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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
If you're interested in reading a refreshing burst of honesty today, you could do worse than Aaron Traister's piece
about the different reactions he received from people when he told them
he was expecting a son and when he told them, a couple years later,
that he was expecting a daughter. Americans tend to think we're above
the prejudices that drive people in China and India to use
sex-selective abortion, but as Traister's piece shows, we're far from
the angels we'd like to pretend we are. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Nobody cops to “political correctness” anymore; policing language is
what the other guy does. The rest of us are just, you know, telling it
like it is. But playing PC-policeman officer is a
relatively peaceful and noninvasive way to nudge the culture in a
particular direction, a form of persuasion in a democracy built on
consensus. And according to the authors of a little study in the November issue of the Journal Sex Roles, switching from one form of speaking to another might shift your inner liberal just as quickly.
The study authors wanted to see whether languages that assign genderto nouns, like Spanish and French, might implicitly encourage “opposition or hostility to extending equal opportunity to women, especially in terms of work-related issues” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
Meredith Shiner and Glenn Thrush at Politico ask the question: Why does the GOP have a "woman problem"—i.e., a problem recruiting female candidates? This should be one of those simple answers to stupid questions situations, because the easy answer is that the Republican party has become the clearinghouse for straight white men angry that they have to share a little power with everyone else. Running too many women, especially women who don't play sexpot or crazed right-wing shill (Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, respectively), would send the skittish angry white men of the party fleeing, hands over their ever-vulnerable man parts ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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It’s been a whole day since I first read Jason Whitlock’s Foxsports.com column defending ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, who was fired from the network after having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.
Whitlock’s main point is that “[a] little off-the-books nookie should
not infringe on man's ability to discuss bats and balls in October.”
I’m going to set aside the obvious fact that a job at ESPN is a
privilege, not a right, and if an employee does something to embarrass
the network, of course he can be fired ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Lloyd Grove interviews conservative rabblerouser Michelle Malkin
for the Daily Beast and is surprised to find that she is "vulnerable"
and gets upset when she gets death threats from readers. I would
imagine that Malkin herself would object to the framing of this
article: She's an intentional provocateur who can dish it out as well
as she can take it. So why does Grove need to paint her as a delicate
widdle girl? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Noreen, you make a good point about Sec. Clinton’s reaction to a Congolese man who asked her about Bill Clinton's thoughts on a potential loan from China to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet I’m hard pressed to believe that many people in the Washington cocktail set would be so impolitic, or clueless, to exhibit anything remotely close to such condescension and sexism. After watching her campaign for the presidency last year, is there really any one left in the U.S. who doesn’t believe she can hold her own on weighty matters? .... (Read more in Double X.)
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At an event on Monday in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a young man asked
Hillary Clinton what "Mr. Clinton" thought about a potential loan from
China to the financially strapped country. She paused, amazed, and
replied: "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is
not secretary of state, I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you
my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.''
My first thought upon seeing the clip of the exchange was, of course, good for you, Mrs. Clinton. But my second thought was: that poor guy ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action
may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think,
is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential
primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity
politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama)
v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much
racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic
of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or
skin color than with their respective ages... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sometimes in politics a sudden spewing of bile means that the target of the nastiness is doing something right—at least that’s how the negative attention recently directed Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party feels to me. Last Friday, a Daily Telegraph columnist referred to “the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman.”
Harman has been an MP since 1982, serving in a number of Cabinet positions since Labor took power in 1997. She has always come in for scorn: She’s a serious person whose earnest demeanor doesn’t win her points in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the House of Commons. A civil rights lawyer before she went into Parliament, she’s done a lot of work on social-justice issues that, outside the writings of Dahlia Lithwick, rarely lend themselves to laughs.
In the last month or so, though, the anti-Harman murmurs have become a clamor. With Gordon Brown traveling the world, she twice substituted for him at Prime Minister’s Question Time and was mocked and bullied both times. Of course, mockery and bullying are the prevailing tone of PMQ, largely because of the old boy’s club atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament. In his (not terribly kind to Harman) Guardian review of her March 4 PMQ appearance, Simon Hoggart described the Tory opposition acting like “playground bullies [who] had caught the whiff of [Harman’s] victimhood.”
Harman is certainly not blameless—she made some unwise populist comments about banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose remarkably generous pension plan is more or less the British equivalent of the AIG bonuses—but I suspect the negativity has more to do with Gordon Brown’s sinking popularity. The bookies have Harman as the favorite to succeed him, so, for the ambitious members of her party she is now a serious rival. Apparently, she tends not to brief against her parliamentary colleagues, which means she’s no favorite of political journalists.
But take a look at the video of the March 4 PMQ. When William Hague, her main opponent for the day, brought up Harman’s political ambitions, the Guardian’s Hoggart described her zinger-less response to Hague’s taunting as being made “in the tone of a girl reprimanding her little brother for saying ‘poo.’ ” It’s true that after sitting stone-faced while her fellow MPs indulge in shoulder-shaking laughter at her expense, she simply stands up and launches into a rather dull description of the government’s ideas about “mortgage support.” But these days, isn’t helping people stay in their homes more important to most people than political infighting? When ordinary voters see videos like this, I suspect they’ll relate more closely to earnest Harman than to an entertaining bully like Hague.
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Like E.J., I am interested in this news about older men. We're used to hearing about the downsides of being an older mom: It's harder to conceive; there's more risk to you and the fetus, etc. And as a woman in her early 30s, I can tell you that all the women I know have internalized the "you-better-have-babies-before-your-fertility-drops-at-35-notion." It's as if it's tattooed to our inner eyelid. But now we're finally beginning to hear more about what I've always intuitively believed must be true: It's not so great to be an older dad, either. This piece in the Independent has details about a comprehensive study of children of older dads, and the news isn't so hot. They are "more likely" to do "less well" on intelligence tests than the children of younger men. The children of older mothers, by contrast, are not. Meanwhile, as anyone who keeps an eye out for these studies knows, this study is hardly the first to suggest that being an older dad isn't so great. As the article puts it:
However, recent studies have linked paternal age with congenital problems such as neural tube defects and a range of medical disorders of later life, such as schizophrenia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder and autism.
Who knows how many of these studies are credible. But I'm interested in the cultural metabolism of them. In the late '90s, the culture got all frothed up about sending the message to "career women" that they couldn't have it all—they'd lost their chance to have babies by putting it off too long. I remember feeling there was a kind of meanness in the coverage, a "so there" quality. Who's betting the same thing will happen to men? Not me, I have to say. Or if it does, it'll be milder.
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Count me out on crying "sexism!" when it comes to Newsweek's characterization of Julia Roberts as "Hollywood ancient." And that's exactly what the author said—Hollywood ancient—and you know what? He's absolutely right. By the response here, you'd think he'd written a headline that read:"Julia Roberts is OLD!!!" But that's not what he wrote. He stated the truth when he proclaimed that at 41, Roberts is old for a leading lady—by Hollywood standards. I guess you can call it sexist, but in Hollywood, it's a reality. And I'd beg to differ with those who see a poke at her taking years off to raise her kids is sexist, too. We heard more about Mickey Rourke's so-called comeback than his acting chops after he got nominated for an Academy Award. Living in Hollywood, you kind of come to understand the movie industry has its own version of dog years, and you learn that men and women have it equally rough when it comes to getting ahead in the business. It's not like guys get a free pass. Me? I've never liked Roberts. I've always found her gummy grin more fake than endearing, and the tales I've heard from those reporters who've interviewed her suggest she's more viper in the grass than girl next door. Here's to her comeback flop.
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Dahlia, Jessica,
Like you, I'm not entirely surprised by the depressing Girl Scout stats. But two thoughts spring to mind: First, I wonder what a poll of girls 9-12 would show. In my anecdotal experience with pre-teens this past election (my mother ran a secondary school that I used to spend time in), the girls in the 10-year-old range were picking up the excitement of the fact that Hillary and Sarah Palin were strong female candidates, and little of the debate over it. Second, adolescent girls are hitting that moment when they do begin to doubt themselves (the Reviving Ophelia moment) and so I wonder if this age group was particularly susceptible to absorbing the glass ceiling message. Just speculation. It'd be interesting to know more.
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Dahlia, you're right that at face value, those Girl Scouts stats are disheartening. But the silver lining may be that these girls are thinking about themselves in leadership positions in the first place. As a teen, I never considered women in politics at all. I was not an especially political adolescent, but I didn't think about the glass ceiling for women running for office because I wasn't even in the room. That girls are even considering those barriers in the first place might be a small step in the right direction. At least Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are now sharing brain space with Taylor Swift and Zac Efron.
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Courtesy of Feministing, a new study launched by the Girl Scout Research Institute shows that girls between the ages of 13 and 17 came away from this past presidential election with some very mixed feelings about females and power. On the one hand, these young women report big increases in engagement in politics, their confidence in discussing political issues, and their sense of their own power to change things in this country. But the numbers also show a huge uptick in their awareness of barriers for women. For instance, 43 percent of girls strongly believe that "girls have to work harder than boys in order to gain positions of leadership." (Just 25 percent of girls agreed with that statement only one year ago.) And the percentage of girls who believe that "both men and women have an equal chance of getting a leadership position" has declined from 35 percent to 24 percent in one short year. Zounds.
None of this surprises me. This election seems to have inspired and discouraged most of the women I know in just about equal measure. But I hadn’t stopped to think about how that would be experienced by a 15-year-old girl, who suddenly feels powerful and smart enough to change the world but deeply doubtful that she will get the chance.
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Emily, totally fair point about the Iseman and Hunter stories—they were examples of other kinds of basic journalistic malfeasance. And Politico didn't point out that a number of its top press screw-ups were sexism. But neither did it really "mount a broader critique" of the media's coverage of, in particular, Hillary. All the blunders Politico named that related to Hillary (there were three) had to do with Team Hillary or the candidate's supporters crying foul on sexism in the press.
Which is a little funny, because I always thought the media's coverage of Sarah Palin was more sex-based than its coverage of Hillary. (I don't mean "sexist," exactly, but perpetually tinged—positively or negatively—by its consciousness of her sex. What's the word for this? It's like the difference between racism and racialism, but is there a word?) The condescending pats on the head from conservatives when the li'l gal did good, the sniggers at her Miss South Carolina-esque ditziness when she did bad, the titanic obsession with her wardrobe (Sen. Norm Coleman didn't get so much heat when somebody bought him fancy suits from the same Minneapolis Neiman Marcus) ... Of course, the McCain campaign invited all this by cynically selecting Palin over other reformers for her anatomical features in the first place.
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Welcome, Eve, and good call about Politico's top 10 blunders. The piece doesn't itself point out that the screw-ups it lists were sexist (though Fox does get dinged for taking two "racially tinged shots at Michelle Obama"). I'm with you in not complaining. Better to mount a broader critique of some of the coverage of Michelle and Hillary and Sarah Palin than to slap a sexist label on it. As we watched all of this unfold over the past year, what drew us in, I think, were the ambiguities and complexities, as well as the high drama. Maybe that, too, is a reason to take heart--as we got to know these women as public figures, we kept coming back for more because they only got more interesting.
Also, a quibble: I don't agree entirely with your list. The NYT's presentation of Vicki Iseman's affair-nonaffair with John McCain was an old-fashioned story without the goods—or at least, without the goods in print. I'm not sure it's more problematic than that. And the failure of the mainstream press to run with John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, after the National Enquirer nabbed them—well, nobody likes to get beat, and once the tabloids make a story their own, it's tainted from the point of view of major newspapers and TV. I'm not defending the laggards—as I said ad nauseam at the time, the Edwards story was wholly legit. But I'm not sure you can chalk up the way the press handled it to the pitfalls of covering women.
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I, too, am fascinated by all of this postgame revelation, Anne and Emily. I'm having a hard time believing, though, that Palin—the governor of an American state surrounded by Canada—did not know what NAFTA was, nor that Africa wasn't a country. She's literate; her parents were teachers. It sounds to me like a sarcastic comment was taken as fact. That said, it's insane that we can even be discussing this; crazier still how O'Reilly leapt to her defense. As if the campaign didn't feel like satire to begin with.
Dahlia, while the diva-branding is surely sexist (like the c-word, there's no male equivalent), I'm not sure that the towel talk is, too. The fact that, as Newsweek has reported, when McCain's top strategists arrived at her hotel room to brief her for for the convention, she appeared wrapped only in a towel—well, that's pretty revelatory about how this woman uses her sex appeal as power in the most egregiously inappropriate circumstances. I admit that I love the idea of such palling around with major governmental figures—if, say, we learned that Angela Merkel hangs with longtime advisers in her bathrobe, I'd feel giddy fondness. But this is another story, and if we're going to looking at a future in which Palin continues to sear our consciousness, I want to know how she plays her game.
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Anne and Emily: I was as riveted as you by Carl Cameron’s breathless dishing—as well as by O’Reilly's almost palpable desire to smash him in the face on live television—but I couldn’t help but balk a little at the substance of the McCain campaign's criticisms: Palin is described as colossally stupid. And a diva (prone to tantrums and throwing things). And someone who opens her hotel room door in just a bathrobe (inappropriately sexual) and also a shopaholic who already had far too many clothes to begin with. Just wondering if the sexism threaded through all that doesn’t make it a little less juicy and a lot more worrisome?
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In Rachael's battle between who is speaking more truth to power--Elaine Lafferty or Christopher Buckley--I think the real winner may be Tina Brown. Both articles by Lafferty and Buckley, which have inspired a lot of Web chatter, appeared in Brown's new Web site, the Daily Beast (named after the news outlet in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop.) Brown, of course, famously saved or ruined The New Yorker, depending on your point of view, in the early 1990s, after she created the still-successful formula for Vanity Fair. I worked at The New Yorker, briefly, during her reign and was among those who felt she was often unfairly maligned because of her sex. Rosa's insight--that pretty women are typically more successful than their less attractive counterparts but also punished more harshly when they fail--seemed to apply a lot to Brown at the time and may explain why she was eventually drawn to the subject of Diana, Princess of Wales (and is now working on a book about Hillary and Bill). In fact, many of the writers that define the current New Yorker are ones Brown hired and first brought to national prominence: among them, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane, John Cassidy, Malcolm Gladwell, Phillip Gourevitch, Larissa MacFarquhar, and David Remnick himself (who became her successor). One of my personal favorites of Brown's discoveries was Nancy Franklin, then a staff editor at the magazine. Previous male bosses had overlooked Franklin's considerable talents. Brown, however, saw a natural wit and born writer and promoted Franklin to critic, a post she still winningly occupies.
Brown had a keen appreciation of the sexism that surrounded her--especially the ways women were expected to work like dogs (as Brown did) while many of the men got to lounge around being "intellectuals." Upon learning I grew up in Texas, she once joked to me that she loved Texas men because unlike most of her male literary peers in New York, they were still man enough to flirt with her. In today's political vernacular, Texas men were "dudes," unintimidated by a woman who is both attractive and powerful. Brown's quip offered a brief glimpse into how sexually isolating it can be to be a fiercely intelligent woman. (I think this explains, in part, why otherwise seemingly smart women, especially of Hillary's generation, sometimes ended up with the Bills of the world: Bill was probably the first guy sexually acquisitive enough not to be put off by Hillary's own brains and star power.) I wonder if, at the Daily Beast, Brown hasn't found her natural home. She's surrounded by a younger generation of web-savvy male and female editors more used to smart, assertive women, and she always did love the outrageous, counterintuitive piece on which blogs depend. I, for one, am glad to have her back, mixing it up.
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I'm glad Ann brought up this piece by Elaine Lafferty. Her go-go enthusiasm for Palin is deeply peculiar and, I think, speaks to some deep tensions present in the women's movement—old guard vs. new, third wave vs. second wave—and some of the concerns feminists of all kinds had when it became clear Hillary Clinton's campaign wasn't heading to nomination night in Denver.
What bothers me about Lafferty's cheerleading is not simply that it's condescending—and that line Ann pulls out is particularly awful "... a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight"; what job doesn't require thoughtful curiosity?—but that it's also completely disingenuous. Lafferty is a consultant to the McCain-Palin ticket. She says it right up front, but somehow it's easy to forget as you make your way through the story. She came over to the campaign right after the Palin pick—a moment when the country barely knew the name of the governor of Alaska, let alone whether she was a "quick study" or a bumbling idiot. There is something disconcerting to me about seeing her sitting there, behind Palin, on stage as the candidate assumes a quasi-feminist stance and steals Hillary Clinton's lines about glass ceilings
And now Lafferty simultaneously mocks the so-called "inside the beltway feminist" establishment that shuns Palin for her Christian-political positioning but then uses her own insider feminist credentials (former Ms. editor) as a shield against any criticism that she's remotely swallowed the Kool-Aid on this one. It's not a critique, it's a turn-conventional-wisdom-on-its-ear essay designed to rile people up. Why else be so casually dismissive of the rape kit story and the book banning rumors? (Of the latter, Noam Scheiber's excellent piece on Palin explains her efforts quite clearly.) Does Lafferty really have such live-and-let-live relationship to Palin's positions on choice, feminism itself (Palin has recently rejected the label), and McCain's inability to support the Ledbetter Fairpay Act? I don't buy it.
Over at Jezebel there's an angry but cogent takedown of Ms. Lafferty and her strange tenure at Ms. If you click through the links to the New York Observer stories on Lafferty chafing against Eleanor Smeal and Gloria Steinem in her final days at Ms., it opens up a few other questions. Namely: While I think its essential to the future of feminism expands the definition of feminist beyond the white middle-class women who served as figureheads in the 1970s, upon reflection, why does this feel like Lafferty's means of getting in a few punches at her old colleagues?
Addendum: Emily's take below really cuts to the point. There are plenty of good feminist reasons beyond abortion to reject the McCain ticket. Lafferty has resorted to old bromides that just don't ring true.