Sexism? What sexism? And make me a sandwich while you’re up, bitch
Echidne has been on fire this week. And her post today is so satisfyingly incandescent I just had to drag some of its goodness back here to the Smoking Lounge.
After pointing to a piece in the Seattle Times about Hillary hatred and to an article wherein the New York Times discovers sexism, Echidne lets it rip:
Gawd I sound old-fashioned. We all know that this is the era of post-feminism. Sexism is dead and buried, all women have completely equal rights in everything and more than equal rights in some fields. It’s mostly men who are oppressed, these days, and the oppressors are the feminazis. To say anything else means identity politics, and identity politics are wrong unless your identity is a white, Christian, heterosexual male. But otherwise they are wrong. And we don’t do identity politics on the left anymore.
Do you know what really angers me? No, not what I wrote above, but the interpretation of sexism as just having to do with sexual jeers and ridiculing of the women in the public sphere. It’s as if the question of “why” this jeering and ridiculing happens is veiled, ignored, a taboo. Or as if we all know the “why”, it’s just to decide if we are infringing the First Amendment rights of sexists too much or not enough.
So why do many people in the media treat Hillary as if she was a piece of rotting meat dragged along in some nightmarish carnival? Sure, many treat her like that because they don’t like her personality, her policies, her marriage or her history or because they don’t like the concept of dynasties or because they don’t like Bill Clinton, his policies, his personality, or his penis being titillated. And sure, it’s hard to differentiate between bashing this one particular woman and all women.
But we have all been asked to pretty much assume that Hillary Clinton is bashed as “Hillary” not as the first woman ever to run in the presidential primaries of the United States. That there has never been a woman in that place is regarded as unimportant, trivial, obviously not something to think about when understanding why a Facebook group such as “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich” exists and why it has 23,000 members.
Even I assumed that most opposition to Hillary Clinton was personal, not sexist, until the way the so-called “tears” incident was treated in the media and on the Internet. Hillary-the-automatic-robot turned in one minute into Hillary-the-too-emotional-woman, and there was much jubilation over this in the media. Now we can get rid of that woman. She is scheming and manipulating and no male politician has ever schemed and manipulated.
It’s not clear to me what percentage of Hillary-hatred is based on her personal history or on political manipulation by those who prefer another candidate (yes, manipulation is quite common in politics) and what percentage is based on a general fear and loathing of women in power. But the latter percentage looks to me to be much higher than I anticipated.
You really, really need to read the whole thing.
3 Responses to “Sexism? What sexism? And make me a sandwich while you’re up, bitch”
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kiuku says:
Regardless of the motivations, it is upsetting the acceptability of sexist bashing in relation to, for instance, race bashing. What does that say about the country we as women have to live in? What does it say about men?
January 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm EST -
The Ghost of Violet says:
You should see the troll comments on this blog that don’t get past the twit filter. Sometimes I feel like the person in the Seattle Times article (link in post), who you can just tell is in a bit of shock at how much misogyny is out there, and how nasty it is.
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kiuku says:
Oh GOV I can imagine!
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