I want to live long enough to see this child become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

Right on, Riley:

Betty Ford: Trailblazer

This woman would be regarded as a liability for today's Republican candidates

Too bad the trail seems to have ended.

My first reaction to the news of the passing of Betty Ford last night at the age of 93 was "Well, she had a good, long run." My second reaction was a profound sadness, because it all came rushing back to me just what a groundbreaking figure she was, and about how much the role of the First Lady has backslid since Gerald Ford ran for re-election in 1976 and people sported buttons that said "Betty's Husband For President."

Today, the perfect Republican prospective First Lady is quiet, unassuming, has that glazed thorazine stare, looks adoringly at her husband and says little else, and most importantly, keeps her mouth shut. Maybe she can take on libraries as a cause, or some vague thing the press refers to as "education", but mostly her job is to wear elegant but modest dresses to state dinners, kiss babies, and show the country just what a swell guy her husband is.

In the years since Betty Ford left the White House, we have had two First Ladies who didn't match that expectation, and both of them have been Democrats. We all know the kind of crap Hillary Clinton took from the right and the media for having the temerity to believe taht being First Lady meant you could do more than just, as she famously (and tactlessly) said, "stay at home and bake cookies." Now we have Michelle Obama, a successful attorney, who is taking no end of crap for having the temerity to suggest that we should get kids eating better and getting outside and moving around.

Hillary Clinton may have been the first feminist-era First Lady, and Eleanor Roosevelt may have been the first one who was actually a feminist (before the word even existed), but Betty Ford brought a radicalism to her role that perhaps no Democratic First Lady could have. Her brief time in the White House was a "Nixon Goes to China" moment in our history; a time when a World War II-generation woman "got with the program" and showed that it's OK for a woman to be human.

Today we have marathons and fundraisers with pink ribbons and baseball players who wear pink socks for breast cancer awareness, but before Betty Ford announced to the world in 1974 that she had undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer, the disease was something to be hidden; something shameful. To the extent that there has been progress with this disease it is because Betty Ford "took it out of the closet." I know a woman, a few years younger than I, who is currently undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. She is strong and fierce and unfortunately is the one who has to reassure everyone she tells when they get, as she calls it, "the sad face" upon hearing the news. To the extent that we can celebrate any death, the fact that Betty Ford made it to 93 after treatment should give her hope at a time when she and everyone around her needs it.

When I went looking for just the right photo of Betty Ford, I found that when you search Google Images for "Betty Ford", you get plenty of photos of the former First Lady, but also many of Lindsay Lohan, and so we move on to what is perhaps Mrs. Ford's greatest achievement -- revealing that it isn't just poor people and people of "bad moral character" who become strung out on drugs. When you look at the wives of today's Republican candidates, which one of them do you think would have the guts to attach her name to a substance abuse rehabilitation center? The Betty Ford Center was founded long after Mrs. Ford left the White House, but she had already earned her place in the hearts of Americans -- a place that allowed her to gently tap on the door behind which lay tens of thousands of substance abusers and say, "I am one too, and there is help for you." When you look at the glazed stare of so many Republican women, you wonder how many of THEM are strung out, but in today's judgmental climate, it's hard to imagine any potential First Lady having the guts that Betty Ford had back in 1976.

Betty Ford favored abortion rights, she favored passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, she was sanguine about possible marijuana use and cohabitation by her children -- she was the kind of "cool mom" that it was hard to imagine in those days, when so many of our parents had been utterly freqked out by what had gone on over the previous ten years. And she was a Republian, no less.

The passing of this remarkable woman isn't sad because of her death itself. Most of us would be grateful to live for 93 years and leave behind a legacy of kindness, nonjudgmentalism, and making a difference in the lives of breast cancer patients and their families and friends and of those trapped in the maw of substance abuse. It's sad because when we look back at the life and work of Betty Ford, and we think about the war that her political party has declared on women who are not fundamentalist Christians, we realize just how much we've lost. Betty Ford blazed the trail, but we have been remiss in continuing to clear the way for future generations of women.

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree is Amanda, who puts the sexual assault and beating of CBS journalist Lara Logan in context.

Money quote:

It says nothing about Egypt but that they’re a patriarchy that this happened. It says nothing about the claims of the protesters otherwise, and it may not say anything about the future of women. It definitely says nothing about whether or not this people or that people can self-govern. It simply says that when we raise men from the cradle to think of women as the gender that serves and is dominated, rape will become an expression of power and dominance. Gang rapes happen here. They happen pretty much everywhere, because patriarchy is a worldwide injustice. Rapes are about this oldest injustice, and this ugly spot on the stain of all humanity. Crowds of men, struggles over power, women as objects. It’s a formula that leads to this. The leg to kick out from under that to prevent this is not struggles for government control, which are part and parcel of being human. Or people hitting the streets, demanding their rights. The leg to kick out is the worldwide belief that women are second class. Then and only then will rape stop.

On a somewhat related subject here at home, I'll try to have some commentary on the South Dakota Legalization of Murder Act tomorrow.

Two words: Beth Littleford

I've been following with some interest the foofarah over the hiring of Maxim and Playboy cover girl Olivia Munn as the latest of precious few female on-air personalities at The Daily Show.

At my age, I'm a bit old to be threatened by a twentysomething TV personality, but the whole sad dust-up is yet another example of how our culture turns women against each other, pigeonholing us into the boxes of "the pretty one" and "the funny one".

For the uninitiated, Olivia Munn is the newest Daily Show on-air hire, whose claim to fame is hosting the G4 gaming channel's "Attack of the Show", where as Sarah Hepola notes in a Salon interview with the subject of the whole to-do:

she was beloved for such stunts as jumping into a giant pie wearing a French maid's outfit and gobbling a raw hot dog dangling on a string.

Munn's early appearances led to a Jezebel post about the show's tendency towards being a largely boys club dating back to its Craig Kilborn days, which led to a Slate piece accusing Jezebel of ginning up page views by exploiting the whole thing, which led to Amanda trying to make sense of the whole thing, and now we're left with a situation in which Munn is getting the kind of publicity you can't buy, and the cartoony Kristen Schaal, who is genuinely funny, still pushed to the edges of rare appearances on the show and what else can we assume other than it's because she looks like Olive Oyl?

It has always been thus. There has always been an assumption that when a guy is fixed up with a girl by his cousin, and he's told that the girl has "a great personality" or "a great sense of humor", said guy has always assumed that said girl should have a bag over her head. The boys' club thing that surrounds The Daily Show has never bothered me. Perhaps it's because I'm so used to male dominance in the media that I'm a hapless tool of sexism, but all I really care about when I watch these shows, is "Is it clever?", "Is it smart?" and "Is it funny?" John Oliver's dispatches from the World Cup have been so side-splittingly funny that I really don't care whether his genitalia is the same as mine. And for me, that's the real problem with Olivia Munn -- not that she's pretty, but because I don't see any indication thus far that she's funny, or even particularly bright. And so I'm wondering just who the show is trying to hang onto. If the demographic is 60% male, wouldn't it make sense to try to bring in people who aren't already watching? Is Conan O'Brien's upcoming show on TBS that much of a threat to Jon Stewart?

On the other hand, the idea that women won't watch a pretty woman on a comedy show is bullshit. I don't know anyone who has watched the show since the early days who didn't think Beth Littleford was hilarious:

And last I looked, Tina Fey wasn't causing women to go screaming for the hills either.

But look, I get it. It's hard to accept someone as a trailblazer for women when most of what people know of her is as a jerkoff object for a bunch of geekboys, especially when other, funnier women (like Schaal) who don't stuff a wild bikini as well, are shunted off to the side. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought Beth Littleford was both beautiful and funny, and who thinks Tina Fey is both beautiful and funny. And if Olivia Munn proves the naysayers wrong and turns out to have the comic chops, I don't think women will gripe.

While women fight on this Battlefield of Mutually Exclusive Boxes, the din is so loud that we can't hear each other, and each of us, from our own little box, carrying our own baggage from a culture that values only youth and beauty and nothing else, and even gives THAT a hard time, we still have a culture in which there is rape and in which women are regarded as nothing but fuck fodder -- and only that until they reach a certain age. Olivia Munn seems to GET this, for all that she seems unable to step out of it:

You can see the defensiveness in other ways, too, though. Like there is a post on your blog after the Maxim cover shoot where you say, " If you have any problems with me in this spread, I have two things to say to you: 1. Just don’t look. And 2. You sound like you just need a good fuck."

Because at that time I was in my last relationship [with "Star Trek" actor Chris Pine], and I was fed up with comments on the blogs, when girls I’d never met were like, she’s only dating him because he’s a movie star. And I really still believe that anybody who's sitting there judging my relationship does need to get the shit fucked out of them.


But is there any part of you that understands an objection to your being on the cover of Maxim? Even like a maternal instinct that would say, hey, this is a talented girl. Why is she putting this part of herself first and foremost? The idea that it might diminish your gifts.

Yes, I can see that. But I would like to hope we can get to a place where it’s OK to be funny and sexy and be on the cover of a magazine and you can still be on "The Daily Show."


I wanted to talk about the story you write in your memoir about the Playboy shoot. [Munn agreed to pose for Playboy on the condition there would be no nudity but found herself continually nudged toward it by an overzealous photographer and stylist. She never did take off her clothes, but it was a constant struggle.] It's a lighthearted piece, but it made me uncomfortable. I really felt for you -- stuck between what you had clearly consented to and what these other people wanted, how you were trying to be sexy and keep it together while clearly anxious and upset that some nip slip was going to be snapped and published.

And the photographer kept going, "Be comfortable, be comfortable," and I'm like, "I'm not comfortable, because I don't know you. And I don't like you."

When I went in to approve the photos, I literally had to have a conversation with my lawyers, my publicist, my manager, saying: Is that her vagina, or is that not her vagina? It's tricky if you're clean-shaven, because what determines a vagina is public hair. It brings up a lot of emotions for me to even say it that way. I know all that some people will see in that sentence is: "clean shaven"! But I remember sitting on the stairs, feeling so violated afterward. I was sobbing. [The eventual Playboy cover did not feature nudity but a picture of Munn in a red bikini.]

Amanda Hess on a blog called the Sexist wrote that the story was a case study in how magazines like that coerce women.

I don't find myself to be the kind of person who is easily swayed. I could see what this guy was doing. But if I pose for Maxim, I know that if my nipple accidentally slips out, they can't publish that. With Playboy it's different. I understand that the criticism is: "Yeah, but she posed for it anyway." Well, that's like saying, "Oh, you were asking for it cause you dressed a certain way."

It did mean something for me to be on the cover. There's such an image of what beauty is: Women get their lips done, and their boobs done. But I'm multiethnic. I've got smaller boobs. I'm 5-foot-4. If they're saying that's what sexy is, then I think it's a better image to perpetuate than the stuff that still influences me to the point that I wonder: Should I get my lips done?

I'm very open about the fact that it's nice when someone says you're pretty. Especially for someone like me. I have a vivid memory of my stepfather saying to my mom, "Olivia isn't very pretty, is she?" I remember looking at myself in the mirror that night and hitting myself over and over, looking at my eyes, because they looked more Asian. Literally slapping my face and trying to change it. When people are like, "Oh, I don't care that I'm pretty," it's a disservice to what people really go through. And I know that I wasn't alone. So when I do these magazines, yeah, it's nice. It's nice to feel power for doing it. It's nice that someone like Jon Stewart can watch a video of me and not have ever seen me in a Wonder Woman outfit and say, "She's funny."

If you're tempted to hate Olivia Munn because you think she's exploiting the way people react to her looks, go back and read that last paragraph. And then ask yourself if you blame her for doing so. Look, I hope she DOES turn out to be worthy of all the fuss. And then I hope she pushes Jon Stewart to give more time to other funny women whom Maxim would never think of putting on their covers.

Halloween is over; it's NLQ Carnival Days!

What's NLQ Carnival Days, you might ask? It's arguably the most awesome idea for blog promotion that I've ever seen, and while every blog we blogroll is worthy in its own way, No Longer Quivering is one to which you ought to be paying attention, as the teabagger lunatics take over the Republican Party. Vyckie of NLQ started the blog to tell her story of her "escape" from the Quiverfull movement.

Quiverfull's web site is deliberately innocuous, as is it's "about us" statement: "Quiverfull.com's first priority is to serve God through proclaiming that every child is a gift and blessing from our gracious heavenly father." Sounds benign enough; it's standard fetophile boilerplate only without the "shoving our views down everyone else's throat" rhetoric. Have as many children as you want, folks, that's part of what "choice" is about. The problem with Quiverfull is that it's about more than just not using birth control; it's about subjugation of women and about reproducing faster than your "adversaries" can. Quiverfull conjures up images of Armies of Children for Jesus -- horrific little Village of the Damned zombies killing heathens for Christ -- and I'm not sure that's all that far off from the truth.

The problem with Quiverfull isn't in its advocacy of large families, it's in its view of women, and in questions about just how much "free will" is involved with women who become embroiled in its clutches. Kathryn Joyce wrote about Quiverfull, and about Vyckie, back in March, and what emerges is a picture of something akin to any other cult, which presents to troubled young people a sense of belonging, of meaning, of something important, as well as providing a rigid structure that so many troubled young people lack in the chaos of their own families. Cults pray on these kids, and Quiverfull appears to be no different as it lures young women into its web. Religion and spirituality contain strong elements of mind control, and it's clear, reading the stories of the women who have been drawn into, and then escaped, the Quiverfull web, that just invoking Jesus is not enough to turn a cult into a mainstream religion.

So go check out the NLQ Carnival, and read about what Vyckie and her colleagues have been doing since leaving the movement. But make sure you have a lot of time. Because once you start reading you won't be able to stop. And catch Vyckie on The Joy Behar Show on Tuesday.

It's interesting that the NLQ Carnival comes the same weekend that has brought us customary New York Times hack Jodi Kantor for once not being completely hacktastic in her article for the Magazine about the First Marriage. Perhaps it's the ambiguity, the "charting one's own course" aspect to this article that fully puts the Quiverfull movement in perspective. If there has ever been an institution that has its own peculiar rules, it's the political marriage. Historically the political marriage has consisted of Ambitious Man and his Pastel-Suit-Clad Helpmeet. Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to bash through this stereotype, and I think she can be forgiven for being clumsy at it, especially when she put her own goals on hold in favor of her far more charismatic husband's political career. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from the Village when Laura Bush, with her thorazine vacant smile entered the White House and promised us a period blessedly free of uppity women.

And then came the Obamas.

This is a marriage that fascinates people far out of proportion to its own dynamic. Perhaps it's the idea of an intact black family that blows people's minds, which means that the fictional Huxtables really didn't make much of a difference after all. Or perhaps it's a marriage in which its partners seem to genuinely care for and respect each other. That the participants are black while pious white advocates of family values such as Mark Sanford and John Ensign fall like dominoes creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance among those for whom "black" still connotes gang members in bandannas on street corners who don't pay child support. Perhaps it's the idea that the Obamas are, well, sexy, which creates an uncomfortable sense of "I just don't want to know" that Wanda Sykes blew right through in her recent HBO special:

And once again, we see an accomplished, achieving woman trying to navigate through the minefield of Political Marriage at the same time as trying to navigate through Marriage itself. And it's a public service that the Obamas have done in consenting to this article, for all of America has tended to insert the Obamas into a kind of marital fairy tale, where they seem to be living a magical existence that the rest of us can't even hope to aspire to. What the Obamas are saying in this article is that we CAN aspire to what they have, but it doesn't happen by magic, it takes constant work and compromise and consideration.

On the one hand we have this Bridezilla culture of diamond solitaire rings and big puffy white dresses and big parties, and by the time the couple is done with all the foofarah they have no idea how to live together for the decades to follow. On the other hand we have Quiverfull, in which women passively agree to a set of rules so they don't HAVE to think or do any emotional work. The Obamas have found a middle ground, and while it's clear that they have to work every day to stay there, they're also demonstrating that the rewards are there too.

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Melissa, who writes a letter to President Obama.

Money quote:

This was a terrorist act, one in an ongoing campaign against Dr. Tiller, who was one target among many in a bigger campaign against women and the people who provide abortion services and safe havens for them—but no one in our government will call it terrorism. There are, in fact, a lot of things that don't get called terrorism in this country, but few of them approach the breadth of the long-term, flagrant campaign of intimidation, harassment, exhorted violence, attempted violence, actual violence, and murder of abortion providers and abortion-seeking women.

Still, our government is unwilling to call this orchestrated, overt, unapologetic campaign against women and their healthcare providers terrorism, even as increasing numbers of doctors say offering the legal service to their patients is not worth the risk—the very definition of effective terrorism. Even as physician champions of women's right to choose are murdered in cold blood. Even as "pro-life" groups openly celebrate his death and take the position that he deserved it.

[snip]

Your statement, upon hearing of Dr. Tiller's death, was that you are "shocked" and "outraged," that you believe: "However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence." Mr. President, if you had been paying the slightest bit of attention to the realities of the front line of the fight to protect women's bodily autonomy, you would not be shocked. This wasn't even the first attempt on Dr. Tiller's life; it was the merely the first successful one.

I'm angry because you have been admonishing pro-choice advocates to respect the views of anti-choice activists, despite the fact there is very good reason not to afford a modicum of respect for a viewpoint that would force women to relinquish control over their own bodies to the state. I'm angry because you don't seem to get that both sides of this "debate" aren't equal, and it's not just because one side contains mainstream organizations who tacitly encourage the murder of doctors.

It is time to go to the mat to preserve women's right to reproductive self-determination

Gloria Feldt has a passionate plea at Salon to stop assuaging our outrage at the murder of Dr. George Tiller with candlelight vigils:

I am done with candlelight vigils.

It is good and necessary that people gather together at a candlelight vigil to honor the memory of Dr. George Tiller, murdered in cold blood today at his Lutheran church by an assailant believed to be Montana “Freeman” Scott Roeder. Tiller was a compassionate and courageous doctor who provided abortion services to women in some of the most distressing circumstances imaginable, when their pregnancies had gone horribly, tragically wrong. He provided services when no one else would, and he was stubborn enough to fight against everyone who tried to stop him. So it is right that people express their grief in public ceremonies.

But I myself am done with candlelight vigils. I have participated in too many of them, from 1993 with the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola through the seven doctors, patient escorts and staff murdered over the horrifying five-year period thereafter. I can never forget the day before New Year's Eve in 1994. I was, at the time, CEO of Planned Parenthood in Arizona, talking on the phone to Pensacola patient escort June Barrett -- who had been wounded when her husband and the clinic’s Dr. John Britton were murdered by anti-abortion zealot Rev. Paul Hill -- when I received another urgent call from a friend whose granddaughter worked in Planned Parenthood’s Brookline clinic. The young woman had just witnessed the murder of two co-workers by John Salvi.

Each time, we held vigils all over the country. We wept and we pledged to continue our work. Which we did, increasingly, in isolation. We were the ones who had been wronged, and yet we were labeled controversial, to be shunned rather than supported. The murders were only the tip of the iceberg, among over 6000 cases of violence, vandalism, stalking, bombings, arson, invasions and other serious harassment. 

[snip]

When it comes to decrying Tiller’s unspeakable murder, I want to hear it from Congress. I want to hear it from clergy, the medical profession, the media and civic leaders: "This kind of violation will not be tolerated. Period." I want to see leaders and people at the grassroots joining hands together in support of those who provide women with reproductive health services, including abortion. I want them to put the yellow armband on, to assume Tiller’s name as so many took on the Obama’s middle name, Hussein, when he was disparaged during the election. Doctors have a special responsibility. David Toub M.D, MBA, who provided abortions when he was a practicing physician in Philadelphia, told me, "This could have been any of us who provide or provided abortion services. I'm just as annoyed by some of my own colleagues and the American Medical Association who marginalized us and even looked down at anyone involved in providing abortion."

The silence overall from leaders so far has been deafening, as attorney and longtime Arizona volunteer for reproductive rights causes Leon Silver pointed out. And if our leaders remain silent, I can tell you with perfect assurance what will happen next. There will be more violence.

For the last twenty years, we've watched as those in a position to make policy began to get "squishy" on abortion rights. We've watched our party become increasingly willing to throw women's rights to control our own bodies under the bus in an effort to include those whose stated concern for "THE BAYBEEEEZZZZZ" is belied by their own behavior. Yes, there are people of good conscience who oppose abortion but support efforts to support women making the decision not to abort -- including financial ones.

But for the most part (including the troll who commented on an earlier post here yesterday), scratch the surface of a fetophile and you'll find a misogynist -- someone who feels that the dirty sluts who can't keep their legs closed deserve to be punished. When you look at who it is who kills these doctors, it's the very same teabaggers who have been praised by right-wing television and radio hosts as American patriots. It is not considered patriotic on the right to murder those providing health care services to women.

There have always been abortions. There will always be abortions. Most of us who believe that there should be NO point in a woman's life in which she ceases to be a human being and becomes nothing but a vessel for a fetus have never had an abortion. I have never had an abortion. I wanted to make sure that this choice I support wholeheartedly is one I never had to make. I was both responsible and lucky -- responsible because I was dogged about contraceptive use, and lucky because in my case, the method I chose, which statistically has a higher failure rate than others, never failed.

"I don't like the idea of abortion used as birth control," we hear people say. Yes, there are women who have repeated abortions. But anyone who thinks that abortion is something that women choose blithely is clearly a) not a woman; or b) has never had a cold speculum shoved into him/her. I had a punch biopsy once, and that was quite enough pulling stuff out of my nether quarters, thank you very much. The very notion that there are millions of women in this country who decide to have a late-term abortino to fit into a prom dress, or who decide that it's such a nice day, let's go get our nails done, have a nice lunch, and then get an abortion, is preposterous on the face of it.

So why do we give these people any credence at all?

It's time to start digging beneath the surface of these people and reveal them for the frightened little weasels that they are. Women have sex. Women enjoy sex. This is a GOOD thing. Once we accept that, then we can open the door to teaching girls about the conscientious use of contraception without the added baggage of having to be "swept away" so that having sex doesn'tmake her a slut. If we want to reduce the incidence of abortion, we need to be teaching women not the madonna/whore dichotomy, but how to make affirmative decisions as to what is right for them at the appropriate times of life. An empowered, confident woman is one who makes smart choices. An empowered, confident woman won't feel unable to insist on condom use. An empowered, confident woman also has better ability to protect herself from disease.

We also need to make contraception more available, especially to low-income women, and not just send them home with pills or devices, but also teach them how to say yes -- or no -- and listen to their own hearts and minds instead of messages from men or churches or even traditions that are no longer relevant to life today. Over the last few decades, contraceptive choices have become fewer rather than more. Try getting a diaphragm these days without having to wait a week for the local Rite-Aid to get the damn thing.

And it's time to stop being squishy about this. I'm not happy about President Obama's statement yesterday, though I realize that it's about as good as we're going to get from him. But the issue isn't simply one of deploring the violence directed against abortion providers. It's time to stop demonizing women who choose abortions and the doctors who perform them. If you want to stop abortions, then support efforts to make contraception universally available, effective, and affordable, and support efforts to help women make independent sexual decisions for themselves. But those who paint their anti-abortion rhetoric with undertones of fear and loathing of women and our sexuality can just shut the fuck up. We don't want to hear you anymore. Guys like Scott Roeder have taken away any credibility you ever had.

This is enough to make me miss William Kristol

Ross Douchebag cites a survey to bolster his contention that feminism has made women angry and unhappy, and like Dan Quayle before him, largely blames Murphy Brown -- and her real-life equivalents:

The decline of the two-parent family, for instance, is almost certainly depressing life satisfaction for the women stuck raising kids alone. But this can’t be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Again, maybe the happiness numbers are being tipped downward by a mounting female workload — the famous “second shift,” in which women continue to do the lion’s share of household chores even as they’re handed more and more workplace responsibility. It’s certainly possible — but as Wolfers and Stevenson point out, recent surveys actually show similar workload patterns for men and women over all.

Or perhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female. But even in the warm, nurturing, egalitarian European Union, female happiness has fallen relative to men’s across the last three decades.

All this ambiguity lends itself to broad-brush readings. A strict feminist and a stringent gender-role traditionalist alike will probably find vindication of their premises between the lines of Wolfers and Stevenson’s careful prose. The feminist will see evidence of a revolution interrupted, in which rising expectations are bumping against glass ceilings, breeding entirely justified resentments. The traditionalist will see evidence of a revolution gone awry, in which women have been pressured into lifestyles that run counter to their biological imperatives, and men have been liberated to embrace a piggish irresponsibility.

There’s evidence to fit each of these narratives. But there’s also room for both.

[snip]

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn’t seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period. We simply don’t have the stomach for permanently ostracizing the sexually irresponsible — be they a pregnant starlet, a thrice-divorced tycoon, or even a prostitute-hiring politician.

Uh, yeah we do, Mr. Douchebag -- as long as said transgressor is a Republican. Newt Gingrich is going to be able to run for president and is already embraced with open arms by the media -- but John Edwards is going to be a pariah forever.

As for his contention about single motherhood, is that really true? I have known in my life at least five women who are single by virtue of having made bad choices in an attempt to avoid single motherhood -- and are now not only single mothers, but have the added burden of trying to chase down child support, navigate visitation and custody and take crap for eighteen years from the jerks they should never have married in the first place. Or is this their "punishment" for not being dutiful wives? I know one young woman in her thirties whose wedding is coming up soon. Her clock started ticking when she was twenty-five. She wants babies right away because of her age. Her fiancé wants to wait at least a year or two. She's planning to revisit the issue with him -- after the wedding. Want to bet how SHE ends up?

Sometimes single motherhood isn't about "sexual irresponsibility." Sometimes it's about getting out of a bad or abusive marriage. Sometimes it's an affirmative decision born (heh) out of dating a parade of jerks, perpetual adolescents and childophobes and not talking oneself into marrying someone for his sperm. Single mothers may be more logistically harried than married ones, but for the women I cited above, I'm not sure single motherhood is any worse than being married was for them.

But I sense something else is at work here, something that goes hand in hand with the rash of "Being unemployed is a GOOD thing! Here's a story of someone who turned lemons into lemonade by volunteering to change the life of a needy child" chirpy stories being covered by bubbly newsbots on local newscasts these days. It seems that the massive job losses we're currently seeing are largely affecting men:

Economists say this recession is reshaping the financial roles of millions of women whose husbands have lost jobs. Since the recession began in December 2007, about 5.7 million jobs have disappeared in the United States. About 4 out of 5 of those jobs were held by men. That's because the heaviest employment cuts have been concentrated in construction, manufacturing and financial services, where male workers predominate.

The uneven impact of the recession shows up in the unemployment data. On Friday, the Labor Department said the overall jobless rate in April was 8.9 percent. But for adult men, the rate was 9.4 percent; for adult women, it was just 7.1 percent.

[snip]

To help their families through the recession, more working women are taking second jobs, according to CareerBuilder's annual Mother's Day survey taken by among women who work full time and have children under 18. The job-search company found that 14 percent of working mothers have taken on second jobs in the last year to beef up household income

Uh...maybe that's why women are unhappy? Because they're working not one but TWO jobs to try to keep things together? Historically it's men who define themselves through their work and their roles as breadwinner, so when that rug is pulled out from under them, men will often go into a tailspin, which leaves their wives having to not only work two jobs, but still come home and cook and do all the housework because hubby is curled up in a fetal position under the covers. Two law professors are questioning the role of the stimulus' focus on job creation for men in terms of gender equity:

Since its enactment, the G.I. Bill has been lauded as the law that "made modern America," rewarding veterans, democratizing higher education, expanding home ownership and laying the foundation for the economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The bill relieved pressure on the labor market by sending former soldiers, mostly men, to college or vocational training, and by allowing them to start businesses. Moreover, by expanding home ownership, the bill fueled a boom in home construction, infrastructure spending and consumer purchases.

But the bill also had other, less positive effects: Women, most of whom were not veterans and who entered the labor market during the war to fill jobs vacated by mobilizing men, found their postwar prospects limited. By law, they had to relinquish their jobs to the returning veterans.

[snip]

But the bailouts and other stimulus measures aim to bolster the economy by bolstering men. This is perhaps unsurprising. Those most imperiled by the recent economic downturn have been men, who have lost their jobs as the markets plunged. The two flagging industries targeted for bailouts are ones in which men play an outsize role - the automotive and financial services industries. The slump in construction has directly affected men, who make up the bulk of workers in this sector.

Women, who tend to be employed in education and health care, have weathered the downturn better. Indeed, statistics show that, because of the crisis and its effects on men and "male" industries, women will likely surpass men in the workforce, becoming the majority of workers for the first time in our history. If these trends continue, there may be more women working (although they continue to earn less than men) and more families dependent on a female breadwinner.

And perhaps that's why Ross Douchebag wants you to think women are unhappy today -- so they'll get out of the workplace to make room for the men. It remains to be seen, however, just how willing the men will be to take jobs making beds in hotels, or balancing six plates of ham 'n' eggs and a pot of coffee at 6 AM, or changing bedpans in a nursing home for minimum wage after they've been making 25% more than their female counterparts for years.

Blogrolling in our time

I hope you'll join me in giving a big, welcoming B@B hug to Laura and Vyckie of No Longer Quivering. You can read some background on their story here.

Further proof that conservatives aren't about "babies", they're about punishing women who have sex

Nicholas Kristof:

The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.

Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.

The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.

There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims.

The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.

The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.

It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.

Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.

“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.

There is not a single person among those of us who believe that women do not cease to be human the minute they become pregnant who favors forced abortion. But how does denying contraception to millions of women do anything to end a practice of forced abortion that isn't even funded by the organization being denied funding?

The so-called "pro-life" movement extends far beyond banning abortions. If they get what they want in regard to abortion, their next target is contraception. Because as far as these lunatics are concerned, if you are a woman who has sex, or even if you are raped, you deserve to be punished, as Eve was, by a pregnancy you don't want. Forget for a moment the idiocy of using an oft-translated allegorical story as the basis of public policy. With every sledgehammer that Republicans use in an attempt to placate the flat earthers who control their party, they show ever further how pervasive their fear and loathing of female sexuality is. And no number of right-wing pundits masturbating to television images of Sarah Palin changes that fact.

Bitter Old White Women For Obama

There. Now I've founded the club. Who's with me, and when do we start the Meetups?

Is it just me, or is there something about this notion that Hillary Clinton's supporters are fragile flowers in need of careful treatment that's profoundly at odds with the whole notion of feminism as being about empowering women?

This is the theme we've heard over and over again since Tuesday, that it's Barack Obama's job to "win over" the disappointed bands of Clinton supporters, lest they cut off their daughters' noses to spite their own faces by voting for John McCain -- all because Chris Matthews is an ass.

Of course this is reductio ad absurdum, but the point remains: If women want to be regarded as being just as strong as men, can we please stop having the vapors and tantrums every time things don't go our way? I'm not saying we need to back down. If having a woman president is that important to you, then start cultivating the next generation of women from the ranks of whom that woman president is likely to come. You could, for example, start with women like Donna Edwards and Darcy Burner, two terrific progressive House candidates this fall; women who, if elected, can obtain the kind of real experience that will be unassailable. That's how we get a woman president.

Joan Walsh, an avowed Hillary Clinton supporter, makes some very valid points about not just the sexism that permeated so much of the media coverage of Clinton's campaign, but about the ageism -- the same kind of fear and loathing of crones that led previous generations of men to burn as witches so many women who somehow managed to survive the births of multiple children, disease, pestilence, and oppression by males that today's women can't even fathom:

Beyond Christian's deplorable reference to Obama as an "inadequate black male" was a wail worth hearing. She also said, "I'm proud to be an older American woman!" I can feel her pain. Reading the sexist attacks on Clinton and her white female supporters, as well as on female journalists and bloggers who've occasionally tried to defend her or critique Obama, has been, well, consciousness-raising. Prejudice against older women, apparently, is one of the last non-taboo biases. I've been stunned by the extent to which trashing Clinton supporters as washed up old white women is acceptable. A writer whose work I respect submitted a piece addressed to "old white feminists," telling them to get out of Obama's way. I've found my own writing often dismissed not on its merits (or lack thereof) but because as a woman who will turn 50 in September, I'm supposed to be Clinton's demographic. Salon's letters pages, as well as the comments sections around the blogosphere, are studded with dismissive, derisive references to bitter old white women.

As a woman over the age of 50 fighting an ever-more-losing battle against middle-aged spread, who doesn't want to spend thousands of dollars on Botox, and who sees new things in her face every morning, it would be very easy for me to succumb to resentment at a male-dominated society's emphasis on female fuckability. After all, not all of us can be Susan Sarandon. I think that because I was never "one of the pretty ones", but rather, "the funny girl" (which in youth means men think you should have a bag over your head but which serves you well in middle age), it may be easier for me to regard this as a freeing phase of life instead of a depressing one. It also helps that I am lucky enough to have a husband who realizes that if you live long enough, you age, that he is aging too, and who doesn't expect me to look like a nineteen-year-old. But bitterness is not something that's imposed on you by the outside world, it's a state of mind that you choose.

I've seen the comments about washed-up white women, and for all that what little self-esteem I have can be packaged into an eight-ounce Tupperware, even I recognize that all this says more about the people saying it than it does about me.

We are never going to be able to outlaw assholes, as much as we might like to.

For years, feminism has given lip service to creating some kind of gynotopia, and in the process has neglected some of the very real problems facing the very real women not lucky enough to even have to worry about whether they're going to make partner, or be able to play golf at the same country club that the senior executives do, or whether they'll be successful at running for president. It's a lot more important that the woman who operates a forklift for a living not have to deal with pictures of a woman fucking a donkey tacked to the gearshift than it is that Harriet Christian be courted with candy and flowers by Barack Obama.

Joan Walsh again:

Mainly I think he has to reach out to women the old-fashioned way: individually, warmly and respectfully. He needs to schedule meetings with Clinton's top female supporters. (It's probably too much to ask, but I'd love to see a lunch with Geraldine Ferraro. Ask for her thoughts on winning women and Reagan Democrats. Explain that being the first serious black presidential candidate is a little harder than maybe it looked.) It's still too early for me to be certain what Obama should do with his vice-presidential pick, except I know he needs to quite publicly take a Clinton candidacy seriously. I'm not sure picking another woman would cut it. It would look like a form of tokenism, and it wouldn't necessarily do the trick: It's one particular woman, not just any woman, who earned 18 million votes that he will need in November.

What Walsh is saying here is that a man who was told by a woman that the only reason he's doing well is because he's black ought to go out and "court" this woman? Why does Geraldine Ferraro need to be treated with kid gloves? Is she that much of a fragile flower?

Of course Barack Obama needs to treat women voters with respect. I've followed his campaign, and aside from the unnecessarily snarky "You're likeable enough, Hillary" moment, I haven't seen him do anything that requires that he serenade Geraldine Ferraro with a string quartet. And he doesn't need to atone for Chris Matthews' sins. But no one said politics is easy. And if Democratic women voters require that the Democratic male candidate who adores his wife and daughters bring them flowers and candy and woo them with pretty words to keep them from voting for a man who called his much-younger rich trophy wife a "cunt" and a "trollop" in public; if these women require "courting" so that they don't sentence their daughters and granddaugters to a lifetime of government control over their bodies and an even MORE male-dominated society, then I would say to you that they really aren't feminists at all.

UPDATE: I'm not saying that women who fervently supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy the way I supported Howard Dean's in 2004 aren't entitled to feel hurt, depressed, or even hopeless. I know that depression, I've lived it. But it's one thing to feel hurt and disappointed, and quite another to vow some kind of revenge that's really just a kind of lashing out -- with disastrous consequences. Barack Obama is a smart guy who is fully aware of whose votes he's going to need, and has already begun trying to bring the party together. This is no longer "a feminist issue" if indeed it ever was. This is now about saving our country. So hurt if you must, cry if you need to. And then let's all get to work.

Just wonderin', is all

I wonder why, in all the hoopla about how poor Hillary Clinton is being pushed out of the race because she's a poor defenseless fragile flower of a woman, there isn't a big feminist outcry about the Blogad for the finale of The Tudors that's running on all the big name blogs (you can see it at Digby's blog, for one). Because if there were ever a poster child for domestic violence, it's Henry VIII. Maybe it's just me, but this poster bothers me. It's the same "hot" image that's been running in ads the entire season, but the bodice-ripper-style photo of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry with his hand firmly on Natalie Dormer's throat, taken in conjunction with what we know happens to Anne Boleyn in this Sunday's season finale, seems kind of like B&D porn to me. Is this an image that progressive blogs ought to be carrying?

Discuss.

Sorry to break it to you like this, but Hillary Clinton's impending loss of the nomination ISN'T because she's a woman

As late as the beginning of this year, Hillary Clinton was presumed to be the Democratic nominee for president; assumed by most Democrats, assumed even by the media that have treated her so shabbily. Now it seems clear that the nomination will instead go to the upstart Senator from Illinois.

So what went wrong? Is it, as many feminists are saying, because she's a woman?

It's no secret that I don't share the focus on the minutiae of language that many feminists do. My view is that for three generations now, while women have been parsing the meaning of words and looking only at the corporate glass ceiling, the Democrats have been rubber-stamping Supreme Court nominees like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, more women than ever are working without benefits and without job security, women are still trapped in abusive relationships from which they have difficulty escaping because they have no skills, or being raped on the street and by their dates, or sexually harassed by their bosses. And it's not because Barack Obama called a reporter "sweetie." While you can make the argument that comments deemed dismissive of women are part of the same continuum that leads to rape and discrimination, they aren't the same, and to equate them is to make the mistake that Andrea Dworkin made when she opined that penetrative sex is, by definition, violent. It's hyperbole in the service of a cause that negates the worthiness of that cause.

It's the politics of victimization that have been the most troubling part of this election campaign, a contest of Who's Suffered More that does little to advance the cause of any aggrieved group making claims of comparative suffering, and a great deal to make very real issues seem trivial. You can't be empowered if you frame yourself solely in the context of being a rape survivor. You can't be empowered if you take to your fainting couch every time a man says something you think is dismissive or cruel.

I tend to suffer from a great deal of free-floating anxiety, and I also tend to be hypersensitive to people's moods. If someone had a bad day, it's my fault. If someone is curt because she didn't get enough sleep last night, it must be something I did. For decades I framed myself solely in terms of what people thought and what they said. And believe me, there is nothing LESS empowering than giving other people this kind of power over you. If I learned nothing else from the excellent-but-tough therapists I've had in my life, it's that you cannot control what other people do, you can only control what you do. And to put your life, your definition of yourself in the hands of those who because of their own psychological baggage, hate women, can't accept women in a powerful role, have issues with their mothers, whatever -- you perpetuate the idea that women just can't handle the stresses of life, that we really ARE fragile creatures who can't play on the same field.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't point out when Chris Matthews opines on national television that the only reason Hillary Clinton is a Senator is because her husband cheated on her. It doesn't mean we shouldn't point out what Hillary nutcrackers really mean, or the comparisons to the Alex Forrest character in Fatal Attraction. But I think there's a way to do this, and it isn't to have the vapors every time a man on television says something mind-bogglingly stupid, but to amass a group of them into a pattern, and THEN say, "See? THIS is what I'm talking about." You must amass evidence if you want to make a case.

I'll give Hillary Clinton credit for this: For the most part, it hasn't been Clinton herself who's played the poor-me-victim-of-sexism card. She isn't entirely blameless, but it's largely been grievance feminists who have chosen to blame the failure of Clinton's campaign solely at the feet of sexist males and hapless dupes like me who've managed to be able to earn a living, yes, even once being fired from a retail job after rebuffing my supervisor in the stockroom, who don't see male oppression around every corner and haven't let sexism define me or my life.

If there's a message that we HAVEN'T heard from the polls during this primary race, it hasn't been a great deal of concern about having a woman president. There's been concern about dynasty, and there's been a fair amount of lynching metaphor used from people who have said they just couldn't vote for a black man, but I haven't heard concern that Hillary isn't "tough enough to be a wartime president." For one thing, it's hard to make that argument when you're talking about a woman who refuses to say that her Iraq war vote was wrong, who voted for Kyl-Lieberman, and who has blithely talked about her intention to obliterate Iran during her presidency. So those who want to chalk up Hillary Clinton's apparent (at this point) failure to win the nomination to sexism don't want to look at:

1) Her crappy campaign organization and refusal to realize that the nature of campaigning has changed. Howard Dean may not have succeeded with a 50-state strategy in his own run, and the DLC of which Hillary is a member has fought it tooth and nail, preferring the old model of pouring money into "sure-win" races. But if the Obama campaign is anything, it's a triumph of the 50-state, campaign-by-the-people strategy. Hillary Clinton put together a conventional top-down, big-donor, big-state apparatus, led by Mark Penn -- a man of dubious connections who didn't even know how Democratic delegates were apportioned. Her campaign burned through money early, assuming inevitability and a bottomless pit of big-money donors. Her campaign focused on traditional Democratic constituencies, which have been insufficient to create a victory for anyone but her husband, who was a far more talented pure politician than she is. Meanwhile, the Obama camp went after expanding the pool of voters and reaching out to the $25 donor, realizing that if you can tap a million donors for ten $25 donations spread out over time, you have a more consistent cash flow and you have more people with actual skin in the game.

2) She ran up against a more charismatic candidate. If we should have learned anything from the Democratic races in the last 28 years, it's that television image matters. Charisma matters. In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004, the Democratic Party nominated intelligent, capable, competent men -- men whose campaigns made them as dull as dishwater. These men were also highly conventional candidates who underestimated the power of the televised image and the impact of media narrative, hence Jimmy Carter's sweater, Walter Mondale pledging to raise taxes, Michael Dukakis in the tank, Al Gore's sighs, and John Kerry's windsurfing. That all of these men would have been better national stewards than the men who occupied the White House instead is immaterial. The media are going to Go For the Story. And if the candidate can't create his or her own story or narrative, the media will create one. Perhaps if this primary race had been Hillary against a bunch of white men, the fact that she was the first viable woman candidate would have been a bigger story. Perhaps if she had not been the wife of a former president, her presence would have been more compelling. But frankly, she never had a chance against a rock star like Obama, who also happened to have a more compelling backstory and represent even MORE of a harbinger of change.

3) She wasn't prepared for a long campaign, and it showed. The worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton's campaign was a long hard slog. In 2000, there were voters who voted for George W. Bush either because they were confused and thought they were voting for his father, or who assumed that the old man would be the one actually running things so it wouldn't be so bad. Hillary Clinton ran on "It'll be Bill all over again." And at one time, that idea didn't seem like a bad one, until things started to go wrong and the Clinton campaign sent Bill out on the campaign trail, hoping to remind voters of that old Clinton magic. Instead, his presence reminded us less of the Clinton magic than the Clinton narcissism. And that made many of us question what it was we ever saw in him in the first place. Once that particular door opened, it was an easy step to "Now I understand why they hated him." And if you weren't inclined to vote for Hillary on gender grounds, and you were no longer looking at a return to the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, but instead, a return to the Clinton drama and uproar of the 1990's, the case for Hillary became far less compelling.

4) The shifting message. Last year at Yearly Kos, Hillary Clinton stood up in front of around 2500 assembled people in response to John Edwards' challenge of a pledge to kick out the lobbyists, and made an impassioned statement that lobbyists are Americans too. The rest of America may not carry the loathing of K Street the way the netroots does, but they have a sense that their government no longer belongs to them, that it belongs to the money interests. I don't think Clinton realized back then, and I don't think she realized until it was too late, that there is a real hunger in this country for Something Different; that the change for which Democrats thirsted wasn't a restoration, but a leap into something unknown. Because when the last seven years had been spent being led by fear and corruption and incompetence, a leap into the unknown seemed somehow better than anything that smacks of more of the same -- no matter what that "same" might be. And so we started to see Populist Hillary, Good Old Boy Hillary, drop-yer-g's Hillary. And as soon as she became Leonard Zelig, the strong lioness, stalwart in the face of adversity, began to seem panicky and desperate -- and inauthentic.

Of course it's still possible, though increasingly unlikely every day, that something may yet happen to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination. But if it doesn't, and Barack Obama ends up giving the acceptance speech in Denver this summer, it won't be because a sexist society conspired against her. It will be because she and her campaign misread the mood of the nation, and that this party realized that change doesn't mean going back in time.

A letter to young feminists

Gentlewomen:

I was reading zuzu's excellent post today on why sexist framing of Hillary Clinton matters, and decided to write a post I've been wanting to put together for a long time. Doing it on a morning when I have to go to work is probably not the greatest idea, but when the time is right, it's right.

Like you, I'm appalled at the virulent misogyny that's been directed at Hillary Clinton not just during her presidential campaign, but for the last sixteen years. For whatever reason, Hillary has been the focal point of male fear and loathing throughout the country. Whether it's a Hillary nutcracker, or sex club devote and Eliot Spitzer ratter Roger Stone forming an anti-Hillary group the initials of which are C.U.N.T., it's clear that the castration fears of American men are almost entirely focused on this one woman. It seems odd that this should be so.

This is a woman who could have achieved a political career herself, but put her ambitions on the back burner in favor of her husband's. She seems to know perfectly well who she's married to and what he does, and I think she decided long ago that what's good in their connection compensates for her husband's mammoth character flaws. I never quite understood what the foofarah about the "two-for-one" notion was; after all, presidents have unelected cabinet members working with them all the time. Had she not been married to Bill Clinton, but become a successful attorney in her own right and married someone else, there's no reason to think she couldn't have become a United States Senator anyway. That her husband was president helped give her name recognition, but she won her office by winning over many of the upstate counties whose denizens hated her most. So despite the attempts to reduce Hillary to a know-nothing who's trying to ride her husband's coattails to the presidency, I think that sells her short. She's smart, she's capable, and she's eminently qualified for the presidency.

That said, I think you are making a mistake by rallying behind Hillary as some kind of feminist icon, and I think you're making a bigger one by using the politics of victimology to do so.

I realize that this post is going to get me blacklisted from the feminist blogosphere in perpetuity. I realize that this post is going to put an end to the links and other assistance some of you have given this blog, but before it does, I want to thank those of you who have helped me along by blogrolling and linking. And I also want to say that while we may disagree on this particular question, and in many cases we are of different generations, there is much we have in common. I would like to think that what what we have in common is more important than our differences of opinion on Hillary Clinton or even our generational difference, but I realize that may not be so.

As I've posted before, a few weeks ago a woman called in to Randi Rhodes and stated that because blacks were given the right to vote before women, it meant that women were more marginalized and therefore "we" deserve one of "ours" in the White House more than "they" deserve one of "theirs." This argument is ridiculous on the face of it for anyone who has even had the rudimentary history study they do in American high schools and remembers learning about Jim Crow laws and poll taxes. For that matter, it's ridiculous for anyone who remembers Florida in 2000. No white woman was ever pulled over for driving while being a white female. No white woman has died in a fusillade of police bullets because the cops automatically assume that a white woman has a gun and is by definition an imminent threat. Half of all white women are not high school dropouts. Half of all white women are not jobless against their will.

We accomplish nothing by trying to assign relative degrees of victimization and make this election a question of who's been more oppressed. This kind of "Who's suffered more" thinking is what created the schism between African-Americans and American Jews, who at one time worked side-by-side in the civil rights movement and now automatically assume that the other group is attempting to hoard all the suffering marbles for itself. I'm seeing women do this now about the Hillary Clinton candidacy, and all this is going to accomplish is giving us President John McCain and another four years of neocon lunacy.

I am a 52-year-old woman. I am supposed to be Hillary Clinton's base. I'm supposed to be one of those people who's going to emulate Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles and vote for McCain if she isn't the nominee. And I'm supporting Barack Obama. Does this make me a traitor to my sex? I don't think so, and here's why.

From the very beginning, feminist theory was created by comfortable, middle-class white women. I remember the mothers of friends going to consciousness-raising groups. One of these mothers was divorced and had a generous alimony check coming in. Another was a psychologist who, along with her husband, had a very nice income. It was all about what female executives get paid and about sexism in the language and things that really don't matter one whit to the waitress at the diner who left her abusive husband, cleans house during the day and waits tables at night to support her kids, and lives in fear every day that he's going to come in and kill her right when she's pouring the coffee.

I would point out to you, zuzu, that the examples you provide in your post are similarly about the concerns of middle-class white women: The female president of a package manufacturer talking about how male executives view Hillary. The low percentage of women with full partnerships in law firms. A Ph.D. who can't find a full-time job at a local college. It isn't that these concerns aren't important, but they are a symptom of a kind of myopia that has been an integral part of feminism since the very beginning. It isn't just about climbing the corporate ladder, and it isn't just about abortion rights. But you'd never know that if you look at the history of feminism.

I remember the women that Betty Friedan wrote about. I remember the women who stayed home and drank because they were smart and creative but in the late 1950's and early 1960's to buck expectations and take a job were out of the question unless you truly didn't care what the neighbors thought. What grieves me about young feminists is that you have grown up in a world that isn't anywhere near that limited, but I often see in you a sense of victimization that is completely at odds with any notion of female empowerment. Yes, zuzu is absolutely correct that the language that people, mostly men, often use when talking about Hillary is an indicator of how they feel about women in general. Yes, sexism is pervasive in our society, and as the available pie gets smaller, it's going to become more so -- and that is the main reason why the biggest mistake of early feminism was in painting men as the enemy, instead of as fellow victims in a corrupt system.

But you can't have it both ways with Hillary, and you can't have it both ways with yourselves. Hillary cannot want to be seen as a strong, capable female leader and then cry that she's a victim of sexism by the media -- even though her treatment by people like Chris Matthews has been appalling. But when she and her husband frame every criticism of her as "bullying the woman", they make her weaker, not stronger.

When Branch Rickey brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, he told Robinson that he wanted a player who had the guts not to fight back. It isn't that he wanted Robinson to be a victim of what he knew were the inevitable racial taunts, but he wanted a black player strong enough to not let the taunts get to him, but to answer his critics on the field -- which is exactly what Robinson did. Most of us can't even imagine what it was like to be Jackie Robinson that year, when he not only took abuse from opposing teams and the fans, but even some of his own teammates. But Jackie Robinson didn't go before the press and cry that people were picking on him, he just went out there and hit .297, led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award.

Sexism IS ingrained in our society. But we have been talking about sexism in the language for thirty years, and there are still women making beds in nursing homes for twelve hours a day and then going home and sending their kids to McDonalds for a Dollar Menu meal because it's a six-mile walk to a grocery store. And there are women who used to work on assembly lines whose jobs no longer exist. And there are women trapped in terrible marriages because they have no skills. And there are women in the military being raped by their commanding officers. And frankly, they have been largely ignored by feminists who for thirty years have been parsing language and talking about professorships and law partnerships and the number of female CEOs.

Hillary Clinton is a woman who has been treated appallingly by the press, and by many of the citizens of the country she hopes to lead. But she is also a corporatist; a woman who refuses to acknowledge the huge role being played by the for-profit insurance industry in rising medical costs and is willing to garnish the paychecks of low-wage Americans to continue to pour money into this corrupt system. She is a woman who has had cozy relationships with outsourcing companies that send high-paying American jobs to India where lower-paid employees, some of them women, are already showing the stress illnesses of Americans. She is a woman who for reasons I simply cannot fathom, inflated a photo-op visit to a war zone into something approaching combat, when she should have known full well that someone was going to find the video. And then she sends her husband out there to do her dirty work for her.

Hillary Clinton may be the first viable woman candidate for president, but she is no feminist icon. And to dump all of feminism's credibility into this particular vessel is a huge mistake over the long term.

I think about another woman who went into politics with less fanfare but who represent female empowerment far more than Hillary Clinton does: Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed and son injured on a Long Island Railroad commuter train and is in her 11th year in Congress as a leading gun control advocate. McCarthy has never once painted herself as a victim, and has held onto a Congressional seat that opponents once ridiculed as a sympathy seat. You want a political female icon? You could do worse than Carolyn McCarthy.

There is nothing that any generation hates more than the previous generation saying, "You kids don't appreciate what we dod for you, blah blah blah." My father-in-law fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and this was a frequent litany. We of course hated it. But I am saying to you young feminists right now: Don't make the same mistakes that the early feminists did. Don't focus on minutiae to the exclusion of the big picture. Right now there are issues that affect all of us -- male and female, rich and poor. It's not about gender this year, it's about our place in the world and about economics -- economics that victimize poor, working-class and middle-class men and women alike. You do us no favors by making this election about how Hillary is being treated and about language. Resist the temptation to succumb to victimhood-by-grievance. If you believe that Hillary Clinton is the better candidate, than of course you should support her. But recognize that if she is to be a viable candidate in November, she cannot use the politics of victimhood to advance herself as a strong candidate. Because strong leadership does not say "Oh, poor me."

The last thing the Democratic Party needed this year was a watershed election pitting a black man and a white woman against each other. This is why I said earlier to vote for the southern white guy. The grievance battles in this campaign have obscured the more important need to kick the Republicans out of Dodge at least long enough to fix the huge mess they've made of everything. But frankly, I'm not seeing Obama's supporters crying racism the way I'm seeing Hillary Clinton's supporters crying about the mean bullying men picking on their girl.

Polls say that over a quarter of Hillary Clinton's supporters and one in ten Barack Obama supporters will not vote for the other candidate and may in fact vote for John McCain. These people are idiots. If you think for one minute that John McCain is going to advance any kind of feminist agenda, you'd better sit down, have a cup of tea, and think again. Because if you think the media are being mean to all women by being mean to Hillary Clinton, wait till you see what two more Supreme Court justices like Samuel Alito are going to do to you.