Memo re Hillary Clinton part 1: Guys–get over it
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Posted by Gloria Feldt November 1st, 2007 |
Sex educators (before the abstinence only people made them stop talking about sex at all, which is a whole other story), use a technique called “desensitization” to help people get to where they can talk sensibly about previously verboten facts such as the proper names for body parts. Secrecy creates mystery and imbues a word or object with powers it doesn’t deserve. Because America’s social discomfort about sex makes us so nervous about dealing with the facts of everyone’s life, teachers sometimes have students say words like “penis” or “vagina” over and over until these words lose their mystical power and become simply the proper names for body parts. This allows learning about physical growth and development to proceed without twitters, just like learning about math, health, or social studies.
We’re going through the same process in the presidential politics. Presidential elections in the U.S. have up till now been a totally male paradigm. Oh there have been the occasional Donna Quixote candidacies, starting in 1872 when Victoria Woodhull ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as the vice presidential candidate (harbinger of a Clinton-Obama ticket, perhaps?).
So it’s no surprise that male politicians and media mucks so often pounce upon Hillary Clinton’s gender-based physical characteristics with the same discomfort previously reserved for middle school sex education students:
attire (as in John Edwards disparaging her pink jacket)
aural cues (such as her laughter—women do tend to laugh more in conversation and it seems to drive every male pundit from Bill Clinton’s former sleazeball political consultant Dick Morris to fake news purveyor Jon Stewart into pure apoplexy)
gender distinctions in physique (heaven forefend, Hillary has breasts and therefore cleavage).
And when all of that razzing fails to topple Clinton’s front runner position, they get really nasty, as witness Tucker Carlson’s recent tete-a tete with Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies :
… [H]ost Tucker Carlson said: “Gene, this is an amazing statistic: 94 percent of women say they’d be more likely to vote if a woman were on the ballot. I think of all the times I voted for people just because they’re male. You know? The ballot comes up, and I’m like, ‘Wow. He’s a dude. I think I’ll vote for him. We’ve got similar genitalia. I’m — he’s getting my vote.’ ” After asserting that “the Clinton campaign says: ‘Hillary isn’t running as a woman,’ ” Carlson stated: “Well, that’s actually completely false, considering the Hillary campaign — and I get their emails — relentlessly pushes the glass ceiling argument. ‘You should vote for her because she’s a woman.’ They say that all the time.” May responded: “At least call her a Vaginal-American.”.
…Carlson also asked: “Do you think that people who are voting on the basis of gender solidarity ought to be allowed to vote in a perfect world? Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to vote on those grounds. That’s like — that’s moronic. I’m sorry. I know I’m going to get bounced off the air for saying it, but that’s true.”
At first blush, it’s May and Carlson who sound moronic. But really, we are dealing with hard-wired cognitive dissonance that affects all of us to some degree.
Leader=man in our collective primordial brains. Yet it has not always been thus, nor will it forever be. It simply falls to Hillary to be the paradigm shifter-in-chief.
Is the only difference genitalia? Obviously not, or Tucker and friend wouldn’t have reacted so viciously. Are some men still uncomfortable with a public leader who has cleavage? Sure. Yet in how many baseball games have women quietly endured watching male athletic leaders adjust their crotch cups, and, quite frankly, watching the metaphorical equivalent in male talk show hosts as they preen their vaunted power to attack and control?
Get over it, guys. If you don’t like Hillary’s positions on issues, that’s fair game. But stop the genderized insults, for they are not only irrelevant, they actually cause women like me and an increasing number of men to rise to her defense.
In his unsuccessful efforts to make Hillary’s laugh look ridiculous, Jon Stewart said: “She’ll be our first president you can’t spill water on”—I don’t quite get Jon’s point, but I do get that it has to do with his response to her uniqueness as the first viable woman presidential candidate.
Get used to whatever it is that jars your preserves here, fellows.
Some things will be different when we have a woman president. Every time I see Hillary Clinton’s well rounded, brightly attired, obviously female body in front of a crowd, surrounded by all those angular dark suits, I think yeah, well, this breaks the mold quite nicely. And isn’t it about time? How refreshing is that?
How long will it take for these distinctions to be irrelevant to our assessment of a person’s leadership? How many times must we repeat the words “laughter, breasts, woman president” before we are sufficiently desensitized that we can focus instead on the substantive issues?
For now, perhaps what matters most is that no one disputes Hillary has what Stephen Colbert so sensitively calls “Lady Balls”.
This is part one of a three, or maybe four, part series. Don’t worry; I’ll challenge the women too in future posts.
Note: I posted this November 1 on Huffington Post. Gender stereotyping is pervasive in the media culture of politics that I wanted to share it with WIMN’s Voices readers too. It is the first of a series I am going to write. Your thoughts here or on HuffPo would be most welcome. Thanks,
Gloria
© Gloria Feldt 2007
Gloria@gloriafeldt.com
November 1st, 2007 18:21
i have to say, i feel the exact same way about the arresting visual of hillary on stage with all the other male candidates. i don’t know if it’s that we’re such an overwhelmingly visual culture these days, but the momentousness of what she’s doing rarely hits me harder that when i see her in that context.
great piece, looking forward to the rest!
November 4th, 2007 15:02
I really see all of this as a positive sign. Hillary is the first viable female candidate for president in the U.S. ever. This scares people. However, its this fear and the reaction of the Republican and Democratic Parties that gives me heart.
Hillary IS THE front runner, she’s ahead of everyone! She’s so far ahead she can take a hit right now and still win!
This is scaring the crap out of everyone, especially the misogynist Reich who can only manage to dig up old white men to run as canoeist. I will admit Baraka’s (sp?) mud slinging at Hillary is tasteless, but do we really expect anything less right now? And hey, at least he is attacking her politics and not her ovaries.
The slamming and fun-making in the media that targets her is hearting too. It seems to be an American tradition to make fun of our Presidents, and more importantly the most popular Presidential runner. The lever of public abuse that she is receiving is on par with what I would expect to see with any other runner-up.
Yes, the jokes point out that she is a woman, but she can’t hide that. Just like she can’t be the Ideal Feminist, what ever that is. I see all this as an adjustment period to the idea that we are going to have the first female president in American history in just one more year! Let the naysayer’s laugh, Hillary is not intimidated and she’s picking out a new desk set for the Oval Office.
November 5th, 2007 13:23
[…] Gloria Feldt compares the process of learning to talk about a female presidential candidate to the desensitization process educators use in sex ed classes. […]
November 5th, 2007 15:15
I have no problem with a female president. But if we do get one, I would sure hope that she would at least be an improvement over the last 5 or 6 males that served before her. Unfortunately, Hillary will continue the trend set by her husband: she will appear to be smarter than Bush but will in fact continue his exact same policies, with very little distinction.
Just today we find out that China now owns the world’s largest company. Well, before Hillary’s term is done, China will become the world’s largest economy. Hillary has no interest in stopping it. It’s about time you realized that she only cares about the people who actually brought her to power. And they, most likely, aint you. They aint the voters. Hey, newsflash, the american people dont choose their leaders. We know that because the election outcome is already all but decided… even though very very very few have casted their vote or will ever cast a vote. Whether we vote or not, we are marginalized on two different levels.
As a man I must say one last thing… the level of naivete required for us to have fallen this far as a country… that level of naivete is only attainable by a woman! So it is fitting that we’d have Hillary to usher us into this new era of utter and complete failure. This willful disregard of everything our founding FATHERS ever taught us. If women were really smart, they would not want Hillary just because of the blame she will allow to be placed on women…
It’s going to set you ladies back about 50 years.
Yes, this has all been planned a long time ago. You have to remember there are some misogynistic people in the upper echelons of the financial elite, and they are snickering right now as america is about to elect a woman right before they pull the plug on the economy. I hate to break it to ya… for those who havent figured this out until now. I really wish you would have figured it out 20 or 30 years ago. I know, I know, I’m the misogynistic one, and it’s all my fault. So enjoy your female president. Dare not to care what history will say about what happened to america when she elected a woman as president.
November 5th, 2007 17:41
@Iconoclast421:
I hate to break it to ya but you *do* have a problem with women–a nasty one. Your emphasis on Founding FATHERS (as if most women were even educated back then), stating that only women are capable of being so naive (What gender was most enthusiastic about the war again?), and holding female HRC voters (as if males won’t vote for her) and Clinton herself responsible for “allowing” the misogyny that will inevitably come her way is obviously transparent. And that whole cop out of confusing feminism with blaming men for everything when it is about combating misogyny, a bigotry that both genders are capable of holding, is quite the final touch. Nice.
November 5th, 2007 19:25
“I have no problem with a female president. But if we do get one, I would sure hope that she would at least be an improvement over the last 5 or 6 males that served before her…”
Translation: The only way we can ever accept a woman in a role traditionally filled by men is if she is perfect! Nevermind that we never held men to such standards.
November 20th, 2007 07:34
As much as I’d like to see a woman president, I don’t trust Hillary as far as I can throw her.
November 20th, 2007 09:47
Retro: again, the point in this post is not about Hillary as president, it’s about double standards in coverage of Hillary’s capaign.
November 20th, 2007 11:53
Colbert for President! I love the guy and even though he’s wacky and wierd, he’d be better than any of the other candidates.