Hey y’all (that’s my Britney Spears impression).
Here’s the post that I sent over to GlennSacks.com yesterday. I gave it the nice neutral title "On Katha & Hillary." Glenn, in his infinitely provocative wisdom, titled it "Sexism Makes It Harder for Hillary Clinton to Win." Glenn’s readers, as you might imagine if you’ve been following our little adventure in men’s rights land, don’t totally agree with my argument.
Anyway, here’s my post. If you’re interested in reading some of the (highly civilized, unfailingly intelligent, impressively fair-minded and thoughtful) reader reaction, go over there.
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In my first post for Glenn,I didn’t focus much on what’s perhaps the most significant reason that I associate myself with feminism. It’s that there are some feminist writers whose writing has been meaningful to me, and whose insights have enabled me (I believe) to understand the world more deeply.
One of my favorite feminist writers, over the years, has been Katha Pollitt. I’ve been reading her since my father first bought me a subscription to The Nation in my freshman year of college, and have rarely been disappointed (I used to get annoyed that she seemed so annoyed by Christopher Hitchens, but these days I’m thinking that maybe she knew the Hitch better than I did).
She’s smart. She’s funny. She’s passionate. She’s willing to be vulnerable (in her latest book of essays, for example, she writes at great length on her capacity for self-deception). And, above all, her perception of political reality has helped illuminate mine in a way that’s felt valuable.
Take this recent column, for instance, in which she disagrees with feminist icon Gloria Steinem about whether, in the contest for the presidency, being a woman or being black is more of a handicap. She writes:
I’ve written many times about sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton as an old, ugly, castrating witch-and-what-rhymes-with-it, but Gloria Steinem’s New York Times op-ed in defense of her, ‘Women Are Never the Front-Runners,’ was not helpful, to put it mildly. ‘Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life,’ Steinem wrote. ‘Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).’ Yes, black men got the vote first, although they could be lynched for using it. Shirley Chisholm, the black Congresswoman who ran for President in 1972, did famously write, ‘Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.’ But Barack Obama is only the third black senator in the modern era; Deval Patrick is only the second black governor. It may be true, as Steinem suggests, that ‘the sex barrier [is] not taken as seriously as the racial one.’ But that doesn’t mean the racial barrier really is less serious. It just means that the public expression of racism is beyond the pale in a way that the public expression of misogyny is not.
There’s a lot going on here, from my perspective, that’s good. There’s the recognition of the complexity of the matter. There’s the courageous, if gentle, dissent from Gloria Steinem, a dissent that only helps to open up space in the feminist discourse for disagreement. There’s the felicitous writing (“Yes, black men got the vote first, although they could be lynched for using it” is a wicked sentence). And there’s the precision of her location of the important distinction: in the political arena, you can get away with being nastier to women, as women, than you can being nasty to black as blacks, but that’s just one fault line in the complicated matrix of challenges that any political aspirant faces.
What’s also appealing to me, in this column, is the excellently concise job she does summarizing the sexist gauntlet that Hillary Clinton has had to run in this primary campaign. She writes:
The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial. So much we’ve learned from the mass hysteria over Hillary Clinton’s ’emotional moment’ in New Hampshire. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson: ‘She morphed into a "compassion brand"–like, irony of ironies, Kleenex’; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: ‘Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?’) Even Southern charmer John Edwards couldn’t resist observing that a commander in chief needed ‘strength and resolve’—a view echoed by Fox commentator Dick Morris (‘There could well come a time when there is such a serious threat to the United States that she breaks down’) and given full misogynous display by nationally syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant’s ‘Madam President Meets the Bad Guys,’ portraying a dumpy, tearful Hillary surrounded by Osama, Kim Jong Il and similar. All this fuss over a welling of the eyes so brief that if you blinked your own you’d miss it. I have moments like that every day! This was the Dean Scream all over again: a nano-nothing whipped into a self-congratulatory media typhoon.
It doesn’t take a trained feminist theoretician to deduce that much of the hostility directed at Hillary has a sexist tinge. That said, I can decode it more clearly because of Katha Pollitt. I haven’t learned from her to hate men, or to blame men for everything, or anything like that. What I’ve learned, among other things, is to read the subtext (and often it’s barely sub-) of political rhetoric for evidence of when people are drawing on sexist themes, archetypes, or language to sell themselves, their ideas, or their politicians.
That doesn’t mean we should vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m not planning to vote for her (Gobama!). Pollitt’s an Obamaniac too. It doesn’t mean we should vote for a Democrat. It does mean, however, that in a contest between John McCain and Hillary Clinton, McCain’s going to have the advantage of her, on the gender front, in a variety of ways.
He fits so many of our deeply embedded fantasies of what a leader should be like (grave, tough, physically courageous, manly) and who America should be represented by (see last parenthetical). Not only doesn’t she fit the mold, she taps into all sorts of sexist anger at, and fear of, women. Then there’s the huge, well-funded, conservative media apparatus that’s entirely shameless about celebrating McCain’s manliness, and drawing attention to Clinton’s shrewishness, in ways calculated to give McCain the advantage. And there’s a mainstream media that, in its sensationalistic, personality-driven coverage, plays up such simplistic and deceptive narratives even more.
I’m not saying that we should feel sorry for Clinton, or that she hasn’t benefited, in various ways, from being a woman, or that McCain doesn’t have his own crosses to bear. What I’m saying is that the picture of what’s going on, in this presidential race, simply isn’t complete without a recognition of the ways that sexism makes it harder for Hillary Clinton to win. And Katha Pollitt writes about that part of the picture very well. And I’m grateful to her for it.
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Jamie here. I’d just like to add that way back in January of last year (’07) after hearing some hysterical Hillary bashing on the radio, I made this Hillary google index of positive and negative terms I searched paired up with her name. I wonder what the numbers are like now (Actually, I’ll post an updated index, with some new terms, on M.A.I.D. this weekend.). Like Dan, I support Obama in the upcoming election, but I was dismayed at how hard people came down on Hillary supporters who’ve suggested that it might be as much of a struggle for her to get elected as a woman as it would/will be for Obama to get elected as a black man.
