Now that voting one's gender has been taken off the table, it's time to bring it back - or at least if women want.

It's a typical crap piece of pseudo-emancipation; women are told they don't need to be their anatomy - when all around us we see women lauded most for being their anatomy.

Kim Kardashian made $53 million last year, much more than her musician husband - presumably for "fashion", which roughly translates to ways to show cleavage and her naked ass and a reality show walking around jiggling.

When the Sony hack revealed Jennifer Lawrence made ~25% less than her male co-stars*, she blamed her negotiating technique, wanting to be liked & not wanting to fight (unlike the male actors who fought for more). But Patricia Arquette's Oscar speech on wage and role equality immediately drew attacks - from women. It wasn't enough to speak as a woman - she hadn't mentioned LGBT and black subgroups, didn't say X, Y & Z, yadda yadda.

It's never enough to just be women concerned about women. That would just be selfish.

The Lilly Ledbetter paycheck act was based on a perverse Supreme Court decision that stated that even though her company was hiding that it was paying her less, Lilly's clock for redress started ticking from the time she first *didn't* know she was being screwed till when she reported it, even though it was ongoing for years. Imagine I started putting poison in your coffee 25 years ago, but you only found out about it last week - well oops, the statute of limitations ran out 5 or 10 years ago, so I can just keep on doing it.

Women have a long history of such perverse access to justice, from the Constitution that ignores them to the otherwise groundbreaking 15th amendment that encodes their lack of voting power. To the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls advancing women's property rights but women's suffrage (supported nobly by Frederick Douglass) would take 72 years longer to achieve despite the equality amendments passed after the Civil War.

During WWII women famously filled the factories while men went to war - and obediently went back to the suburban kitchen once the war was over. During the 60's fight for rights and equality, women were there side by side - as the sexual prize of the free love and and hippie protest movement, especially with newly effective contraception - the bunny movement could thrive. During the 90's economic boom and rise of the internet, women's roles rose - in HR & finance, web design and social media, or PR & marketing, tied to those cute-looking ubiquitous Booth Babes at every convention. Glass ceilings abounded elsewhere.

It was seriously pissing in the punch bowl when a female social media organizer 3 years ago outed some geeky heroes of internet making typical Beavis & Butthead jokes - getting one fired unintentionally - and herself fired as well. But at least it's clued the tech community in to new more inclusive standards, which is much more than you can say for the TV and political world, which has just endured its first "schlonging" and "blood coming out of her wherever" events (whereafter the conservative media mogul begs the potty mouthed instigator to come back and be friends), which make Obama calling a reporter "sweetie" seem like the good ol' days.

But that was at least men attacking women. Back in the real world, while health care plans have long covered Viagra, Cathie Adams - head of Texas' GOP - was raising money on Obamacare purportedly giving Viagra to rapists and sex offenders (obviously she cared more about Obamacare's other provisions than male incontinence), while Nuns were suing because they thought contraception was also an abortofacient (it isn't) and GOP female candidate Carly Fiorina was showing doctored videos claiming to be Planned Parenthood, all to shut down any expansion of the health benefits that largely help women.

Hobby Lobby, a large arts & crafts company, leveraged its supposed religious beliefs to remove contraception benefits, even as it ignored scripture in many of its other practices (one might think money was the operating factor here, but Rush's takedown of a coed's contraceptive use as "slutty" might have set the tone). It's perverse that we've gone from 80s attacks on "Welfare Mothers" with their "overbreeding" along with "anchor babies" in the 90's and 2000's to the current concern about women having too much birth control (and certainly no abortion thanks to the archaic Hyde Act, even Democrat-forced provisions in ACA and late attacks) - but every day's a good day to attack women in America, since they're half likely to blame someone else and have little power anyway.

It was the first year of Obama's presidency that George Tiller was assassinated outside an abortion clinic - the start of an intensified fight against abortion, shutting clinics down in state after state via bogus new health regulations, limits to chemical abortion (RU-486 and similar), and straight out laws against abortion - some of which have partially held.

Meanwhile, reported in November on a rape epidemic among police officers, nearly 1000 cops nationwide lost their badges for a variety of sexual offenses, in almost all cases using their badges and positions of power in scary one-on-one situations to force women into sex. And those are partial numbers, as states largely don't keep records. 

And it's not even a topic in this campaign, as aren't most "female issues" that by default must be subsumed or displaced by a larger non-female problem. Similar to rmrd's complaint that America's racism isn't covered by economic prescriptions, sexism and women's need for more support and structural change isn't covered by civil rights or Glass-Steagall or trade policy - there's a huge list of outstanding issues that needs to be addressed, and largely won't.

As Madeleine might have said more daintily, there's a place in hell for women who don't support their own female interests - and that hell's the living hell of the constantly tilted playing field. But that rephrasing would largely neuter the issue - there's a large grand brotherhood at play, the accepted "normal" that makes it unlikely women will get good roles, executive or law partner positions, treated seriously in tech, or even treated with dignity rather than abuse at a late night traffic stop.

Women are as hard on women in various affairs and scandals and inequalities as men, as Maureen Dowd over-exemplifies. Even the backlash against Albright is unusual in that her pronouncement is as well known as "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", repeated across decades. God forbid she had shouted it out like most on the speaking circuit do or Fox and MSNBC, or said something half as outrageous as Trump or Cruz or Mario spreading their medieval Christian or Neanderthalish outlook on their cheering fans (or that Chris Matthews has said in prime-time about Hillary).

But yes, women need each other's support, those "little acts of kindness" that can make all the difference in a society still not that different in bias from Dangerous Liaisons and Anna Karenina days. Cara Joy David points out the need for networking, even noting there's frequently only 1 token female position in play for aspiring women to fight over. (There's the Bechdel Test that famously notes the shrunken men-absorbed roles women have in most movies). Women help each other out during joblessness, child-rearing, building those home businesses, finding courage for self-promotion where men have it more naturally and more accepted, dealing with their always over-studied looks and lack of self-esteem, the lack of opportunity, the subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination, or even preparing for a hopefully safe date....

Yes, there's a Sisterhood, and it deserves to be respected and promoted and expanded on, not shamed out of existence. The law and social customs have never kept up with the needs of women, so that back channels and other forms of encouragement and support have always been needed. And yes, including areas like compassion towards immigrants and other races, care for the sick and dying and disabled, educating the next generation, the mental issues that women have often suffered in silence, the tenuous grip with an abusive spouse... 

There's a chance that perversely with a strong female candidate that women's issues will again be given short shrift, dismissed as just a campaign convenience rather than a real requirement by a real very large constituency - with the male candidate again professed to be the real carrier of the female flame. With all the spoken concern that the last 2 decade's rise in wage inequality be the centerpiece of this year's election, it's once again ironic that the largest group affected by this inequality will likely have its needs marginalized yet again.

Fight on, care on, help on.

*Seeing as Lawrence has just filmed her first sex scene, her shelf-life as an actress is likely to last at least until the ripe old age of 35. Yay!