Listening to the end of Dolly Parton’s America. Let me tell you: I am not shocked or angry Dolly vehemently rejects feminism. Here’s why:

My great grandmother would run a man over with her Thunderbird for looking at her the wrong way. She wore her hair long (a faux pas for “old ladies” in the South) and wore red lipstick and dresses to church.

She kept marbled in socks inside her purse in case she needed to whoop an ass that day. She kept baseball bats behind every door in her house. And she hated men.

Men wronged my great grandmother her entire life. Her husband and dad were alcoholics. She got pregnant at 15 and gave birth in a field when she didn’t even know how babies were born. She didn’t have the patience for men.

She divorced her husband in the 1940s (read: a big assed deal in the 1940s South) and married an Italian looking guy named Cotton just to piss her husband off. When he straightened up and dried out she remarried him.

My great grandmother didn’t finish middle school. She worked hard. I don’t even know the jobs she had because they were probably considered too “meaningless” for my family’s collective memory.

Feminism of the 1970s did not care about my grandmother. Detested her, actually. She was poor. She had big boobs and big hair. She didn’t go to college and she didn’t want a corporate job.

If you asked my great grandmother what she thought about feminism, she’d probably think about the horn rimmed glasses college girls in Florence that looked at her like she was trash. And she’d tell those women to go fuck themselves. They’d never worked like her. They theorized.

Dolly Parton has no patience for feminism because of how feminist treated her. She was a makeup wearing bimbo that objectified her own body. She doesn’t know Cixous. She has no “”serious”” contributions to feminist discourse or corporate takeovers.

Classism is rampant in 3rd wave feminism. It was worse in 2nd wave, when Dolly faced ridicule for coming from the holler and looking like a beautifully decorated Christmas tree.

Feminism has come a long way. But Dolly’s generation of poor women who have “superficial” interest were deeply hurt by their exclusion and ridicule from the movement. I ain’t mad she says she’s not a feminist: I just wish she’d point out that the problem is wealthy white women.

Women who work, who didn’t go to college, who have kids to feed and a bitching husband, so do not give a flying shit about your subaltern communities of transnational power usurpation. And I don’t blame them.

A feminism that doesn’t include poor women is a joke. Dolly knows that, even if she says she ain’t a feminist because feminism means hating men. When women say that they’re often pointing to the fact that feminism neglects class struggles: which men, laborers, go through too.

So @Sarah_Smarsh rightly pointed out: the part of us that gets mad when clearly feminist women say they aren’t feminists is the part of us that got to go to college. The part of us that’s privileged enough to theorize.

Ask Dolly what she thinks should happen to men who rape. Ask what she thinks we can do for rural women‘s ABYSMAL healthcare access. By by god don’t ask her why she’s not a feminist. Don’t ask her why she doesn’t support the women that made her a punch line; who named her trash.