Dear Mr. President,
I get that you're trying. I do! And I get that it's hard, in a society as misogynistic as ours, to come out and say such radical things as "women are allowed to make decisions about their own reproductive choices" and "women and men should receive equal pay for equal work." You've made some good steps forward--Clinton as Sec. of State, Lilly Ledbetter--but if you think that I am going to overlook shit like this, you are sorely mistaken, because you are doing it wrong and quite frankly, I demand more of you. And if this is what you think being a feminist sounds like, well for fuck's sake, stop helping, we'll do it without you.

The relevant quote:

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit.

Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action, for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill to try to move in that direction.

I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.

If you're having trouble seeing the problem here, allow me to clarify: Setting aside the issue of whether or not we "need" more men in teaching & nursing to "save" our fatherless inner-city kids, which is a whole 'nother can of poisonous snakes, I am all the fuck in favor of raising the pay grade for "women's work." But not because we need to make it more appealing to men, jesus christ, I just have these weird ideas that the work women do--traditionally or otherwise--is inherently valuable, and that women deserve to be paid commensurate with men, regardless of who is the primary breadwinner in the sublimely heteronormative view of the world you've got going on there.

Mr. President, I know you can do better than this. Please don't prove me wrong.

p.s. When you start getting more men in women's fields, what actually happens? Is that those men get called "fags" and "pussies" and earn significantly more than the women in those fields. But, you know. Whatever.