I’ve gotten a lot of criticism lately whenever I do a post about the primary, and, specifically, about misogynistic language or sexist framing used to tear down Hillary Clinton. Invariably, someone accuses (and it’s always an accusation) me of being a Clinton shill, or grills me about why I don’t write a whole bunch of balancing posts about racist language and framing being used against Obama, or tries to dismiss what I have to say because Clinton did X, Y or Z that the commenter found offensive.
I’m focusing on the misogynistic stuff thrown at Clinton because this, as you may recall, is a feminist blog. And while there are hundreds if not thousands of other blogs as well as entire networks and mainstream media outlets rushing to the defense of Obama (thus rendering anything I have to say pretty well redundant), there are few outlets calling out misogynistic attacks on Clinton and/or on her supporters. And it matters that somebody’s calling it out. It’s got nothing to do with who’s the better candidate, who should win, the “delegate math,” or what have you. Vote for whomever you feel like voting for; I’ve been on record from the beginning of the primary that feminists don’t have to vote for Clinton to be feminists, since feminists get to make up their minds the same as anyone else does. Of course, I’m also on record for letting the process play out, which seems to equate in some people’s minds to being pro-Clinton.
However, I have also been on record, for a very long time now, that using misogynistic language and framing to dismiss and diminish a woman you disagree with on the issues is damaging to all women. And I’ve been on record (as have my cobloggers) for a very long time that using such language and framing (and any other identity-based language and framing, such as homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic) is unacceptable even if the person you’re attacking is a really, really awful person who holds really, really awful ideas. Yes, it’s wrong even if the person uses sexist, racist or similar attacks against other people. As I said on one such occasion in November 2006:
We’ve been down this road before, kids. With Ann Coulter. With Michelle Malkin. With “pussy.” For that matter, with fat jokes. [And, as Lauren reminds me, with blackface.] And those arguments are no more valid now than they were then.
If you can’t attack the positions of a rabid antifeminist commentator or a deep-in-the-pockets-of-Big-Pharma politician without resorting to insults designed to highlight not just their gender, but their relative worth as fucktoys, then you have no business writing what passes for commentary.
It’s easy to reach first for the gender-based insult. And it’s wrong.
And, seriously, how can you sit there and be shocked, shocked, that people you don’t agree with are attacking Nancy Pelosi for her femaleness and not realize that you’re contributing to the problem by portraying a United States Congresswoman as a cumguzzling two-dollar whore? By whining that women are too sensitive because they complain when you call a media figure a cunt?…
These insults aren’t meant just for the recipients. They’re meant for everyone else in that group, too. So detailed descriptions of your fantasy that “corporate whore” really means real whore doesn’t just hurt Tauscher, the intended target. It hurts Pelosi, too. And it’s meant to — that’s what insults based on a group characteristic or stereotype are for. They’re meant to convey the message to any member of a non-dominant group that they might be accepted for now, but we all know that they’re really just a cunt and a whore, like those women we don’t like.
So, having listed my feminist bona fides, allow me to explain why calling out the misogynist shit thrown at Hillary Clinton, even if you think that Clinton is a party-destroying, warmongering succubus feeding at the corporate teat, is important. The Wall Street Journal has helpfully provided a framework for discussion:
When Sen. Clinton started her presidential campaign more than a year ago, she said she wanted to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling. But many of her supporters see something troubling in the sometimes bitter resistance to her campaign and the looming possibility of her defeat: a seeming backlash against the opportunities women have gained….
But her campaign has also prompted slurs and inflammatory language that many women thought had been banished from public discourse. Some women worry that regardless of how the election turns out, the resistance to Sen. Clinton may embolden some men to resist women’s efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.
This is why I continue to call out the use of misogyny and sexist insults in this campaign. It’s not so much that I’m defending Clinton (though I think she’s getting an unfair shake in the media and in the blogosphere, and that annoys me), but that I’m calling this shit out because this shit hurts women. Women like me. Women like many of you. Women like your daughters, your sisters, your mothers, your friends, your spouses, your SOs. If it’s okay to dehumanize a US Senator and presidential candidate as “that thing” or dismiss her as “that bitch,” or set up a 527 called “Citizens United Not Timid” (aka C.U.N.T.) to “educate the American public about what Hillary Clinton really is,” then we now have an environment in which it’s okay to dehumanize, demean and diminish ordinary women because they’re women.
But even some women who don’t support Sen. Clinton express unease about the tone of some attacks on her. “Why is it OK to say such horrible things about a woman?” asks Erika Wirkkala, who runs a Pittsburgh public-relations firm and supports Sen. Obama. “People feel they can be misogynists, and that’s OK. No one says those kinds of things about Obama because they don’t want to be seen as racist.”
What I’ve been most disturbed by recently is the number of feminists and feminist allies who are willing to overlook misogynist framing and attacks on Clinton because they don’t want her to win, or are willing to dismiss such framing and attacks because “Clinton’s a racist,” or “She went negative first,” or what have you.
That doesn’t fly when someone dismisses Michelle Malkin in racist, sexist terms rather than engage her ideas — even though she herself has made a living off racist, sexist and xenophobic commentary. It doesn’t fly when someone makes tranny jokes about Ann Coulter rather than engage the substance of her ideas, even though she makes a living spewing eliminationist rhetoric. And it doesn’t fly when someone dismisses Jonah Goldberg for being fat rather than attacking his really, truly, breathtakingly idiotic positions.
So why should it fly just because you don’t want Hillary Clinton to get the nomination?
Do you want to be contributing to this kind of marginalization?
Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives “started talking about what an awful b—- Hillary was and how they’d never vote for her.” She says she kept quiet. “I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with them,” she says. “But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn’t positive.”
Think this kind of thing doesn’t have an effect on ordinary women? Think again.
Heather Arnet, a Clinton supporter who runs a Pittsburgh organization that lobbies for more women on public commissions and corporate boards, recently surveyed the Internet and found more than 50 anti-Hillary Clinton sites on Facebook. One of them, entitled “Hillary Clinton Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich,” had more than 38,000 members.
“What if one of these 38,000 guys is someone you, as a woman, have to go to and negotiate a raise?” she asks.
One of the things that was so very appalling about the AutoAdmit fiasco was the glimpse into the unvarnished thoughts of male law students and associates. These would be the people that Jill and the other women targeted were going to go work with, and for. Their toxic attitudes would be carried into the work world and would influence them as they interacted with their coworkers, superiors and subordinates. And in a thousand different ways, they would find some kind of expression, or would be used to justify keeping women from advancing. As the WSJ notes:
At U.S. law firms, women accounted for 17.9% of partners in 2006, up from 14.2% of partners 1996, according to the directory of legal employers compiled by the National Association for Law Placement, even though women received 48% of law degrees granted in 2006 and 43.5% in 1996.
It’s very rare that anyone outright denies someone a promotion because she’s a woman. It’s usually the result of a thousand little decisions and diversions along the way. Such as a refusal to acknowledge authority:
An hour away in Indiana, Pa., a working-class town, Jill Fiore, who teaches part-time at a local college and has a doctorate in English, says she constantly has to remind students to call her “Dr. Fiore” — the same way they address male professors — rather than “Jill” or “Mrs. Fiore.” Unable to get a full-time college teaching job, she made just $8,000 last year cobbling together part-time work, and she recently decided to open a yoga business.
Those constant reminders took away from her ability to teach, and therefore from her ability to get ahead. “Well, her students don’t respect her,” or “She doesn’t have classroom authority,” or “She doesn’t spend enough time teaching,” were probably the reasons given when she was passed over for consideration for a full-time position. And yet the problem, at the root, was sexism.
And sexism is also at the root of much of the “A woman, but not her” phenomenon. There are some very interesting examples of why Clinton is in a catch-22 with regard to being the female candidate:
Jean Yarnal, who has worked in local government for 41 years, says she was unnerved recently when a man she knew came into her office and asked for help with a zoning issue. When talk turned to politics, she says, he denounced Sen. Clinton as a “lesbian” and used several slurs. Ms. Yarnal says she didn’t respond, but thought to herself, “That’s the last time I do you a favor.”
“It’s like the feelings against women are getting stronger,” says Ms. Yarnal. “It’s like men are saying, ‘We want to put you women in your place — watch out, don’t go too fast.'”
Charles McCollester, a professor of industrial relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who works with union members, says he is ready for a woman president, “just not this woman.” He supports Sen. Obama. “Several of my really close female friends feel this is unleashing some kind of antiwoman sentiment. But I don’t see it. We love women. I just never cared much for Hillary. She has set out to become as male as all the rest of the boys.”
Some women in town say they don’t bring up politics at work. “The consensus in my office is that women are too emotional and won’t make a good president,” says Terri George, a paralegal in a law office.
Some young women who support Sen. Obama — sometimes to the chagrin of their pro-Hillary mothers — say they too are troubled by the gender gap in the workplace. But many say they don’t feel comfortable being called “feminists,” and that they look to different role models than Sen. Clinton.
“It isn’t easy being a woman in academia,” says Amanda Moniz, a 36-year-old Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Michigan. “I want a woman candidate who is strong, but also feminine, and who doesn’t feel she has to be tougher than men to succeed,” she says. “Although Hillary has achieved a lot on her own, she wouldn’t be where she was if not for her husband — and that isn’t an inspiring lesson.”
Alexa Steinberg, 25, a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, says she recognizes “that women only make 78 cents for every male dollar, and there are still hurdles for women that I’ll face.” She says she thinks it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be supporting a female candidate for U.S. president — but it won’t be Sen. Clinton. “Politically and personally, she’s trying to take on the male persona, and isn’t a woman in the way I want a woman candidate to be,” she says.
Ms. Steinberg, who supports Sen. Obama, says she’s far more drawn to Michele Obama as a role model. “Michele has a career and even earns more than Barack, and she can knock him for not picking up his socks or doing the laundry,” she explains. “But she has a sense of humor, too. She has a blend of many things, a balance that I can see and appreciate.”
Ms. Steinberg is only 25, so perhaps she does not remember that Hillary Clinton, when Bill ran for President, also had her own career and made more than her husband. However, you may note a theme in the “just not this woman” rationales given here: It’s not that I don’t want a woman to run, it’s just that Hillary’s not a “real woman” because she’s trying too hard to be a man.
Which, honestly, makes me laugh. Because not only has she been slammed for being too feminine (i.e., the New Hampshire voice break that got blown up into a crying jag), but she’s also been slammed as a cold, calculating ballbuster. IOW, she’s got to walk the same line as any other woman who’s trying to get ahead in a male-dominated field, and she’s being subjected to the same impossible standards of being tough but not too tough, feminine but not too feminine, etc., etc., etc. And she, like a lot of other women, just can’t win.
So to circle back to what I said in November 2006:
These insults aren’t meant just for the recipients. They’re meant for everyone else in that group, too. So detailed descriptions of your fantasy that “corporate whore” really means real whore doesn’t just hurt Tauscher, the intended target. It hurts Pelosi, too. And it’s meant to — that’s what insults based on a group characteristic or stereotype are for. They’re meant to convey the message to any member of a non-dominant group that they might be accepted for now, but we all know that they’re really just a cunt and a whore, like those women we don’t like.
Please keep this in mind when you read critiques of the gender-based slurs and framing and tactics and dismissals of Clinton. Those hurt all of us, as women, and tolerating or excusing them just makes it harder for women to be taken seriously.
Attack her all you want on her positions, on her record, on her tactics — but don’t stand for gender-based attacks on her. They’re not acceptable, no matter what you think of her and no matter who they’re coming from.
It’s bigger than this one candidate, and it’s bigger than the election.