BonosSaint
Rock n' Roll Doggie
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We have a good chance to make history this election--with either the first African-American president or the first woman president.
And beyond the election, I think our attitudes are starting to be scrutinized once again. I'm more affected by the gender aspect of it. I've become more sensitized in the past several years when I've gone from being a young woman to a not so young woman.
I assume too that blacks ask themselves similar questions and black women doubly so.
Where are we really when we get past the lip service? The New York Times had an article on the gender aspect of it today.
The Nation
Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales
Brendan McDermid/Reuters, left; Dana Edelson/NBC, via Associated Press
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: March 16, 2008
PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.”
It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?
Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.
It’s hardly that all women are on the same side — there were plenty of women making the points men were about prostitution after Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned following the news that he had paid perhaps tens of thousands of dollars for sex. But there seemed to be a starker split between men’s and women’s reactions to the scandal. And women who for a long time felt they were on opposite sides of a generational divide on gender issues were finding things in common.
“It’s a little bit like the Anita Hill moment, when all of a sudden everybody is talking about something that probably always goes on, and there really is a fundamental difference in who the men and the women identify with,” said Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of several books on the ways men and women communicate.
Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia and director of its sexuality and gender law clinic, called the current climate “a perfect storm.”
“Before Spitzer, there had been a great focus on women as presidential candidates and women as voters,” she said. “Now we add to that women as political spouses.”
“I’m not such a Mars-Venus person but this is one of those moments where gender is at least a partial explanation, it affects how people hear campaign rhetoric, how people see political downfalls,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Even people who were unwilling to see it before are more likely to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes.”
At one extreme there was the bald outrage of Geraldine Ferraro, who complained that Barack Obama would not have come as far as he had if he were a white man or a woman of any race — comments that led her to resign from the Clinton campaign last week. Ms. Ferraro tripped right into the race minefield in her big rush to make her point about the gender minefield. But all along, many women who fought the first wave of battles for gender equality have seen a bias against Mrs. Clinton — which helps explain why older women form the core of her support.
Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.
“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”
It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”
“During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest stir are the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men,” she wrote. “I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.”
A year ago, it all seemed so different. If the nation wasn’t quite gender-blind, still, a woman stood poised to become president, didn’t she? So unskeptical were women about that possibility that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for “the woman candidate”; it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate — or John Edwards or any of the other men running, although it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic.
And beyond the election, I think our attitudes are starting to be scrutinized once again. I'm more affected by the gender aspect of it. I've become more sensitized in the past several years when I've gone from being a young woman to a not so young woman.
I assume too that blacks ask themselves similar questions and black women doubly so.
Where are we really when we get past the lip service? The New York Times had an article on the gender aspect of it today.
The Nation
Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales
Brendan McDermid/Reuters, left; Dana Edelson/NBC, via Associated Press
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: March 16, 2008
PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.”
It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?
Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.
It’s hardly that all women are on the same side — there were plenty of women making the points men were about prostitution after Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned following the news that he had paid perhaps tens of thousands of dollars for sex. But there seemed to be a starker split between men’s and women’s reactions to the scandal. And women who for a long time felt they were on opposite sides of a generational divide on gender issues were finding things in common.
“It’s a little bit like the Anita Hill moment, when all of a sudden everybody is talking about something that probably always goes on, and there really is a fundamental difference in who the men and the women identify with,” said Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of several books on the ways men and women communicate.
Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia and director of its sexuality and gender law clinic, called the current climate “a perfect storm.”
“Before Spitzer, there had been a great focus on women as presidential candidates and women as voters,” she said. “Now we add to that women as political spouses.”
“I’m not such a Mars-Venus person but this is one of those moments where gender is at least a partial explanation, it affects how people hear campaign rhetoric, how people see political downfalls,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Even people who were unwilling to see it before are more likely to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes.”
At one extreme there was the bald outrage of Geraldine Ferraro, who complained that Barack Obama would not have come as far as he had if he were a white man or a woman of any race — comments that led her to resign from the Clinton campaign last week. Ms. Ferraro tripped right into the race minefield in her big rush to make her point about the gender minefield. But all along, many women who fought the first wave of battles for gender equality have seen a bias against Mrs. Clinton — which helps explain why older women form the core of her support.
Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.
“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”
It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”
“During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest stir are the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men,” she wrote. “I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.”
A year ago, it all seemed so different. If the nation wasn’t quite gender-blind, still, a woman stood poised to become president, didn’t she? So unskeptical were women about that possibility that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for “the woman candidate”; it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate — or John Edwards or any of the other men running, although it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic.
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