 |
Sexism For All Types |
 |
Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you I do not support Hillary Clinton's candidacy for president.
Having said that, as a woman, I appreciate and commend Hillary Clinton for her service to my gender. By putting herself out there as America's first serious female presidential candidate, Clinton has endured more gender-bashing — explicit and implicit — than any other female in America. Moreover, in the course of this presidential race, she has faced more nitpicky, tedious, insidious scrutiny of her hair, her makeup, her fashion sense, her tone and pitch, her figure, her choices surrounding family vs. career, her marriage, and her personal demeanor than any other presidential candidate in American history.
First, here are some examples of the abundant, overt sexism that has been levied at Hillary Clinton during this race. The most egregious instances have come from people in the media, like Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan, who make their distaste for the former first lady evident not through substantive comments about her policies but rather, by making negative comments about her voice, appearance, or political profiteering from her husband's success and/or infidelity. Yes, "let's not forget" these classic television moments:
Moving on, overt sexism also comes from everyday Americans, like this guy who didn't hesitate to exercise his freedom of speech at a New Hampshire rally:
Though this image raised a few comments in the news cycle, it sparked virtually no national discussion about sexism in politics, much less about why a female candidate would chose to express such pride in a nation that fails to launch a bipartisan, collective condemnation of this sort of behavior. Call me sensitive, but I think had someone held up a sign at an Obama rally that read "pick my cotton!" there would have been far greater outcry from the American public and media.
Apart from garden variety "gender role" based sexism, there are more implicit forms, like the range of seemingly-complementary to unapologetically-malicious critiques of Hillary Clinton's clothes, hair, and make-up. Perhaps most shamefully, much of this commentary comes from other women, like this bullshit from famed NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd:
Hillary didn’t care about style as first lady; she was too busy trying to get in on Bill’s substance. She showed off a long parade of unflattering outfits and unnervingly changing hairdos.
In Iowa, her national anthem may have been off-key, but her look wasn’t. It was an attractive mirror of her political message: man-tailored with a dash of pink femininity.
Remarks like these are utterly devoid of substantive relevance to her character or leadership capabilities, though they do serve to trivialize Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
The thing is, none of this is really surprising. Everyone knows there are people out there who believe (either consciously or subconsciously) that female candidates are inherently less serious than male candidates. Fortunately, though Hillary Clinton has little political room to call them out in her own defense, these types of sexism (while hideously underreported) are at least noticed by the media and blogosphere in token defense of female candidates.
What frustrates me, rather, are the insidious forms of sexism that female candidates have no choice but to embrace. There is sexist criticism, but there is also sexist praise, and it is Hillary Clinton's acceptance of the latter that reveals how far women still have to go before they are treated as mens' equals in Washington.
Sexist praise is telling women they are good candidates because of the qualities they share with men, like toughness, decisiveness, unemotional rationality, drive, and so forth. Successful female politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi may well be incredibly intelligent and competent leaders. However, they have not been successful because they exude traditionally feminine qualities — emotion, maternalism, or (uh oh!) sensuality — but rather because they have downplayed or wholly abandoned many of their "womanly" traits. From the policies and rhetoric she pursues (e.g. national defense and stopping illegal immigration) right down to the way she dresses (e.g. the obligatory colorful "power suit") a female candidate seeking respect and status in politics today is expected to do everything she can to become one of the boys.
Speaking in hypotheticals, how then, would Americans vote for a female candidate who presented herself as truly feminine? Starting with her political rhetoric, how seriously would they take a woman whose response when asked about terrorism is, "Well, we must accept that like most of us 'terrorists' are just people who want the best for their families, so perhaps we should help them achieve that end." How likely would Americans be to vote for a female candidate who displays maternal compassion when discussing health care, the justice system, immigration, or education? More superficially, how seriously would Americans take a female candidate who stood publicly accused of adultery, or one whose sexual history was made public? How seriously would they take one who shunned the power suit and wore outfits that accentuated, rather than downplayed, her figure? How seriously would Americans take a female candidate who was, well, hot?
Placed in this context, high profile female candidates face a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemma, whereby they are criticized for being too "womanly" in their approach (to governing, or to anything else), and yet lambasted for being too ambitious, too tough, too cold, or too "manly" a candidate. Facing down criticism on both fronts, Hillary Clinton has done so well in this race because she manages to balance these conflicting expectations of her relatively well; but who knows what part of herself she leaves behind by conforming to this model.
Kathleen Reardon of the Huffington Post captures the sentiment well:
It would be refreshing to hear people admit that there are male-female differences, that we've historically linked leadership with the former, and that people who haven't examined the subtle effects of such leanings on their thinking may indeed act in sexist ways — even if inadvertently….
That's why all this squabbling over Hillary's eyes welling up — even though many male leaders have done so and Barack clearly uses emotion to move us — is becoming a diversion in the election. We have much bigger fish to fry.
We should admit that being a woman is different from being a man and that expectations differ with regard to how we comport ourselves in private and public life. Our problem as a culture: we don't have this sorted out yet.
Luckily for me, I don't think sexism in this instance can prevent a worthy woman from becoming president: Hillary Clinton does not deserve to be president, not because she is a woman, but because she legitimately faces a better qualified candidate for the job.
But despite the likenesses between Obama's and Clinton's respective "triumphs" over racism and sexism in this race, Americans appear profoundly more tolerant of sexist comments against Hillary Clinton than they are of racist comments against Barack Obama. Clinton may not embody for Americans the full potential and promise of a female president, but she has certainly brought to the surface the barriers America's first female president — whoever she may be — will have to overcome to get the job of "most powerful man in the world."
DISCUSSION
One RESPONSE to “Sexism For All Types”