Twisty:

The idea that women’s public sexuality can so precisely mirror traditional male fantasy while simultaneously existing in a kind of pro-woman, I-do-it-for-myself alternate universe is the cornerstone of funfeminist “thought.”

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Prostitution, Pornography on July 22, 2008, 6:49 am EST

9 Comments »

July 19, 1848: one hundred and sixty years ago today. In Seneca Falls, New York, 300 women and men gathered to discuss “the social, civil and religious condition and rights of Woman.” It was the first women’s rights convention in American history.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a young firebrand then, sharp of tongue and sharper of wit. She’d spent the week before the convention laboring over a Declaration of Sentiments, modeling it closely on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal,” she scribbled on a long sheet of foolscap. “We insist that [women] have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.” Her husband was so alarmed he decided to leave town for the duration.

Just as the Declaration of Independence had enumerated the colonists’ grievances with King George, Stanton listed “injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The Declaration was read aloud at the convention and adopted unanimously, with 100 women and men affixing their signatures to the document. “In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule,” Stanton wrote, “but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.”

One hundred and sixty years later, where do we stand? How many of those “injuries and usurpations” have been fixed? I thought it would be interesting to list the items in a table, a kind of feminist punch-list, as it were, with a status note on each item. Fixed or not fixed?

#	“Injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” from the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments	Fixed in U.S.?	Fixed world-wide?
1	He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
2	He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
3	He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both natives and foreigners.
4	Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
5	He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
6	He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
7	He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master–the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
8	He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women–the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
9	After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
10	He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
11	He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
12	He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
13	He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
14	He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
15	He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
16	He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Making this little table was partially an exercise in translating Stanton’s 19th century prose to modern concepts. Item #11, for example: that’s the glass ceiling. Granted, we’ve made immense progress in the professions (though “theology” doesn’t have quite the cachet it used to), but the ceiling is still there. Hence the big red X.

But mostly I’m gratified by how far we’ve come, at least in the United States (and other countries that have experienced the feminist revolution.) All of the legal restrictions listed by Stanton have been removed, and most of the social barriers of her day have fallen as well. Even the unfixed items show significant progress. The women of 1848 would hardly know what to think if they were plopped down in the midst of modern America.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a sharp cookie, though, and she would have quickly grasped that there’s still a world of hurt buried in items #14 and #16. Changing laws is hard; changing hearts and minds is harder.

The tragedy of this little table is in the column for “Fixed world-wide?” Not a single checkmark. Not a single one of those “injuries and usurpations” has been completely removed from the face of the Earth. It’s all red Xs, all the way down.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on July 19, 2008, 12:51 pm EST

12 Comments »

A couple of weeks ago I posted this link to Apostate’s compelling essay, Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue. In light of the New Yorker discussion of the extent to which Islamophobia is racist, sassysenora posed the following question:

i agree completely that attacks on Muslims are more than simple racial bigotry. the bigotry is partly racial, partly cultural, partly political, and partly religious. invidious, uninformed stereotypes underlie all those dimensions. my problem with your approach is that i thought you were opposing that type of argument when you endorsed “every line” of Apostate’s article “Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue”.

Apostate condemned Antonova’s article which, while condemning honor killings, argued that they are not per se Islamic but more cultural (i.e., Islam does not always embrace or embody Arab cultural traditions such as honor killings depending upon the culture of its adherents). to me, Apostate’s post was in large part an explicit rejection of the idea that honor killings are cultural as well as religious. Even in non-Arab cultures, she asserts: “Islam IS Arab culture, to a very great degree. Arab culture IS Islam to a very great degree.” Apostate rejects the view that honor killings are not an inherent part of Islam even though (1) honor killings don’t exist in non-Arab Muslim countries, e.g., Indonesia or West Africa and (2) honor killings cross religious divides but tend to follow cultural ones, i.e., if Muslims in a country practice it, usually so do Hindus, Sikhs and Christians.

perhaps we interpreted Apostate’s and Antonova’s articles differently, but your positions seem inconsistent to me. how can you say that honor killings are not partly cultural and partly political as well as partly religious but then say that Islamophobia is only partly racial? it seems to me that implies that Muslims are not motivated by things like culture and politics as well as religion and gender while we’re more complex. If you are not Islamophobic, why do you “embrace” Apostate’s argument that Islam inherently promotes honor killings even though some Imams insist that it condemns them?

I wrote a 500-word comment in reply and then realized that if I’m going to be writing a 500-word comment, I might as well make it a 500-word post. Especially since the intersection of religion and feminism is one of my favorite topics. So here’s my answer to sassysenora:

First of all, I do think we are interpreting Apostate’s post differently.

I read Apostate’s post as objecting to the facile Western (liberal) notion that Islam is a nice idealistic religion that floats above unpleasant cultural practices, and never the twain shall meet. Her point was that religion and culture are inextricably intertwined. Religion codifies culture, and culture reflects religion. You seem to read her as saying that honor killings and other horrors are religious, not cultural, but what she was saying, in my interpretation, is that this is a false dichotomy.

Islam developed in an extremely patriarchal environment (the medieval Middle East) and is saturated with misogynistic notions. There are a few branches of Islam that attempt to transcend the misogyny and embrace a more gender-balanced view, usually because they’re situated in a different cultural environment (for example, the semi-matriarchal tribes of Indonesia), but it’s an uphill struggle. Judaism had a similar start in life, and it took 3000 years to get to the Reform branch and Jewish feminism — and we still have the Orthodox. Christianity took 2000 years to travel that road, and we still have the fundies and the Catholics. It is even arguable (and I have certainly argued it) that the sexism embedded in the deep-history layers of Judaism and Christianity is sufficient to prevent those religions from ever completely shedding their patriarchal frames, though of course many modern, enlightened adherents disagree.

The situation with Islam is even more dire. It’s a much younger religion, and has not encountered an Enlightenment-like revision. It has not been tamed by secularism, as both Christianity and Judaism have been in the West. And it is rooted in a cultural milieu that is more misogynistic than the historical seats of worldwide Christianity and Judaism — both of which were born in the same sands as Islam, but found their destiny in Europe. (Yes, medieval Europe was marginally less patriarchal than the medieval Middle East; that’s not cultural chauvinism, just historical reality.) So it’s easy to look at Islam and wonder how on earth it can ever get to the place where, say, Reform Judaism is now.

But I hope it’s possible, mostly because my preferred alternative (the disappearance of all patriarchal religions from the face of the Earth) seems unlikely. The modern pace of cultural evolution is so rapid that there’s hope. We live in a global village, and memes are the world ocean. Cultural evolution occurs in decades, not centuries. Theoretically, “reform Islam” is a not-impossible goal.

I really don’t know how to help make that happen, though. I could write at length here about the obstacles — political, ideological — but maybe I’ll leave that for the comment thread.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Godbags, Religion, Election 2008 on July 16, 2008, 9:37 pm EST

23 Comments »

Via TalkLeft, quoting the AP:

In an interview this week with “Relevant,” a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother.”

Obama then added: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.”

We’re all feminists here, so I don’t need to explain why and how that is outrageous.

Jan Crawford Greenburg, writing for ABC News Blogs, accurately assesses the significance of the remark:

In a recent interview, Obama appears to back away from his long-stated positions on abortion (and a proposed federal abortion rights law he had co-sponsored), repudiate 35 years of accepted Supreme Court rulings on the issue and embrace a view on abortion restrictions that has been expressed on the Court only by Justices Thomas and Scalia.

Obama’s remarks are printed verbatim in the interview, published yesterday in Relevant Magazine. Read them — there’s no mistaking that Obama says he no longer will support what’s long been a cornerstone of the abortion rights debate: The Court’s insistence that laws banning abortions after the fetus is viable (now about 22 weeks) contain an exception to allow doctors to perform them if necessary to protect a pregnant woman’s mental health.

‘I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother,” Obama said. “I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.”

Wow.

Greenburg goes on to review the history of the mental health exception, and why removing it has long been the goal of anti-choicers. Read the whole thing.

Then, when you’re finished saying “Wow,” how about saying “ROAR”?

PUMA ROAR!

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Election 2008, PUMA on July 4, 2008, 9:09 pm EST

31 Comments »

From Apostate: Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue.

I’ve been a feminist all my life, and the plight of women under Islam has long been a focus of my involvement. I just want to say here that I underline and endorse and recommend every line of Apostate’s post. To my mind one of the most regrettable failures of Third Wave feminism has been its abdication of genuine intellectual engagement with the nature of women’s oppression, particularly with regard to religion. The bold insights and global awakening of Second Wave feminism have given way to the equivocations of Third Wavers, too many of whom mistake anti-racist posturing for enlightenment. It’s easy that way to overlook the blood on the floor.

We need to recover our truths.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Godbags on July 3, 2008, 10:31 am EST

33 Comments »

In Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales, Kate Zernike looks at the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Eliot Spitzer sleazemelt, and asks “where does society stand on gender matters?”

PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.”

It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?

Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.

Ah yes, that younger generation. The twenty-somethings who are convinced that sexism is irrelevant because they haven’t hit the the double standard or the glass ceiling yet. It reminds me of an editorial in the Boston Globe earlier this year by a 25-year-old woman who acknowledged the debt to earlier feminists, but concluded that women her age feel confident in their “abilities” and know that it’s safe to turn their attention to other problems. But maybe there’s hope:

Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.

“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”

I’m going to skip right over the fact that “tears” and “scolding” are part of the sexist narrative against Hillary, and if you’ve bought into it you might want to do a little re-calibrating on our post-feminist progress. Right, I’m going to skip over that. Not mention it at all. What I’m going to focus on is this next thing:

It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”

There’s some truth in what the old dude speaketh, though he should have clarified that the young women’s “power” is a fleeting illusion based purely on their appeal to genuinely powerful men, and it expires the instant they pass their sell-by date. But when this same wisdom is delivered by old crones (feminists over 40 or so), our daughters complain that we’re scolds or dinosaurs or simply jealous of how young and pretty they are.

Which, again, is one of those little indicators that the Land of Postfeminism is still a long ways away.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on March 15, 2008, 11:25 pm EST

5 Comments »

Both from Echidne of the Snakes:

1. Echidne fisks a piece by Joel Stein that is so astoundingly sexist I’m actually surprised it’s running in a major national newspaper.

2. Someone needs to tell Chris Rock about rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, wife-murder, prostitution, sexual slavery, FGM, and various other items that he seems to have gotten through 43 years of life without hearing about.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on March 1, 2008, 12:50 am EST

18 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

47 Comments »

Is he a secret Twisty fan? Every time he comes out with one of these pieces I wonder.

Politics and Misogyny:

With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s win in New Hampshire, gender issues are suddenly in the news. Where has everybody been?

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.

Little attention is being paid to the toll that misogyny takes on society in general, and women and girls in particular.

Its forms are limitless. Hard-core pornography is a multibillion-dollar business, having spread far beyond the stereotyped raincoat crowd to anyone with a laptop and a password. Crowds of crazed photographers risk life and limb to get shots of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears without their underwear. At New York Jets home games, men regularly gather at Gate D to urge female fans to expose themselves.

And he keeps going. Violence against women, the cult of the Dead White Female, the incredible degradation of prostitution in Nevada, sexual assaults on women in the military, advertising that glorifies rape and abuse.

Read the whole thing.

Should we be grateful that there’s at least one writer at the New York Times who gets it? Or furious that there’s only one writer at the New York Times who gets it?

I’m in a good mood at the moment, so I’ll be grateful.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on January 15, 2008, 5:32 pm EST

7 Comments »

How pernicious is sexism in American life? So pernicious that the media and the pundits and a large segment of the population, it seems, are determined to pretend — to us or to themselves — that it doesn’t exist. Ergo, the shameful treatment of Hillary Clinton in the press, and the determination of women to vote for her, has nothing to do with sexism. Because sexism doesn’t exist. Not in America.

In the wake of the New Hampshire primary, the punditocracy went nuts trying to figure out why so many women voted for Hillary and why the press didn’t see it coming. The New York Times inadvertently stumbled into part of the answer with this article: Women’s Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism. Not “Women’s Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Crying Jag,” because that didn’t happen. No, women’s support for Clinton rose because they were fucking FED UP with the misogyny of the press, which reached a tent-pitching crescendo in the crucifixion that followed the so-called “crying.”

See, that’s the problem with being a journalist nowadays: occasionally, in the course of investigating stories, you actually happen upon the truth. This is inconvenient if the truth doesn’t correspond to the dominant media bullshit, and the dominant media bullshit in this case is that sexism doesn’t exist and everybody in America despises Hillary almost as much as Chris Matthews does because she’s Satan with a Vagina, that’s not opinion, just fact, no sexism here at all.

Notice that the Times was already hedging with the headline of the article: “perceived” sexism. Women perceive sexism, though the Times can’t go so far as to say it actually exists. Women just think it’s there, probably when they’re having their periods. But who really knows? It’s like Sasquatch, or UFOs maybe.

That women in New Hampshire and the country reached the breaking point with the unremitting misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the truth, and probably accounts for a good deal of her last-minute support. (That and the fact that many women deeply long to see a woman in the White House, even if Hillary’s politics render them ambivalent about supporting her openly.)

But this narrative — this truth — must not be allowed to stand. Because sexism doesn’t exist, see? So a competing narrative has taken shape, one far more to the liking of the sexist media. And in the grand tradition of Dude Planet, the narrative designed to discount the possibility of sexism is, in itself, mind-bendingly sexist. Actually it’s just a continuation of the one the media was already working on before the primary, the one where Hillary broke down crying on camera, either from womanly weakness or because she’s a stone cold manipulative bitch, take your pick. Page Two of this narrative is that the women of New Hampshire saw the tears and instantly started lactating or something, then rushed to the polls to vote for poor Hillary out of sympathy, because that’s what women do, see? They cry and they moan and they don’t really understand the issues or the world or anything, that’s complicated guy-stuff, they just gather in the menstrual hut and sniffle and watch Oprah and hug each other.

The media loves that narrative. They want it to be true. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true, because our media isn’t about truth anyway.

As for the business about how what women were actually responding to was the sexism leveled at Hillary, especially by the media itself and especially after the tears nonsense — gone. Into the memory hole. Never happened.

The New York Times made it official today with its lead political article: The Crying Game. Watch how it’s done, in three easy paragraphs:

Paragraph 1:

“I’m not prepared to concede that there are Americans who decide based on who cries,” he said, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s misty-eyed response to a question in Portsmouth the day before. “I’m sorry, I just don’t think that is quite possible.”

Translation: Granted, at first some people weren’t buying the Crying Narrative (including this very paper three days ago but god forbid we should say that out loud).

Paragraph 2:

In the days since then, commentators, analysts and pollsters have offered more sober explanations for why the polls favoring Barack Obama were so misleading. Maybe race was a factor that polling couldn’t account for. Maybe voters leaning toward Mrs. Clinton were wary of showing their hands to pollsters. Maybe the Granite State had one of its customary contrarian convulsions.

Translation: Could have been racism, could have been reticence, could have been Yankee contrarianism. What? The sexism of the media and the anger of feminist-minded voters? That we reported on in this very newspaper just three days ago? Never happened. Sucked into the memory hole. Sexism doesn’t exist.

Paragraph 3:

Any or all of those factors could have contributed to the surprise result. But social scientists say that the pop-psych 101 hypothesis — linking emotional breakdowns to ballots — cannot be dismissed so easily.

Translation: Aaaaannnd drum roll, please. Social scientists say…and you can fill in the rest. Sob fest, breast leakage, menstrual hut, sympathy. Probably some daytime TV in there too. Crying Narrative ROOLZ!

Sexism? Doesn’t exist.

Having disposed of the unpleasant-but-brief confrontation with its own foam-dripping misogyny, the media can return to its comfortable rut: Obama is the voice of change, Hillary’s a shrew whom no one really likes. And sexism doesn’t exist.

Over at the Washington Post this tactic is on full display in Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as The Great White Hope:

Obama’s Jan. 3 triumph let loose a giddiness bordering on exhilaration among voters and, especially, media commentators, who hailed his triumph as “historic,” even though he was not in fact the first African American to win a major presidential nominating contest. (Jesse Jackson won 13 primaries and caucuses in 1988.) By contrast, when Clinton overcame long odds to become the first woman in U.S. history to win a major-party primary, no leading news outlet trumpeted this landmark feat. Many failed to mention it at all.

A promising start, right? You’d think the writer would go on to examine why Hillary’s ground-breaking run isn’t being treated as the revolution that it is.

But no. According to the preferred narrative, only Obama is revolutionary. Hillary’s just sloppy seconds:

Many of the voters and pundits who were thrilled by Obama’s compelling Iowa speech 10 days ago remain intoxicated, heady with the hope that he can deliver not just “change” — any candidate running would do that — but a categorically different kind of change from Clinton or the Republican candidates. So what explains the magic?

The most obvious explanation is Obama’s stirring oratory, with its notes of generational change and unity. The key to his seduction, though, resides not just in what he says but in what remains unsaid. It lies in the tacit offer — a promise about overcoming America’s shameful racial history — that his particular candidacy offers to his enthusiasts, and to us all.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the analysis. Obama’s election would be revolutionary, and that’s why people are enthusiastic about him and not Hillary. And granted, it would be revolutionary, no doubt about it. Our country’s racist legacy is deep and ugly, and the election of the first African-American president would stand as a magnificent milestone in our rocky and ever-faltering path towards a more just society.

But there is not a single line in the entire article about how electing the first woman president would also be revolutionary. Not a single line about our country’s history (and most of civilization’s history) of female oppression; about the yearnings of generations of women for a voice and a representative and a leader who looks like them; about the breakthrough that all true progressives long for — men and women both — to a world where gender is no barrier; about the potent symbolism of a woman (finally) as President of the United States. Not a single line.

In other words: electing the first black president? Transcendent, transformative, profoundly symbolic. Electing the first woman president? Eh.

Because sexism doesn’t exist.

Even Newsweek sounds the same note:

This year Barack Obama is either a smooth but insubstantial media-created savior, or he is the embodiment of hope and change whose election would transform America, redeeming us from our racial sins. And Hillary Clinton is either the boomer Daisy Buchanan who has ruthlessly plotted her way to power so that she can bring about a liberal utopia, or she is the hardworking, experienced policymaker and advocate who knows how to fight the good fight in Washington.

Notice how the parallelism falls apart? Obama can potentially redeem us from our racist sins, but Hillary’s just another policy wonk. And this in an article that, schizophrenically, nods to the possibility of the first woman president as being something vaguely appealing. But not revolutionary. Not something that would serve as a powerful symbolic redemption of a shameful history.

Because sexism doesn’t exist.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on January 13, 2008, 1:01 am EST

6 Comments »

Even after posting something like this, I’m still not prepared for how vicious the sexism really is.

From the Washington Post:

No shame at all. None whatsoever. Not even the tinest smidgen.

Women have no idea how much men hate them, said Germaine Greer. You have to raise your head above the parapet to find out, or let some other woman raise her head. And then you see. Then you really see.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on January 11, 2008, 5:40 pm EST

17 Comments »

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.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Politics, Election 2008 on January 10, 2008, 11:44 pm EST

3 Comments »

From xkcd:

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues on September 29, 2007, 1:20 pm EST

11 Comments »

From the “Birth to 12 months” girls’ section at Toys R Us: The Little Princess Big Favor Pack. Includes pink tiara bag, Little Princess stickers, pink princess pen, glitter nail polish, birthday bubbles, marabou tiara, and daisy swirl lip gloss.

Whenever the conversation turns to ev-psych, some chump or two (or twenty) shows up to insist that any test score differences between male and female teenagers must reflect an underlying innate disparity between the sexes. Apparently it is widely believed by chumps everywhere that there is no such thing as socialization, that boys and girls are all raised in identical featureless plastic bubbles and are treated exactly the same by their caretakers. Maybe it’s like that in your neighborhood, but I’m not seeing it.

Eight years ago, the Renfrew Center found that “90 percent of commercial toys and dolls for girls age 2 to 10 emphasize beauty, shopping and dating.”

What’s changed since then? That would be nothing, Bob.

In 2005 Sudie Hofmann did a study of children’s toys and found the same thing. Girls’ toys: beauty, shopping dating. All pink. Boys’ toys: war, weaponry, and educational toys. That’s right — the challenging word games and chess sets and science kits were all in the boys’ section. Hofmann couldn’t find a single female pictured on a science kit, nor a single science kit in the girls’ aisle. Not even a pink one.

But Hofmann did find one area of girls’ toys that the Renfrew Center didn’t mention: housework! That’s right, pink housework toys. For when the girls grow up.

And for all the Larry Summers types out there who insist that these toys are just mirroring children’s behavior rather than shaping it, let me quote this long section from Hofmann’s excellent article:

The girls’ area, or should we say fantasyland, is well stocked with vanity mirrors, combs, brushes, nail kits, makeup, and polyester hair extensions. The focus is on being popular with boys. The shelves are overflowing with Mattel Barbies and endless paraphernalia, including Barbie’s scale, set at one weight: 110 pounds.

Shopping is a focus of many of the girl toys such as Lil Bratz Fashion Mall, which warns girls, “Don’t forget to stop at the makeup shop.” Packages provide fashion advice and tips about how to be trendy and get noticed. Crowns, pompons, and phones in lavender and pink hang on the separate carousels near the small, upholstered furniture. Jump ropes, umbrellas, tea sets, and sticker books are in abundance. Unlike the colors used on the panels of the boys’ toys, pastels reign here. The edges of the letters are smooth and an i or a t is dotted or crossed with a heart, butterfly, or star. Glitter is on everything — from the packaging to the product itself. The copy usually includes words such as “kitten,” “princess,” “fairy,” “precious,” “wish,” “dream,” and “wonder.”

The girls’ section does not have many board games that stimulate creative thinking or require higher-order reasoning. It has bingo and simple activities such as coloring books and car or travel games. Although the female area appears to be a pink fantasyland, the dream soon ends. After getting the guy, by playing Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date or through sheer vanity and competition, the girls get the brooms, mops, vacuums, diapers, and plastic food. And they are smiling in every packaging photo.

Boys are noticeably absent from any of the advertisements, promotions, store posters, or packaging for toy household cleaning products, kitchen items, or childcare toys such as baby dolls and strollers. The product lines do not model social acceptance for boys to play homemaking or parenting.

When young boys engage in dress up, pile on the necklaces, enjoy painting their nails or select other girl toys, cultural norms or homophobia often correct the behavior immediately. In fact, in Fisher Price Playlab studies where staff members observed children behind one-way glass, they found that boys will play with “girl” toys if they think they are in a safe environment.

My students frequently offer supporting evidence about boys crossing these gender lines, from their part-time jobs at after-school programs. They believe that young boys relish the chance to get their nails painted and have their hair styled when girls are doing it as a special activity. As one student told my class recently, “I think boys just like the closeness of being with a staff member, being touched while we paint their nails, and talking with us.” Perhaps it is the tactile, calming aspect of this activity that draws boys and girls to it. However, sex roles are reinforced very early in boys’ lives, and toys play a part in that socialization.

Jackson Katz in Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, a Media Education Foundation video, explores the ways boys are taught to be tough and how they’re encouraged to define manhood in ways that hurt themselves and others. Katz provides an insightful analysis about how boys are socialized to be solitary, independent, and often violent through toys, video games, and Hollywood movies. According to Katz, the cultural message is that emotional connections are for sissies. Beyond the obvious problems of violence and aggression that many of the toys engender, even the science-based toys are solitary and don’t present opportunities for verbal or social development. Packaging hints at being the best or creating and building superior models or designs. There is little evidence that toys help boys in social and emotional development or in Katz’s words, help boys to be “better men” some day.

Toys for girls implicitly urge them to find husbands in order to get their dream lives. Girls are taught to compete with each other for male validation. One makeup kit states, “Wait ’til they see you.” Female rivalries, jealousies, and other negative behaviors such as bullying and harassment pose a host of problems for girls. Yet girls’ toys promote unattainable physical perfection and materialistic values. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, a groundbreaking book about the emotional lives of adolescent girls, including depression, eating disorders, and declining self-confidence, refers to contemporary society as a “girl poisoning culture” and offers many empowering approaches for addressing issues of self-esteem. The toys available to girls typically strengthen the cultural messages of inferiority and second-class status that have influenced and continue to affect self-image and academic performance for many girls.

Socialization? What socialization?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 19, 2007, 2:13 am EST

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