It's That Simple! (Spanking)

Nothing politicized me more than the 2004/2005 same-sex marriage debates. It wasn't same-sex marriage per se that got me going, it was the increasingly contradictory and bankrupt arguments against it that made me realize what was happening: the social conservatives had motives under the surface of the debate that they dared not state explicitly. Extreme bigotry was hiding behind a string of bizarre and stupid debating points.

So JP and I decided to infiltrate the Canadian right-wing noise machine by forming our own social conservative group: "The Realer Women of Canada." A spoof of "REAL Women of Canada," we decided to pretend to agree with all of their premises, and then take those premises to their "logical" (and more extreme) conclusions, in order to expose what we believed were the rotten underpinnings of the movement. We found some sympathetic webmasters and began our secret plan: to say all the vile stuff that the social conservatives WANTED to say, and then clasp those people to our bosoms. Sort of like abortion clinic bombers publically cozying up with the American Family Association. We wanted to embarass them by making them explain why OUR stances differed from THEIRS, which (we predicted) they'd be unable to do. If they were REAL women, we were REALER women!

We started writing topical "editorials" as the headwomen of "The Realer Women of Canada." My section of the site was called "It's That Simple!" and I wrote as a suburban housewife from somewhere in Calgary. I seem to remember that JP's character was more of an understated, embittered ex-scholar.
Even though the site went online and our editorials and mission statements were posted, we quietly took it down a few months later without ever publicizing it. I think the idea behind it was sound, but we'd been completely unable to find any actual women to write for it, and it seemed wrong for us to condemn bigoted women when we didn't actually have any women on our team. More importantly, though, writing these editorials made me feel emotionally drained and terrible; I didn't enjoy stepping into the shoes of somebody so reprehensible, and I couldn't see myself going beyond the four pieces I eventually wrote.

I thought this stuff was lost forever, but I stumbled upon the rough drafts today, and I figured I'd post them for posterity. They're nasty, offensive, small-minded, and brutish, but I think they really do peel back some of the layers of civility that barely cover the bigoted mind (with some satirical embellishments to make them more entertaining).

(I was originally going to post them in this blog, but somebody is bound to think I'm endorsing these ideas and report me to Blogger. Years ago, in response to rampant and ongoing anti-semitism in a chat room, I made a website called "Jewish People Eat Worms and Ride the Lochness Monster." Whenever somebody started ranting about the sinister "Jewish Conspiracy," I'd say "yeah, I agree, look at this site, it proves it!" But somebody thought I was serious, and I was promptly banned for violating the server's terms of service. I don't want that to happen again).

(So I had a link to my site, and I realized the articles were so reprehensible that I didn't want to be associated with them, so I wimped out and took away the links. Sorry!)