Seeing Sexism
It's not easy to see sexism. It's such a part of our lives it seems invisible. It's in us and outside us. We want not to believe in it---until something---like men making fun of Hillary Clinton, like women making fun of Hillary Clinton---stirs it up. And then something inside our heads shouts: "THERE IT IS AGAIN! I thought--I truly hoped we were past this."
The truth is, we want sexism to be passé. We don't want to keep fighting it. It's so uncool to fight it. We sound so shrill, so whining, so strident, so piercing, so shrewish, so female. For these are all coded adjectives for women you hate. We hate them ourselves. We don't want to be shrill, shrewish, strident, whining, piercing. We want to be cool. We want to hold our own, we want not to waver, not to be high-pitched, not to betray our femaleness, our weakness. And yet our voices are higher than men's and we are less listened to in the agora. We are always tokens.
On most charitable boards I sit, on every prize committee I deliberate, on most writers' panels, I am a token. One woman and seven men, two women and fourteen men, three women and twenty-one men. I hate being a token. I wish it were otherwise. Unlike those nasty women of yesteryear--Clare Boothe Luce, Ilka Chase--the women who inspired The Women--I have no stake in being queen bee. I want a 50--50 world. But the world is not that way. So tedious, old-time feminism must rear its shrieking Medusa head again.
The Greeks got it. Medusa's snaky head, the sex-strike in Lysistrata, Medea's fury in Greek myth and tragedy.
The truth is we have been trying to assert women's rights (and wrongs) for a long time. Too, too long, in fact. No wonder everyone is turned off. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Germaine Greer to Gloria Steinem is at least two and a half centuries. And before that, Mary Magdalene was smeared by the damned disciples, Cleopatra by Shakespeare, Hatshepsut by all those Egyptian dudes and doubtless even the Sumerian earth goddess. Too fat, too shrill, too monomaniacal, say the cool men. And the cool women echo it.
What? Life begins in the womb? Women are the life force? How unfair! Didn't Samuel Johnson--that old bore, say: "Nature has given women so much power that the law wisely gives her little" The Greek tragedians smeared a lot of women too, but they were shrewder observers of life than our present day guy writers. At least they had the myths to set them straight. So they knew women were fierce from being raped so often and they knew the rapists (usually men) deserved everything they got.
So now we have the cool dudes saying Hillary is dead, the fall of the house of Clinton is here, baby-boomers are so over, don't trust those wrinklies (British for your parents' generation), youth is roaring again, hope is the watchword, Obama has a feminist wife and two cute little girls, he'll fight for us. And the cool chicks echo it: Hillary is over, we have our rights, we have the pill, we have the patch, we have the IUD, we have the vote, we have nannies for our kids, so what about the retrenchment on Roe, so what about the Right to Lifers, so what about my mother's battles? Over and done. Passe. Youth has come in the person of Barack. Male? Not really. Think of his wife. Two for the price of one--like Billary in 1992. But will Ms. Obama be the prez? Not really. Power behind the throne. Same old, same old. We seem to have forgotten that we did this all before.
But it's different this time, say the women of my daughter's generation. We've won the battle. We don't need the White House. Say what? We don't need it? We're past it? We have all heard that before, too. It's an old, old story. Hillary is the establishment? Hillary stole the vote in New Hampshire? Hillary is passé. Hillary is too close to Bill. Hillary is not close enough to Bill. Hillary is calculating. Hillary is cold. Hillary cried. (Actually, she didn't cry -- as Jon Stewart and I pointed out). She just looked human. She showed a teeny bit of vulnerability. UNFAIR! They scream. FEMININE WILES! They scream. The heart of being a woman is to be always in the wrong.
Let's be honest here. We don't know how a female President would act. But we could look around. I know America is a provincial country, but we could look at Germany, Ireland, England, Pakistan, India, Argentina, and Finland--to name a few. We could ask why the USA, out of all the so-called "civilized" countries, is so damned afraid of a woman leader.
We could look at the invisible sexism--as Gloria Steinem has been asking us to do for nearly half a century. We could acknowledge that a multiracial male president with a fierce feminist wife would be great for America, but maybe we should break the invisible gender barrier first. Yes, blacks have been hideously oppressed, but so have women--and black women know this better than white women do. We have been tokens for so long that most of us just take it for granted. The flaying of Hillary Clinton shows us we can take nothing for granted. We need to break that tough, annealed, glass ceiling with the barbed wire over it. And we need to break it now.
If this is the politics of gender, so be it. We need a politics of gender in this country. Obama is a good man who will only get better. Youth is on his side. Perhaps Hillary will appoint him to the Supreme Court where he can counter that embarrassing Clarence Thomas. Perhaps he will be President in 2016 or perhaps, even better, Michelle Obama will be. They have nothing but time.
Hillary's time has come.
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Yeah, pink men.
I see sexism and her name is Erica Jong.
Sexism may be hard to see, but it seems that, in Jong's case, racism is hard to see. “Perhaps Hillary will appoint him to the Supreme Court where he can counter that embarrassing Clarence Thomas,” she writes. But if a man had written “Perhaps Barack will appoint Hillary to the Supreme Court where he can counter that embarrassing other woman,” I think she might notice that for what it would be: sexist condescension.
And, in any case, what are we to make of “embarrassing”? “Embarrassing” to Afro-Americans? Are all disagreeable conservative white men embarrassing to white people? No, they're simply disagreeable conservative men.
I would not vote for Hillary Clinton, but not because of her gender, but because she is a war hawk and would be a foreign policy disaster.
To Ladyjax
The 15th amendment took away race as a legal barrier to voting. The 19th amendment took away gender. Of course actually survivng to vote is another issue but black men could legally vote in this country before any woman. To debate who is the more oppressed is probably a waste of time but I do not notice movements to DIVEST of holdings in the many countries of the world where women continue to be treated as chattel, as they were here just like slaves for most of our country's history.
I refer you to Shirley Chisholm's I'd Rather be Black Than Female.
Regards.
No matter how hard feminists work to promote gender equality, people like you will continue to tear down all that they have worked for.
Political candidates should be judged solely for their political platforms and their track records for effectively putting those platforms into practice.
Sexism does adversely affect too many facets in the lives of too many women today, yet let's be clear that Senator Clinton has been smart enough and hard-working enough throughout her life to overcome most, if not all, gender discrimination she faced.
From Wellesley to Yale Law School to a plum job on graduation with the House Judiciary Committee to a partnership in the most successful law firm in her state to the Board of Directors of WalMart, Senator Clinton does not seem to have been deterred by discrimination, if or when she encountered it.
That being said, it is perhaps understandable why until very recently she had not been seen as an avatar of feminism. But now, suddenly she is.
Why? It certainly seems to be an incredibly smart and effective campaign tactic designed to increase the percentage of women voters she receives in the nominating process, and her campaign management team is demonstrating their talent by employing it.
But let's also be realistic, each of the candidates in both parties has faced hostile reporters, been the subject of hostile media commentary and been criticized (or attacked) by overzealous partisans. The treatment of Senator Clinton has not been observably harsher or more lenient than that of other candidates.
Her campaign is wise to energize a segment of women voters by pointing to the times she has faced the rigorous scrutiny all presidential candidates receive and suggest the scrutiny was motivated by sexism. But, suggesting it is so doesn't make it so.
The Democratic primaries have become a battle to superimpose context. Voting in the context of male and female versus the context of black and white. This moves us further and further from seeing who the contest truly is between.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are among us people who would vote for a Caucasian male just to stay clear of these two contexts. And the unfortunate thing about Erica Jong or Gloria Steinem or Jesse Jackson getting involved is that they're really good at owning the issue. How can real change occur without some amount of starting anew, and how can real starting anew occur without at least a partially blank, partially unowned canvas. The best thing would be to accept, at least for now, that there are prejudiced morons out there, and just ignore them already.
Ms. Jong:
Ms. Clinton has every right to fight like hell to be president, and to use any legitimate tactic or strategy that attracts sufficient money and votes to make that happen. That is true of the survivors of the primary in New Hampshire and the later contests. To make a distinction between the sole woman in the race and the men solely based on her sex, and wring hands about sexism skewing the playing field, diverts attention from the issues that should be addressed to the horse race that is covered by the media. And that is sad.
Obama must deal with racism, and it will not go away. So must Clinton deal with sexism and her political baggage, because those are realities that will not go away. It is not productive to rue the existence of those things, but it is productive, instructive, and liberating to examine how Ms. Clinton deals with her political problems, which might reveal what kind of president she may become.
As a male, and a supporter of feminist ideals since the 1960's, I used to cringe at the infighting in the movement, and the seeming willingness of women to carve each other up because their views were not feminist enough, too shrill, or just plain different. If I have heard it once, I have heard a variation on the theme, "oh, that is so second wave," or something like it to marginalize and dismiss other women and their views.
Like sexism and racism, aspirants for office are better off dealing with the playing field as it is, with all its potholes and dead ends, to overcome the hurdles with intelligence and finesse, so that they may one day achieve the necessary power and prestige that may overcome societal and cultural inertia. Politics, like business, is viciously competitive. Watching "Executive Suite" should be an informative primer for every political observer.
D.
I will start this off my letting you know that I was the first female loadmaster on the C5 aircraft. I know what it is like to work at a "man's" job. This does not mean that I would vote for Mrs. Clinton just to get a first female president. I am in my late 50's now and I would not vote for her if they paid me to. I do not agree with her politics or with the solutions to some of the problems she wants to fix. When her husband took office and she was placed on the panel to look at health care, her plan scared the h**l out of me. Government is spending more money now than it takes in and the Federal Government is getting into too many things that are not covered under the Constitution.
"We could ask why the USA, out of all the so-called "civilized" countries, is so damned afraid of a woman leader."
I think we can, but I am more concerned about the quality of a leader we elect than the sex of our leader. I am not going to not vote for Hillary because she is a woman, but she will not get my vote simply because she is a woman either. Both attitudes are equally sexist.
I want a progressive leader, who has shown leadership in the past. Who makes firm stances on issues that are important to me. Who wants to get us out of Iraq and is not a hawk on foreign policy. I want a leader who is going to defend the constitution, NOT give immunity to telephone companies, and not roll-over for insurance companies. Whether or not this leader has cleavage is completely irrelevant. And based on my criteria, Hillary is not the leader I want for the free world.
Ms Jong posits:
"Yes, blacks have been hideously oppressed, but so have women--and black women know this better than white women do."
*sigh*
As a Black feminist, I can only shake my head and say that I'm not surprised by this commentary at all.
When the rubber hits the road, many white feminists will always trot this little tidbit out about Black women and yet will circle back to arguments about sexism and gender, without really adding any real substatial analysis about the intersection of the conditions of race and sex (as well as class) and how those things work within campaigns like this.
(Caveat - I say many white feminists but not all because I've met a lot of white feminists who actually do get it and try to put for the analysis I'm looking for above).
Ms. Jong, I know about my conditions in this country way better than you do, that is indeed true. Just like I know that hitching my wagon to the star of someone just because of their race and/or sex (sexual orientation, class, you name it) isn't about to bring liberation in my lifetime.
At this point, I still have yet to see the candidate that makes me want to stand up and cheer. What I want I'm probably not going to fully get which is why I'm putting my energy behind helping people vote on election day when I work the polls in my princinct. In regards to my own choice, I'll probably vote for the lesser of two evils yet again and hope for the best.
And for the person who said that black men get through first then perhaps women and maybe children, you might want to go back and look at suffragist history: when the possibility of Black men getting the vote before white women came up, many early white feminists resorted to racist and nativist arguments to garner support for the (white) women's vote.
There is another side to it. You are just to general. If you are a man, you are sexist if you say, I did not like that emotional moment on the radio, period. To spin a sexist label off this, is like telling a German to shut up about Israel's invasion of Lebanon. In the 80's men were supposed to be sensitive showing their emotion, now it is like taking the emotional argument away from women. I have seen feminists, with loud slogans dating the "dangerous men at night and demanding the sensitive man during the day. I really do not care who wins the Presidency as long as it is a democrat. Do I like Obama because he is a very good orator. Do I think that Clinton has a problem with her track record, i.e. health care reform 94: Yes. But making this a referendum on women rights is the same as declaring only a man with military experience can be commander in chief. And that is what pisses me off. Can a catholic be president in a protestant country? Can a man named Huckabee be president? Throwing the sexist label makes me angry, because converts to everybody who votes against Hillary is a sexist. And isn't it sexist under that definition to elect a female president just because she is a woman and not because she is capable? Since I do not like intolerance you managed me to be against Hillary as president. I was considering her until you wrote your posts.
How long must we wait?? I understand that many of you want the first female president to be the ideal woman, perfect in every way, powerful yet demure, clever but not calculating. The list of necessary credentials is more than any woman can live up to. Just look at our past presidents, while some have been deified, many were far from perfect, forgettable even. I wonder if Hillary doesn't do an impossibly perfect job, do people think that we never have a chance for another woman ever again? "I'm sorry, women (half of us by the way)you have shown us, by way of the 0.006% of you we allow to have political power, that you are incapable of maintaining it.
So, if Hillary loses, its all becuase of sexism? Ms. Jong, you and those who think like you are teh exact reason why seixsm continues to affect our society. If you cry "wolf" too many times, people are deafened to the real problem. ANd this may be the most egregious case of crying wolf yet.
Hillary Clinton is a terrible politician and would be a worse leader. She triangulates and moves her position based on polling. She covers away from tough stances - look at her decision on the war; look at her inability to take a stance on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. I don't dislike Clinton becuase she is a woman; I dislike her because she is a weasly, popularity-seeking, carpet-bagging politiican of the worst ilk. I would dislike her is she was a man. I would dislkie her if she was transgendered.
Sexism has nothing to do with it. If the 50-50 world of which you dream is one where women are above criticism simply because they are women, you will never live to see it.
And thank goodness for that.
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