STILL A WINNER
Thanks for the good fight. And for enduring 16 months — on top of a lifetime — of sustained misogyny.
"How do we beat the bitch?" a woman asked Senator John McCain, this year's Republican presidential nominee, at a Republican rally last November. To his shame, McCain did not rebuke the questioner but joined in the laughter. Had his supporter asked "How do we beat the nigger?" and McCain reacted in the same way, however, his presidential hopes would deservedly have gone up in smoke.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
Don't miss the montage.
posted by kc @ 11:29 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Thanks for sharing. My first thought was to forward to family -- my second that maybe I shouldn't because of "unseemly" language -- and my third that that was the point.
Yeah. I read that about 10 minutes before reading your post, and it's got me thinking hard.
It's sort of amazing, really, the level of misogyny that people have spewed and/or tolerated. Since she was first lady, every time I've heard someone criticize Hillary Clinton — not that she's beyond reproach by any stretch — I asked myself if they actually said anything of substance or merely made a derisive comment that was rooted in either flagrant or subtle sexism. It has almost always been the latter. Seriously. My friend Rick is one of the very few people I know who is not a Hillary Clinton fan at all AND who can articulate relevant and specific reasons for being such. (I don't agree with him, but I respect him!)
Katha Pollit, who's one of my favorite commentators on women's issues (and a frickin' good writer and poet and, incidentally, she knows her Shakespeare!), wrote a great piece for The Nation on this same topic.
Robin Morgan has a link to Hillary's awesome U.N. speech she gave in 1995. I want to hear a male candidate give voice to these concerns (even 13 years later):
I believe that now, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break the silence. It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and for the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.
These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. But the voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loudly and clearly:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed -- and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely -- and the right to be heard.
I wonder how much of this is because the candidate was Hillary Clinton and not just the first plausible woman running for president. Back in the early 90’s, when Hillary’s health care reform efforts were falling apart, I remember seeing bumper stickers that said Impeach Clinton and Her Husband Too. There’s been a sizable anti-Hillary industry ever since. I’ve been mulling Pollitt’s question of whether Clinton losing will set women in politics back. That seems unlikely, but I find it disturbing that there is this core of Clinton supports who have totally bought the notion that Clinton was cheated out of the nomination. Clinton’s own arguments to replace the rules of the contest with whatever system most furthers her own aims only fed this sort of thinking. If the narrative of this race over the next few years is Hillary-was-cheated vs. no-she-wasn’t, I think it will be less likely that there will be the more impartial kind of reflection that could lead to a broader collective cultural judgment about how ugly the sexist behavior was and more resolve to call it out early and firmly. If Clinton had bowed out a month or so ago and acknowledged that she was beaten by an excellent candidate who ran a much better campaign, then she herself could have been part of such reflection. As it stands now, anything she says will just be seen as sore loser-dom. But perhaps there will be some of this reflection anyway. I have a hard time understanding how anybody would put themselves through the process of running for president, but women in particular will probably think twice about it.
Kc is right that I’m not at all a Hillary fan, but there is one reason I’m glad she ran. I used to worry that the first woman president would be some horrible reactionary. But Clinton showed that a woman with regular Democratic views can do very well. Against the field that ran for the 2004 Democratic nomination, she would have won.
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