Olbermann Out

Falstaff says it best: "Keith, we knew ye all too well. Richly deserved -- but for rather different reasons. This is like getting Capone on tax evasion."

Here are my reasons:

• Falsies -May 13, 2009
• Women They Love to Hate -November 14, 2008
• The Lady Killers - October 15, 2008
• Metaphor? No, Murder. - April 25, 2008 
• Olbermann Calls for Clinton's Murder - April 24, 2008

Anglachel

Attacking the 50 Foot Woman

While much of the blogosphere is talking about the audacity of Virginia Thomas trying to shame Anita Hill into taking back her testimony against Clarence (read Historiann's take on the matter), I want to bring up something that isn't online as far as I can tell, but needs some analysis. And it's kind of related to the nonsense being inflicted on Ms. Hill.

The Spousal Unit reads Mother Jones online a fair amount, mostly to follow Kevin Drum's blog and for the occasional article. A family member gave him a subscription to the dead-tree version of it as a birthday present and the first issue arrived yesterday.

The cover, which I looked for but could not find posted on the web site, is a variation on the iconic movie poster pictured here. In this pulp classic, a wealthy woman who is being abused and cheated on by her scumbag husband has a run in with an alien from outer space and is transformed into a 50 foot tall giant. Her husband attempts to murder her with a lethal injection, but fails. She goes after him and his mistress, kills the mistress and seizes him. She is killed by an explosion and her homicidal spouse is crushed when she falls with him grasped in her hand. Good cheesy fun.

The Mother Jones cover has turned the scantily clad, rampaging female into Sarah Palin standing over a suburban street and crushing a house in her left hand while minivans and SUVs careen in the street and tiny human figures (of tastefully multi-ethnic skin tones) flee in a panic.  The headlines emblazoned across the cover say "ATTACK ON THE MIDDLE CLASS!" "A confused & frightened citizenry votes against its own self-interest" "They say they're taking back America, but really they're taking... your money!!!"

No, really. It's just like that.

Whores, sluts, cunts, and bitches

On Thursday, The Times reported that the Los Angeles Police Protective League provided an audio recording of Brown calling the union to discuss an endorsement. Brown apparently failed to hang up, and then had a conversation with his aides discussing strategy in response to potential police endorsements for Whitman. Whitman had earlier exempted public safety officials from key parts of her pension reform plan — at the same time she said Brown would bend to labor's desires on the issue.

An unidentified voice can be heard saying, "What about saying she's a whore?"

"Democrats urge Brown to apologize over remark about Whitman" - LA Times

I guess my surprise over this remark is that anyone is surprised. The article above tries to minimize the problem by placing it within the context of tough political infighting. The problem, however, is that this is an automatic response to obstreperous women as such and is not a result of tempers running high in an electoral contest.

The use of sexual slurs against women who refuse to behave the way their opponents or competitors want them to behave is normal behavior. It is a culturally acceptable standard for maintaining power relationships between the sexes - women who fail to comply are sexual misfits who deserve to be disciplined for their transgressions. The discipline ranges from name calling and public shaming to rape and murder.

Was Jerry Brown the person who said this? Irrelevant. What matters is that the political left is just as comfortable throwing this around as anyone on the right. Misogyny is an equal opportunity tool of power.

Can you imagine someone in the Brown campaign casually tossing out "What about saying she's a spic/nigger/coon/wop/chink?" (assuming the female opponent is a person of color)? Nope, not even in a private conversation. Yet using comparably derogatory gender-specific language is done without hesitation, and all-too-easily defended with a heated "But she is one!" as justification for the slur. Really? "Whore"? Why not hypocrite, panderer, liar, fraud or any other term that would have been applied to a male opponent? Terminology that is both more accurate and more politically appropriate.

The problem is the unproblematic acceptance of using of women's sexuality as a method to invalidate their participation in the public realm. No matter who the woman is, no matter her political affiliation, no matter her actual behavior, it is perfectly acceptable to casually refer to her as a cunt or a bitch in conversations in a way that calling someone a dago or a yid wouldn't fly and where fag or fairy is raising eyebrows. To describe a woman engaging in any kind of deals or agreements that her opponent dislikes (whether because they are objectionable transactions or merely that they gain her some perceived advantage) as a whore or slut - someone bargaining her sexual favors - is likewise acceptable. Using the term "whore" with regards to a man is not really intended to call his morals into question; it is to feminize and delegitimize him as someone ready to be penetrated.

Which starts to point back to the foundations for the derogation of women in the first place, of course, but that's a bigger topic. The tagline for this blog (You say I'm a bitch as if that were a bad thing...) points directly at the way my gender is used to deny my humanity - that I'm not just a dog, but I'm a female dog - normalizing male as fully human and female as something apart, ontologically distinct as it were. It's my starting point into my political thinking because it is the irreducible fact of my life - that I must provide arguments to demonstrate that I deserve to be treated as fully human.

Back to the gubernatorial campaign. An apology for calling a woman a whore for having engaged in ordinary campaign bargaining misses the mark. An apology is simply "Ooops, our bad. We'll hang up the phone next time. Sorry you feel offended. (snicker)". It is words. The only reassuring action would have been to hear, as the next element in the phone conversation, a roar of disgust that someone attached to the campaign would dare utter that suggestion.

It didn't happen. Sorry, Jerry. I'll be writing in your sister's name in November.

Anglachel

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child

Repeat after me:

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

That child did not seduce him. By her own account, she screamed and struggled and fought and tried to get away.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

She is not an "accuser". She is the victim of a brutal, vicious, premeditated attack on her by a fully aware adult. The State of California is the accuser in this legal case, and it is the State that is pursuing this criminal.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

In response to that accusation, Polanki pleaded guilty to the crime. He stated for a court of law that he knowingly planned and executed the violent rape of a child. Whether he did so as part of a plea bargain is irrelevant. He pleaded guilty to the full extent of his attack on a minor.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

There was a civil case later, where he was also found guilty and made to pay retribution to the child he brutally violated. Some people think this constitutes "paying" for the crime. It does not. It is a civil proceding for damages against a private individual. It does not pay for his crime against the laws of the state, those that forbid violent assault, even if the criminal is able to hand over a wad of cash afterwards. And, by the way, that is known around these parts as prostitution - the exchange of sexual services for money or goods in trade. The civil law offers additional remedies to those wronged, but it is not a substitute for punishment by a criminal court for criminal acts.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

His movie making "genius" is irrelevant to his assault on this child. He planned, in a horrific echo of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, to render the girl unconscious with drugs, unable to protest his carnal use of her body. As in Lolita, the drugs did not work. Unlike Lolita, much like real life, the child fought back. She rejected him. She did not want this to happen. He raped her anyway. Nabokov's novel is art, an examination of how men rationalize their violence against their victims. Polanski's rape is a crime, a case study of a particular man rationalizing his violence against his victim.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

There is no defense for what he did. Nothing he has ever done as a movie maker excuses or diminishes the premeditated violation of another's body for his own physical satisfaction. Any pain he has "endured" since that decision - when he knowlingly and with malice of forethought chose to force alcohol and drugs onto a child so he could rape her - is entirely of his own making:

• He chose to rape a child
• He chose to play games with the court system
• He chose to flee when the courts would not agree to diminish his crime
• He has refused to face the consequences of his acts
• He has attempted to buy off the victim and the law
• He has paraded his story around to increase his own celebrity
• He has traded on his celebrity to get his brutal rape excused and escape just punishment for what he did

The defense seems to be Polanski is an artist and should not be subject to the same laws as the rest of humanity becuse he has gratified us with his artistic endeavors. That is an exact inversion of the principle of the law:

Because Roman Polanksi does not wish to share the earth with other human beings, feeling entitled to treat another person as a sex toy for his personal entertainment and gratification, there is no reason why the rest of humanity should wish to share the world with him.

He deserves to go into prison with the rest of the child rapists and spend the rest of his miserable life suffering in his own self-inflicted hell. Why does he deserve this?

Because he drugged and raped a 13 year old child.

Anglachel

Falsies

Right on cue, The Incomparable One, serves up another excellent take down of the so-called-progressive media by focusing on the casual acceptance of sexism by the audience as a legitimate and progressive mode of political rhetoric.

Susie Madrak, in her review of Boehlert's new book, cuts to the chase more crisply than I did the other day:

Perhaps it will help matters if I point out the only blog reviews to date have been written by the bloggers who also protested the treatment of Hilary Clinton in last year’s primary. Which raises an interesting question: Is discussing even the possibility of sexism in the liberal blogosphere the third rail? Looks like it. ...

But the book does have a few flaws. Boehlert takes great pains to list the charges of sexism in the primary without really investigating them; for instance, I can’t imagine why he let it pass when a male blogger claims there was no sexism on his site because he didn’t allow his commenters to call Clinton a "cunt" or a "bitch." (Because, of course, we all know there’s simply no other language that could possibly demean women.)

My point - that the A-List and A-List-wanna-be bloggers were on message with the major media, not in opposition to them - is most clearly demonstrated by the way in which sexism was not simply tolerated, but deliberately and aggressively deployed, first in the primaries and again in the general campaign. I also think that we have to focus on class and liberal disdain for "low culture" as something that amplified the misogyny.

Somerby has always been clued in to this mix, though he often overwhelms the fundamental argument with his exhortative style. Today, though, he sets aside his usual arch delivery and delivers a sharp, uncompromising critique of the fauxgressive media celebrities and the pseudo-liberals who love them.

Bob starts with an insightful, critical, yet also sympathetic report on Marion Barry casting the sole dissent from the D.C . city council's bill to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Bob makes clear his own disagreement with Barry, and his hope that Barry's assessment of the effect of the vote on D.C.'s black community is wrong. He then asks why there is little attention being given to Barry's opposition and arguments outside of the D.C. Metro area, specifically among the "progressive" media. Indeed, why not? This is a significant political figure making a strong argument about a possibly violent rejection of a cause near and dear to liberal hearts, an argument that has resonance in California where Proposition 8, enshrining anti-gay bigotry in the state constitution, was strongly supported by African American voters. This is a serious point of contention among traditional constituents of the Democratic Party and needs to be understood and dealt with.

What do we get instead? The trivialization of the issue compounded by blatent misogyny, courtesy of Keith Olbermann. A long but excellent excerpt, all emphasis mine:

But it’s funny, ain’t it? You haven’t heard squat about Barry’s “ugly words” on your “progressive” cable news channel! But last night, The Dumbest Person in the World devoted another lengthy segment to ridicule of Carrie Prejean, an insignificant 21-year-old who recently made the mistake of saying something about same-sex marriage which Olbermann has never even bothered describing.(For the record, her view on the matter seems to resemble that of Barack Obama. And that of Hillary Clinton. And John Kerry and Al Gore.) The big nut went on for almost seven minutes mocking Prejean—and her breast implants. But it’s funny, ain’t it? You’ve never heard a word on this program about the things Marion Barry said.

Of course, the reasons for that are obvious:

Olbermann doesn’t have videotape of Barry walking around in a two-piece swim suit. And Barry is an older man, not a younger woman. As Olbermann has made dumb-foundingly clear, he seems to live for the opportunity to ridicule young women. He never says boo about older man—perhaps understanding they could come to his studio and engage in conduct which might require him to obtain a sphincter implant.

Olbermann’s a woman-trasher—a genuine nut on this matter. And no, we hate to break the news: He doesn’t do “progressive” television. He seems to do work designed to capture the eyeballs of well-meaning young liberals. And for some ungodly reason, he does television which has long been devoted to the ridicule of women’s brains and bodies. Marion Barry doesn’t count. An insignificant creation of Donald Trump quite incessantly does. ...

For sheer stupidity, we strongly recommend last night’s buffoonish segment, devoted to the eternal dumbness of Miss California. (To watch the segment, click this.) Olbermann plays you every way but blue, citing those breast implants two separate times (including in his opening paragraph) and failing to tell you why Prejean might be upset about the way she’s been treated. (He always forgets to explain this.) You see, in the world of “progressive cable,” calling a young woman a “c*nt” and a b*itch” isn’t worthy of comment —if she fails to hold pseudo-progressive views, that is. “Where are the feminists?” Laura Ingraham inquired. We would broaden her limited framework: Where are the progressives?

Oh, we forgot! They’re dragging their knuckles and sucking their thumbs, watching a 50-year-old nutcase get his eternal jollies. And drive his rating among the demo, putting millions of bucks in his pants.

Where are the "progessives" indeed.

The Incomparable One turns the criticism of the media around to those who eagerly consume it and who are proud to count Olbermann as one of their tribe. Bob asks what Eric Boehlert danced around but couldn't quite bring himself to ask, what Susie and BTD (among others) have asked, which is why are liberals so comfortable with Olbermann's and others' use of liberal politics to engage in crude misogyny?

With Prejean, as with Gov. Palin and in an oblique way with Hillary, the mysogyny is twisted together with a culture critique that tries to have its cheesecake and spit on it, too. The high-minded disdain evinced by (mostly but not always) men like Olbermann allows both the critic and the audience to manhandle stereotypes of "low" women, simultaneously creating what is low and implanting those reviled qualities into a disposable other, inviting each other to ogle, manipulate, possess and indulge in those despicable (yet deeply desired) aspects under the guise of rejecting them. We can't just talk about Prejean's opinions - we also have to stare at her (false, deceitful, whorish) breasts which serve as proof of her shallow character, her vanity, and her desire to be fucked over. She's just asking for it!

We lose sight of the real political challenge, the deep division within the Democratic coalition about our commitment as a party to equal rights, and we are assaulted by yet another misogynistic T&A drool session masquerading as political commentary. In the end, Somerby is less criticizing Olbermann than he is those who watch him with admiration, thinking that this is somehow progressive.

To think you can engage in this kind of misogyny and be progressive is simply false.

Anglachel

Dignity of the Office

There are good discussions of the Favreau photo showing Obama's chief speechwriter and another Obama staffer performing lewd acts on a cutout photo of Hillary Clinton, with Favreau grabbing Sen. Clinton's breast while the other staffer grabs her hair and forces her to chug beer. See posts one, two and three on Alegre's Corner, and posts at one and two at Corrente, Feminist Law Professors, Historiann, Shakesville and TalkLeft. My opinion of Favreau himself is that he finds denegration through sexual molestation a neat-o thing, and I pity those who have to deal with him on a daily basis. I am a little unclear on when the photo was taken (Before June? Near the convention? Before the election? Within the last few weeks?) and I am also uncertain about his employment status (Is he currently chief speech writer? Applying for a job at State?), but these are subsidiary concerns, things that slightly increase or decrease the offensiveness of the image but do not change the political circumstances of the revelation of the image.

The question of Favreau himself (well discussed at the above linked blogs) may be getting most of the attention but that is not where the political issues lie. The political question remains: what will Obama do with this challenge to his authority? Does he have the political acumen and self-assurance to make a well-timed example of someone who has been important to the campaign?

The stance Obama takes towards Favreau will have repercussions. To say "Sorry, this behavior does not measure up to this administration's standards, can't have this around," would clearly communicate some serious expectations for executive staff performance and workplace environment. To fail to do so will damage the administration.

The reluctance to act upon the irreducible fact of this photo is paradigmatic of Obama's political behavior. He is loath to spend political capital to do the right thing if that thing involves an implicit (let alone explicit) criticism of himself. This is one of the reasons the Rev. Wright situation dragged on as long as it did. The desire to not be wrong overshadows the desire to do what is right, particularly if there is political advantage (real or imagined) to be wrung from the wrong. I compare this political tendency - wait out bad news and see if it will resolve itself - to the behavior of banks that have reaped a windfall from the Hanky Panky. They have capital but will not put it at any risk even when the long term danger for failing to do so dwarfs any immediate penalty. The Village snickers at Hillary's degradation, shills like Campbell Brown want HRC to act out their own private revenge fantasies instead of behave like a public figure of stature, and the public is distracted by the collapsing economy. It must be tempting to see if this situation can be toughed out.

What should be an opportunity to set a number of political expectations is being allowed to slide down the memory hole to defend the imagined hoard of capital.

But this isn't a campaign and we are talking serious, high-stakes politics. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not an electoral adversary, nor is she just another senator. By virtue of her appointment as Secretary of State, she is the representative of the United States to the world. She embodies American policy and reliability to other sovereign nations. To allow this image of her being treated with disrespect by a close associate of the president, someone who appears to be on track as a member of the administration, says two things to the nations and diplomats she will engage:

1. Go ahead, piss on her. We do.
2. We don't respect you enough to send someone we respect to treat with you.

Had this photo come out during the campaign, it could have been kept an individual matter, dimissed (however disingenuously) as the unfortunate side effect of a highly competitive contest. But now Hillary has been named Secretary of State and the revelation of the contempt under these circumstances carries a different meaning. This image is no longer about her. This is not a situation of her making. It is an act of denegration towards her. She cannot respond to it politically because, while it is a personal insult, it is not her political predicament.

It is about defending the dignity and authority of a cabinet officer, which is identical with defending the dignity and authority of the administration as such. It is about Obama's ability to maintain order and enforce discipline. In this case, the president is responsible for defending the nation, as represented by a member of his cabinet, from violation and degredation. That the acts were perfomed on a cardboard cutout should increase awareness of the symbolic import of an assault upon a representation of the country. People have mentioned (and even Photoshopped in) faces of other women, which misses the point. The correct reshuffling of that image would be to have foreign nationals in the place of the staffers. What is done to the Secretary of State is done to the nation.

As I mentioned above, it is not clear when the picture was taken but that is irrelevant. The repercussions of this demonstration of disrespect are happening now.

The dignity, efficacy and authority of the office is at stake.

Anglachel

Women They Love to Hate

The Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, dissects Olbermann and Archie Bunker (my emphasis):

He’s gotta do it: Progressive interests would be better served if our leaders could stop saying things like what follows. On Wednesday evening, Keith Olbermann was chatting with his “friend,” Margaret Carlson about—what else?—Sarah Palin. Carlson was lounging about the Republican Governors Conference in snowbound Miami:

CARLSON (11/12/08): We’ll always have Sarah Palin, it seems. But here, actually, the governors are wanting to talk about 2010, because the number 2012 is code for talking about Sarah Palin, which was where they do not want to go. Her saying that she doesn’t represent herself, she represents an entire movement that’s going to save the Republican party is just what they quietly don’t want to happen. If they had their way, she wouldn’t be here tomorrow.

OLBERMANN: Wow. I mean, to what degree is that the other prominent Republican governors who got some passing mention during this campaign, with an eye towards 2012—Jindal, Pawlenty, Crist? Is there any sense that any of them are forming a power base behind Palin? Or are they intending to, you know, cut her up like a Roman dictator and smuggle her out under their robes?

CARLSON: Ha, ha. Well, they only say that quietly, Keith.

Sorry, but that’s very strange. A few months ago, Olbermann apologized for picturing Hillary Clinton getting beaten up by a bunch of goons behind locked doors. This week, he was picturing Sarah Palin getting cut up into pieces.

Within moments, he mockingly compared her to Lindsay Lohan—then, to Dizzy Dean.

It’s always surprising to see the way such fellows discuss the women they hate. They seem to find it hard to do so without picturing violence or turning to overt, gender-based derision. In our view, Palin is a remarkably underwhelming figure, in ways which are quite easy to define. You don’t have to compare her to Lohan, or picture her being killed—unless your skills are remarkably weak, or you simply enjoy hating women. But MSNBC has trafficked, for many years, in weird, remarkable woman-loathing. And when it comes to their new uber-star, it seems he’s gotta have it.

But then, here’s Archie Bunker—sorry, Josh Marshall—letting us know, just yesterday, who the latest “dingbat” is. Without even bothering to report what this new "dingbat" actually said! [Anglachel note - WKJM has belatedly identified the woman he was deriding.]

But so it goes as progressive intellectual standards spiral steadily downward. Olbermann’s performance on Wednesday’s show was an unfortunate case in point. He performed in ways which used to define the woeful standards of pseudo-con talk. ...

Increasingly, it’s sad to watch the work done on Countdown. Increasingly, that work reflects the lowball intellectual standards pioneered by pseudo-conservative talk. In the long run, progressive interests will not be served by dumbing down the progressive base. It may be good for ratings and salaries—but it can’t be good for the country. This country badly needs to be smart.

(By the way: There has been a lot of chortling this week about the Martin Eisenstadt hoax. On October 16, Olbermann showed remarkably odd judgment in the way he handled one part of this story. No, he wasn’t taken in by the part of the hoax allegedly involving Joe the Plumber. But in repeating claims which he knew were untrue, he almost seemed to be trying to make sure that some viewers did.)

Increasingly, Olbermann offers extremely weak work. What can you say about a guy who can’t lay out Palin’s obvious weaknesses without resorting to gender-based trashing? But most strikingly, Olbermann’s instinct for violent imagery doesn’t seem to want to quit. This is bad for progressive interests, and it’s bad for young men and young women. We’d have to say it’s just plain bad for the world in which we all live. Can someone explain why “progressive” leaders can’t seem to quit this kind of talk?

Perhaps more to the point, why don't we have more men like Bob Somerby unflinchingly calling out the misogyny of people like Olbermann?

Hannah Arendt once described this situation as that she was not so much concerned about Bluebeard himself (pirate, marauder, criminal) as she was by those who would not find Bluebeard objectionable. I take this to mean that while there will always be people who will engage in violence and inhumane acts, the danger to a population is those people who do not see that kind of behavior as needing opposition. Perhaps they view it ironically, or explain it away, or secretly approve because it is of momentary advantage to themselves, or because it allows them to vicariously enjoy the expression of things they (usually) know better than to say out loud.

The last two reasons are what we saw on parade this electoral cycle. People like Olbermann would be outrageous and then the enablers would try to explain why it wasn't so bad instead of standing up to the violence and rejecting it. The overall language and imagery would rachet up in the next round. The introduction of violent, misogynist themes into political discourse, the normalization of exhortations or suggestions to do physical harm to non-compliant women, all of it explained away as self-defense mixed with just desserts for getting out of line - hmm, where on the political spectrum is that usually located?

Right. Not anymore.

Anglachel

Personal and Political

Echidne is a goddess, but you all knew that already, didn't you?

My own recent posts on women, violence and proximity were inspired by Echidne's series on why she is a feminist. If you have not yet read all of them, here are the links:

1. The Right to Go Out
2. Planet of the Guys
3. Our Father Who Art in Heaven
4. The Invisible Women
5. The Female Body As Property

She has completed that series with her current, magnificent post, The Longest Revolution, in which she addresses proximity. She makes this key point (my emphasis):

That women are so integrated on that most primal of levels probably explains why sexism is harder to see than other -isms which oppress people. If women are killed because of their sex it mostly doesn't happen in large public slaughterings but privately, one woman at a time, and in each case we wonder if the cause for the killing might not have been something personal, something unrelated to the gender of the victim. And note that while most racists don't have parents of the race they now hate, all misogynists do. -- It's all too close, too intimate, too hard to see because we lack the necessary distance, the necessary ability to see the possibly oppressed as a separate group.

This is crucial for understanding how misogyny can be simultaneously invisible to most people and yet part of the daily routine for millions of men and women. It's the core of what I am trying to get at when I talk about it being privatised and excused. I'm not a rapist, my girlfriend was just playing hard to get. I'm not a wife beater, she was bitching me out and wouldn't shut up. I'm not committing incest, I'm helping her explore her sexuality. I didn't do anything to her, she was asking for it.

When we do come across situations of women being slaughtered in significant numbers, or executed one at a time, or aborted in numbers large enough to skew sex ratios, or perhaps just kept in gulags of prostitution cut off from any source of protection and offered for rent in a booming sex market, we see the violence as the product of a killer with mental problems, or of an exotic society's bizarre customs, or where the women are participants in crime, instead of understanding women as a class systematically subjected to harm in a way that is unique to them and is due to being female.

Every day women must test the proposition that the men we know aren't a danger to us by putting ourselves in harm's way and seeing whether our trust is justified. In most cases, it is, and this is a good thing. In many cases, it is not and too often those violations occur with men whom we have trusted in the past, like a classmate, an intimate partner, a relative, a co-worker, an authority figure, people on whom our well-being depends.

So, I keep returning to the question, who are you? It doesn't matter what you say online or if you say anything at all. It's just words here. What matters is how you answer that question with your actions. I want you to think what you are doing. I cannot do this thinking for you, nor can I act in your stead. Mandos said "By deduction, what Anglachel must want is for men to help end the privatization of misogyny and rape. What form this is supposed to take is what eludes me." It eludes me as well, not because I can't come up with a nice, thorough, egalitarian to-do list of acts and attitudes I would dearly love to see made flesh in this world, but because you (both Mandos and the generic "you" reading these words) must inhabit a form of life that rejects misogyny and you must do this in the same manner in which you currently inhabit one that embraces misogyny; it can't be done by checking off a list of tasks.

It means reconstructing the world we have in common.

Hillary was talking about this thirteen years ago:

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 woman and girls are sold into the
slavery of prostitution.

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 along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.

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.

Tell yourself what you are doing to create a form of life where these things do not occur. That will say who you are.

Anglachel

Reproduction of Culture

I read an interesting post in the Feminist Law Professors blog today, "New Study Documents Sharp Rise in Pregnancy Discrimination Complaints, Driven by Discrimination Against Women of Color".

They quote a study done by the National Partnership for Women and Families that presents information about a sharp rise in discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. (Full report PDF here) The key paragraph from the news release is this:

The new study finds that race and ethnicity appear to be playing a significant role in the rise of pregnancy discrimination complaints. During the discrete period from FY1996 to FY2005, claims filed by women of color jumped 76 percent, while claims overall increased by 25 percent. During that time, complaints filed by Black women increased by 45 percent, by Hispanic women by 135 percent, by Asian/Pacific Islander women by 90 percent, and by American Indian/Alaska Native women by 109 percent. More than half the claims filed with the EEOC during that period (53 percent) were filed in service, retail trade and the financial services, insurance and real estate industries — where some seven in ten women work.

The one thing missing from the study report are the economic demographics of the women who filed discrimination complaints. I suspect that there was no consistent way to gather that data. The PDF only presents summary information with a little data.

Industries that have low educational barriers are heavily represented in the claims filed - retail, manufacturing, transportation. Secretarial and general office employment is not clearly identified. It could be under "Services", "Finance, Insurance & Real Estate," and "Other/ Not Provided". The lack of job category data makes me wonder if the women filing the complaints are ordinary employees, supervisory/managerial, or executive level staff. The examples in the report cite two management-track situations and a hiring policy (Numbers are footnote references):

Examples include a case involving a female regional manager of a hotel chain who was demoted repeatedly after announcing her pregnancy. A senior vice president for the chain asserted that women were not suitable for managerial positions because they missed too much work.35 In another case, a maternity clothing specialty store agreed to pay a settlement after being sued for its policy of not hiring pregnant job applicants.36 In still another case, a rising star who had quickly moved into a manager-in-training position was told to consider her options and had her training rescinded when she announced her pregnancy.37

The mere presence of female reproduction is reason to discriminate. The report cites percentage increases in claims filed by minority women, but does not provide actual numbers, so it is unclear what the numeric breakdown is or if minority women are more likely to be subject to pregnancy discrimination than white women. Given general patterns in racial discrimination, I suspect the answer is yes to the latter. Are managerial level women more likely to file complaints than regular staff?

What can be gleaned from this? The gestating body is not respected. Pregnant women are a suspect class, not trusted to perform their tasks responsibly. The requirement that an infant be tended once born is viewed not as a respected obligation of the birth parent, but as something to be penalized, reducing the value and respectability of the affected party.

My point of curiosity, which the report cannot answer, is how much of the discrimination is culturally based. Are the white women who are discriminated against from an upper middle class background with professional credentials, or are women with origins lower on the socio-economic ladder and perhaps with credentials rather than degrees more likely to be singled out? To what degree are cultural stereotypes of "welfare queen" and "trailer trash" the background biases of the managers who decide a gravid body no longer deserves equal treatment?

In short, do pregnant women of the right class get better treatment, less discriminatory treatment, than pregnant women who are looked at through lenses of cultural disdain?

One of the uglier lines of argument to come from the Left against Gov. Palin and her daughter Bristol was that these women should not reproduce in the first place. They are just trash, they will reproduce an inferior culture, there is something pathological about their fecundity. Why wouldn't either of them get an abortion when the outcome was not going to be good - a Down Syndrome child for one, teen parenthood for the other with mutterings about shotgun weddings and possible incest. It is of a piece with conservative arguments about minority women's reproductive decisions, that those people shouldn't breed.

On top of general misogyny, lower socio-economic status women constantly battle bigotry that would deny them their own children. When it gets applied to women who are not so low on the ladder, such as the Palins, then the culture argument is easier to see because it slips from being a purely economic claim and begins to base its authority on judgment about the kind of mother this or that woman would be, and what pathologies she would inculcate in her offspring. That these arguments have been offered most stridently from the right and against minorities should not camouflage the more general class bias that is used by all political sides. I am concerned about this given the rampant misogyny on the Left coupled with the explicit rejection of working class and poor interests by the current power brokers of the Democratic Party.

The irony, of course, is that discrimination against women in the workplace for being (or potentially being, or just having ceased to be) pregnant is one way in which economic advancement of working class women is curtailed and the "pathological" culture they are presumed to inhabit is prevented from changing itself through stable, sustainable employment.

Anglachel

Girls Have Cooties

The NYT has a front page article, Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty, on the significantly higher premiums private health insurance carriers charge woman. It appears that trying to remain healthy is a reason to charge higher premiums because the users "consume" more of the "product".

Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage, according to new data from insurance companies and online brokers.

Some insurance executives expressed surprise at the size and prevalence of the disparities, which can make a woman’s insurance cost hundreds of dollars a year more than a man’s. Women’s advocacy groups have raised concerns about the differences, and members of Congress have begun to question the justification for them. ...

In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.

Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy group that has examined hundreds of individual policies, said: “The wide variation in premiums could not possibly be justified by actuarial principles. We should not tolerate women having to pay more for health insurance, just as we do not tolerate the practice of using race as a factor in setting rates.”

The women most likely to be purchasing individual health care are those least likely to be employed and/or married to someone who has employer based health care. The women most likely to have lower household incomes and greater health risks due to the demands of work (possibly needing to do two jobs, leaving little time for self-care) and the structure of food pricing, where the least nutritious is the cheapest. This group of women is also likely to have dependents who are also significant "consumers" of health care.

One of my first thoughts was childbirth and attendant medical complications were factored into the premiums. After seeing what a friend of mine went through to have an "uncomplicated" ceasarian, I can see there would be some significant expenses involved. But that's not necessarily the case:

Insurers say they have a sound reason for charging different premiums: Women ages 19 to 55 tend to cost more than men because they typically use more health care, especially in the childbearing years.

But women still pay more than men for insurance that does not cover maternity care. In the individual market, maternity coverage may be offered as an optional benefit, or rider, for a hefty additional premium.

Crystal D. Kilpatrick, a healthy 33-year-old real estate agent in Austin, Tex., said: “I’ve delayed having a baby because my insurance policy does not cover maternity care. If I have a baby, I’ll have to pay at least $8,000 out of pocket.”

So, it's not because the dames are popping out sproglets. That would be an additional expense. The "but you might get pregnant" argument is the same as what was used for years to deny access to education and good paying jobs. Your biology isn't male, thus, we're going to charge you. How big are these disparities?

Humana, for example, says its Portrait plan offers “ideal coverage for people who want benefits like those provided by big employers.” For a Portrait plan with a $2,500 deductible, a 30-year-old woman pays 31 percent more than a man of the same age in Denver or Chicago and 32 percent more in Tallahassee, Fla.

In Columbus, Ohio, a 30-year-old woman pays 49 percent more than a man of the same age for Anthem’s Blue Access Economy plan. The woman’s monthly premium is $92.87, while a man pays $62.30. At age 40, the gap is somewhat smaller, with Anthem charging women 38 percent more than men for that policy. ...

Thomas T. Noland Jr., a senior vice president of Humana, said: “Premiums for our individual health insurance plans reflect claims experience — the use of medical services — which varies by gender and age. Females use more medical services than males, and this difference is most pronounced in young adults.”

In addition, Mr. Noland said, “Bearing children increases other health risks later in life, such as urinary incontinence, which may require treatment with medication or surgery.” ...

In Iowa, a 30-year-old woman pays $49 a month more than a man of the same age for one of Wellmark’s Select Enhanced plans. Her premium, at $151, is 48 percent higher than the man’s.

So, women and men engage in sex, but women get pregnant and might have complications. That men, statistically more likely to have more partners, are at a higher level of risk for STDs and (since they are less likely to seek treatment) are more likely to suffer the long term effects of a disease like herpes and to spread that disease to other partners doesn't come up. Can we also talk about the propensity for male "young adults" to engage in risky behavior and end up requiring extremely expensive treatment for injuries? A friend of mine is recently out of ICU because of bashing in his own skull in a fall while trying to skateboard while drunk, for example. Are these accidents being factored in to male insurance premiums? Is it really the case that a woman is 48% more expensive to insure, or is it that the insurers know that men don't use medical services enough to make any money off them?

At the same time as women are being charged more because of they might get pregnant and they might make more use of the doctor, the fundamentalists are trying to remove access to effective birth control (in part by trying to force states to drop requirements that birth control be covered by insurance) and discourage use of health care that is aimed at reproductive health, such as pap smears, vaccines and and non-hormonal birth control, especially if provided by clinics that also provide abortion services. Where are the men of the Left in this battle?

Then there is the argument of health care over time. Women use health care earlier in their lives when it will pay out greater benefits in long term health. Men do not. The article did not offer a comparison of health care consumption after 40. Are men actually costing more long-term? The actuarial people warn against sharing the risk:

Cecil D. Bykerk, president of the Society of Actuaries, a professional organization, said that if male and female premiums were equalized, women would pay less but “rates for men would go up.”

Mr. Bykerk, a former executive vice president of Mutual of Omaha, said, “If maternity care is included as a benefit, it drives up rates for everybody, making the whole policy less affordable.”

Um, wouldn't it make the whole policy more affordable to the people most likely to need the health care? Instead of women, and the most vulnerable groups of women, having to bear a premium for the ordinary health needs of life, why don't we spread it around and make it a little more expensive here but a lot less expensive there? In short, why don't we use insurance the way it is supposed to be used, to reduce cost by recognizing the social benefits as well as the individual risks? Some people have their heads on straight:

Mila Kofman, the insurance superintendent in Maine, said: “There’s a strong public policy reason to prohibit gender-based rates. Only women can bear children. There’s an expense to that. But having babies benefits communities and society as a whole. Women should not have to bear the entire expense.”

The cost of poor maternal health as a whole is greater than just the considerable burden on the mother and her children. Of course, one answer I hear even on the Left is that women who can't take care of themselves (i.e., cannot afford health insurance plus the maternity rider) have no business bearing children anyhow. And they shouldn't expect to have contraception to save them, either. They can just keep their knees together and stop being such welfare queens and trailer park trash. Besides, the world is overpopulated and we don't need more people who are just going to reproduce their pathological culture as well as extraneous children.

Hmm, what's familiar about that picture? If you view women primarily as breeders, and then you divide them into the well mannered breeders who limit their reproduction and deserve to be treated like men and the undeserving breeders who have babies to stay on welfare or who are just sluts who fuck until they "have" to get married, well, you don't really have to look at the social benefit that accrues to men whose medical needs are no less than women's, but which follow a different pattern.

There is something profoundly wrong treating human reproduction as a disease peculiar to women.

Anglachel

Private Matters

Some of my readers (and not just the published commenters) seem confused by discussion of public, private and the excusable when analyzing misogyny.

Right on cue, the AP reports today about a pair of white supremacists who intended to murder African American students and also try to kill Obama. The media frenzy is about the stated threat to Obama, while Damon on Corrente goes to the real problem, which is that the plot to murder people on account of race was the primary motivation: "To me, the main part of the story is the murderous rampage planned against a bunch of innocents folks based on nothing other than their color".

I'm going to focus on the planned school attacks not to minimize what the perpetrators wanted to do, but to emphasize a point I have been making about the privatized nature of misogyny compared to racism. As an aside to the total nut cases who have been innundating my comments and email: A) discussing the lack of attention given to misogyny in no way minimizes racist violence and B) providing a critical view of racism alongside of a critical view of misogyny is not excusing race-baiting against HRC during the primaries, or to minimize the misogynystic attacks on her or Gov. Palin. Smarter trolls, please.

What I want to point to first is the very serious and responsible actions of the ATF to the plot. That these racists did not appear capable of actually carrying out the full horrors of their plot against their initial targets (they evidently confessed to having fired at least one gun at an unoccupied AA church in the recent past) is not much of a concern - to have caused injury well short of death to a single person is reason for revulsion and condemnation. We look at it and can agree without equivocation that this plan was racist and inexcusable. Unlike the two school attacks, on the Amish school and on the Colorado high school, I have referenced before there is no doubt that these men were singling out a class of people without regard to anything specific to those people except a demographic marker - race. We are not confused by any personal histories of the would-be murderers or particularly interested in their motivations. We can see bigotry based on a class in a way we can't or won't see it when groups of women are murdered, or even threatened with violence short of murder.

There is another quality to the foiled plot that needs attention. Racial violence is conducted publically and (though not clearly present in this example) institutionally with state-controlled means of violence and coercion. Strangers seek out racial groups for assault and murder. Institutionally, we see patterns of actions that disproportionately punish non-white groups - "driving while black", the staggering incarceration rate of young black men, the different penalties handed out to different drug users, and so forth. This is violence inflicted in the street and with an audience.

As discussed in the previous posts, violence against women is disproportionately a crime performed within a private space - a home, a car in a secluded place, a locked dorm room, a professional office. The assailants are not usually strangers to us, but family members and friends. The privacy makes it difficult to measure the scope and scale, easy to reduce it to expressions of antipathy between particular individuals or of the psychopathy of the assailant, and extremely difficult to prosecute because of the intimacy and dependence between the assailant and the victim. The institutions of civil society, divided into feminine and masculine space, home and work, emotion and economics, provide constant, unmonitored, unremarkable access to the subjugated class.

This has also been the condition of racial violence in this country, of course, where slaveholders claimed to be acting as paternal authorities over the people attached (willingly or not) to their household. It was the physical and sexual subjugation of people who could not escape and who were, as time and generations went by, the kin of the abusers. America's apartheid, Jim Crow, was defended on the grounds that it was a private matter that outsiders should not interfere with, the paternalistic, patriarchal model of violent control extended to the community. It lingers on in arguments about "state's rights" or the power to systematically treat classes of people as the proper subjects of private violence and coercion.

Another aspect of the public/private which is counter intuitive is that misogyny does not need to hide itself in public, which is why I call it excusable. It is permissable to describe women as their body parts, to have magazines dedicated to demeaning sexualized portrayals of women, to harass, to graphically describe the sexual violence you want to inflict on a particular female as punishment for some real or imagined failing of hers, etc. We can talk violently and derogatorily about women in public venues in every corner of this country, in every socio-economic group, in every place of discourse from high brow to the gutter in a way that is not acceptable to speak about racial and ethnic groups. Ironically enough, to the degree that Obama was unfairly treated by The Village, the language used sought to feminize him, to make him appear weak, unmasculine, vain, girly, "Obambi" in Maureen Dowd's all-too self-revealing terminology. The worst thing she could think to call him was a girl.

To the degree that the society accepts as normal the use of private violence and coercion against a class of people, you will see public expressions of that violence tolerated, even promulgated, without irony or shame. Olbermann can trash women as such, something that the Incomparable Bob Somerby has noticed about Olbermann in the past.

Two of my favorite bloggers also bring up the public/private split in recent posts, one on race and another on gender disparity in pay. French Doc of The Global Sociology Blog posted a cartoon "Of The Invisibility of Social Privilege and Institutional Racism" that could just as easily be used to describe male privilege. She notes:

This should be mandatory material for any introduction to sociology course to explain the simple yet often hard to understand for our students fact that we do not all experience the social structure and interact with its social institutions in a similar fashion. ...

Moreover, social disadvantages and privileges are invisible, especially for the dominant categories (and sometimes even to the disadvantaged who might buy into the dominant ideology). That society is overall experienced as more structurally and interpersonally violent for the disadvantaged is a greatly under-discussed social fact that contributes to the reproduction of these forms of violence.

The violence against women is reinforced by structures of habitation and the acceptance of a level of violent language and imagery that would be unsustainable for any other class of people. Ann of Historiann has a post Who’s your daddy? that looks at the pay disparity in law firms, and that women are consistently paid less, even when they are married and have children and, at least objectively, have as great a need to provide economic support to their household. Married women with children earn the least, which is another informal structure of society that makes them vulnerable to coersion and violence in the home - low pay and pressure to not work increases vulnerability and also increases the relative advantage of all males, not just those who woud use violence. To my mind, the increasing reluctance of the men on the Left to spend political capital fighting for contraceptive rights has a great deal to do with wanting to reduce the competition. If I'm smart enough to get this connection, so are they.

Back in my grad school days in NYC, the spousal unit and I lived in a walkup in Little Italy. In the apartment above us was a couple who argued and scuffled. The woman was good friends with another woman on our floor. One night, we were brought bolt awake by the sound of the upstairs woman screaming and of things crashing. We scrambled to pull on our clothes, and the SU tried to find a stick or club. The woman downstairs was calling the cops and screaming up the stairwell for the guy to stop beating the other woman. The upstairs apartment door crashed open (big, heavy metal doors) and the woman being attacked ran downstairs to her friend's apartment, slamming the door shut before the boyfriend could get her. He spent the next 15 minutes pounding on the door screaming at them both. The cops showed up and did the arrest just outside our door. After the Miranda Rights, it kinda went like this:

COP: (Conversational, almost cheerful tone) So, why'd ya go beatin' your girl?

BF: (slurred voice) I din't!

COP: But she said ya did. Look, that's blood there. Need a closer look? (sounds of scuffle)

BF: I din't do nuthin'!

COP: Ya broke her nose, asshole.

BF: I din't hurt her!

COP: Ya didn't hurt her, huh? Well, tell ya what. How's about I take this here flashlight an' I smash in your nose? Whadda ya tink? Tink it would hurt?

Ah, rhetorical questions from New York's Finest. They dragged the guy off about then so we didn't get to find out of the boyfriend took the cop up on the offer. Two things have stayed with me about the exchange. First is the cop, who obviously didn't like this abuser, discussing the woman as a belonging and in a diminutive - your girl. The second is the insistence by the guy that he had not done anything, he had not inflicted harm. I think he meant it, that he didn't think what he had done to her constituted harm. Actually, there was a third thing I remember. It is Franca, the maintenance woman, on her knees on the stone steps the next day, scrubbing away the blood. It was spattered on the walls, the stairs and the floor.

Domestic violence, the systematic infliction of violence and threats of violence on household members, may be privatized, but it is not private, which is to say that it is not simply an altercation between two individuals but is a relationship of power that the society chooses to maintain as normal, natural, and outside anyone's ability to address because it's a "family matter". Just like chattel slavery used to be. Violent acts are performed by a significant minority of men for the simple reason that they know they will probably get away with it, but those acts in turn take place in a milieu where contemptuous degradation of women is as common as the nearest Hooters restaurant or the pharmacist who won't fill birth control prescriptions. Why wouldn't they think they can get away with it when the majority of men give no indication that they have any interest in changing the terms of the interactions?

I'm back to my original question to the men - who are you? Don't bother to tell me about what a great guy you are or how offended you are that I would compare you to those bastards who beat and rape. Anyone can appear sincere online. Since I don't know any of you in person, I have no way to know whether your words and your deeds coincide. Only you know if you are making excuses for not standing up and excercising the 1st Amendmant rights you hold so sacred for those who want to spew murderous misogynystic crap, and doing so on behalf of those who have to live on the receiving end of that violence. A system that promulgates misogyny also keeps intact the structures that engender classicm, racism and homophobia.

You can excuse yourself, or you can do the right thing.

Anglachel

PS - I look up from my blogging and see this posted by Echidne, Modern Day Sex Slavery. Someone is buying the use of these children, in enough volume that it is worth risking arrest to run these operations. I read this post and all I want to know is who is visiting these brothels and handing over dough to fuck barely pubescent girls?

Unacceptable, but Excusable

First my thanks to the commenters in the previous post, So, who are you?, who tried to seriously respond to the challenge I presented. The really stupid comments went into the trash. I tried to keep the balance representative of what came in. About half were personal stories that I won't be posting. Remember, if you want a direct reply from me, use the contact form linked in the top right hand box.

Why is it so difficult to fight back against misogyny and the violence inflicted on women? Reflecting on the different treatment of racism and misogyny as political issues over the last year, I come up with the formulation that both of these modes of domination are formally unacceptable to most people in society, but that misogyny remains excusable. Racism and misogyny are acknowledged as wrong. There are laws, policies and measures to combat each. The formal opposition to each is having an effect. Barriers to employment, education and equitable treatment have been reduced. You cannot espouse racism and misogyny the way you could into the 70s. It is simply a fact that we don't have a white supremacy party (Howard Dean's paranoid fantasies not withstanding) even if we do have a party that encourages racist behavior.

The chief difference, as every newspaper's breathless articles about it demostrates, is that racism is no longer excusable in mainstream discourse. It is a mark against those who use it. This must not be mistaken for its absence or social extinction, only its delegitimation as an unapologetic argument in "polite" society. It is built into the structure of economics, society, education and politics. Even so, it has to hide what it is, abstracted, coded and whistled.

Misogyny can appear in an unadulterated form in public and private. It remains excusable. He was drunk. She was dressed like a skank. You can't blame a guy for reacting like that. Some sluttishness was probably involved. He didn't actually mean kill her, it's just a sports metaphor. You can understand why someone would want to beat her up. He didn't mean to go that far, but when a guy's riled up, he can't help himself. She should have known that would happen.

An excuse in this context is the attempt to shift the locus of agency, and thus of culpability, to the recipient of the violence, so that the actions of the aggressor become reactions to provocation. "You asked for it." The "asking" exists only in the mind of the perpetrator - and those who identify with him, not with the object of his desires.

The point of this kind of domination and exploitation is to perpetuate itself. As I have written about racism, you don't have to be a perpetrator to benefit from its effects. You can piously scold the benighted Bubbas and Bunkers for their expressions of hatred while enjoying the benefits of a system that has and continues to marginalize minorities. To the degree that racism remains, it is because it benefits a significant class of people to keep things that way.

Rape and other instances of violence against women is endemic because this violence benefits men as a class. If it only benefitted rapists then other men would not be so willing to go along. A trammeled, subservient class that provides emotional, physical and economic benefit in excess of what it receives is a nice thing to have around. It provides rewards that are visceral and personal. Societies such as the Taleban and the FLDS are structured around maintaining an exaggerated version of this subordination. It is more efficient and less work to have a less formal structure. Then, all you need to do is keep certain key activities, such as contraception, in a perpetual state of danger to exert a significant amount of disciplinary force. Leverage - it's not just for Wall Street.

We can look at something like the abandonment of the people in New Orleans to die by inches and immediately recognize this as an instance of racism, even when complicated by other matters like straightforward bureaucratic incompetance. White people would not have been left to their fates in that way. Those who do not have an ideological investment in disempowering citizens and a regulatory state can identify and describe the institutional racial biases that put that particular group at such risk. But where is that kind of analysis when confronted with a pattern of men rounding up women and girls and executing them in public places? If the murderers at the Amish school or Platte Canyon High School had rounded up all Blacks or all East Asians and beaten and murdered them, would we be discussing the psychosis of the murderer, or would we be discussing the pernicious influence of racism?

Misogyny is excused away in great part because it is privatized, a "domestic" form of violence that is a manifestation of the bad relationship between particular individuals, not a pattern of behavior endemic to the society. If it is a private matter, there's nothing to be done except hope the people involved "reform". The violence is decentralized, making it difficult to oppose. The violence flourishes most where tradition is strongest - the family home, the military, religious organizations and academia.

This is why the question has to be turned on individual men to drive home that you are absolutely complicit in a social system that excuses rape, beatings and murder of women because they are women. Until men confront and punish the men who engage in this, it won't stop. Which means giving up your privilege, which is more than anything the ability to remain oblivious of the damage done because you have the luxury of not having to face it.

As I said in an email to someone earlier today, perhaps the unrecognized violence here is that done to the men who would never consider doing such a thing, yet are always judged on the basis of the worst they might do. Of all the men I know or come into contact with, there are exactly two who have my absolute trust that they will not do me harm if offered the opportunity to do so. I'm married to one and the daughter of the other. Every other man I am around is on my scale of "probably not an immediate danger" to "get away from him now". I do not ever ride in a car alone with a guy if I can help it. I'd rather walk or take the bus or wait for a female friend or call the spousal unit to come pick me up. I don't meet in rooms with doors closed. I don't invite male friends over unless the spousal unit is at home. I watch what my male coworkers do, listen to what they say, judge how they talk about women, constantly evaluate whether they are erratic, bullying, dominant, or exhibit other behaviors that indicate potential danger. I don't have a choice about remaining ignorant of the behavior of the men around me because it very much is the difference between life and death. Every. Single. Day.

I'm reading the comments on the earlier and finding a lot of excuses for why men don't know what their fellows are up to, or why it's not really what it looks like, or how are you supposed to know if somebody did something, or some other explanation. Mandos (the tender of souls in Tolkien mythology) asks if it is responsible to remain oblivious. It is certainly easier to remain oblivious. It will be less work for you. It leaves the women out there having to defend themselves from all sides, but at least you won't be uncomfortable around the guys while joking about the hawtness of the new girl in marketing. I think that even asking the question indicates a knowledge that the price for your oblivion is the abuse of the women around you.

When I discuss misogyny in my academic voice, men feel reassured because it is an amorphous "they" who are discussed, maybe a statistical sample, it's a problem over there, not here. It's a voice I cultivated in academia so I would be taken seriously, manipulating abstractions that did not challenge the actual situation, which was having a professor with a three decade track record of propositioning, molesting and forcing himself on his female students as my graduate advisor, specifically assigned to him to show to the university that he was "rehabilitated" after his most recent incident, one that cost the university plenty to keep it out of the papers. When my voice shifts, dropping abstractions and addressing the fact that violence against women is done by men indistiguishable from you and I am tired of hearing excuses for why you don't know anything about the crimes around you, you feel personally threatened.

Welcome to the club.

Anglachel

So, who are you?

Alegre and Red Queen have recent posts up about the basic fact that rape is a problem with men. It is something you men evidently enjoy doing and don't really want to see stop happening, though perhaps you'd prefer it not happen to your current female, unless you're the one doing it.

While one man can inflict violence on a number of women, it's not the case that there is a small secret club of guys responsible for the bulk of sexual and other attacks on women. The extreme cases make the papers, like the Austrian who imprisoned his own daughter for most of her life so he could rape her as he pleased or the Pennsylvania man who murdered the Amish schoolgirls he had taken hostage apparently to rape them, but the mundane, ho-hum, rape-em and go stories rarely get brought to the attention of local law officials let alone the media.

If every 6th woman you meet is statistically likely to have been sexually assaulted, then doesn't that also indicate that, say, every 7th or 8th man you meet is statistically likely to have committed a sexual assault?

I know many women who have been attacked. They tell me stories of what happened, when, who did this.

Do you men really not not know who among you is a rapist? Note that if you have forced yourself on someone who did not want sexual contact with you, you are a rapist. Just once is enough to earn you that lable. Did your wife or lover or friend ever tell you about the person who attacked her? Have you ever heard another man say he had assaulted a woman? Did you ever offer sympathy to a raped woman and then go on and rape yourself, either her or someone else?

Most women know the person who assaults them. Nearly 3/4 of sexual assaults are by done by someone known to the victim. That means you men are getting thrills by attacking women you know and who have some kind of trust in you. My opinion is if you hear a man saying something misogynistic, you are probably listening to a rapist, a person dehumanizing women so they are simply prey.

The fault lies with you men, even those of you who don't (or have not yet) rape, which is failing to go after the men who do. It's a male behavior, structured around male concepts of what is excusable, and is entirely up to men to eliminate.

Red Queen:

The only people who can stop rape are men because men are the rapists.

Dude thinks that everyone needs to work to change it, that women need to work just as much as men do to stop rape.

Except, we aren't the rapists. And we have been working on preventing rape since forever. And I for one am tired of tailoring my behavior out of fear that some rapist will see me coming like a bright shiny beacon of potential cum dumpster status.

Alegre:

Let's put the blame for this violence where it belongs... squarely at the feet of the men who attack and kill women. When are folks going to stop blaming women for the actions of others? When will our leaders wake the hell up and understand that it's the responsibility of men to stop attacking and killing. That it's the responsibility of other men to stand up to those thugs, speak out against this violence, and say ENOUGH! when it comes to those who attack their sisters, mothers, daughters and wives?

We can't get away from you. You're half the species and you have colonized every inch of human space, claiming it as your property that we women occupy at your pleasure.

So, I'd like to hear from the guys about the men they know who are rapists. Or what you have done personally to get some rapist arrested. Or how you stand up against male peer pressure to make a point that rape isn't acceptable to you.

Silence is complicity.

Anglachel

Ambiguous Conversations

Anthony McCarthy has a post up on Echidne of the Snakes that is well worth reading, The Suppression Of Clearly Bigoted Words Is A Necessary Step. What he proposes is very straightforward - when anyone uses bigoted derogatory language towards individuals and/or classes of people or that perpetuates bigotry and derogatory treatment of a class of people, harass the living hell out of them until they stop doing it:

Achieving the suppression of the language of bigotry is straight forward, you suppress it. You make the use of the words uncomfortable and an invitation to be hassled. For example, the blog boys use the word “cunt”. The way to make them uncomfortable is to constantly call them on it when they use it. It’s simple as that. They refer to women in that way, you make that uncomfortable for them, you harass them whenever they say it. You make it not worth their wile to use the word. When they whine about your calling them on it, you just do it anyway. They pout about you ruining their fun and boy bonding, you ignore it and keep calling them on it while taking pleasure at their discomfort. Their discomfort is a sign your plan is working, I see nothing wrong with enjoying it, privately. Of course, you've got to give up using language like that yourself, you've got to have credibility.

I fully concur.

There is no liberal cause that is advanced by using bigoted and derogatory language. Nailing someone for using this kind of language does not require you to check their political credentials or determine what side they're on because it's just wrong. The difficulty will be in training yourself to think more critically about the language you encounter and to refuse to excuse it because it is aimed at a political opponent.

Some stuff is easy, like name calling. "[Name goes here] is a [epithet goes here]!" is a simple formulation that calls for critical evaluation. Calling someone a cunt, a ho, a fag, etc., is simply out of bounds. Simply starting with this would do an enormous service to the level of discourse without preventing powerful opposition.

What's harder are oblique references. What do you do with a statement like "They're just bitter knitters."? To me, this is bigoted and derogatory because of the stereotyping, the projection of intent, and the reduction of a class of people (all supporters of a candidate) to a gendered and mocked activity, but it doesn't use a "bad" word. What about a phrase like "throwing dishes" or "the claws come out"?

What about uses of language that do attempt to use bigoted words and phrases in an ironic or contestatory way? Anthony notes, "Those words and similar ones shouldn’t be tolerated no matter what comedian or pop star has used them in their act, no matter how gratifyingly transgressive they make the user feel." OK, so what about my blog tag line - "You say I'm a bitch as if that were a bad thing..." I use it to mock those who would (and do) call me a bitch. Qualities attributed to being a "bitch," being tough, getting in people's faces, fighting back against domination, are things that women are not supposed to do. Yet, it is clearly an epithet, so should I use it? Why or why not? What about my use of the tag "Media Whores"? Is calling anyone a "whore" ever acceptable?

Pressing on, what about a term that is used widely and is not aimed at anyone in particular, perhaps not even used as an epithet, but which has derogatory overtones? My current pet peeve is "bitch slap", a term linguistically paired with "pimp slap" and arising from abuse of prostitutes by pimps and johns, which was brought into the political lexicon by WKJM as "the bitch-slap theory of politics," and is now used in economics discussions by people like Paul Krugman and Ian Welsh, who used the term today in this article. Why use this particular phrase? What value does it bring except to invoke the picture of a woman being slapped around or, focusing on the slap itself, of a weak, laughable, "girly" way of doing things. Without the derogatory gendered meaning, it doesn't work.

How about agreement with the statement of others? What about Atrios and his infamous "Heh," when he quotes another person's words or links to something that is derogatory and bigoted? Does agreement or promotion deserve the same reaction as being the originator? How about stuff in the comments? Are bloggers or site proprietors to be held responsible for the language of the commenters? I say yes. What do you say?

Finally, what about non-linguistic communications? If I post an image of Anne Coulter being subjected to violence of some kind, but I don't write any objectionable words, should I be harrassed until I remove it? What about blogs that run ads that have bigoted or derogatory imagery and/or phrases?

I think Anthony is right. The only question for me is how far to take it. Commenters, share your thoughts.

Politely.

Anglachel

The Price of a Woman's Life

...to PepsiCo is a single can of soda.

Shakesville has another one to add to the unending series of Assvertising and Rape is Hilarious, and this one is making me shake in rage, especially after the the posts of the last few days.

Pepsi has a new ad campaign showing a person being bribed to look the other way and allow another person (and at least one chimp) to do something "naughty" in exchange for a can of Pepsi. The ad evidently is running in France.

There is an image of a trucker giving his truck keys to a chimpanzee in exchange for a Pepsi. The chimp wants the truck full of bananas.

There is an image of a NASA astronaut handing over a space suit to a teenager in exchange for a Pepsi. The kid wants to go on the space shuttle.

Finally, there is an image of a lifeguard handing over a lifeguard shirt to a teenager for a can of soda. The kid is leering at an unconscious woman in a bikini at his feet, gouges in the sand leading back to the shore where she has been dragged out of the water. He obviously intends to have sex with the comatose and possibly dying woman.

Truck of bananas = space suit = woman unable to resist rape. All interchangeable. All fair game to sell some carbonated sugar water. Hey, guys, it's totally cool to grab a Pepsi and walk away while a woman is raped. Really! If she didn't want to get fucked, she wouldn't have worn that bikini or come to the beach or made herself look nice or, ... hell, she's female, she's fuckable, just do her. That's what she's for.

Just another unit of exchange.

Anglachel

A Room of One's Own

If you have not yet read Echidne's post, The Right to Go Out, go there at once and read it. It's brief and I'll wait. Back now? Good.

The line from the post that sticks with me is this one (my emphasis): "My second reaction [to a statement quoted in the post] was the realization that people mostly don't see that female fear of the outside as a civil rights issue or a human rights issue. It's just How Things Are."

Without disagreeing with Echidne, I think the argument can be applied more broadly – the problem is that there are almost no physical spaces women may safely occupy and that the home may be even more dangerous than the street. Echidne’s observation that, “In most societies women who go out alone at night are at greater risk than men who go out alone, because women have to deal not only with the risk of getting mugged but also with the risk of getting raped. They are seen as prey,” can be applied to any location. A workplace, a parking lot, a path or sidewalk are places where women are stalked as prey, but so are homes, both in and out of buildings.

The percentage varies with the study being done, but it is the majority of violent assaults on women are by someone they know, a partner, a relative, a family friend. The most common place for this violence is the home. Where the hell do you go if nowhere is safe?

I have been raped more than once, always in my own home, always by someone I knew. I am lucky that the only man who threatened to kill me decided to batter holes in the wall beside my head while screaming how he would kill me instead of doing the deed. I am also lucky that I was able to leave that situation behind.

What of women who cannot? What if you lack the money and the support to get a room of one’s own?

The current financial meltdown will produce an upsurge in violence against women because the opportunity to engage in this violence without repercussions to the abuser will also increase.
If you have no health insurance except what your spouse or domestic partner gets through work, you have to calculate the costs of losing that coverage. If you kick out an abusive partner, will you be able to pay your mortgage or sell the house at any price? Shelters are closing for lack of funds – would there be a place to go to? If you have children who need to be protected, how might homelessness affect them (PDF)? Will rents be affordable even if you have your own income? Will employers hire you if they know you have a restraining order against a violent partner? Will you be targeted to be let go if your home life threatens to spill over into the workplace?

What about community programs that try to combat violence? The Family Justice Center of San Diego provides a one-stop-shop to help victims of domestic violence to work their way through the legal and social service tangle and get help. It both is and is not a part of the city and relies on volunteers, grants and donations to keep running. How will it be affected when corporate donor budgets are cut to the bone, charitable groups have less to give, and volunteers may need that time to work for wages? City of San Diego Police Department has one of the best domestic violence response units in the country, and works closely with the Family Justice Center (FJC). The City is also looking at a 10% cut across the board budget cut. What will happen to this unit? To similar units in other cities? What about emergency medical services? What about undocumented aliens? Will they protest if it might mean a visit from the INS? FJC won’t ask about your residency or citizenship, but will legal and social service agencies that use public funds be required to report suspected illegals?

Given a political and cultural environment awash in misogynistic imagery and sentiments, where the leader of the majority party is openly courting cultural conservatives and saying privately to the money men that social programs and services will be cut, we can expect to see policy and funding choices biased towards “family values” and increasing privatization of the risks of ordinary life. If misogyny and violence against women are not seen as civil rights or human rights violations, then the home becomes that much more dangerous a place because it is just a private matter, just that bitch getting in his face, you know, so you can understand why he had to give her a smack to make her calm down. Or maybe more than that. Whatever it takes to reassure the abuser that order has been restored.

In the current political environment, how difficult will it be to secure a room of one’s own?

Anglachel

Update - I have received some incredible comments from a number of people, some who said they've never posted a comment before to a blog. They are almost all stories about a woman's encounter with violence in her home. After consideration, I will not post these, even if the writer did not specifically say "don't publish", though most of you did say that. Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me these things.

The Lady Killers

I delayed a few days in writing this as I didn't want to rain on Paul Krugman's Nobel parade, an award he richly deserves, but even he says it's time to move on from that.

I was disgusted by Krugman's blog post on October 10, Not about the Financial Crisis, but not for the reasons most people had. Most writers focused on the comments about the right-wing hatred towards Obama and how afraid Krugman felt seeing this hatred. Part of me is just tired of the "They're all out to kill me!" story line Obama has been pushing since last year. News flash, Precious: Anyone who runs for or occupies the office of President becomes a potential assassination target. Ask George Wallace. Ask Gerry Ford. Why was Krugman so shocked, shocked, at the sight of angry right-wingers chanting violent threats? Political violence in this country is overwhelmingly from the Right, with a few notorious examples on the Left. It is often mixed with racism and always linked to authoritarian personalities who believe that they have some cause or mission that justifies their use of violence to achieve their ends. This is what ties William Ayers to Timothy McVeigh, and why ethical people shun Ayers to this day. He ordered the murder of people for ideological reasons and has never repented of his acts. It is to the credit of the Left that we don't have many like this. But what bothered me most about Krugman's post was not what he said, but what he left out.

He said:

We've seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons - they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn't just show up in fringe publications - it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

The problem, Paul, is that the Left has been doing the exact same thing to the Clintons and Clinton Democrats for the last eight years. The Incomparable Bob Somerby gently takes Krugman to task, as he does all self-styled progressives who avert their eyes to the sins of the SCLM (my emphasis):

THE DECLINE OF THE REST: Paul Krugman has long been our favorite top-level columnist-the one who almost always says something accurate and/or relevant. And of course, Krugman is the only high-end columnist who would have typed what follows. As we noted yesterday, this material appeared last Friday, on his New York Times blog: [quoting same paragraph as I did above]

There are shortcomings to that paragraph-which appeared as part of a short post on a larger subject. In our view, it's always a mistake when liberals fail to mention an obvious fact-the fact that the insanity of the attacks on the Clintons was quickly transformed, in March 1999, into the insanity of the attacks on Candidate Gore. And that twenty-month Group Insanity "didn't just show up in" conservative editorial pages, like that of the Wall Street Journal; it was heavily driven by famous "liberals" on the op-ed page Krugman shares. We especially think of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, who were still driving the most inane critiques of Gore even after his first debate with Bush. But the sheer insanity of the 1990s was widely purchased, all around. Even "liberals" signed up for the Clinton-hatred, then agreed to extend it to Gore.

None of these giants has ever explained why this insanity happened.

As Krugman put it, this history-changing episode has been "written out of the mainstream history of politics." Most career liberals still won't discuss it. For that reason, most voters have never heard that it even occurred.

Among top-end pundits, only Krugman will ever discuss this insanity.

Somerby's point, expressed mildly towards Krugman in recognition of the work Krugman has done to call out the idiocy, is that it is not just the Right that launched broadsides against some of the most talented and capable leaders we currently have, but the Left was fully involved in it, too. This election season, all of the worst attacks on the Clintons have been from the Left, right down to repeating the lies about murdering a personal friend, about their aberrant sexuality, about their criminal business dealings, about their insatiable lust for power. Cover the names and you couldn't tell Scaife from Josh Marshall.

What the two best critical voices on the Left have also left out in these criticisms, particularly glaring in Krugman's post given his focus on violence and assassination, is that this election season has not been marked by racism, but by misogyny of a very violent kind, and that this violence has come overwhelmingly from the Left. I don't think this is because the Left is inherently more misogynistic than the Right, but see it as a sign that expressing hatred of and desires to inflict violence upon women is as acceptable across the political spectrum as racism was in the first half of the 20^th Century. While Krugman was consistently critical of Obama and the more general lies his campaign promoted about Hillary Clinton throughout the primaries, he has a single blog post after the primaries were over scolding a general audience (Sexism? Who, us? )about the presence of "raw sexism" as one of a number of factors that made for a bad primary, but immediately walked back his criticism by saying "So this is no time for a protest vote."

And why not?

While he has a public freak out over some typical wing-nuts yelling violent threats, Krugman did not say a single word at the time (nor anything since) about Keith Olbermann's very public exhortation on national TV for some Democratic delegate to kill Hillary because she was politically inconvenient. As I said then:

...However, certainly within the liberal blogosphere and the MSM (I do not venture into the wingnut fever swamps), there is no drumbeat for violence against Obama.

This is not the case with Hillary. I have myself read comments advocating rape and murder. I have read main posts saying she was inciting violent acts against her, or saying they could "understand" the position of those who wished violent harm to befall her, her husband and her daughter. The descriptions of what Obama should do to Hillary verge on the pornographic. Not a day goes by that some prominent voice on the left or in the MSM does not demand her submission, subordination and public humiliation.

And now a major MSM celebrity and talking head, not some anonymous commenter on some obscure blog, has openly and unapologetically advocated that Hillary Clinton be marched into a dark room and murdered.

Think that is too far? A real stretch? Just a tad bit hysterical? Replace Hillary Clinton with Barack Obama in that formulation and you tell me what that means. If someone said this about Barack Obama, it would mean that this man be lynched to remove him from a path to power. Period. Full stop. No equivocations. It would be understood as nothing less than a call for the man's murder, and there would be an outcry from EVERY Democrat, even those of us who do not much care for Obama as a candidate, condemning those words, because that is what we are called upon to do when confronted with evil.

And, when those kinds of threats were made towards Obama, they were instantly and vehemently denounced and not just by Democrats. It was called for what it was, on the spot, and McCain was rightly held responsible for tacitly condoning the threats. The Right needs to be called out and condemned for its reliance on threats and acts of violence to advance its political goals. It is the party of Timothy McVeigh, of clinic bombers, of Abu Ghraib.

But the Democrats and the self-proclaimed progressive blogosphere have shown themselves to be more than willing parties to misogyny and violence against women. Along with Olbermann's homicidal fury, there were the widespread comments after the Kentucky Derby that the euthanized filly was a good example for what should be done to Hillary. The language and imagery I mentioned when writing about Olbermann resurfaces every time there is a breath of a rumor that somehow Hillary isn't campaigning hard enough for Obama. How she is going to pay if he loses, because... well, because she is there and women are the usual targets of violence when men feel disempowered, disrespected, disappointed that they didn't get what was owed to them. The deep irony of the Obama campaign's self indulgent "She wants us dead!" yowling over the RFK reference is that the parallel was between Hillary and RFK - trailing in the delegate count but persisting to the end despite threats and danger. She was the person in RFK's shoes and the one at risk of murder, not Obama, especially given the constant agitation against her at every level of the media.

I started to write up a post about misogyny and this election cycle and found I have been writing about it since November 4, 2007, almost an entire year. I doubt I will be finished after November 5^th, 2008. This campaign has been defined by false claims of racism and the brutal enactment of misogyny. The assaults on women as women show us that using misogyny to intimidate and eradicate female participants (voters as well as candidates) is excusable in a way that racist assaults are not. Racist attacks have to be dog whistled because they cannot be made openly without immediate backlash and condemnation by people in power and major opinion makers. Allan's "macaca" moment is an example of this, and I think the McCain campaign rally tapes will be another. Public imagery of Obama that has any racist overtones (such as the New Yorker cover, which I do believe was intended as satire) is greeted with anger and derision. There are words you just can't say in connection with Obama without having hot coals heaped on your head.

This is a good thing.

It is how our society should respond to attacks upon anyone for what they are. It is how any true progressive will respond, regardless of how the larger society behaves. But this outrage does not extend to women. Language and imagery denigrating women as women (bitch, shrew, whore, cunt, slut) are available on most of the well-trafficked locations of Left Blogistan, in the spring referring to Hillary, this fall referring to Sarah Palin. Cannonfire presents a few ugly examples of just how unfiltered the hatred has become, and is probably not safe for most workplaces.

The people at McCain's rally were indefensible, and we did not see any mainstream, reputable new reporter of public figure saying that he could "understand" why people would want to murder Obama, or even something less than that level of violence. We saw and heard exactly that kind of excuse summoned to dismiss threats and smears against Hillary and we are in a rerun of even worse with Gov. Palin. Violence and maltreatment of women has as long and, yes, as violent a history in this country as racism. Neither women nor minorities have been treated all that well, and both have placed their hopes in the Democratic Party to right past wrongs and prevent more in the future. This election cycle, whether the mainstream media will acknowledge it or not, whether the A-List blogs will cop to their gleeful gang bang of women they love to hate, has been a very public repudiation of one groups' hopes.

That female identification with Hillary and later Palin has been dismissed as either irrational (vagina voting) or actually a sign of secret racism exposes the ease with which misogyny is mobilized to try to belittle, badger, and dominate. Its very ubiquity makes it unremarkable and difficult to problematize. Our arguments and explanations on how we perceive our interests to be best served are trivialized as the whines of "bitter knitters" instead of serious challenges by engaged citizens. Insisting that we be heard garners a mix of aggressive bluster and wide-eyed faux-innocence.

Misogyny deniers try to focus on just a few figures, and explain away broad actions as being reasonable responses to these despicable, polarizing broads. No, no, it's not that we are kicking women down; it's that Hillary's a cold bitch! We'd like someone else. But not Ferraro, that racist, shriveled up old hag. And Chelsea is really just letting herself get pimped out. Then we defend teenage sexuality, except for that wanton slut, Bristol Palin, and her bigger slut, the mother I'd like to fuck (MILF), Sarah. But then how to explain the fury expressed at women who do not support Obama? It's any woman who does not toe the line, not just the politicians.

Too many doing this, male and female alike, will not accept that the modes of attack "work" because they rely on a background of bigotry and denigration that attaches itself to all female bodies. They can laugh at images of a fist smashing into Palin's face until her bones are broken and her teeth are knocked out because that is an excusable, if not precisely acceptable, way to treat women in this culture. I think of the photos of the faces of battered women in Annie Liebovitz's photo essay book, Women, and wonder what they would think of that imagery. The shirt "Bros before Hos" with Obama and Hillary's faces on it was a giggle fest for most of the left wing blogs ( at worst a "tsk, tsk, that's childish" objection) but "works" because women are whores and we brothers have to stick together against those greedy bitches. We all know women are just out to bleed you dry, just like your ex-wife did. The current pop hit "Whatever You Like" is little more than a sugar-coated version of a man asking to buy access to a woman's body, but the bro/ho relationship is clear.

Would there have been similar amusement on the Left if McCain supporters promoted shirts with a racial slur, such as "Homeland before Homeboys," or "Stop the buck here"? When someone proposed a PAC called "C.U.N.T" with an image of a star-spangled female crotch, it was seen as tacky at worst and usually as uproariously funny. What if there had been a PAC called "No Indulgence, Genuine Gains, Equal Rewards," with an image of a blackface minstrel in an Uncle Sam costume, or other patriotic emblems on a disembodied rapper (capped teeth, baggy pants, set of heavy chains and medallions, etc.), wouldn't that have been some good natured ribbing? You know, don't take it so seriously or personally. What about PACs called S.P.I.C., W.O.P., K.I.K.E., B.E.A.N.E.R, etc.? All in tacky fun, hey?

Calling Hillary a cunt or Sarah Plain a slut only work because of the misogynistic backdrop in which we understand that these are qualities of being female, and where they are used to shame, humiliate, intimidate and justify violence against the women so named, exactly as racial epithets are used to do the same on reviled minorities. These kinds of racial epithets and imagery were acceptable, even respectable, in popular culture. Alex Guinness' great movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, released in 1950, shocked me when I saw it in the 70s. Watch the movie trailer for the particular scene. Some versions have been dubbed to remove the offending word. I remember eating at "Sambo's" restaurants as a child, a chain marketed through racist imagery. It is now gone. Conversely, there are two "Hooters" restaurants within 10 miles of my house, where women's breasts are the central marketing tool for second rate fried food. It's promoted as a "family" restaurant, by the way.

What the campaign season has demonstrated is misogyny is as acceptable a weapon of social and political dominance as race demagoguery was through George Wallace's presidential campaigns. By Reagan, it was dog whistle time. I've written before why the fauxgressive Left is happy to profit from misogyny as a social condition in Just Like Grad School and Weeding out the Competition,

The reaction can be guilt rather than anger because there is really no chance that this class of people will ever get ahead as a class such that there would be competition. It may not be PC to say this, but there is a very rational basis for working class white racism that has nothing to do with believing minorities are lesser beings and everything to do with keeping that structural advantage in place. That's why the cynical claims of the Obama campaign about Archie Bunkers - when the target is actually the guilty upper middle class - doesn't ring true. Obama himself is no threat. He codes "white". The threat he offers is not raising up minorities but turning his back on all the working class and failing to enact policies and programs that will help those who are struggling. The real way to undermine racism is by increasing economic stability and prosperity, not by trying to shame people living on the edge as some kind of moral reprobates.

Change the makeup of that class and suddenly the privileged white boyz start getting nasty. The structural disadvantage that kept women from competing directly for previously male-only positions, structures both legal and cultural, have disappeared with enormous speed in the last forty years, especially the last twenty, and while entry of women into the workplace in professional and skilled labor ranks (they have always worked their asses off in retail, agriculture and service industries) has increased household income, it has also curbed a rise in male wages while offering increased competition for positions. Women's economic success has directly harmed individual male economic success and the concomitant social privilege. ...

The success Hillary is enjoying is flushing the fauxgressives out of the woodwork. Hillary hatred has permutations beyond simple misogyny, but the very real competition that women as a class offer these guys is what we see bubbling up in anti-feminist broadsides and pathetic attempts to reduce women's choices and aspirations to acts of vagina voting or bitchy resentment. What we are seeing in this election, from right and left, is the rage of white males who see their privilege under real threat and they don't like it one bit.

It's not the entire explanation, but I think it explains a large part of why Left Blogistan fell all over itself to see who could piss on women, candidates and voters alike.

There is no "answer" for it as long as it is a contest where the privileged have no intention of letting the dominated get a leg up, and where authoritative critical voices fall silent when wrongs are committed. Paul Krugman, I'm sorry to tell you that your willingness to push aside all the unpleasantness for the sake of winning the election, lecturing Hillary voters, us bitter knitters, to not go away mad just because we've been threatened with rape, murder, beatings and torture if we don't ditch that bitch and vote for The Precious has materially harmed women. You should have been screaming every day about how Obama had better put Hillary on the ticket or else watch half the party walk off, encouraging people to be angry over being treated with contempt instead of meekly getting the scraps from the table. Maybe if someone of your stature took seriously that treating women badly to their faces means treating them badly in social policy - the kinds of policies I have reason to believe you support - we'd have a hope of moving Obama out of his neo-Reaganite position and slightly towards something that moves the country towards the left.

Changing the subject doesn't change the situation.

For me, my political calculus has changed. There's never been a chance I would vote for Obama, nor that I would vote for any Republican, and for much the same reason - illiberal, misogynist, classist, and lacking a vision for the construction of progressive state. I also will not be forced out of my party and the institutional power it can command. However, my money will not go to general party funds or to PACs where it might be used to support candidates and party officials who refuse to fight back against misogyny. My votes will only go to women from now on. Male Democrats are going to have earn back my support by performing public, material acts to counter misogyny, such as promoting the ERA again, defending women's reproductive choices, passing UHC, which is of greatest importance to women with dependent children and no employer-based insurance, raising the minimum wage which affects women's job categories the most, defending Social Security, and supporting GLBT rights.

The lady killers are no more and no less than the racists of the Left, and should be treated as such.

Anglachel

Note - A few edits throughout to correct formatting problems and correct grammar. Reference to Annie Liebovitz's book added.