The XX Factor: What women really think.

Macaca Pancakes, Yum!

"The kids needed me'' may be poll-tested, but it's also a narrative I can't say no to—unless, and this is absolutely unfair—a man is telling the tale. For instance, I heard George Allen on the radio Tuesday saying how it was worth losing to Jim Webb because his 9-year-old daughter made him pancakes last Saturday, and that I found pukatrocious.

As for the crazy goddesses, I'm just as fond of them all the same as I was of my Aunt Ginny who spoke to dead people; they've earned those off-the-meds moments, and may even feel they are required. Though snits like that do suggest that somebody's power is being threatened, which is why I also take them as a sign that the abortion lobby worries that Obama—who is 100 percent pro-choice, despite Hillary's claims to the contrary—might fail to get into the kind of big pointless fights that raise a lot of cash for interest groups.    

But how DID Hillary become a US Senator?

Meghan,

Chris Matthews was more interested in being nasty than being right. But isn't there something to the fact that the reason Hillary's a US Senator, the reason she's a candidate for president...is the fact that her husband was president at all?  Reverse the first paragraph of that Gloria Steinem article  again and ask yourself this: Imagine a talented man who falls in love while at Yale law school student and decides to follow his wife to a very provincial city - Little Rock, say - where he makes a decent but hardly national reputation for himself. Then he follows his more important wife to Washington, where for eight years he works as a full-time spouse. Is such a man qualified to be a senator, let alone president? I know that this is the old reductive narrative, I know we all know this, and I know it's reverting to the basic facts, but personally I find the fundamental presumption of Hillary's candidacy impossible to get away from.

The thing I don't get about Hillary, and never have, is why she is championed by feminists like Steinem. To me, a woman who owes her fame and reputation to her husband - and we would never of heard of her, a Little Rock lawyer and the governor's wife, if it weren't for his own New Hampshire surprise -doesn't inspire, however smart and talented she may be. I can see that there would be other reasons for New Hampshire women to vote for her, but because she's a role model for women? I don't get it.

For the record, I'd also like to note that everyone I know, even the most apolitical, is suddenly talking about American politics. Personally, I've found it hard to care deeply about the primaries, which always seemed to be months away. But—pathetically, predictably—now I'm gripped, absolutely gripped, by the whole thing, am even scouring YouTube for the latest soundbites. There's an actual race! There are interesting issues! Sexism! Racism!  I can't be the only one out there who feels that way - might this be the election that gets the non-voters out to vote?   

Gloria, Hillary, and Feminism Revisited

Dahlia (and others): I don't think your point and mine are mutually exclusive. I certainly agree that sexism/the death of feminism is not why Hillary lost Iowa; she lost Iowa, and Obama won, for the very reasons you point out: Obama represents the possiblitiy of change, a break from baby boomer preoccupations and impasses, a break from, well, the Clinton era. (Andrew Sullivan summed it up powerfully in his Atlantic Monthly piece a while back.) These are the reasons many young women I know are supporting Obama. And sure, Steinem overstates the issue and writes from a prescriptive, first-wave point of view that doesn't float my boat. And yet I really do think, as I said earlier, that Steinem captures something crucial about the challenges facing women in America right now, namely, a pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its head in surprising ways. This unease would dog, it seems to me, even the female candidate "with Obama’s innate confidence and openness" whom you call for, Dahlia. Sure, such a candidate would probably perform better than Hillary is performing. And gender wouldn't be the main factor in her candidacy -- just as it is not the really the main factor for many Democrates, including me, as they try to make up their minds about Hillary vs. Obama. But there would still be the same tiresome debates about what a female presidency meant, and in what ways a woman was or was not tough, and so on.

What I hoped to point out is that in so frequently describing how gender isn't the main factor in this presidential race, we are sometimes quick to assure ourselves that it isn't a powerful factor. I absolutely agree with Melinda that many of Hillary's negatives have little to do with her gender. Yet what so many of the debates about Hillary have reminded me is that as a nation (and as a media) we are strangely anxious about identifying any element of sexism to begin with -- and that's what I find striking. And that's why I liked Steinem's piece, even given its quite obvious limitations. Her point that today gender is harder to overcome than race may be spurious. And yet the notion that gender issues are easier to whitewash than racial ones seems right on. I'm curious: Do you really think that if some men had heckled Obama about race at a campaign stop, a national newspaper would have printed a headline referring to his response to "seemingly racist remarks"? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining it.