Americans Still Blaming Sexism For
Clinton's Defeat In Obama's Hand: The
Way They Are
June 29, 2008
Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female
gender got to the nomination of a major political party.
But the episode will also be recalled
for many other salient features. The first time that the wife of
an ex-president leveraged her first-lady status into a
senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first
time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner-in-chief) was a
person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for --
among other things -- obstruction of justice. The first time
since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination
implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the
rancor of the "white working class".
The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's
eyes welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that
a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably
accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One
Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate said of her
half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the
Muslim faith "as far as I know". The first time that the loser
in the delegate count failed to congratulate or even acknowledge
the winner on the night of his historic victory.
These are quite a lot of firsts to have accumulated. But now
Senator Clinton's partisans are crying foul and saying that the
Democratic primary voters, incited by the media, rejected her
only for something known as "sexism".
This indistinct and vague offence, portentously invoked in many
recent articles and "news analyses," is supposed to be revealed
(as a New York Times report on its own reporting so
masochistically phrased it) in such outrageous ways as the
following: "The New York Times wrote about Mrs Clinton's
'cackle'."
Other cited examples of the poison at work were Chris Matthews's
use of the term "she devil" (which can only be a female
equivalent of a "he devil," unless only the prefix "he" can
denote a devil), a remark by Mike Barnicle to the effect that
Clinton was "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside
a probate court" and more than one joke about the way in which
her fanatical persistence and denial was reminiscent of the
Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.
None of these things will bear the smallest comparison with
racism, which must be strictly defined as the attribution of
inferior characteristics to the members of a distinct ethnic
group. One reason why the comparison almost never works is a
very simple one: no anthropologist, ethnologist or geneticist of
any reputation really believes that the human species is
subdivided by race, whereas it would be a very incautious person
who did not regard the human species as separated for
reproductive purposes into two sexes or genders. One distinction
is false, the other is real.
Replay some of Clinton's less spontaneous moments of laughter
during the Democratic debates. How would you describe them? To
refer to them as merely mirthful would be to do violence to
language.
The word "cackle", which is really an onomatopoeia, is easily
the best, because it conveys what her awkward noise sounded
like. It also perhaps conveys hens rather than roosters, but
that's exactly why our language has so many words for our great
species distinction, which is the ability to laugh. The range
from "guffaw" to "snigger" or "giggle" is huge and some of it
will imply "male" just as some of it will imply "schoolboy" or,
as the case may be, "schoolgirl". So what?
Try the same test with the more
edgy stuff, such as the Fatal Attraction gag. Is it being
alleged that to be a stalker is to be a female? Not at all. As
with serial killers, stalkers are almost always (and are almost
always assumed by the police and the press) to be men. Perhaps
this makes it appear to some people that it's almost unnatural
for a female to be a stalker.
But, then, how "sexist" is that assumption? Going as far as it
dared on the point, the same sternly disapproving New York
Times report found the courage to say The Washington Post,
in mentioning Clinton, had also alluded to "her cleavage".
Living as we do in an age of the easily offended and the
aggressively innocent, we were not regarded as sufficiently
adult to be informed whether this cleavage was in the front or
the back (something in me makes me hope very devoutly that it
was not the latter).
But I think I see the emerging pattern. People who favour
Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times
and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are
even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the
United States in time of war only because she would be the first
vagina-possessing person to hold the job.
But - and here's the catch -- people who do not favour her are
not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and
has feminine characteristics. In this way we prepare our brave
daughters and granddaughters and even disenfranchised
grandmothers for a future that is sex-free and gender-neutral
or, at any rate, something like that.
How pathetic can you get? When will we learn that there is more
to political and social emancipation than the simple addition of
the "ism" suffix to any commonplace word?
In common with quite a lot of men, I have or have had a mother,
wife, grandmother, mother-in-law, daughter -- more or less
everything female except a sister, which I wish I had had -- and
given all this feminine backup, I decline to be talked to in
such a condescending fashion.
There are many ways in which to be a bad person and I don't
think that I would ever deny that the Y chromosome especially
encodes some of these. I certainly don't know any feminists who
wouldn't agree with me that some regrettable traits are forever
associated with the male sex.
But in that event, it will not be easy for Clinton's supporters
to argue that she can't be identified as womanly, or even as a
woman, unless (or do I mean until?) the word "woman" becomes
more coterminous with the word "saint" or "angel" or the term
"nurturing person" than it is now.
Her whole self-pitying campaign, I mean to say, has retarded and
infantilised the political process and has used the increasingly
empty term "sexism" to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest
and most bigoted candidacies in modern history.
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