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

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

But You're Supposed to Teach Me!

Go and read Historiann's post about an obnoxious exchange with a student, Ummm, you e-mailed *me* for advice, remember?, and be sure to read the comment thread.

I agree with commenter Dr. Crazy that the emailer was being sexist as well as rude when one of his ass-covering excuses for being rude was that he wasn't asking Historiann out on a date, which is a weirdly inappropriate reply. Would he have said the same to a male professor? Why would being civil and acknowledging the humanity of the other person be confined to trying to get a date?

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

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.

Fortune is a Woman

Looking at the presidential campaign, the one element that leaps off the page is the horribly compromised position of the so-called "progressive" Left with regards to women. Make no mistake - both Left and Right have been deploying disgusting arguments, narratives and imagery about women and their "place" in politics and society. The Right is still firmly on the wrong side of civil rights for women. As I have watched over the last 12 months, what I see is that the Left has engaged in crude and direct misogynistic attacks on particular women, while the Right has made a more subtle and strategic use of femininity in the public sphere. They have ended up reinforcing their standard arguments about women while the progressives have grossly undermined their own claims, though perhaps they have finally exposed their true beliefs.

In both cases, the two sides have put forward arguments about female sexuality and maternal conduct. The Right has additionally served up attacks on Democratic candidates that utilize social constructs of masculinity and femininity to keep the campaign focused on personalities and avoid issues.

The Left blogosphere thas treated three prominent women, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin, with varying degrees of contempt and levels of demonization. Each woman has been the subject of a slightly different kind of attack.

The brutal assaults on Hillary are taken almost word for word from the Right Wing Noise Machine and are no more true coming from the Left. She has been treated the worst and continues to be impugned and badgered at every turn. Key to her demonization is the attempt to desexualize her. Her looks are derided, from her age to her fashion sense, her sexuality is a subject of speculation, her emotional availability and empathy is dismissed (cold, heartless, calculating, castrating, etc.), and the result is not a masculine figure, but an inhuman one. She is also cast as a bad mother, someone who pimps out her child, refuses to properly surrender her life to the cause of Obama, and overall fail to prevent young men with dumb ideas from getting themselves into trouble. If she had been a good (sexually available, enticing and submissive) wife, her husband would not have strayed and she would have kept her house in order. When she is compared to Grendel's mother (and I don't think the columnist meant the Angelina Jolie version), the demonization is complete. She is denied both sexual agency and maternal impulse, and ecomes a mythologcal creature like Medusa or a Harpy. Reducing her this way makes it possible to igore her as a political actor and a public servant.

Also in the progressive blogophere, though in a complicated way tied up with points of congruence with the Right due to Republican drift, are slanders against Michelle Obama. These attacks focus on her role as wife and her ostensibly illegitimate participation in the campaign. I also see her as a target of racism that cannot be expressed directly towards Barack Obama. I have read any number of allegations, all leading back to "anonymous" (i.e., non-existant) sources in the campaign that it was Michelle Obama's decision to not allow Hillary to be VP. I have no idea what Michelle's input on the VP selection was, and I assume that she is a highly trusted counselor to her husband, just as Hillary obviously is to Bill (and vice-versa), but I doubt she was the only person who said no to that choice, assuming she even said no. Michelle is getting the Lady Macbeth treatment, cast as the scheming woman who drives her husband over the edge and into villany. Given the opposition of the current DNC leadership to all things Clinton, making Michelle the fall guy (gal?) for Barack's decision smells to high heaven - someone is gladly trading in character attacks on her to get themselves off the decision hook.

Something that may not be as obvious is the way in which Michelle is being domesticated and disciplined into the role of good First Lady. It is ironic, given Barack's own snotty comments about Hillary's years in that position, which was part of the misogynistic puts downs and trivializations of his opponent. But Michelle herself is going through a very public "taming of the shrew" process to tone down her sex appeal, limit her statements (whether you agree with her or not, it's better to have outspoken women than the alternative), play up her helpmeet status and generally craft a very pure maternal image. The crafting ends up being a criticism of Hillary, a capitulation to Republican standards of public wives, and a loss of an opportunity to change the rulesl for how to cover political spouses. I keep thinking of the petty sniping at Dr. Dean, the missus, who simply went on with her medical practice rather than be arm candy for Dr. Dean, the blowhard.

Palin is simply getting shit on as a trashy woman who is indulging herself and needs to get home and feed the kids. Unlike Hillary, whose sexuality is regarded as perverse/non-existant, or Michelle, who is presented as properly domesticated, controlled and presentable, the narrative about Sarah is a slut out of control. Too fecund, too careless, too sexually available. The beauty queen who won't stop breeding. This is used to question her maternal qualifications, from whether she has too many kids , to whether all the kids are hers to whether she is properly caring for her children. The juxtapostion of (pre-fall) Edwards and Obama with their young children as above paternal reproach throws a spotlight on the double-standard applied to Palin and other female politicians. The claim that her politics legitimize questioning her on these grounds doesn't pass the sniff test. The anti-McCain elements in the Republican Party were also willing to advance these arguments, but have fallen conspicuoulsy silent in the face of Palin's convention success.

In all of these cases, what we see is direct and crude deployment of standard misogynistic tropes that women have battled whenever they enter the public sphere as actors in their own right rather than accountrements to male actors. What is happening on the Right with respect to Barack Obama is also misogynistic, but at one remove. Obama is being portrayed as feminine, effete rather than effeminate, but still occupying a degraded and unmanly position. The celebrity he enjoys, according to Republican ads, is not that of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. He is purposefully compared to Palin as much to say "You're not even as tough/strong/capable as a girl!" as any other reason. The comparisons to Hillary coming from the Right give them a two-fer - focus on the mannish Hillary and the feminized Obama. Michelle as Lady Macbeth is not just imagery to degrade her but also to signal his impotence in the face of a tough female.

This is more of the same of what has been thrown at Democratic candidates for the last two presidential cycles. It does not just augment the usual tropes of weakness; it exposes the foundations of that attack which is misogyny itelf. To quote Machiavelli:

For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.

In the Republican mind, the candidate is a male hero striving to shape feminine Fortune to his will, and those who will not do ths are females to be likewise dominated, the "girly-men" Ah-nold sneered at in 2004. Thus, the female "blonde bimbo" celebrity imagery is of a piece with the attacks on Gore, a man who was "practically lactating". These are no longer opponents to contest with; they are feminine objects to be kept under, beaten and ill-used.

This is an argument of the Right, of conservatives and of fundamentalists, that to be female is to be of a lesser class of humanity than males. From this basic proposition, the rest follows. There is room in the world view for an exceptional woman, just as there is room for the exceptional Jew or the exceptional Black, but the socio-economic location of this class of beings is below, subservient and docile.

The "progressive" blogosphere has exposed its own fundamentalist tendencies this electoral cycle, wielding misogyny like a sledge hammer to achieve its political goals. To try to claim innocence on this count is insulting to the readers' intelligence. The Blogger Boyz (and the women frantically trying to prove they are really just Girlz so they can stay in the club) have damaged the campaigns of every female Democratic candidate, legitimizing use of misogynist tropes. The reproductive history of our women candidates is now fair game. In performing this violence against female candidates and public figures, they have validated its continued use by the Right and have cast into doubt their progressive claims. (And here's a clue: The answer to Palin is not that she is a hypocrite but that the Democratic approach allows her family the freedom to make exactly the choices they did, while allowing others to decide differently. Treat her particular choice as one of many valid choices.)

It is one reason why I reject the lable "progressive" for myself and state clearly what I am - a liberal. I do this in the same way and for the same reason that I say I am a feminist.

My fortune is as a woman.

Anglachel

Taking Out the Trash

The out of control misogyny being aimed at Gov. Palin and her family since Friday is breathtaking in its breadth, depth and total inhuman cluelessness. I fear to visit Shakesville anymore because they keep finding more and worse practically by the hour. Melissa McEwan has a far stronger stomach than I do to view and chronicle the atrocities instead of just screaming invectives at the screen. I don't doubt but that she hurls a few invectives as well, but the chronicling is nothing less than a public service.

There is an aspect to the misogyny that is mentioned here and there, but doesn't get the full attention it deserves, and that is the class bias thoroughly interwoven with the gender hatred. Gov. Palin (yes, kids, she *is* a governor and I'm damnwell giving her the title she has earned.) and even more her daughter are being typified not just as female or sexually promiscuous females, but specifically as white trash females. Class, race and gender are all mixed into a seething stew served up by the privileged white males (and far too many females) of the MSM and the political establishment (Both parties - contemptuous stereotyping is not just for Republicans anymore!). In a class by itself, we get the raving Boyz of Left Blogistan, revving up the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby known as Daily Kos and going for a gang-banging joy ride through the Palin family's reproductive organs.

I have written about this before, pointing out the deep revulsion the political and cultural elite feels towards things working class and especially things working-class, white and Southern. The original sin of Bill Clinton was to be a hick from Arkansas who didn't disavow his roots. The greater sin of Hillary Rodham Clinton was to marry that hick and stick with him even when he acted like a Bubba. Lower class white females are treated with even greater contempt than their male counterparts, reduced to Dolly Parton boobs, Daisy Duke butts, and Britney Spears midriffs. Above all, a lurid fascination with their alleged propensity for beastiality and incest, with accusations of the latter making an appearance in the current assaults. After all, "we" nice clean college educated denizens of Whole Foods Nation know about "those" kind of people. What do we know about them?

• Poor
• Lazy
• Uneducated
• Racist
• Stupid
• Religious
• Unhygienic
• Drunkards
• Druggies
• Violent
• Promiscuous
• Smokers
• Unhealthy
• Bad taste

It is not just that Gov. Palin is female and conservative. The cheeto brigade would not heap this kind of visceral hatred on Republican women who are part of their own class. The names are already bandied about - Carly Fiorina, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Christine Todd Whitman, Liddy Dole, etc. "Why weren't these more deserving women selected?" goes the cry (hint, it has to do with the conservative base, you know, a political decision?) These women are not "beauty queens" with questionable sexual pasts (that we know virtually nothing about their sexual pasts kind of proves the point - they are not being dug up), they have the correct number of children (if any) born at respectable points in their lives and properly raised not to get knocked up at politically inconvenient times. That Gov. Palin is a smart, college educated woman who knows how to gets things done (bracketing for a moment whether those are the things I would wish to see done) simply won't be acknowledged. It's all about how she uses her reproductive tract. It is even alleged that McCain chose her because he simply wanted to stare at her body, agin reducing her to her (slutty) sex appeal and him to a dirty old man. As I've discussed over the last few days, the refusal to look directly at the political reasons for choosing Gov. Palin only hurts Democrats.

Another element I don't think is being addressed enough is the "taking out" part of removing the trash. Aside from Hillary, name me another presidential ticket contender who has been the obsessive focus of such widespread and aggressive verbal violence. These attacks are far in excess of anything necessary to discredit a political rival. The politically savvy thing to do was to play it cool like Hillary did, and calmly, politely and firmly dismiss this person on the only grounds that matter - Republican policies. Hillary keeps trying to remind the party that when the political objectives of your opponent are wrong, none of the rest is relevant. The Democratic message should be the same whether the VP choice is Palin or Pawlenty, Ridge or Romney.

But there do not appear to be any bounds to the indignation, even rage, that this, this, tart from Alaska presumes to be the VP. As with the assaults on Hillary, the squalls of the MSM and the blogosphere are like the infant who can't make Mommy do what he wants so he is going to wish her dead. The posts and comments on Gov. Palin and her oldest daughter are invasive, trying to tunnel inside of their offending bodies and shred them from within. It is the same rage that Olbermann spewed when he asked for someone to take Hillary into a dark room and murder her. It is not as far from the recent murders of women in Pakistan - shot and buried alive - as we would like to believe. These women sought to control their bodies and their lives and were murdered for it. Bristol Palin is living her incredibly ordinary teenage life and these modern day Dimmesdales have appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner in her case. How dare a 17 year old "girl" fuck without our consent! (Or our participation...)

And now we are into more tropes of white female trashitude with the Boyz naming her upcoming union a "shotgun wedding". Never mind that she wears an engagement ring and that her neighbors were well aware of the situation and were happy for the young couple. Yup, Pappy's gunna make that young buck git hitched, even iffen' he don't wanna, an make an honest women outta the lyin' slut. Um, no. I have too many friends who are in fully committed relationships from their late teens onward who do not bother to get married until a pregnancy occurs. My own very traditional in-laws had collective freak-outs over the fact that me and the spousal unit were (gasp!) living together in sin (What are her folks going to think? my FIL demanded of my not-yet husband) until I was presented a proper engagement ring. Then it was cool. Then the hubby had done the correct social thing and his immigrant Catholic family was content that all was right with the world. The rituals of marriage are more flexible and common sense than you think.

The media mesage is coming through loud and clear - white trash women are sluts for us to fuck with as we please. They should not aspire to higher than the shanty that houses their (incestuous) family and should know this is not their place to trash. They need to remain breeeders and feeders. I mean, how can we associate with these women? They don't even have Ivy League degrees to make up for their slutitude! If they won't stay in their place then we will take them out like the trash they are.

Women preceived to be of a lower socio-economic classes, regardless of their color, regardless of their actual status, are treated like trash - cheap, dirty, used, disposable objects undeserving of civil rights and privacy, let alone common decency.

Anglachel

Choices

One of my choices in life is not to have a child. Another of my choices is never to have an abortion. I am lucky enough to have been able to hold true to both those choices thus far. Sometimes, like when I was holding the less than 24 hours old son of dear friends last week, I wonder if I made the right choice. Other times I know I have.

Most of my female friends have experienced at least one of those conditions. Several have experienced both. A few others have experienced miscarriages. Some were in their teens when they had their first (and even second) child, some in their forties, most somewhere in between.

Some didn't use birth control at all. Some used birth control and it failed. Some tried for years with all the reproductive fertility technology available to them. Some were just getting laid. A few were raped.

I know several women who decided they wanted a child without the benefit of marriage. A few did so to win freedom from their families and married the guy later or not at all. Several were engaged to be married and became pregnant deliberately before the wedding. Several were engaged and became pregnant accidentally before the wedding. All of my lesbian friends have borne their children as "single mothers" despite the presence of their loving partners.

I have family members who were born out of wedlock and those born within it. I have a number where baby number 1 was before the "I do" and the rest afterwards. A woman I know was conceived after her mother divorced and tossed out a pain-in-the-ass husband. She belonged to her mother alone.

My friends and co-workers and acquaintances and women I know tangentially are an interesting mix. They run the gamut from far left to far right and determinedly a-political. They grew up in households both strict and permissive. They, like me, make choices about their reproductive lives and they, like me, live with the consequences, especially when the choices don't work out.

Unless they tell you, though, you aren't going to know what those choices are. Do any of you know why I won't have a child? No, and you won't. How many of you have become pregnant by accident? On purpose? With or without marriage? Is it anyone's business? If your relative or parent is a public figure, does that change anything about your choices?

To try in any way to make a public example or a political point by singling out any individual for scrutiny and shaming is an inhumane thing to do.

Anglachel

Update: I have many, many comments on this post, some of which moved me to tears. Most commenters have asked not to be published. After looking through the collection again, I've decided not to publish any comments for this post. Thank you, all of you, for sharing your thoughts.

With Friends Like This

Zuzu at Shakesville says this all far better than I can. Key graphs, but please go read the whole thing. The article is filled with excellent links to posts I had not seen:

Well, what's one of the Democratic Party's greatest strengths? Its appeal to women -- who make up more than half the electorate -- as the party that cares about their rights. The party's problem, of course, is that Clinton's candidacy exposed that for the expedient lie it is, since the party establishment allowed the blatant misogyny directed against Clinton by the media, Democratic lawmakers, the Obama campaign and the rank-and-file to go unchallenged. Then, when Obama was ushered into the nomination by a fishy decision by the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee that was contrary to the DNC's own rules, the party establishment finally spoke up, albeit weakly. But only for so long, because there was no time to pay attention to silly things like rooting out misogyny in the party that claims to care about women. Get in line and vote for the Chosen One, and keep your mouth shut and don't spoil the optics.

This did appear to be a fairly serious problem for the Dems; Obama was losing support among women and other groups with his lurch to the right. And instead of trying to bring those voters back into the fold with persuasion and carrots and addressing their concerns, the campaign, the party, the media and especially the fan base turned to threats, mockery, infantilization, accusations of racism, doomsaying and RoeRoeRoeRoeRoe when those voters started saying that gosh, love to vote for you, but you haven't given me any reason to and how dare you assume that I have nowhere else to go?

Now, there was never a real risk that progressives would vote for McCain en masse; those Hillary supporters who show up in polls as planning to vote for McCain may very well be Republican and Independent women who were voting for Clinton, not for the Democrats.

There has been, however, a real risk that progressives who are sick of the misogyny and sick about the direction the party was taking would sit this one out. And the Republicans were counting on that continuing.

And then a funny thing happened -- after a lot of tension about whether Clinton and her 18 million supporters would be shut out of the Convention, the Obama people agreed to give Hillary and Bill Clinton prime-time speaking slots. And they both spoke of unity, and urged Hillary's supporters to vote for Obama. And a lot of the Hillary diehards here watched those speeches and said they were convinced, they'd now vote for Obama. Others, too -- as Jack Goff said, it was what he'd been waiting for, though he hadn't known he'd been waiting for anything.

Obama's speech, too, convinced more people that Obama was not necessarily all style and no substance, that he understood the need to talk issues and the need to fight.

Then McCain -- who, it should be noted, was telling the press he had not selected a running mate as late as the final day of the Democratic National Convention -- dropped the Palin bombshell.*

Right on cue, the sexist attacks against Palin began on the left -- which the McCain people were undoubtedly counting on.

Zuzu's excellent distillation of the primary dynamics helped crystallize a thought that has been rattling around my brain for a few weeks. The framing of this election cycle on the Left uses as an operating presumption that any fault or failure in the Democratic march to victory is to be laid at the feet of women voters, specifically female Clinton supporters. This is more than just IACF, though that is one of the cornerstones.

It is the presumption that we are an untrustworthy, disloyal, always in need of discipline part of the party. An internal enemy. A band of evil sisters just drooling over the chance to defect to the dark side, or else a bunch of brainless, shallow, vagina voters who just don't know what's in our own self-interest, poor mindless dears that we are.

We are threatened, bullied, lectured and warned that we had better not go vote for some hard-right cultural conservative. Any female public figure who it is imagined we might support is assailed in vile and sexist ways, always seeking to demean, humiliate and cut that bitch down to size. And it's not just the bully boyz at Cheetopia who are doing this, though they are the worst offenders. I've stopped going to TalkLeft after Jeralyn's offensively paternalistic lectures on how bad Palin is and don't we foolish HRC holdouts know what's good for us undermined whatever credibility she had as an Obama supporter trying to convince on-the-fence Clinton Democrats to grit their teeth and vote strategically. As if I am not a life-long Democrat and feminist who has never voted for a Republican.

Think about this. Did anyone ever hear Hillary criticize a single voter for declining to cast their vote for her? Did you hear her campaign do this? I can think of one person, Jim Carville, calling out one super delegate, Bill Richardson. I have heard Hillary say, with her typical humility, that she failed to get her message across and she was going to have to work harder at winning the voters' trust and support.

Hillary herself has been very publically lectured, buillied, warned, threatened, and harassed that she had better deliver her voters (And why is the image that I get in my brain when I read this stuff is of a bound, gagged and drugged female form being handed over for gang rape?) to Obama, or else she is ruined, done, over, disgraced, without a political future.

Treating half your base as presumptive enemies is not a good way to run a campaign. Just sayin'...

Anglachel

Personal Benefit

A comment was submitted that was worded in such a way that I don't know if it was sarcastic, ironic, sincere but badly put, trying to get a rise out of me or what. The overall message was how have I personally benefitted from Affirmative Action since I seem to disdain other middle class people using it. OK, here's the answer.

I have benefitted enormously from AFAC. I think I'd be hating life about now if the conditions for women today were the same as what they were when I was born. I remember growing up that there were only four professions open to women - mother, school teacher, nurse and fairy princess. I remember my mother unable to have a credit card in her own name. I remember her joy at returning to college and finishing her BA. I remember the algebra teacher who would not give any girl in his class an A because girls couldn't actually understand algebra, but neither would he give a girl an F because she couldn't really fail at something she didn't understand. Maybe that's why I always got a D - I never bothered to do work that could never earn what it was worth.

What I do now, working in a senior position in an IT shop, treated with respect and given much authority, placed in a management track, this would not have been available to me at the beginning of my life. Did anyone making a decision to hire me say "She's only #3 on the list, but she's got tits, so hire her"? I have no idea as I wasn't privy to the decision meetings. Maybe that's exactly how I got my foot in the IT door. What I do know is that it was the tireless efforts of women from Abigial Adams to Sojourner Truth to Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Shirley Chisolm to Hillary Rodham Cinton that have won me the luxury to not even think about why I was hired, to engage in significant financial transactions without my spouse or father as a co-signer, to have access to safe and affordable birth control, and so forth.

It's not complete. I am the primary taxpayer on our tax returns with hubby filling in the "Spouse" columns. One year, the state of Califonia sent us the income tax booklet to Mr. Gurthang, Anglachel and Mrs. Unit, Spousal. It's not like we have gender neutral names like Shawn and Taylor either. The taxpayer was the man and the spouse was the woman - didn't we know that? I showed it to my class on gender and the students got an initial laugh, then starting thinking...

What I am also the benficiary of is centuries of white supremacy that has only begun to be dismantled since I was born. If I had been dark-skinned, my psycho ex-boss would never have hired me and given me my entry into the IT world when I changed careers. My father would have been barred from his college education and probably would have stayed in the military to make a living. He would have been in a desegregated Marine Corps, while his father would have been in a segregated Navy, and would not have been a surgeon. The university he went to might have let in hay seed farm boys with a hankering for something besides dirt, but they didn't allow "coloreds" in. The wealth, the education, the acculturation that a white middle class third generation professional can take for granted is clearly a benefit to me. The spousal unit may have been the first college graduate in his family (his mother was the first high school graduate), but his family was considered "white", not even Hispanic, and so could rise in the post war boom.

I'm just pointing out some advantages in education and employment. I'm not getting into things like housing, treatment by police, elegibility for pensions and retirement funds, access to medical care, public transportation and other public amenities. These are things I can take for granted that other citizens cannot, not with the automatic certainty I enjoy.

So, yes, I have benefitted greatly from long standing bigotry and from recent equality. To use Hillary's phrase, I have been blessed in what I have encountered in my life, and I agree with her that it is incumbent upon me to use these blessings to demolish the first source of benefit and expand the second, both for what I will rightly lose and for what I may help myself and others gain.

Anglachel