Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - Posts
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When did infidelity on the part of politicians become such an urgent feminist issue? From the outrage on the XX Factor over Eliot’s misdeeds, Bill’s affairs and Hillary’s toleration thereof, and, most of all, from the speech on gender that Melinda and Dahlia think Hillary should give, you’d think political philandering was the paramount issue facing women in our time. Public figures cheating on their wives, having sex with prostitutes, and—oh yes!—sexually harassing employees: These are the grievances we and Hillary are supposed to deem worthy of addressing the nation about. Sure, my fellow bloggers recognize that there are other important policy matters, but to gauge from word count over the past few weeks, this is what gets their juices going—the negative “gender signals called out by the media” (to quote Melinda and Dahlia) in their coverage of the various scandals. Poor, weak women being victimized by powerful married men. The bad examples Eliot and Bill and their consorts set for the young men and women of America.
Since when has it served the cause of women to demand that our public figures act like Victorian gentlemen? Since the era of Victorian feminism, of course, when women’s clubs joined with “social purity” clubs to police the morals of the time. (Anyone remember the Society for the Suppression of Vice?) Ladies, move on. Trust the several generations of 20th-century feminists who fought for such freedoms as no-fault divorce: Making marriage this sacred is not a good idea. For one thing, women philander too. Even sexual harassment is an issue feminists ought to handle gingerly, given the long history of institutions and politicians abusing sexual harassment codes to take down their enemies or violate civil rights. (See Margaret Talbot’s still-remarkable piece about the University of Wisconsin’s prosecution of feminist professor Jane Gallop, for an example.)
What didn’t Melinda and Dahlia put in “Hillary’s speech” that I think they should have? Here are a few things I’d have liked a speech on gender to address:
—Abortion and contraception. Our right and access to them have diminished steadily in the past eight years, and they lack a firm supporter in the Republican presidential candidate. Have women in America forgotten how grisly life gets without those things? If so, they should request 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days from Netflix immediately. The movie is set in Romania in the 1980s, when the crazy Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had made both abortion and contraception illegal, but it could just as easily be us in a land ruled by the anti-choice crowd.
—Fairness in the workplace. By that, I don’t just mean equal pay and equal treatment, but the need for business and the professions to alter the criteria for promotion so that working women aren’t damned by their biology. In other words, rethinking how people come by tenure and partnerships and editorships and other leadership positions so that women aren’t penalized for, or forced out by, the decision to have children in their 30s.
—Day care—expanding it, funding it, regulating it.
—Public preschool education—making it universal.
—The length of the work day/week—given women’s “double shift,” a feminist issue if I ever saw one.
Anyone care to contribute to the list?
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Here's one thing George W. and Hillary have in common: She never was a big consumer of news. In fact, according to Carl Bernstein's book, during her Little Rock years "Hillary didn't read newspapers or watch television news. Instead, she listened to National Public Radio or classical music in the morning. If there was anything else she really needed to know, she figured, she'd be told about it early in the day, either by Bill on the phone or Vince in the office. But even in her earliest days as first lady of Arkansas, "she didn't want to read about things that would bother her and about which she could do nothing,'' said Betsey Wright. "She saw it as an irritant.'' So perhaps no one's made her aware of the David Brooks column you mentioned, Meghan. Not that she needs him to tell her it's over—and has been for some time, if you're going to be a total math drone about it. Honestly, if you didn't know better, you might even have begun to suspect she was hanging in there at least in part to do the maximum damage to her party's nominee, weakening his chances in the fall and building the I-told-you-so case for Hillary in 2012. But that couldn't be right. Right?
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This link is to the utterly bizarre video tribute by Hillary Clinton to Heather Mills—the mentally unbalanced newly ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney. Hillary, in a kind of zombie mode, gives a unified field theory tribute to Heather. In this four-minute accolade, Hillary credits Heather, in part, for New York's recovery from Sept. 11, Hillary's decision to introduce an anti-landmine bill, and Hillary's knowledge about life that we must "just enjoy every single minute of this beautiful gift that we've been given." She ends by saying, "God bless you, Heather." (The judge in Heather's divorce case has a somewhat different take on Heather's qualities, saying she is a self-aggrandizer with a tenuous relationship to the truth and an "explosive and volatile character".) The only explanation for this artifact I can come up with is that in a little-known episode Hillary was forced to make this tape while being held hostage by Heather, which must have been a far more perilous situation that Hillary's trip to Bosnia.
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Dahlia, I definitely agree that these "conversations'' on race and gender are no fun. Still, maybe the only thing worse than having them is not having them; we've been trying it that way more or less forever and where did it ever get us? Yesterday I was part of an online discussion on race and gender in the Democratic primary on Washingtonpost.com, and though the questions were great, I found it frustrating trying to snag at least a few of the balls whizzing by me when each one of them deserved a seminar-length give-and-take. One question I never even got to—because it was more than I could begin to address on the fly—I am still thinking about today. As I no longer have the questions, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was from an African-American woman who was writing in to say that she just doesn't feel she has that much in common with white women. Occasionally, there's a spark of connection over childbearing or -rearing, but in the main, she relates more to black men than to women of other races.
Now, that does make me feel sort of rejected—I feel like her sister and she doesn't feel like mine -- but it's interesting, too: Why is it that I'm imagining I'd feel kinship with women from Jupiter, and she doesn't see the female experience as all that formative? Donna Brazile told me the answer once, I think. This was when I was just starting to work on my book on how women make electoral decisions. (Short answer: Other-than-rationally, just like men do. Not unlike decisions in dating, really. Which is why our dutiful, "Oh, my top issue is health care,' answers to pollsters don't always mean that much.) Anyway, what Donna said was, you know, women don't vote as a block because we never had to go through something like the slave experience together. So the biological and cultural deal that I consider such a sealing bond just doesn't compare. (Does it?) My son who is mad for movies had us watch Sixth Sense for I think it was the 234th time this last weekend, and you know how the ghosts go away after the little boy finally listens to them? Cheesy, OK. But on race and gender, I do think there's a lot more we have to hear from one another.
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Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan in response to Hitchens' current piece in Slate about Obama and cynicism. I have to say I'm with Sullivan on this one. I think if the mask were going to come off Obama and reveal some foul, calculating monster within, it already would have. Sure, all politicians are to some degree calculating; they have to be, to survive at all. But Obama has really made such calculations as transparent as he can. And he has for the most part resisted stooping to the petty mudslinging that passes for political discourse today. Sure, we can catch him out on exceptions now and then. And I think there are some real questions about how untested he is, and whether he'll be able to make good on his many promises to the American people. But I don't find him to be a powerful hypocrite. Meanwhile, Hitchens' piece and Sullivan's response only underscore the very solid point of David Brooks column in the New York Times today: That whatever you make of Obama, it is time for Hillary Clinton to bow out of the race gracefully. Read it; it's more cogent than I can be. The power of language is real. And the longer Clinton stays in the race and hashes it all out with vicious political rhetoric, the more that power will be driven home to all of us. As Brooks says, Obama's ratings have already dropped in the polls.
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