Gender and Politics: Followup
Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it's righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he's black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:
(The conservative brand identity also doesn't have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton's problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)
Um, what?
Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess -- could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?
Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren't sexist. If I didn't think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn't a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.
A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face -- but that's not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores -- but that can't be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting -- uniting against racism AND sexism.
posted by Clara @ 3:09 PM
2 Comments:
In general, I agree with you, but I think you're overreaching on the interpretation of that particular quotation. Yes, Hillary is dealing with sexism, and a lot of it in some places. However, her problems in the primary are largely influenced by her gender-neutral missteps (repeated blatant lying, for example). While there are people who didn't vote for her in the primary because she's a woman, the crucial segment of voters she needed was the segment who thought critically about the positions and actions of the candidates, and then chose Obama. If she'd won those people, she would have won the primary. It would be absurd to say Clinton hasn't faced sexism or had problems with it, but for a columnist to say that Hillary Clinton's problems come LESS from sexism than from her positions and actions is pretty much spot on.
The way I read the quote (especially in the context of the rest of the article) made it seem like it was making the logical leap that I've seen a lot of people make: Clinton has gender-neutral problems (e.g. blatant lying), therefore sexism against her must be trivial -- but my argument is that it's important to acknowledge the considerable sexism she faces, even though it's easy to get distracted by her real (and perhaps larger) non-gendered problems.
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