving more of the media spotlight is nothing new.  But, never has the spotlight shined so brightly and never have I been this frightened.  Traister echoes my despair, rage and fear when she states:

“For while it may chafe to hear Rudy Giuliani and John McCain hold forth on the injustice of gender bias, what really burns is that we never heard a peep or squawk or gurgle of this nature from anyone in the Democratic Party during the entire 100 years Hillary Clinton was running for president, while she was being talked about as a pantsuited, wrinkly old crone and a harpy ex-wife and a sexless fat-thighed monster and an emasculating nag out for Tucker Carlson’s balls. Only after she was good and gone did Howard Dean come out of his cave to squeak about the amount of sexist media bias Clinton faced. That may not be pretty to recall, especially in light of the Grand Old Party’s Grand Old Celebration of Estrogen. But it’s true. And it’s also true that if there hadn’t been so much stone-cold silence, so much shoulder-shrugging “What, me sexist?” inertia from the left, if there had been a little more respect (there was plenty of attention, of the derisive and annoyed sort) paid to the unsubtle clues being transmitted by 18 million voters that maybe they were interested in this whole woman-in-the-White-House thing, then the right would not have had the fuel to power this particular weapon.

Which leads us to my greatest nightmare: that because my own party has not cared enough, or was too scared, to lay its rightful claim to the language of women’s rights, that Sarah Palin will reach historic heights of power, under the most egregious of auspices, by plying feminine wiles, and conforming to every outdated notion of what it means to be a woman. That she will hit her marks by clambering over the backs, the bodies, the rights of the women on whose behalf she claims to be working, and that she will do it all under the banner of feminism. How can anybody sleep?”

There has never been a time like right now to wake up and reclaim ourselves for ourselves. Because if this war-mongering, gun-touting, anti-choice candidate officially marches into the office, we will have a long way to go.  It will make the fight that suffragettes began to wage during the repressive Victorian era seem mild in comparison.

What will YOU do?