The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Neo-Victorians

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 20^th-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?