The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Language Instinct

Just to revisit for a second the thread about profanity: Emily's Tina Fey homage and Cindy Loose's parking lot dispatch both arrived, for me, at an opportune moment. Last week, my sweet and cheerful 12-year-old came home to report that a boy on her middle-school bus had called her a bitch—or, as she put it, "the b-word." As is often the case, I marveled at how my sixth grader is encountering so many things so much sooner in life than I did—algebra, fluid dynamics, and now, gratuitous bursts of misogynistic profanity. One minute you are sitting in your seat thinking about homework, or groceries, and the next minute you are being angrily reminded of your gender. As a parent, it was hard to know what my role should be: I know she's going to hear bad words on the bus (she hears them when I am looking for a parking space), but does she have to put up with that particular word, directed at her particularly? How does it affect your sense of self, at 12, to be called a bitch by a boy? Did this signal the start of the loss of self-esteem that some feminist theory maintains sets in at her age? Or was that the prior generation of girls that happened to? And what should I do about any of this, aside from assuring her that she doesn't have to put up with a comment like that, ever? In this case, that was enough: She knew it anyway, and in fine Loosian fashion had already told the boy (who is well-known for colorful commentary) to cork it and resolved to avoid him on the bus. A friend sitting near her later told a school counselor. It may have bothered me more than it bothered her: While I loved Tina Fey's riff, the b-word, directed at my daughter, still had a real power and potency. And it did bother her enough to tell me about it.  

I was also struck by the comment the Hillary supporter made to Cindy in the parking lot. To me, one of the underexamined questions of the campaign is how much and in what way a female president would or would not change—well, everything. Attitudes, language, middle-school bus conversations, judicial appointments, workplace policy, parking lot tirades: What would change, exactly, and what wouldn't? Would there be less sexist invective in the world, or more? More angry outbursts, or fewer? What would the trickle-down effect be, or not be? One senses that the female primary voters of Texas and Ohio may be asking themselves that right now: stick with the woman candidate, or decide that gender is not a deal-breaker? In an effort to win the continued allegiance of women, Hillary broached the topic in last week's debate, saying, "I am thrilled to be running, to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country and around the world, and would give enormous [APPLAUSE] ... you know, enormous hope and, you know, a real challenge to the way things have been done, and who gets to do them, and what the rules are." She says this kind of thing elsewhere, of course, rightly stressing the historic nature of her candidacy, but may feel constrained from elaborating because she feels an even more pressing need to shore up her credentials as commander in chief, and it's hard, frankly, to do both, implying that some things will be different with a woman at the helm, while others, like America's military readiness, won't. At any rate, I wished she had spelled out what "things" and what "rules" she had in mind. Perhaps she does in stump speeches. A friend of mine argues that the reason Margaret Thatcher was accepted lo these many years ago is because the British, with their history of queens, have a national imagination that accepts the image of a powerful female leader. Would the election of a woman U.S. president mean that our national imagination had enlarged? Would it mean the work of equality was done—or just getting started? Another friend has a 9-year-old boy who is an Obama supporter: He likes to circle newspaper photos of Hillary supporters, marshaling evidence that they are mostly "bitter old women." Apparently it's a laughable notion, to a 9-year-old boy, that a woman might be bitter. His view might change once he starts riding the middle-school bus.