Yeah, so, many of you have by now read Gloria Steinem's NYTimes Op-Ed piece about sexism and Hillary Clinton. Many people have had problems with it. This was my reaction after the first read: "She's basically right, except for the part where all this means that everyone should vote for Clinton." I would say I "mostly liked it."
Not that we shouldn't vote for Clinton. (More on that to come.) And if we ignore that paragraph, and pay attention to her other points, there's a lot to embrace. I have long held that sexism is the last acceptable "ism"--even among young, liberal, well-educated people like me and my friends*. Steinem seems to agree:
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race... and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.
The evidence is everywhere--but because we're so bombarded with it, it's easy to shrug off even the most overt examples. And that's what I'm talking about: explicit sexism. Sexism is not necessarily more prevalent than racism, but being overtly sexist is way more acceptable. Sexism is mainstream. Take my Chris Matthews examples below: could you imagine him saying, "Do you find it difficult to debate a black man?" Far more egregious is the instance in Salem, New Hampshire from a few days ago: at a Clinton rally, a young man stood up and started yelling, over and over, "Iron my shirt!" He had a big yellow sign that also bore the slogan. Imagine if someone had stood up at an Obama rally and shouted, "Pick my cotton!" It would've been a huge event. There might have been violence. It certainly would've gotten media attention, whereas this event was ignored in favor of Clinton "crying**."
Perhaps the simplest example--which won me some supporters at a bar last night--is the question "Do you think a woman can be as effective a President as a man?" This question is being debated on Facebook. WTF? Think for a second. Can you actually imagine someone asking, "Do you think a black person can be as effective a President as a white person?" If you can imagine someone asking that, the person you are imagining probably not only has a Confederate flag tattoo, but would also actually say, "I hate black people." To ask a question like that, you have to be an avowed racist.
I'd been planning on talking about this for awhile--in the context of how it's okay for a movie to be sexist--but the issue's really come to a head. And while I DON'T agree with Steinem that it's cool to support Clinton because she's a woman (and this "on-the-job training" argument makes me uncomfortable for various reasons), what she says about the media's treatment of her is almost all undeniably true:
[W]hat worries me is that [Obama] is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex... What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations... What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.
Steinem offers a few reasons for all this, which may or may not be valid. I mentioned the ubiquity of sexism, and how it's desensitized us to the problem, and I think ubiquity is also one of the root causes--in short, sexists know more women than racists know black people. There are more opportunities to be blatantly sexist. It's the oldest form of prejudice there is, because gender is the first characteristic available to us. After establishing that a person is, you know, human, gender is the next thing we want to know. Newborns are labeled as such in hospitals.
I'm not saying we should be squeamish about using gender as an identifying feature--I mean to illustrate the significance of gender in our lives from the moment we're born. And if we're basically okay with gross displays of sexism, think about how okay we are with implicit and unconscious sexism. It's scary.
*Perhaps even more so, since among this demographic the other "isms" are SO unacceptable.
**And Edwards being a douche about it, but that didn't get much attention either.
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One of the big problems I had with this Op-Ed were the brazen assumption Steinem made about American’s attitudes towards gender that (as far as I’ve been able to find) can’t actually be substantiated. For instance: “What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.” That may be true. I don’t know. I don’t live in Iowa. But neither does Steinem. And aside from Steinem, no mainstream commentary I’ve been able to find (I’m disregarding the obvious wingnuts blogs who are in the minority and shouldn’t be allowed to be representative) has even suggested this attitude exists in the Iowa primaries. And I specifically looked for an hour, trying to substantiate this claim. This is a claim that has been made in past elections, and may have been true then. But it is unfair to automatically assume this is happening now. That’s just one example of Steinem’s unsubstantiated claims. I haven’t done the factchecking on the entire column yet, but given how closely I have to follow these campaigns for work and how few of Steinem’s assertions I’ve actually hears said by anyone else reporting on Clinton, I suspect it’s not the only one.
The opening graf (where Steinem imagines Obama’s viability if he were a woman) is also pretty infuriating because it makes some sort of claim that race and gender are somehow interchangeable. Identity isn’t like a Mr. Potato Head. Her black female candidate would have a hard time not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a black woman. It’s a whole other ballgame. Whatever problems Clinton faces as a woman, she’s still white and with her race come certain assumptions and privileges that even a black man cannot have. It’s silly to rank “isms” because we’re all more than just one facet of our identity. Despite sexism, a white woman can still get away with a lot more than a black man can in a bastion of liberalism like New York City (when was the last time a white woman was shot by the NYPD while reaching for her purse?). Sexism may be the last acceptable “ism,” but it isn’t the only “ism” and each facet of our identity comes with its own benefits and challenges. It may be in poor taste to bring this up, but Steinem has always been criticized for preaching a brand of feminism that is completely ignorant of minorities, and I think this Op-Ed isn’t doing her any favors.
But what irked me more than anything in the Op-Ed was when Steinem wrote:“ [W]hat worries me is that [Obama] is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex... What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.”
This has less to do with the media than with the Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. The Clinton campaign has, from the beginning, tried to play as many of their critics off one another as possible. Her very campaign strategy depends creating division. There is certainly media spin, but the fact of the matter is she isn’t “seen” as divisive, she is divisive, and it has less to do with her sex and more to do with her politik than Steinem will admit. Furthermore, that Clinton even cites the old boy’s club is insulting considering she’s the most elite and insidery of all the Democratic candidates. Her support of the Iraq war, her rhetoric and vote regarding Iran, and her membership in the Clinton-Bush dynasty endear her more to the old-boys club than either Obama or Edwards. If she isn’t the candidate backed by this shadowy old boys club, then who is?
Maybe if Obama gave speeches where he claimed the whites were holding him back, he’d be seen as divisive. But when Obama talks about race and civil rights, it’s in a positive light. Obama has never, to my knowledge, ever suggested that any criticism he’s received in the press has been racially motivated. Obama isn’t divisive like Clinton because he’s not blaming the patriarchy for the challenges he’s encountered as an African-American candidate, instead he offers a message about how his viability is a result of Americans affecting change in the past, and how we can do it again. He embraces his identity as a sign of how far we’ve come, not as a leg iron holding him back from being taken seriously as a candidate. Whether or not Clinton is actually facing sexism (she is), I think the bigger issue here is tone. There are ways to address racial and gender discrimination that divide and ways that unite and I think Clinton has chosen a way of addressing her identity that tends to be more divisive.
Susan,
I agree with much of what Stephen said, but I have one other quibble, this with your argument tested in the bar.
Seen from one angle, the one you present, "effective" means "given these innate* qualities (race/biological sex/whatever) is a person capable of fulfilling the putative requirements of the job?" Here, the answer is obviously yes: of course a woman *could* be an effective president, no less than any other fully functioning adult.
However there is another sense for "effective" in this case and that's "able to govern, able to manage the political environment," which, for this job, the political leader of the country, is an important meaning to take into account.
Given the pervasive explicit sexism - equal in kind if not specifics to Jim Crow racism! - that you and Steinem see in our society**, I think that it's a fair question to wonder if a woman who's meeting such resistance already in her campaign, will be able to govern effectively, in a politically expedient manner.
That's not to say we shouldn't elect women because the less-enlightened won't accept it - how else to have change, right? And I'm certainly not asserting that the folks on Facebook are debating the question in this way.
However, if your premise is that the world is against women in power, then you have to take that resistance into account when reckoning whether or not they'll be able to get anything done once in office. This is doubly the case for a candidate whose basic campaign message is that her experience as first lady and junior senator will enable her to get things done.
Admittedly, this is a small point, but my pedantry isn't to be restrained today.
*If you were wondering, no, I don't want to get into a debate about what innate might mean; think of it as meaningless shorthand for stuff-that's-hard-to-change-without-expensive-medical-care
@stephen: The points you make are good, and there's certainly plenty of criticisms to be made about Steinem. (Indeed, one of the criticisms the Third Wave has of the Second Wave is its indifference towards people of color. Also, its derision of younger women, which she also shows here in spades.) As I said, the stuff about Clinton was less coherent/interesting than the stuff about sexism in general. Maybe I shouldn't have included that second quote. As for the difference between being a black woman and being a woman, of course there is a difference. Black women are, in fact, valued least by our justice system--crimes against black women are punished the least. I am not *remotely* saying that there is more sexism than racism, or that sexism is worse than racism. What I'm saying is that sexism is not taken as seriously as it ought to be, even among people who would generally agree that it is bad.
@barking goose: I agree with the part where you say, "I'm certainly not asserting that the folks on Facebook are debating the question in this way," because I really do not believe that your explanation is actually the motivation behind the debate topic. It is, however, an interesting illustration of the arguments out there suggesting the Clinton's gender is devisive--especially considering that Andrew Sullivan was on The Colbert Report the other night saying that Obama's race would be an asset when dealing with foreign countries. You never hear anything about Clinton's gender having inherent upsides--it's strictly an obstacle to overcome.
Just to clarify: are you saying that you yourself believe that "pervasive explicit sexism [is] equal in kind if not specifics to Jim Crow racism," or are you saying that Steinem and I believe that?
On another point that just occurred to me. You say:
“Far more egregious is the instance in Salem, New Hampshire from a few days ago: at a Clinton rally, a young man stood up and started yelling, over and over, "Iron my shirt!" He had a big yellow sign that also bore the slogan. Imagine if someone had stood up at an Obama rally and shouted, "Pick my cotton!" It would've been a huge event. There might have been violence. It certainly would've gotten media attention, whereas this event was ignored in favor of Clinton "crying”
Clearly, a nut yelling “Iron my shirt” or “Pick my cotton” is completely uncalled for. But what about if someone, say a well-respected intellectual, wrote an Op-Ed in a major American newspaper where this intellectual said that Clinton would be a better president than Obama because men (especially black men) always need to prove their masculinity? Wouldn’t this be an egregious example of sexism by someone who clearly in their right mind and should know better? And wouldn’t this sexism be even more egregious because it was published a well-respected newspaper? And wouldn’t this egregious sexism be even more troubling because no one calls the intellectual or the newspaper out for voicing such a belief?
This troubles me because this is exactly what Steinem does in her article. In no uncertain terms, she says that Clinton would be better than Obama because “she has no masculinity to prove.” And this is far worse than a man yelling “Iron my shirt” or “Pick my cotton” because its been given an authority (by Steinem and the NYTimes) that a crazy person in a crowd doesn’t have. What Steinem says is no better than what Chris Mattthews says.
Granted, this all proves your larger point about how sexism is still acceptable, but it brings me to a troubling question: Why do you, Susan, let Steinem get away with it? When Matthews opens his big, fat stupid mouth, you called (rightly) him on it. But when Steinem does it in an article, you defend her larger ideas nonetheless. Why defend Steinem’s thoughts on sexism when she is sexist herself? Think of how seriously you would treat any essay Matthews would write on sexism in the 2008 campaign, and then look how you’ve treated Steinem. Can you honestly say you would give them the same treatment?
@stephen: I can only say so many times that I think the stuff specifically about Clinton is wrong. But for the record: I think the stuff specifically about Clinton is wrong. What I'm arguing is that this doesn't negate the other point.
But my point is this:
Look at the way you treat Steinem and Mattews on your blog today, both of whom have said extremely sexist things about presidential candidates in the past 2 days. You're very dismissive of Matthews and yet fail to even call Steinem out as a sexist.
Why is that?
Steinem's sexist.
And also plain-old wrong, seeing as Clinton would have a lot of "masculinity" to prove.
I love this. Keep going. :)
Actually, I might have to play Al Gore in 2000 and retract my concession. I think her reference to "masculinity" is more wrong than sexist, in that (in my rereading) she is referring to societal expectations of masculinity--particularly as embodied by our current President. It would be truly sexist if she'd said Clinton was better suited to office because she had "no masculinity," but what she said is that Clinton has "no masculinity to prove." It is not masculinity itself that is a problem in politics, but having to PROVE that one lives up to standards of masculinity is what leads us into so-called "cowboy diplomacy." I think she is justified in suggesting that this hyper-macho imperative has been destructive in recent years. HOWEVER, she is patently wrong to suggest that Clinton would not feel those same pressures.
@Susan
Sorry to interrupt an ongoing conversation, but I did want to respond to your question/points.
I’m sure Clinton’s gender has positives to it, too, if not especially in the management of a 500-odd old white men in Congress.
Actually, her likeness to your mom aside, I think its here “Clinton-ness” rather than her gender that would make it more difficult for her to manage. Bill was elected in far less divisive times, with a Democratic Congress, and he couldn’t get a damn thing done; I have great difficulty believing that a new Clinton regime, coming after 2 terms of acrimony, would even be able to build bridges to other Democrats.
To your request to clarify: I was saying that you and Steinem have argued that there is in today’s American society an pervasive and explicit sexism equal in kind if not specifics to Jim Crow racism.
Steinem’s column, because she argued that “because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was,” and your post, because, on that point at least, you seem to agree. It seems to me that Jim Crow era racism was defined precisely in its ability to naturalize racial difference – though the associations with extra-legal violence makes my use of the analogy a bit intemperate.
Actually, I would never compare the situation of women today with the Jim Crow situation. Even putting aside the differences between the everyday way that the two groups were/are treated, women today are mostly allowed to say "Hey that's sexist" without having the firehoses turned on them. Et cetera.
In the end, it is fruitless to compare racism and sexism. For most of the population, it is probably easier being a white woman than a black man. In politics? I don't really know. Shirley Chisholm said that being a woman had held her back more than being black had. That was awhile ago, and the story with Clinton is very different, in that she didn't have to rise up through the ranks, so I don't really know what the situation is like for white women vs. black men trying to make it on The Hill.
But the point--the point that I've been trying to make this whole time--is that we need to take sexism seriously. And usually we don't.
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