Iron My Skirt......Good article on the impact of Hillary's race

[cally]

I think this is a great article on the impact of Hillary Clinton's race for the WH. I do think sexism was discussed more than I've seen in years. BTW, I also agree that Hillary lost because of her Iraq vote and the incredible campaign Obama ran.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/pollitt

Hillary Clinton came this close. In fact, as of this writing, she hasn't formally conceded. Nobody really understands why: why she stuck it out this long, given the math, and why she gave such a grudging, graceless version of her stump speech after the South Dakota primary clinched the nomination for Barack Obama. Suggestions I've heard are not very flattering: she hopes to whittle down her multimillion-dollar campaign debt with donations from the deluded die-hards screaming Denver! Denver! She wants the number-two spot. She's a crazy narcissistic rhymes-with-rich. Maybe she's just ticked off because pundits have been trying to hustle her off the stage ever since her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.


Some think Clinton's loss, and the psychodrama surrounding it, will set women back. I think they're wrong. Love her or loathe her, the big story here is Americans saw a woman who was a serious, popular, major-party candidate. Clinton showed herself to be tough, tireless, supersmart and definitely ready to lead on that famous Day One. She raised a ton of money and won 17.5 million votes from men and women. She was exciting, too: she and Obama galvanized voters for six long months--in some early contests, each of them racked up more votes than all the Republican candidates combined. Once the bitterness of the present moment has faded, that's what people will remember. Because she normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can't stand her.

There's another reason to be grateful to her. Clinton's run has put to rest the myth that we are living in a postfeminist wonderland in which all that stands in women's path is women themselves. Like a magnet--was it the pantsuit?--Clinton drew out the nation's misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it. "Iron my shirt" hecklers. Wearers of Bros Over Hos T-shirts and buyers of Hillary nutcrackers. Fans of the Citizens United Not Timid website (check the acronym). Vats of sexist nastiness splattered across the Comments section of hundreds of blogs and websites. It's as if every obscene phone caller and every exhibitionist in America decided to become an amateur political pundit.

As for the real pundits, thank you, Hillary, for showing us the snickering belittling of women that passes for media commentary: Rush Limbaugh, no Adonis, wondering out loud if "the country" was ready to watch a woman age in the White House; Chris Matthews, Don Imus and Tucker Carlson with their litany of insults--she-devil, Satan, witch, Antichrist, Lady Macbeth. NPR's Ken Rudin compared her to Glenn Close's indestructible bunny-boiler character in Fatal Attraction. And surely a special prize goes to Keith Olbermann for his indignant, hysterical bombast after Clinton's ham-handed reference to RFK's assassination. Rarely has men's terror of women with more brains than a Bratz doll been on such public display. And, of course, men were what we mostly saw up there on the small screen, yakking and blathering away.

It wasn't just men, though. Thank you, Hillary, for letting us get a good look at female sexism: the catty fashionistas and Style page dingbats obsessing over her clothes, her hair, her weight, her cleavage, her laugh. Air America's Randi Rhodes calling her a "big fucking whore," Maureen Dowd offering up her twice-weekly dose of vinegar and dozens of women writers musing prettily about why they and their friends all hate Hillary. Could it be they're jealous? Not, as novelist Mary Gordon has suggested, of Hillary's bagging of sexy Bill (yuck) but of her unsinkable ambition and drive. Hillary's run upset the carefully balanced apple cart of trade-off and resignation and semi-suppressed frustration that is how women of the professional class accommodate to patriarchy lite.

[ismnotwasm]

1. I just read this today at work

It was in the Sunday newspaper. I was thinking that this is one of the best summaries of Senator's Clinton's campaign I've read

[ThomCat]

2. Katha Pollitt almost always gets it exactly right.

And she definitely nailed this very well.

I really hope she's right that this whole sexist media circus has galvanized women into a powerful political force that will challenge the sexism.

[Ellen Forradalom]

3. Sign me up

I'm appalled at what I saw and enraged that so-called liberal men deny it.

[spooky3]

4. I think she understates the problem.

Some of the commenters pointed this out, and I think they are right.

For every "iron my shirt" sexist who is very open about it, there are a dozen or even a hundred people who are clever or dishonest enough to disguise it.

Because there are so many confounded factors, no one can sort out exactly which factor(s) accounted for the primary wins and losses. It's just as reasonable to propose that misogyny was a bigger factor than Iraq, as the reverse, for example.

I am not as optimistic as Pollitt that this campaign has made things easier for female candidates. H. Clinton had many advantages that many other female candidates do not have. If she couldn't win with these advantages, that raises questions about what will happen for other female candidates. And I would think that serious contenders, after seeing what H. Clinton went through with respect to the media bias and unchecked misogyny (and mostly, silence on the part of male Dem. leaders) might decide that they have no interest in putting themselves through the same experiences.

Hope I am wrong about all of the above, but I've found that most of my life, sexism has turned out to be worse than I thought it was in many situations.