Thursday, March 27, 2008 - Posts
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Judith, I agree that the right messenger (at the right moment) could deliver most of your speech on gender. But maybe it would be easier for a woman to achieve liftoff. Anybody else remember Nicole Hollander's Sylvia cartoon on the wage gap? From her classic, Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (A: Sure, just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken.) In it, four people respond to the question, How do you feel about equality for women? "I feel that women should get equal pay for equal work,'' says the white guy. "I think it's only simple justice that women get equal pay for equal work,'' says the Hispanic guy. "I think if a woman's doing the same job a man is doing, she should get the same pay,'' says the black guy. "Equality for women,'' says the Hillary stand-in, "means that our potential for physical, intellectual and emotional growth be supported and nurtured. It means being recognized as full and valuable members of this society. It means being given a chance to risk, to grow, to make a contribution to a better world, side by side with men.'' I think about this not infrequently. (Though perhaps not as often as I do my very favorite Sylvia, in which two hookers walk into a bar. One tells the other, "So he dresses himself up in this chicken suit, covers himself up with mostaccioli ... and then looks around real scared. He says: 'How do you feel ... about Title IX?' And I say, 'Senator, anything that turns you on, turns me on.'' And then I trigger the hidden camera.'')
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Rachael, Melinda,
1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech
I want her to make. As
Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around a speech that bluntly addresses these issues and is uplifting and unifying to boot. Nonetheless, these are (I believe) the fundamental issues: control over one's body and workplace policies that level the playing field for women, despite women's child-bearing and mothering functions. They seem essential if we're to achieve a truly egalitarian society. (Yes, I still think we should seek an egalitarian society, even though I also think that it's unlikely, for biological and possibly linked social reasons, that women will ever be able or even willing to give up certain primary caregiving functions. The job of feminism today, as I see it, is to create a world in which we get to remain members of society in equal standing while raising our children in a serious, loving, attentive way. In this possibly idiosyncratic sense of the term, then, feminism isn't just for women anymore. It's for fathers as well as mothers. Maybe it isn't even feminism any more.)
As for the presidential race: It also seems evident that a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin. Check out
Mike Kinsley's hilarious piece on the time-cost to a female candidate to meeting female standards of presentableness—roughly two-and-a-half weeks more spent primping during the average campaign cycle. Women operate under countless other double standards. You know which ones: They sound "overemotional" or they seem "calculating"; they're too sexy or not sexy enough; they made choices in the "Mommy Wars" that half of all American women disagree with, or else lack children and thus are't people American women can identify with. I don't see Obama taking any heat for having left the child-rearing to his wife. I wonder how a woman running for office would play to the public if she had left the child-rearing almost entirely to her husband.
In short, it seems as if we have arrived at something of a consensus, albeit a very rough one, about what racism is and why it's bad, whereas we still disagree about what sexism is and so don't agree on what's bad about it. That's why it's hard to imagine that speech.
2. Even though I see that it's hard to imagine, I don't think it is nearly as impossible to make as we think. The miracle of Obama's speech was that he made a number of thoughts that have long been unthinkable in America sound reasonable, even obvious--the notion that white America is suffused with casual racism; the idea that we need not demonize a man who says unacceptable things but does good in other ways. And so on. I put my list out there in a bald, unadorned way.
Emily suggested a way to wrap it up more elegantly. The speech would try to re-imagine family values. There might be other ways to give it. I'll admit that neither Kerry nor Clinton has found a way to do so. That doesn't mean that Obama couldn't, if he so chose; or that a female politician with similar levels of eloquence and courage wouldn't be able to put it across.
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If Dahlia can stand one more conversation about the conversation, I thought the grace note of Barack Obama's March 17 epic conversation starter were his few words about his grandmother’s quiet bigotry. He was, as pundit Jon Stewart said the next evening, speaking to the electorate as adults. At the same time the remark reminded everyone why his particular heritage is so appealing to lead the effort for change. If you missed it, Stewart and Larry Wilmore had a hilarious sample conversation of their own. All that was before, as Dahlia wrote, the "dialogue" devolved into “the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end.” I missed the example of Obama being blacklashed on by the Fox & Friends hosts on March 21 when Obama’s reference to the elderly woman who raised him as a “typical white person” in a radio interview was apparently edited to sound offensive while the morning show hosts imagined insult. The New York Observer gives a flavor here:
Can you say ‘typical white person’ if you’re white?” asked Mr. Doocy. Of course not, noted Ms. Carlson. There’s no way that Senator Hillary Clinton could use the phrase “typical black person,” they noted. “So there is a certain double standard in society,” said Ms. Carlson. And also: “I sort of take offense at that line: ‘typical white.’”
Oddly, Chris Wallace, who anchors Fox News Sunday, thought they weren’t “providing the full context” and thought their spin was “excessive.” Chris who can be a bit snappish, called his Fox colleagues on their zeal. Fortunately, he did so using the live 2-way camera they had set up to promote Wallace’s Sunday lineup so we can all hear.
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Ouch. I think I just got my hair pulled. Guess it wasn't so memorable, but here is Kerry on the wage gap, which he spoke about on many occasions. Here he is on his plan to subsidize day care, which he tried to make a big deal of, though the press mostly ignored it. Both Kerry and his wife spoke about early childhood education every time I ever traveled with them—though much of the resulting attention, as here, seemed to focus on how we just couldn't afford such programs. Here he is being congratulated for reaching out to women "not only about abortion but in the questions of gender discrimination in the workplace over pay and family-related flexibility, and also the minimum wage, which affects the pay of more than 9 million women.'' And here he is on choice, which he talked about plenty. If Hillary has been more subdued on the subject of abortion rights, maybe it's because she agreed with what Kerry said after the '04 election—about how his party's determination to make pro-lifers feel like pariahs may have hurt him at the polls. According to USA Today, "In a meeting with liberal organizers after losing the presidential election in 2004, John Kerry infuriated some party stalwarts when he said the approach to abortion needed to change. He said Democrats should do more to welcome candidates and voters who say they're pro-life and to make it clear that being 'pro-choice' didn't mean being 'pro-abortion.' A survey in February by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg concluded that the abortion issue was a significant factor in Kerry's loss of white Catholic voters, a key group that sometimes votes for Republicans, sometimes for Democrats. President Clinton carried white Catholics by 7 percentage points in 1996; Kerry lost them by 13 points.''
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One of Hillary Clinton's rationales for staying in the race when she was getting battered in a string of defeats was that she was so much more experienced than Barack Obama, that over time his inexperience would cause him to stumble. That would leave Clinton, having been so gruelingly tested over so many years, ultimately victorious. But isn't it ironic that now a central Clinton claim on the presidency—her experience—is making her look foolish. There have been her embarrassing, exaggerated claims that as first lady she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland and risked her life in Bosnia. And now the Boston Globe has effectively taken apart one of her oft-repeated accomplishments: that she created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Turns out, according to the legislators who did create it, that she had virtually nothing to do with it, and that the (Bill) Clinton administration initially opposed it.
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Christie's New York will be auctioning a naked portrait of the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, on April 10. I'm no prude, I'm certainly not a Victorian, and I commend the French for turning a blind eye to their politicians' private lives, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that we're better off with straight-laced statesmen.
Case in point: A CNN article on the French couple's first official visit to the U.K., which tries to, ahem, cover Carla's bod and Sarkozy's foreign policy all at once. The result is absolutely ridiculous: a nude pix lede, followed by the portentous quote, "We cannot afford to lose Afghanistan," back to the nude pix, then mention of a rumor that Sarkozy might boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
I think the world needs dull, egghead politicians. Or maybe sexless ones, at least until the press grows up (and God knows we never will). I'm pretty sure the Qing Dynasty had eunuch bureaucrats, so there's precedent.
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Hey Melinda, when you get off your fainting couch, John Kerry did NOT give that speech—not in the memorable, reimagining-family-values way that Judith is imagining. And yes you're right, Rachael, these issues are divisive, and I guess I have to reluctantly agree that it wouldn't be in the Democrats' interest if Hillary or Obama decided to have a Big Gender Moment. Which is why, as Dahlia and Melinda started out by acknowledging, we're not having it. But I applaud Judith's list, especially in its attention to economics and employment, which never quite seem to get their due and catch on fire, and so leave two-working parent families scrambling to keep it all together. I'd like to think that someday the country will be ready for and will find the candidate who will make universal preschool seem as important as saving Bear Stearns.
On a lighter note, earlier this week I watched Fifty Nude Women by Margot Roth of New Yorker Talk of the Town fame and marveled at its winsome playfulness. The women in this 12-minute film seem entirely at ease in their bodies, of all varieties. I'm with Jezebel in that the video made me think about weight but in a much less tedious way that usual. The curves and rolls and wrinkles and scars and stretch marks signaled vulnerability and also a record of lives fully lived.
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Sorry for the delay; I was on the fainting couch, indisposed and hoping I'd remember to tell Chantal that while I appreciate her efforts, overlacing cuts off oxygen to the brain. Judith, John Kerry did give that speech, point for point—until he was hoarse, bless his heart. Yet when the votes were counted—or some of them, anyway, because I, too, have my conspiracy theories—all he had to show for it was a three-point narrowing of the gender gap. And if Hillary sent up that flare right now, the most likely effect would be a narrowing of her lead in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. She won't.
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