Sunday, September 21, 2008
News, In this Issue...
Hot and bothered
Both the Democrats’ Hillary Clinton and the Republicans’ Sarah Palin have been dragged through the latrine. Why do we treat female candidates so badly?
Sen. Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference on fair pay for women on Sept. 10.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesBy Stephanie Ramage
In 1872, almost 50 years before American women would finally get the right to vote, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president. She campaigned on a platform of equal rights and free love.
There was some confusion over what exactly Woodhull meant by “free love,” but the press and the general populace—including some of her fellow feminists—felt they didn’t have to understand something to despise it. Every major newspaper in the country wrote damningly about Woodhull. As explained in “Other Powers,” a biography by Barbara Goldsmith, some of what they said was true; nearly all of it was hyperbolic.
They reported, for example, that Woodhull shacked up in the same house with both her first and second ex-husbands in an illicit triangle of debauchery. As a matter of fact, Woodhull’s first husband did live in the same house with her and her more recent ex-husband, but, she said, it was because he was a morphine addict and she didn’t want her son’s father to die alone in a gutter. So why was she living with ex-husband No. 2? They didn’t believe in marriage as an institution. They divorced and stayed together.
The Cleveland Leader warned that it was “unfortunate” that Woodhull had aligned herself with the suffragettes, because “now her shameful life has been exposed and the enemies of suffrage will point to her as a fair representative of the movement. … In Cincinnati years ago, she was the same brazen, snaky adventuress that she now is.”
The famous women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton hastened to defend Woodhull from the press and other women, writing, “This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. … If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.”
Putting aside how unlikely it would be today to see a man or woman who is cohabitating with a partner running for president of the United States, times have changed, and maybe not all for the better. Today, the women’s movement is a fog-bound, rudderless wreck. Today, both Hillary Clinton, who competed in the Democratic presidential primaries until conceding victory to Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin, GOP candidate John McCain’s vice-presidential pick, would be grateful to be called merely “brazen, snaky adventuresses.”
They’ve been called much worse. A Google search for “Hillary Clinton bitch” turns up 1.1 million matches. “Sarah Palin bitch” turns up 322,000—but she hasn’t been in the public eye nearly as long as Clinton, so that’s a pretty good start for a rookie. Palin also trails Clinton on a Google search for “c**t,” but it shouldn’t be long before she catches up.
Some feminists blame this epic use of epithets on a culture that encourages violence against women. This violence, they say, manifests in character defamation and brutal sexual fantasies about Clinton and Palin, fantasies that are voraciously consumed and shared via the Internet. American women won the right to vote 88 years ago, but when it comes to campaigns for high office, America is at least as sexist as ever. And it’s not just men who are taking potshots at the women candidates. It’s other women, too.
Consider a brief sampling of some recent Internet postings about Palin:
From Salon.com columnist Cintra Wilson (yes, a woman): “A hyperconservative, f**kable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume—as a vice president?” “She is their [Repubicans’] hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,” and “Republican blow-up doll.”
From Facebook: “The mentally retarded baby which Sarah Palin touts as her own is in fact the bastard child of her slut daughter Bristol Palin.”
From the Jezebel blog (also on Palin): “Obama was an organizer in his 20s and moved onto the Senate. SHE was popping out kids just like her daughter is now, hey!” Another from the same place: “This bitch infuriates me too. I can barely hold it in, I talk about it to anyone that will listen. I HATE HER.”
Some women on that particular blog said they were so overcome by rage at Sarah Palin and all she stands for that they cried.
Bucky beavers, blow-up dolls or just plain old bitches
As bad as all this may look to American women like me, it looks even worse to the rest of the world. Emma Tom, a columnist for the Australian, a daily newspaper in Sydney, has been keeping tabs on the nasty way we treat female candidates in America, and she’s compiled a list of the more recent jabs.
From MSNBC host Tucker Carlson: “There's just something about [Clinton] that feels castrating.”
From the president of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Cliff May: “At least call her a vaginal American.”
From radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh: “Mrs. Clinton's testicle lockbox is big enough for the entire Democrat hierarchy.” (Limbaugh also suggested America wasn't ready to watch a female politician age because only men looked more “authoritative, accomplished [and] distinguished” as they approached the grave.)
From YouTube: “Hillary is a dumb c**t and satans (sic) ho.”
From comedian Bill Maher: “I will send [Barack Obama] whatever I have to, to keep this snarling bitch out of the White House.”
As for Palin:
From the Huffington Post's Michael Seitzman: “I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to 'first wipe off Palin's tranny make-up.')”
From Cintra Wilson’s Salon.com colleague Gary Kamiya: “For the die-hard Republicans who lusted over Palin at the convention, her whip-wielding persona was a turn-on. The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the base yearned to drill her.”
From YouTube: “Sarah Palin is a dumb ass buckey beaver bitch who has a slut for a daughter.”
Tom further notes that “While Clinton and Palin couldn't be more different politically, the abuse (as opposed to the considered criticism) they've been copping is identical: aspersions cast on their abilities as wives and mothers, an obsession with their appearances, and accusations that they are either too youthful and foxy, or too old and ugly. Far worse, however, are the fantasies and threats of sexual desecration. It is this sleaze—even more than the dismal number of women in positions of power—which provides incontrovertible proof that the playing field for political females is still far from level. After all, when was the last time critics of Obama or John McCain said they needed some sense f**ked into them?”
Women occupy a perilous place in American culture. Every year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1,400 women die as the result of injuries inflicted on them by husbands or boyfriends, and an estimated 1.2 million women are forcibly raped. America, where women make up 51 percent of the population, has a striking lack of women in office; they make up only 16 percent of Congress. Most noticeably, American television gives males almost total power to decide what the political conversation should be about. According to a study released by Media Matters for America, at least 77 percent of the 2,150 guests who appeared on the four major Sunday political punditry shows in 2005 through 2006 were men.
“It was like saying, ‘Here is the gender of authority,’” says Shauna Shames, a feminist researcher at Harvard University.
Shames is a doctoral candidate in American government , and she has all the bona fides of a liberal feminist, including letting abortion seekers from out of town crash on her couch the night before their appointments. But she is nonetheless aware of how Palin, a conservative woman candidate who is ardently anti-abortion, has come in for some unusual criticism.
“I mean, here we have Gloria Steinem saying that Palin is [conservative political activist] Phyllis Schlafly, only younger,” says Shames, referring to a recent column in the Los Angeles Times by the feminist icon. “I thought, ‘Whoa, look at this.’”
Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate has emphasized our country’s deeply conflicted attitudes about women in general and women in politics in particular. The women’s movement, explains Shames, is more heavily concentrated in the Democratic Party. Democrats have been more supportive of abortion rights, which can free women of a certain biological inequality. So the alliance with Democrats is natural, but it creates problems for building bipartisan consensus to pass other legislation that's helpful to women. Yet conservative women would appear, in theory at least, to be more electable than their liberal counterparts.
“People assume that women are more liberal, anyway,” says Shames. “So if you have a woman who’s a liberal, it’s a double whammy. A conservative woman seems more moderate.”
It should be noted, however, that substantially more of the relatively few women in Congress are Democrats. Of the 70 in the House, well over two-thirds are Democrats, and of the 16 in the Senate, 11 are Democrats. Of course, everyone else is a man.
Shames, who has previously worked for the White House Project, a national nonprofit, non-partisan initiative to promote women in politics, business and media, is currently researching how women might react to seeing more women—of any party, and regardless of their stand on abortion—in office.
“For women who believe in choice, advocating the election of someone like Palin is very hard to think about,” she says. “Not all women will agree, but there is an argument to be made that having more women as a whole in elected office kind of outweighs the issue [of abortion rights] itself. We need more women in office, and we need lots of different kinds of women in office."
Why? Because just as blacks benefit from seeing blacks in leadership positions, women may benefit from seeing women in leadership positions.
“There are still some questions, and we don’t know this for sure, but the research we do have suggests there may be some kind of effect where just seeing women in leadership roles makes women more interested in politics and more likely to participate in politics,” she says.
Even if they’re called bucky beavers, blow-up dolls or just plain old bitches.
A new women’s movement is needed
When Steinem compared Palin to Schlafly, an apologist for male hegemony who rose to national prominence in the 1980s, she took pains to point out that some treatment of Palin has been sexist, writing, “I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father.”
That same refusal to stoop to misogynist attacks can be seen in how Hillary Clinton has conducted herself in discussing Palin, says Alida Brill, a social critic affiliated with Steinem’s Women’s Media Center.
“She talks about Palin and McCain’s policy, not about Palin personally,” says Brill.
Clinton herself had to endure the worst media mauling applied to a woman since Victoria Woodhull got caricatured as Satan by Harper’s Weekly.
“The Chicago Sun Times, during Hillary’s ascendancy, published a cartoon of her as a witch,” says Brill. “That paper ran things about Hillary that you would never see about people of color or older people. And there were cartoons and jokes about her with ‘going down’ all over the place. Now that she’s not a threat, everyone loves Hillary, even Rush Limbaugh.”
There is no clear-cut reason why America displays such misogyny toward women candidates. But Brill, who is 59 (“I’m an old broad,” she says), can see two developments that work in tandem with one another: the avoidance of the sexually tense subject of women’s rights, and the exhaustion of the women’s rights movement.
“Sexuality is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when we talk about gender issues,” she says. “We have had discussions about age and color in a polite way, but we have never really had those discussions about gender.”
We never got around to having them, she says, because feminism’s “second wave,” with its storied leadership of activists like Betty Friedan and Steinem, has aged. Friedan passed away in 2006. Steinem is in her 70s.
“We kind of liked where we were and we failed to pass the microphone on to the next generation,” says Brill. “We got tired, really. And now it’s your turn. You and your generation have to pick up where we left off.”
SP