Amidst all my attempts to insist that there are no generational differences between me and my younger progressive sisters, I'm often made aware that there are. I don't refer to the time in college when I was held down on a bed in a guy's room and told that either I have sex with him or my clothes will be forcibly removed and tossed out the window as rape, largely because I don't think about it at all. I'm not convinced (though I don't judge anyone whose mileage differs) that calling it "my rape" would have been constructive to my mental health over the long term.
I've lived through enough retrogressive social history where women are concerned, and seen how enough of what's known as feminism has been about language rather than real change to have lost patience with it. My thought tends to be that we have more important things to worry about than whether we want to spell "woman" with a "y" so it doesn't have the word "man" in it or any of the other fodder for misogynistic standup comics that feminism has come up with over the years. My brand of feminism has been about things like creating a society in which a woman who chooses not to marry isn't a pariah, or a woman who is gay doesn't feel she has to hide herself behind marriage, or giving women access to the same jobs as men, or not tossing women out of the workplace at 40 because young men no longer want to fuck them.
I'm not judging younger feminists who think differently. As I said above, I was a child in an era when my mother was a neighborhood pariah for working outside the home and when the books they gave you that explained menstruation to you still warned of the dire consequences of sitting in cars and "petting" (which at age ten I didn't understand, because to me petting was what you did to the dog and I couldn't imagine what that had to do with boys), and using Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh as examples of love in the movies.
Sure, I was angered by the comedy stylings of Andrew Dice Clay, and while I may laugh uproariously at Family Guy, the way the character of Meg is treated sometimes makes me so angry I can hardly watch the show. And of course I'm the founder of Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews, because even I can recognize a pattern of misogyny when I see it.
I wasn't watching when David Schuster talked about Chelsea Clinton being "pimped out" into a more active role in the campaign. I agree that using the expression "pimped out", as if the Clintons had Chelsea out turning tricks for votes, was a pretty offensive choice of words. But I have to wonder, given the fact that a) Don Imus was playing a song called "Pimp-slap the Ho'" for years before his suspension for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed ho's"; b) a song called "It's Hard out there for a Pimp" won a fucking OSCAR®, for God's sake; and c) MSNBC has been a frat boys' club for years before Tweety finally went over the edge and said that the only reason Hillary was a Senator was because her husband cheated on her; why the sudden hue and cry over this one remark?
I'm not defending what David Shuster said. Using the metaphors of prostitution to describe any woman who is not an actual prostitute ought to be verboten in polite company. And I would hope that this incident gets the suits at MSNBC, as well as the guys in front of the camera thinking about the way they talk about women. And no, Keith Olbermann isn't exempt either, because he too has gotten on the Bash Hillary bandwagon, not to mention the fact of his gleeful snark about troubled young women like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and the late Anna Nicole Smith. And yet, the "Keeping Tabs" segment has been running with nary a peep out of feminists for a long time. Do those women somehow "deserve it", because they put themselves in the limelight? Is that why there has been no protests about that? And if so, how does that differ from saying that a woman walking down a dark street in a miniskirt was "asking" to be raped?
I'm just askin', is all.
I wrote the other day about how ridiculous it sounded when a caller to Randi Rhodes indicated that sexism is more pervasive than racism. When you look at Media Matters' rundown of appallingly misogynistic remarks coming from the Boys of MSNBC over the last few years, the only thing that's surprising is that it hasn't come to a head until now. And yet given that Chris Matthews, a much higher-profile talking head than Shuster, was able to get away with a simple apology (and having both Joe Scarborough and Shuster stick up for him on Morning Joe the next day), I'm getting a sense that David Shuster is simply the "waferr-theen meent" that causes the male privilege Mr. Creosote that is MSNBC to explode.
I watched last night's Real Time With Bill Maher today, and with the Shuster episode still raw, P.J. O'Rourke's remark about Hillary Clinton's posterior seems similarly gratuitously cruel. Perhaps we've just become accustomed to men making appallingly nasty cracks about Hillary because they've been doing it virtually nonstop for the last sixteen years. Or perhaps it has more meaning when it comes from what's supposed to be news programming, for all that news has become more like Entertainment Tonight than the kind of programming Edward R. Murrow once delivered.
Keith Olbermann, for all that he faux-humbly denies that he's in Murrow's league, clearly sees the chain-smoking anchor of the 1950's as his role model. Somehow, despite the rampant sexism of the 1950's, I just can't see Murrow ever descending into the kind of locker room stuff coming from the mouths of the MSNBC boys.
The irony is that there IS a legitimate point to be made that it's disingenuous to have Chelsea Clinton be a public face of her mother's campaign and then say she's off-limits to the press. The problem is not with having candidates' adult children out on the campaign trail, it's about having them out there but somehow in need of protection. Chelsea had to endure being called the family dog by Rush Limbaugh when she was just thirteen years old, and this year's likely Republican nominee, John McCain, said in 1998 that the reason she's so ugly (which she isn't, and wasn't then either) is because Janet Reno is her father. So it's understandable that the Clintons want to protect her from the likes of Limbaugh and McCain and Matthews, and alas, now even David Shuster, whom we thought knew better. But when Cate Edwards and the Romney boys have been out there campaigning and WERE accessible to the press, the Clintons do seem to be operating with a double standard. And that's what should have been the story. But by using the language of whoredom to describe the situation, Shuster blew his chance to make a legitimate political point.
Perhaps the suits at MSNBC believe that now that they have a lesbian progressive appearing occasionally in the person of Rachel Maddow, they no longer have to worry about what their male anchors and correspondents say. However, I don't think that when Maddow signed on to be an analyst for MSNBC, being Keith's and Chris' and David's and Tucky's beard was exactly what she had in mind. If Rachel Maddow had something to do with the line now being drawn in the sand, that's all to the good. But suspending Shuster and having Keith Olbermann apologize for him does no good if the behavior continues -- as it seems to be continuing with Matthews.
It seems to me that perhaps all of the MSNBC anchors need to get some psychotherapy and find out just what it is about women that makes them so frightened, and particularly what it is about Hillary Clinton. God knows there's plenty of reasons not to vote for her, but her looks, her legs, her cleavage, and whether or not Matthews or Shuster or Scarborough want to fuck her daughter ought not to come into play.
And while we're doing some soul-searching on this, why don't we lay off the Britney suicide watch as well? In fact, let's keep Michael Musto and his snark about these troubled young woman away as well. Because if we're going to start treating women like human beings in the media, let's extend it even to those disturbed young women being devoured in the maw of show business fame as well. Because NO woman, ANYWHERE, is "asking for it."
UPDATE: Imagine my surprise when I found that Amanda, who God knows has first-hand knowledge of what sexism there is in presidential politics, kinda sorta is on the same wavelength as I am.
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