There’s a piece in Salon this week about the dude vote, those guys who lurve Obama and/or McCain but would rather stab their eyes out with a fork than vote for Hitlery. It’s an amazing phenomenon, really, second only to the phenomenon of people deluding themselves into thinking that the first phenomenon has nothing to do with sexism.

Think about it: lifelong Democrats who disagree with McCain on every single issue, but would vote for him in November if Hillary were the nominee. Hillary is too “Nurse Ratchedish,” you see. (Mr. Limbaugh, white courtesy phone. White courtesy phone, Mr. Limbaugh.)

The author of the Salon piece doesn’t offer much in the way of analysis, though he does close with the suggestion that other liberal-leaning dudes “suck it up” and force themselves to vote for Hills if she’s the nominee. Sure, it’ll feel like having your nuts pulled off with a pair of pliers while standing naked in a vat of battery acid during a hailstorm, but dude. Be a man.

Over at the Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford goes deeper with Obama’s White Male Voters: Do They Hear Something Blacks Don’t?:

White men have always been the most reactionary, racially-bonded voting group, the deepest well of anti-Black hostility in the country. So, what makes them flock to Obama’s banner? The answer is simple: Obama has based his entire strategy on sending messages to white males, assuring them he will take race and sex privilege off the table of American discourse. They got the message, and vote accordingly.

Now let me be clear that Glen Ford is most definitely not endorsing Hillary; he and his contributors generally regard Clinton and Obama as political twins. But Ford’s ongoing deconstruction of Barack Obama is some of the most interesting political writing out there.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 27, 2008, 9:48 am EST

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So, that picture of Obama in some kind of turban? Matt Drudge says he got it from the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign says that’s bullshit.

I thought everybody knew that Matt Drudge was a notoriously unreliable right-wing gossip monger with a direct line to Republican operatives. Certainly Democrats have known that for years.

But now, amazingly, it seems that whatever he says is The Pure Unvarnished Truth. At least when he’s slandering a Clinton.

My only question is just how long this truthiness situation has been in place. Does this mean that Hillary really is a lesbian and Bill really has an illegitimate child? Inquiring minds want to know!

UPDATE: I see Tennessee Guerilla Women also has a post up on the topic and theirs is much beefier than mine, with background and links and everything. Go read.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 26, 2008, 9:10 am EST

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Jesus, I hate it when these filthy rich megamediacorporacrats pull videos from YouTube. Copyright, schmopyright. Bite me.

EDITED FOR CLARITY: Anyway, it’s no longer possible to see the YouTube clip for the [fabulous pro-Hillary] “Bitch Is The New Black” thing by Tina Fey on SNL [because evil NBC keeps pulling the goddamn video], but here’s a partial transcript from MyDD:

FEY: And finally, the most important Women’s News item there is, we have our first serious female presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton.

And yet, women have come so far as feminists, that they don’t feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she’s a woman.

Women today feel perfectly free to make whatever choice Oprah tells them to.

Which raises the question, why are people abandoning Hillary for Obama?

Some say that they’re put off by the fact that Hillary can’t control her husband, and that we would end up with co-presidents.

‘Cause that would be terrible, having two intelligent, qualified people working together to solve problems. Ugh.

Why would you let Starsky talk to Hutch? I wanna watch that show, Starsky.

You know, what is it, America? What is it, are you weirded out that they’re married?

‘Cause I can promise you that they are having exactly as much sex with each other as George Bush and Jeb Bush are.

Then there is the physical scrutiny of her physical appearance.

Rush Limbaugh, the Jeff Conaway of right wing radio, said that he doesn’t think America is ready to watch their president quote “turn into an old lady in front of them.” Really?

They didn’t seem to mind when Ronald Reagan did that.

Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch.

Let me say something about that: Yeah, she is.

And so am I and so is this one. (pointing to Amy Poehler)

POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.

FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.

(Amy says yeah and starts nodding her head, together they get in a rhythm, with Amy saying in response, more yeahs, uh huhs, with a ‘you go girl’ style)

Like back in grammar school,

they could have had priests teaching you but, no,

they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots

and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches

But at the end of the school year

you sure KNEW the capital of Vermont!

So COME ON Texas and Ohio

Get on board, it’s not too late!…

BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!

I’d also love to see the skit where they mocked the media’s flagrant pro-Obama bias, but that, too, has been withdrawn from YouTube.

I want NBC to die.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 25, 2008, 3:55 am EST

22 Comments »

I’m in the habit of carrying on substantive conversations with people in the comment threads, so it sometimes happens that my Serious Opinions About Major Issues end up being expressed not in posts, but in off-hand comments. Which is fine, except that whenever people ask me stuff like “where did you say that thing about x?”, I can’t remember. It’s not in a post. It’s buried in some comment thread. So I’ve invented a comment rescue category, and whenever I run across (or someone points out to me) some comment that really should have been post, here’s where I’ll put it.

Yesterday Julia asked about what it was like during the Women’s Liberation Movement and how it was different from today. Here’s what I said:

Julia, I became a feminist (an adolescent one) in 1971, when Women’s Liberation (as it was still called) was cresting. You know what it was like? It was like every single woman in the country was having an Ah Ha! moment, like HEY WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? It was like the scales were falling from a million eyes.

The big question, though, which would take a long time to discuss, is why that happened THEN and not before and not since. Because what had always happened before — and what has always happened since — is that the scales-falling-from-eyes is instantly squashed by a million contradicting impulses and inputs, as I’m sure you’ve experienced yourself.

It’s not discrimination, it’s just nature and

no no you’re exaggerating and

ooh feminism is icky those women are scary and

you women belong with your menfolk (insert race or nationality) rather than ganging up with those other women, those other women (insert race or nationality) are our enemies and

what’s wrong with being sexy? and

why not learn to play the game and stop making a big deal? and

do you hate men or something? and

what are you complaining about, don’t you realize how good you have it? and

women don’t suffer nearly as much as (insert any other group) and

a better way would be to wait quietly and ask nicely instead of antagonizing men and on and on and fucking on.

So why didn’t that happen circa 1970? Zeitgeist. The pill plus the sexual revolution plus labor-saving devices multiplied by the Baby Boomer generation and then raised to the 10th power by a series of movements for human equality and justice beyond the traditional old tribal allegiances that usually keep women apart.

Will it ever happen again? I wonder.

I’ve bolded the bit I want to expand on. We can’t re-create the social and historical conditions that gave wings to Second Wave feminism, but we can notice the extent to which women — most definitely including feminists — have subsided back into tribal and clique allegiances, rather than standing together as women.

Just today I was reading an essay questioning why on earth black women would support a white woman for President, even if Obama weren’t running. Yeah, it’s not as if black women and white women have anything in common.

That kind of anti-ecumenicism is perhaps the single most salient aspect of Third Wave feminism. To some extent it is a good thing, even a great thing: understanding that women’s experiences are different, that the black woman’s experience is different from the white woman’s, and from the Native American woman’s, and from the Iranian woman’s, and so forth. And the queer experience, that’s different too, and then there’s the poor woman’s experience, and the immigrant experience, and the disabled experience, and the fat experience, and all of it intersects in a zillion different ways: a Chinese menu of oppression and privilege.

All of which is extremely valuable and important. Give everyone a voice; let everyone tell her story. No shoehorning into a dominant narrative, no assuming that every woman’s experience is synonymous with that of the middle-class white women who spearheaded waves one and two and who themselves were the beneficiaries of several types of privilege built on the backs of less fortunate women.

What has been lost, though — and this is as plain as day to me, though it’s apparently bad manners to point it out — is the sense that we are all women and that we all suffer in particular ways as women. Feminism is supposed to be about combating the oppression of women qua women, and so for it to work we have to think beyond more immediate allegiances.

Look: women are not a natural group. There are no families of women, no tribes of women, no nations of women. Humans organize themselves around kinship and language and culture, and other types of alliances are inevitably weak in comparison. The Marxists discovered that a century ago, though they kept up the “workers of the world, unite!” self-delusion for decades more. German and French peasants in 1914 had vastly more in common with each other than with their parasitic overlords, but when war threatened all the German people — peasants and parasites together — voted happily to blow the fucking heads off all the French people. It was ever thus.

For all their differences — and women are as different from each other as men are — women all over the world share a set of common obstacles as women. And that will be true as long as patriarchy exists. But getting a bunch of humans to cross boundaries of culture and tribe and race and nation is hard. Way hard. I guess what disturbs me today is that almost nobody even seems to be trying. The Third Wave commitment to multiple feminisms seems to devolve all too often into the basest of human impulses, which is essentially fuck you, stranger.

And so we have the essayist who believes that black women and white women have no common cause. We have queer feminists who feel like they’re on a different planet than straight feminists. We have pro-porn feminists who seem to think that their worst enemies are anti-porn feminists. And don’t even get me started on the chasm between Western feminists and non-Western feminists.

Some people will tell you that it was like that even in the early 70s; that the ecumenicism of Women’s Lib was an illusion. That Women’s Liberation was just middle-class white girls and it only looked like universality because other women’s voices were silenced. In fact, I suspect that’s becoming the dominant narrative. Certainly it’s believed by a whole bunch of young feminists who weren’t even alive at the time.

All I can say is that in my experience it wasn’t like that at all. The feminist circles I was exposed to in the 70s were made up of women of all races and nationalities and backgrounds. What we talked about, what fascinated all of us, were the commonalities between us. A middle-class Jewish girl and a Lakota woman comparing notes. A privileged wife and a prostitute realizing that they were both fucking for their supper. Black women and white women talking urgently together about their menfolk, about the “race traitor” business and that whole godawful clusterfuck.

And through it all the realization that if women were ever going to be liberated, it would be because we’d done it ourselves, working together as women. That we couldn’t rely on any other justice movement to do it for us. Not humanism, not Marxism, not pacifism, not the civil rights movement — nothing. Because no matter how hard women worked or how much they threw their hearts into those other quests for liberation, at the end of the day it was mostly just the men who got free.

Yep, we knew all that then. And those days are gone. Gone, gone, gone. Gone, she said. Gone.

I have no idea how to bring them back. But I think we need to try. I think if feminism is going to have a fourth wave — if the dream of women as fully human is to survive into the permanent consciousness of the species instead of being embalmed as a quaint relic of the 20th century — then we’d better figure it out.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Feminist Theory, Gender Issues, Recommended, Election 2008, Comments that should have been posts on February 23, 2008, 1:11 am EST

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This piece at the Boston Globe gives the rundown: Black man vs. white woman. Ignore the freakout at the very end of the article when arch Ev Psycho John Tooby tries to explain it all as the result of Flintstones-era hard coding; just read for insight into present-day American attitudes. This is stuff that psychologists and sociologists have known for a long time.

A caveat: This is not an invitation to engage in an inane argument over which is “worse,” racism or sexism. The question as posed is unanswerable; what is meant by “worse”? In what way? For whom? And from whose perspective? If you can’t grasp the difference between analyzing the perdurability of certain types of bias and making sweeping statements about which bias is “worse,” then you’re on the wrong blog. Also, anybody who shows up here and uses the phrase “oppression Olympics” will be instantly exploded by my magic intertube bomb.

But back to the Boston Globe article:

But in a campaign in which it’s hard to find many substantive policy differences between the leading Democratic contenders, it’s notable how well the psychological research on bias predicts the race we’ve seen so far. Obama’s ability to disarm the initial reservations of an increasing number of white voters as the race has progressed — especially over the past week, in his string of eight straight primary victories — fits with the findings of bias researchers that racial bias is strikingly mutable, and can be mitigated and even erased by everything from clothing and speech cadence to setting and skin tone.

As Clinton has discovered, gender stereotypes are stickier. Women can be seen as ambitious and capable, or they can be seen as likable, a host of studies have shown, but it’s very hard for them to be seen as both — hence the intense scrutiny and much-debated impact of Clinton’s moment of emotional vulnerability in a New Hampshire diner last month.

As the race moves toward the possibly decisive March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas, Clinton and Obama will have to continue to negotiate the complex demands of campaigning for an office that has been held by an unbroken string of 43 white men. But while this presidential campaign has proven a stage on which these issues can dramatically play out, they also run deeply through the rest of our society. And if the ample literature on bias shows anything, it is that, for all the difficulties Americans have with race, it may prove that attitudes about women are the hardest to change.

What follows is a review of some of the big work done on race and gender bias with test subjects, which has consistently shown that the two things behave very differently. In a nutshell, gender bias is more stubborn and resistant to change. And the particular gender bias that our society exhibits is bad news for any woman running for President.

“The deal is that women generally fall into two alternatives: they are either seen as nice but stupid or smart but mean,” says Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton who specializes in stereotyping.

And unlike racial bias, there’s little evidence that these attitudes are softening.

According to Eagly of Northwestern, the problem isn’t that women aren’t traditionally understood as smart, but that they traditionally aren’t understood to be “assertive, competitive, take-charge” types. More than intelligence, she argues, this “agentic” quality is what we look for in leaders, and, as both surveys and experimental studies have shown, we find it deeply discomfiting in women.

“That’s what Hillary Clinton is up against,” argues Eagly. “She’s had to show her toughness, then people turn around and say she’s too cold.”

Amy Cuddy, a psychologist at Northwestern, suggests that the durability of gender stereotypes stems in part from the fact that most people have far more exposure to people of the opposite gender than to people of different races. As a result, they feel more entitled to their attitudes about gender.

“Contact hasn’t undermined these stereotypes, and it might even strengthen them,” she says. “Many people don’t believe seeing women as kind or soft is a stereotype. They’re not even going to question it, because they think it’s a good thing.”

In a world where even self-described feminists are complaining that Hillary is unlikable, where these same women find it easier to root for an empty suit than a smart woman as long as the suit’s draped on a good-looking man, where more than one feminist has actually called on Hillary to step down and end this long national nightmare of a woman competing with Mr. Charisma — maybe we need a national refresher course on unconscious bias.

via Echidne.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 20, 2008, 11:56 pm EST

27 Comments »

Rush Limbaugh’s latest on Hillary:

It’s — a lot of it’s attitudinal — she just — she reminds men of the worst characteristics of women they’ve encountered over their life: totally controlling, not soft and cuddly. Not sympathetic. Not patient. Not understanding. Demanding, domineering, Nurse Ratched kind of thing. Everything you do, you have to do behind her back, that kind of — and then, after all of that, with Mrs. Clinton with this — the characteristics I just described — with the flick of a light switch, all of a sudden, she’s a victim of evil men and bad Republicans and she starts crying and she wants sympathy. She’s a classic manipulator.

And this after a long freestyle screed on Hillary’s “testicle lockbox” and how many testicles it will hold.

Allow me to remind you that just hours ago we were considering the sad case of Erin the Queen of Idiocracy Spain, a woman who is so delusional that she’s convinced herself that gender has nothing to do with people’s attitude towards Hillary. Nothing.

Where are these drugs? I want them!

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 15, 2008, 11:22 pm EST

12 Comments »

Erin at Queen of Spain — apparently a popular mommy blogger, though I’ve never heard of her — thinks Hillary should step down. Why? Because she makes people uncomfortable, especially men. And this, according to Erin, has nothing to do with the fact that Hillary is a woman.

When I told myself it was gender that got people going, I refrained from asking and wanting you to step aside. Simply on principle, I wanted to see you run and win because they said it couldn’t be done. Because it was my belief, this was all about being a girl.

It’s not, and I was wrong.

I firmly believe while the gender issue has given you a handicap I hope we all one day overcome, it is NOT the reason people have a gut reaction to you or your campaign or your legacy.

It’s not? Gee, what is the reason, then?

Erin doesn’t know. No fucking clue. She says:

For some reason you still get people very riled up, and not in the good way.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the analysis. Hillary may be the best-qualified candidate, but for some mysterious, unfathomable reason that Erin can’t quite put her finger on, people don’t like her. Especially men.

So Hillary should quit. It’s awful, men feeling threatened and stuff. We can’t have that! Much better to just wait quietly and patiently for some nice lady to come along who the men will accept. Then maybe, if our husbands agree, we can have a lady president.

In the meantime, we can have President Jesus Obama. Because once he’s the Democratic nominee, the Republicans will just roll over. McCain will withdraw his candidacy and there won’t even be a Republican on the ticket. There won’t even have to be a campaign! No fighting, no mudslinging, no character assassination, nothing. In fact, the Republican party will probably just fold right up! No more red state-blue state culture war, no more wingnuts, no more fundies, no more neo-cons, nothing. Everybody in the country will grow their hair long and we’ll join hands and sing kumbaya. I can’t wait.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 15, 2008, 3:42 pm EST

17 Comments »

Today the media is dancing on Hillary’s grave, thrilled to the very tips of their dicks (prosthetic or otherwise) that The Bitch Is Going Down. It’s pre-New Hampshire all over again, though this time it may be for real.

The sexist old guard is not about to let a woman become President. Some stupid twat in the White House? Are you fucking kidding? Much better to have the Tasteful Black Man. The old guard is racist, too, but there’s no question that at this point in our nation’s life, the media and most of the establishment are more amenable to voting for a black man than for any woman.

And they are joined in this by the sexist new guard, the post-backlash generation that is every bit as misogynistic — if not more so — than their predecessors.

Melissa at Shakespeare’s Sister has done a round-up of all the Hillary Sexism Watch posts at her place; there are sixty-two. Sixty-two posts, and that’s just since September. I was reading through the comments there and this one jumped out at me:

How this got so polarized is beyond me, then I remember that it’s the twenty-somethings who are coming out in droves for Barack, the ones who trash people (particularly women) with glee at the slightest hint of disagreement, the ones who urge young women to commit suicide, the ones who think rape is funny, the ones who dress provocatively and point video cameras up their (nearly nonexistent) skirts because their boyfriends want them to…. yeah, those kids. Do I sound old? I am. And it’s depressing to see that this is the generation that’s supposed to bring “change” to the world. What, exactly will change, or has changed? You think it’s great that you have the freedom to be dismissive, obnoxious, self-absorbed, nasty a**holes?

Exactly. The glorious youth of today. O joy.

See, if you’re a decrepit old person like me and you came of age in the 70s, it is painfully obvious that my generation, the feminist generation that grew up with the Second Wave, is an aberrant hiccup. Before us there was the Rat Pack world of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, where all the women were broads and dames; after us is the hip-hop world of Snoop Dogg and Joe Francis, where all the women are hos and bitches. It’s the post-backlash, kill-the-feminazis, all-porn-all-the-time culture of exuberant misogyny. My generation certainly included plenty of sexists, but we also created a brief moment in time when it was actually cool to be a feminist. When respect for women as fully realized human beings was the “in” thing. Those days are long gone. Even while the political demands of liberal feminism have become mainstream — equal pay, etc. — social attitudes towards women are more dismissive and degrading than I’ve ever seen in my life.

Go to some lowest-common-denominator site like YouTube or a gamer forum or something and read the threads. These are the moronic youth of America, people who can barely even spell, much less string a sentence together. Notice how they think. They’ll lecture each other self-importantly about how evil racism is (to the extent that they possess sufficient human language to “lecture” anybody about anything), but when it comes to women, holy christ. It’s all skanks and hos and fuk u bitch and I’d hit that and lol she nasty cum ho and suk it u bitch — and those are just the nice comments.

All you have to do is listen to a few rap songs or watch a couple of hip-hop videos or check out the porn landscape — the mind-boggling miasma of misogyny with which today’s generation is saturated — and you realize that there is no way in hell most young people would ever get behind a woman for President. Bitches be for fucking! Clothes off, face down, ass up!

P.S. Almost forgot Camille. Poor old Camille, still on her lifelong quest to never miss an opportunity to ridicule women and feminism. Her piece in Salon today: “Old-guard feminists caterwaul for Hillary.”

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Election 2008 on February 14, 2008, 9:17 am EST

26 Comments »

It has come to my attention that certain individuals are questioning my vacation schedule. In the words of commenter Aunti Disestablishmentarian, “Between your Red hot Chili Pepper and that Raul Feller, you sure do take alot of vacations! You’d give the Preznit a run for his money in terms of ‘most days off.’”

Christ on a club cracker with alfalfa sprouts, people, can you blame me? First of all, the Chili Peppers rule. They just do, sorry, end of story. Secondly, Anthony Kiedis is really, really good in bed. I mean think about it: if you had Anthony Kiedis in one hand and a large supply of some seriously fine mind-altering substances in the other, what would you do? Hang around here and write blog posts?

It’s not like I’m missing some big fucking Happy Dance back here in the real world. The past couple of weeks have been so goddamn depressing I don’t know why there hasn’t been a spate of mass suicides across the land. The media’s hate-on of Hillary continues unabated; I swear to god, I think those guys’ dicks must be hard all the time. It’s a fucking paroxysm, an orgy, a crack high of misogyny. And Obama is a fucking asshole who’s increasingly looking to me like an amoral creep. Yes, I will vote for him if he’s the nominee, no question, even work to support his campaign, blah blah blah, but I say it here: I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. I do not like thee one fucking little bit. Trash Hillary, trash the Clinton presidency, have your wife say she probably wouldn’t even help Hillary get elected (remember Bill saying that if Obama was the nominee he’d do everything in his power to help him win?), indulge in coded or not-so-coded misogyny, feed bullshit smears to the press, anything. Hope and change my ass. This guy is the new Reagan. Remember Reagan? An empty suit whose entire political life was based on giving speeches that people liked. I was appalled at the stupidity of the American public when they 1) elected Reagan and then 2) re-elected the son of a bitch, and during a recession at that, ’cause it was “Morning in America,” see? Yes, the American people in all their wisdom actually voted for a goddamn cereal commercial.

But lo and fucking behold, nobody seems to get that Obama is the same can of soup. His speeches are written by a speechwriter, you fucking twits. Deliberately crafted to sound as much like MLK and JFK as possible. Do you not get that? Ignore the speeches and look at the man. Look at how he can’t hold his own in a debate. Look at his record. Look at the content. Look at the mudslinging his campaign engages in. God almighty, Americans are morons.

And the Brits are no fucking better, Mr.-Archbishop-Eyebrows-who-can-wipe-my-ass. Hey, why not sharia law in Britain? Oh, but only for family matters, says Eyebrow Man, by which he means the entire spectrum of codified patriarchal abuse that governs women’s personal lives: divorce, marriage, custody, marital rape, marital beatings, financial support, “honor,” etc. Clearly His Very Reverend Eyebrows think it’s just peachy keen for women to be second-class citizens because after all, they’re not really human, are they? They’re just women. Eight hundred years of English jurisprudence and a modern European concept of civil rights are fine and dandy, but they do only apply to human beings. Which lets women right out.

The only good thing that happened in the past two weeks was Robin Morgan’s kick-ass piece about the sexism dogging Hillary’s candidacy (go read it, it’s fucking great), but goddamn if a couple of third-wave feminists didn’t ruin the moment by wilfully misinterpreting the essay as a personal attack on them. Why? Who the fuck knows. I guess they saw the words “young” and “women” next to each other and the voices in their heads told them it was a coded message from Morgan to them personally. Shit, they must have even better substances than I do.

Where’s Anthony? Anthony! Come back!

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Politics, Election 2008 on February 11, 2008, 9:00 pm EST

30 Comments »

Sorry. These things happen. I’ve been AWOL on a sex vacation with Anthony Kiedis. I’d planned to be back a few days ago but then John Frusciante begged me to leave Anthony for him and so it was a real situation.

I gotta check my email and stuff.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist on February 7, 2008, 3:02 pm EST

13 Comments »