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Misogyny, Momism and Militarism
Elton John recently expressed surprise at the misogyny of the American media as it relates to Hillary Clinton. I have been stunned by it -- especially the random physical put-downs that are everywhere. Matt Taibbi* refers to "flabby arms" in his latest Hillary obit. Who cares? I want to ask. But apparently Mr. Taibbi does. (And how would he know? Hillary is always encased in a blazer).
Physical mockery ended in seventh grade, I thought -- but apparently not where women pols are concerned. I find it bizarre that a grown man would invoke a physical put-down in an opinion piece. It smacks of a complex of some sort.
Disturbing enough that magazines like Star show telephoto close-ups of women's stretch marks (Cindy Crawford is the latest victim) -- but what is the meaning of this mockery of age-related or even genetic (chubby ankles) flaws? We know that ankles have no impact on the ability to do a job well. (Katie Couric has great ankles and is not getting the ratings CBS wants). And HRC is not auditioning for American Idol or a modeling contract or even gazillions as a news reader.
Look at a room of middle-aged male politicians -- paunches and liver spots abound. Pathetic comb-overs that turn to greasy streamers in a high wind. Skin cancers turning to melanomas, flat feet, bursitic elbows and shoulders -- who cares? Ronald Reagan got elected with a wandering mind. And that does impact performance. So this is more than a double standard. It's a kind of obsession with female youth and perfection -- which, of course, would disqualify a candidate too.
Do we want to live in a country where women's brains are judged by their arm flesh and the trimness of their ankles? I don't. I am writing from Rome where the men are just as sexist as they are in America yet there is no physical mockery of female candidates. The Italian elections are on Sunday and Monday and most of the women candidates are between forty and sixty plus. Yet no one makes fun of their looks. They are not movie stars. They wear glasses and don't all have facelifts. Nobody expects them to look like Sophia Loren. And nobody mentions their physical attributes one way or another.
So what is wrong with American men? Particularly male journalists. I think it was discovered long ago and labeled "Momism" by Philip Wylie in a virulently sexist book 1942 book called Generation of Vipers. The book went through many, many printings in the forties and fifties. It apparently struck many nerves. Momism is a kind of Oedipal obsession with the bad mother -- to counter a boy's attraction to his good mother.
Wylie's book is as livid as the Malleus Malificarum -- that textbook for witch hunters. No one could hate so much without having loved. And love is the problem, of course. You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her.
A few months after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, I found in the bathroom of my Connecticut house a New York magazine I had not read when it appeared. It contained an article of advice from Benazir Bhutto to Hillary Clinton.
Bhutto, of course, came from a society where western educated women leaders were not uncommon -- their tribal credentials being more important than their gender. Benazir Bhutto suggested to HRC that she evoke the strength and caring of a mother in proceeding with her campaign. Perhaps this is possible in Pakistan and India with their myriad female deities who embody the mother as creator and as destroyer. But in uptight American Christianity, the only role for the mother is as puritanical disciplinarian who eschews sexuality in favor of punishment. Punishment evokes rebellion. And tender little boys grow up to be Momists. When a powerful woman comes along -- whether Hillary or Eleanor Roosevelt or Gloria Steinem, the reaction is kneejerk. The rage against her spills over into idiotic name-calling, which only reflects badly on the name-caller. And we are all the losers. We get mediocre male politicians with comb-overs and drinking problems rather than acknowledging that women have brains that might be put to use to save us. Goddess help the U S of A.
* Corrected to reflect that Matt Taibbi, not Mike Taibbi, made the reference, in a Rolling Stone story that can be found here.
Related:
Matt Taibbi Responds: Erica Jong Thinks I Want to Do My Mother
Erica Jong Responds: Eight-Hundred-Year-Old Jong Responds to Callow Youth Taibbi
Matt Taibbi Responds: Erica Jong Rolls Out Every Liberal Cliche in Existence
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"Disturbing enough that magazines like Star show telephoto close-ups of women's stretch marks (Cindy Crawford is the latest victim) . . ."
If citing Elton John's opinion of U.S. sentiment didn't render what followed suspect, the quotation above should have. Jong is so uptight about an ordinary flaw of the female physique--stretch marks on a mother's body—that she considers documenting them a hostile act that turns the subject into a "victim." Besides making it clear she flunked Women's Lib 101, it illustrates the conceit of calling truth an assault if the person judging doesn't like what she sees or hears. This kind of morally deficient thinking made second-wave feminism look mindlessly bigoted and pointless to me, and I’m female.
Jong’s lobby, which would make gender the prime qualifier for the presidency, is infantilizing the issues, degrading the discourse, and endangering the future. It’s getting harder to envision uniting with those who’d knowingly compromise the presidency by electing a proven prevaricator. They act as if honor is dispensable, and being female is a self-vetting standard that trumps the character requirements of positions of public trust. This attitude appears more frequently these days, in inchoate arguments often accompanied by playground tactics like screaming "misogynist" at those who differ, and invoking the victim card when name-calling and brutishness don't work. It’s an ethical comb-over, and no one’s fooled. The gender-baiting nonsense of Jong and her ilk is just that, egoism masquerading as feminism. Let’s move on.
Could you be more correct?!
Worse still, after opening by denigrating anyone who comments on physical imperfections (I prefer to call them "realities"), Jong launches a tirade that includes criticism of men with combovers.
Ay-yi-yi!
Jong's opinion on the Presidential election is as important as Judith Krantz's. Enough already.
I despise Hillary as the sleazy, triangulating, "kitchen sink"-style kneecapper, do or say anything to get elected political hack that she is.
But to debunk you pathetic Hillary apologists who are screaming misogyny - Hillary sucks as a candidate and she makes women politicians look bad.
I would indeed have strongly supported Barbara Jordan or Ann Richards, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius and a few others, ALL of whom would make far better presidents than Hillary, ALL of whom are strong, accomplished, seasoned women of a certain age.
You see people who don't like Hillary don't like her because she's Hillary. It has very little to do with the fact that she's a woman.
When men see a woman who is running for President of the United and Commander In Chief running on a platform of Girl Power, It's Our Turn, Let's stick it to the men, innuendo, gossipy whisper campaigns, playing the victim, "shame on you, Little Baracky Obama" in a motherly tone, we become offended, angry and begin to resent the female aspect of the equation.
So Hillary has engendered much of the "misogynist backlash" she's complaining about.
But oddly enough, every man I speak to that won't vote for Hillary, when asked if her being a woman has anything to do with it, they flatly answer NO and say that if Michelle, not Barack, Obama were running against Hillary, they'd vote for her.
People don't like Hillary not because she's a woman, but because she's a hack.
I'd vote for all the women you named in a heart beat and add Barbara Boxer's name to that roster. But Hillary, no way. I am not going to vote for a person who I disagree with both their voting record and political affiliations (DLC) just because we share the same gender. That would be sexist.
Matt Taibbi is my Hero. He is great on Real Time With Bill Maher. And dead-on in Rolling Stone.
Matt is the bomb - not to mention he's right!
It speaks more of your own sensitivities that an off-the-cuff remark by a man about Hillary's arm brought on this male-bashing angst. I heard a female supporter of Hillary's on Larry King say that it was comforting to her that a "pudgy" middle-aged woman can be president. Coming from a supporter - that seems to sting a bit more. Would it be fair to judge all women as being thus fixated on another woman's physique? It is our society that is the problem - not that of men only. Face it, we're a shallow species - and no one can top Americans when it comes to shallow virtues.
Characterizing Matt Taibbi and American media as woman-hating because of a joke he made about a candidate's physical appearance is either paranoia on the part of Ms. Jong, or simply a desperate attempt to provide facts to support her tenuous argument that Hillary’s candidacy is losing (rather than being kept afloat) because of sexism. Since Ms. Jong's view of the world appears to be based largely on her phobia that anyone with a penis is out to degrade anyone with a vagina, I suspect the former.
Taibbi is the same guy that brought us "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope" and self-described it as an "off-the-cuff burlesque of Truly Tasteless Jokes". Did that make him anti-Catholic? When Taibbi describes Bush as a "smirking chimp", is he filled with anti-simian bigotry? When he comments that Mike Huckabee "isn't a sane man", is this predisposition for denigrating religion, or is it abhorrence of the mentally ill?
More realistically, Ms. Jong's issues with Mr. Taibbi have more to do with his columns like "Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination" and "Hillary Clinton: The New Nixon?" and "Don't Ask Hillary About Gay Rights - She Won't Tell" and much less about deep rooted misogynist prejudices of the entire American press corps.
What is it about Jong and other angry, gender-neurotic women who constitute Hillary’s base that keeps them fixated on this rather than issues that really do matter to others besides themselves?
You said it .... 'gender neurotic women fixated on hillary's gender'...
Personality politics is here to stay.. there will be a day when black women would be the only politician that gets elected because people wont be able to get past their gender and color.. (ok thats a bit farther ahead in the future :) )
India, Ireland are prime examples of the kind of psuedo liberalism that Erica and her ilk seem to advocate.. In India for example if a party decides to field a woman of lower caste, it is considered an insult by other parties to field a candidate against her (if anyone does so, they are branded casteist and misogynist, sound familiar?).. At least here we have a debate on whether this really does constitute sexism or not..
erica, you start your piece by holding up elton john opining on the restraint of the british press?
let's see a man who makes a living dressing like a duck, who regularly rails against the british press, who " arguably doesn't even like women* is now your standard bearer.
this is pathetic. i am so glad i ditched you as a model for feminisim when you exhorted us to vote for our sister hillary merely for her gender. you've lost all perspective.
i want the chance to vote for my gender when we're the better choice due to ability and record and that's about it.
p.s. - out of elanor, hillary, and gloria, only elanor had a whit of true *personal* power that transended gender, class and ages. your even putting the other two on her level is somewhat repugnant, given what elanor managed to do with her life compared with the other two.
the infatuation with dinosaurs like Steinem must end or *organized* NOW style feminism is rightly in trouble.
Laughable on so many levels... I lived in Rome Ms. Jong and worked in politics... perhaps you in your tremendous wisdom have never heard of Cicciolina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicciolina
The Porn Star elected to parliament in Italy... please don't demean the American Democracy by holding up the Italian Parliament... she's only the tip of the iceburg...
OK, Ms. Jong. You sound like a lunatic. You do realize that Freud made all that nonsense up out of thin air, right? It's not as though he discovered some "actual" scientific truth.
There is no truth to Freud's lunatic rantings, just one seriously screwed up guy's drug-induced psychosis, worked out on paper. Invoking them as some sort of psychobabble motivator only shows you to be a lazy intellectual. Which is sad, because I don't think you are, really, and I think you are very right about sexist attitudes.
But wanting to fuck our mothers? Please, that is so 20th century. Join the real world.
As one in the middle here - slightly acquainted with Erica via my grad school and her daughter, and a former columnist for a site that featured Matt - I think you both come off like jerks from this argument!
Ms. Jong was just saying that she found it "bizarre that a grown man would invoke a physical put-down in an opinion piece. It smacks of a complex of some sort."
While Freud / Oedipus doesn't hold water here, I would agree that Taibbi has *something*. I read his RS piece and it doesn't bother me. But his sample of political commentary is offputting. So his complex is to draw occasionally vulgar caricatures that are distasteful to a number of people, including a 100 year old square like me.
Hillary a victim? Floating the idea:
It started when word got out that Hillary was telling Democratic allies that the "big boys" were trying to "bully a woman." She later denied ever having used those words. But they were out there, just floating.... It didn't help when Bill then said at a campaign rally, "Apparently it's okay to say bad things about a girl." Just floating.....
Hillary then tried to play the poor-victimized-woman-card on NPR when she told host Michele Norris that there was a "double standard" in the press coverage of this campaign, but then refused to elaborate. Just floating...
Now she has Elton John saying her losing campaign is due to the "misogynistic" American people and press. Just another chance to remind us that she is not losing because of the terrible campaign she has run, but because of how despicable the rest of us are. Just floating....
This is a scurilous campaign: an exploitation of women, a betrayal of feminism, and extortion of the DNC. There have been a lot of "powerful women" who have come along (Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi) and they all differed from Clinton in one key way: they never claimed to be victims.
Elton John knows all about misogyny, based on songs on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and later: All the Girls Love Alice (about older well-to-do lesbians doting on young girls), The Bitch Is Back, Sweet Painted Lady (sentimentalizing whores catering to sailors), and Dirty Little Girl: "It's a terrible world, she's a dirty little girl. Someone grab that bitch by that hair ... rub her back, scrub her back, turn her inside out. 'cause I bet she ... I bet she ... let me tell ya now, I bet she ... hasn't had a bath in a year."
Yes, Elton knows misogyny.
FYI, Elton is gay. As is his lyricist. Gay people "she" one another all the time. He's really talking about men in those songs. Try to keep up.
wow, thanks for that , Dalicious. Like the rest of us humans, those in Rock and the media world have a dual nature... one hand promoting the better things about our nature, on the other hand the power and ability to use people that comes with money.
Another sexist who doesn't want to admit that Hillary is nothing but a LIAR - except when she is busy voting to send a million people to their death for political gain, or is busy promoting policies that put a million people out of work. I have not come across the flabby arm statements, so I don't know where you are looking, or what kind of shoddy company you keep. At the same time, you, apparently, have not studied your own candidate at all - not for her appearance, but for her endless lies, scheming, cheating, whining, etc.
There's something that I find ironic in posts like this: pundits are so horrified by physical characterizations or references to a person's sex, but they refer to them by their given name, like they're best friends. I don't know about other societies, but we seemed desperate to bring our public figures into our personal spheres. Erica Jong doesn't like the fact that Senator Clinton's arms were described as "flabby", rightly stating that it has nothing to do with her job performance. But she is clearly unwilling to treat the Senator with appropriate decorum by keeping her in a place of respect and distance.
It happens with every candidate. We should not be surprised when unprofessional comments are made about these candidates, because all the barriers that would make such comments off-limits have been removed. If you expect these public figures (or even better, the offices they seek) to be treated with respect, then everyone needs to show that respect at all levels.
And Ms. Jong, I don't know what Italy you're staying in, but male Italian politicians are constantly making sexist comments about their female counterparts. Silvio Berlusconi was heard on NPR this morning stating that the conservative party had much more beautiful female MPs than the left.
Ms Jong
that was pretty pathetic. You rail against men judging women by the bushel, only caring about their looks and grading them all on some sexuality curve. Yet you disparage all males in huge swipes, past, present, future.
I am sure it was mentioned in the comments before, generalities about males are as inaccurate or incorrect as generalities about women.
Please use the powerful, analytic areas of your mind (I know you to be a particularly astute person)...instead of giving in to your prejudices. I do not want HRC as the candidate. Give me a progressive woman and I will vote for her. I have seen some awful press the last 20 years. HRC being in the public view for almost 20 years has earned her some extra attention. Horrible things have happened to Carter,Dukakis,Cleland, Kerry, McCain, Gore. juvenile comments by Chris Matthews and mentions of flabby arms does not rise to the level of HRC backers claims of misogynist press. Elton John knows nothing. I wouldn't want his advice on any subject. BHO has gotten some raw deals too. lets all grow up and elect a progressive candidate and get behind HIM.
am sure it was mentioned in the comments before, generalities about males are as inaccurate or incorrect as generalities about women.
trying to make a point.
Sheesh.
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