in many ways, Palin was a bit of a stroke of genius on his part -- remember our threads in here by some of our more excitable posters about how McCain would win if he picked Palin? --
Oh yes. And also about how
bulldyke bullheaded white
harpies women might
emasculate ruin the race, a less titillating prospect than social oppression at Yukon Barbie’s well-manicured hands. Anyway, I guess I’m not really comfortable with all this emphasis on wombs/uteri—it’s not her fertility that’s attractive/repulsive, it’s all the disingenuous paeans to maternal duty über alles. Not that she ever actually made that the center of her life or was even expected to, of course, but she sure made a reassuring rhetorical show of knowing her place. Or as a (firmly apolitical, nonvoting) neighbor of mine bemusedly observed on a related front, "Palin seems like the kinda girl where if you walked up to her in a bar and smacked her on the ass, she'd just giggle. Hillary seems like she'd deck you."
the difference, for me, is that with female candidates the defense often appears to be the reinforcement of hackneyed, mildly offensive sex-role stereotypes rather than seeking to overcome them in the way that Obama, for example, had to overcome the knee-jerk reaction that many white people had when exposed to the rhetorical flourishes of the black church.
But “overcoming” (as opposed to simply ignoring, which both Obama and Hillary did lots of) is a rhetorical strategy, and requires a challenge with enough moral gravitas to be eloquently “overcome.” No one’s going to hand a female candidate anything as direct as “You don’t like white people” or even (per the Barney Frank example) “You don’t respect families” to wax transcendent in response to. Just a steadily belittling drip-drip-drip of ‘subtly’ gender-based allusions to psychopathic jilted mistresses, scolding refrigerator mothers, fingernails scratching on blackboards, and she-demons. And that’s just the stuff coming from major news network personalities, people who’re supposedly in your own political camp. Anyhow, I thought we were talking about how the supporters respond? ...which is something different.
after all, would Hillary have risen on her own merits or did she need Bill's coattails?
to Palin's credit, she didn't run on Todd's coattails.
Yes, this was a big part of why I never favored Hillary--the dynastic aspect in general (been there, done that, no thanks), the especially extreme intimacy of the dynastic tie in this case (as you said, even more years of Clinton baggage in the White House), and the fact that while she’s surely got the requisite drive and intellect, she lacks on her own the strong accessibility and compelling presence that for better and for worse you need to become president in this country. I do suspect merely being female is
part of that--again, what would a compelling female presence in presidential terms even look like? can we as a culture really even articulate that yet?--but, it's surely not all of it; there's no getting around that Hillary's no born communicator, by anyone's standards.
But, I think a case could be made that Palin did ride McCain's coattails--that she almost had to start out playing sexy/earthy character accessory to an unexciting yet bona fide Real Man in order to break in at all, because she's simply too damn goofy on her own.
on a final note, sex role stereotyping, and also falling into step with said sex roles, really bothers me. always has. i was never a "boys will be boys" kind of boy, obviously, and perhaps i am more sensitive to this because of my lifelong discomfort with notions of "boys do this, girls do that" as well as how this is used as justification for degrading me as a human being. i'm equally as irritated with commercials and situation comedies that depict heterosexual married men as just another child a woman must take care of, what with his man caves and obsession with beer and football and boobies. i also find myself sometimes irrationally irritated when my female friends, once so ambitious, begin to drift from their careers and simply tread water until they can get pregnant and quit their jobs or go part time so they can spend their mornings at Starbucks with the other new moms. i see this and i'm always like, "really? really? so was all that talk 10 years ago in college just fashion?" men, on the other hand, really don't have these choices. well, sure, they do. we can all come up with examples of stay-at-home dads (heck, if we were to have children i'd be the stay-at-home parent in the beginning because my job is writing-based and i can do that from anywhere), or of equally hard working couples who easily share child-rearing duties. but, truth be told, i can think of very, very few of my hetero male friends -- lawyers, doctors, lobbyists -- who wouldn't feel that as some sort of emasculation. perhaps it's my issue -- how watching people entering their early 30s quickly and easy fall into the same roles their parents had and replicate the exact same life they once so deconstructed with undergraduate earnestness. and also how reassuring and comforting they find these roles. i don't have that. i have a freedom that perhaps none of them have. or, perhaps i envy it to a degree? either way, what the LGBT community, as well as women, all share is a common oppressor -- notions of the essential nature of gender and that deviations/perversions of that are indications of dysfunction. you're not really a woman, you're a "bitch." you're not really gay, you're a confused heterosexual. we were all supposed to resist this, and now many of us have decided it's much easier to accept society's role for you and learn to love those limitations.
i guess i'm just disappointed in the broad sense.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I more or less inferred something like this was behind what was puzzling me, but I couldn't quite lay my finger on it.
Well...it's a huge topic, and well beyond this thread. The degradation of gay men in our culture is more harsh and drastic than that of women; no one goes around thinking, “There’s no human category ‘women,’ only pathetic failed men” or “She comes across like a
woman, and that’s disgusting!” Whereas the degradation of women is more insidious and pervasive; certain dynamics follow you every minute of every day, and no social situation exists where “passing” is an option. You needn’t at all be a notably dominant (or forceful, or stubborn, or competitive etc.) woman to be affected by this and to feel it keenly; gentle-natured ‘team player’ women bristle regularly at being condescended to, girlie-ized and ignored, too. And there’s no default ‘safe space’ you can retreat to--leaving full-time work to raise your kids isn’t akin to going back ‘into the closet,’ if that's the analogy; you’re still a woman, and the world-at-large is still going to react to you accordingly. (Do you want to be a cold, shrill, selfish careerist, or a mush-headed, bovine-natured cookie baker? Take your pick…)
I know exactly what you mean about the melancholy of watching friends' youthful dream-up-the-world ambitions seemingly erode away, especially female friends, and that too is a huge topic, and not one where anyone can speak conclusively for anyone else. I do think that overall the transition from world-is-my-oyster/student mode to commitments-bound working adult mode tends to be more disillusioning for women than for men, both because certain obstacles loom larger there (in others' attitudes and unexamined social habits, as well as your own insecurities), and also because your social preparation for those obstacles wasn't perhaps as well-rounded as you'd once assumed (how much were you really pushed to always challenge others, and to invite them to challenge you back? to effect confidence and push on when you've fallen flat and aren't quite sure what you're doing?). Then, too, there’s the matter of what you’ve been raised to measure your success in life by (Yes, yes, but how
likeable are you, Hillary? Does anyone love you, really?). In general, I think young women often enter adulthood too focused on trying to prove what they’re not rather than exploring who they really are and could be.
And yes, having children does change you, no matter which sex you are or how you choose to balance family and career in a divvy-up-the-hours sense. We always knew we wanted our children to have the experience of a stay-at-home *parent* while they were young, but at the end of the day, that decision was based on who currently had the best prospects for a family-supporting income (me), not on who’d 'always dreamed' of being a homemaker (neither of us). So that shared vision of family does come first, but acceptance of divided responsibilities follows immediately from that, and must be committed to wholeheartedly and for the good of the goal. None of which means any particular arrangement need be "fallen" into, just that you need shared conviction in arriving at one then jointly following through. You don’t need “boys do this, girls do that” to have a close-knit family and a vibrant home life.
As for stay-at-home-dad households, speaking from experience, even when Dad doesn't feel emasculated by it, you can take for granted that certain "friends" and perhaps relatives will make it obvious that they see it as precisely that. But here’s the real kicker, at least for me: rather than 'elevating' me to Domineering, Castrating Bitch status in said folks’ eyes--which would at least be hysterically amusing in its inapplicability--it’s more like, Poor, forlorn, unappreciated dear, she works like a slave to keep food on the table (apparently I’m touchingly vulnerable and overburdened, an assumption I notice they don’t make of women in two-income families) because her husband doesn’t have any “drive” (as shown by the fact that he just does silly, mush-headed women’s work all day long--oops, did we say that?!?). It doesn’t make me disappointed with women who do choose to stay at home with their children, though; just with a society that sometimes can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a sign of their saintliness or their insignificance when they do so. As if it has to be either.
, which I agree undermines it considerably, but the sniveling runt deserved it. If he'd stuck to insinuating that she's only in it for the money I'd have agreed with him, but tacking on the textbook chauvinist dig that Mommy's hormonal ball'n'chain ties to the copious produce of her (ewww) girl parts compromises her ability to focus--never mind that he's a father of seven--that was beyond the pale, and he needed to be called on it.
make it seem like the mean boys are beating up on you or the older men are chomping cigars and making "iron my shirt" jokes when you leave the room. and if you're a Republican and dealing with men who can't understand women outside of daughter/sister/mother, answer every question with, "well, Tim, as a mother ..." it's more how women react to women doing such things that strikes me as very interesting, kind of bogus, and certainly unique from other aggrieved minority archetypes, and ultimately patronizing because it's women patronizing other women (... "oh dear, are the boys being mean, sweetie? let's have some strawberry ice cream"). female candidates get (from other women) the Oprah trademarked, holding-back-tears, head-nod reaction shots, silently mouthing "yes, yes ..." in a way that a black man, or an Asian man, or whomever, would never quite get on the basis of race. perhaps because it comes from other women, and 51% of the electorate are women, and only 13% and 3% (?) are black or Asian. and it's not more or less moral or calculating than anything else, it just seems much more obvious to me, and rather unique. a black candidate would do whatever possible to transcend his/her race (excepting majority black Congressional districts or local government), and gay people do everything they can do prove just how "normal" (i.e., just like you) we are (we want to get married! just like you!).
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