Month: March 2008

by hilzoy

This time, it’s Linda Hirschman:

“And there we have one of the most puzzling conundrums of the 2008 Democratic contests. Black voters of all socioeconomic classes are voting for the black candidate. Men are voting for the male candidate regardless of race or class. But even though this is also a year with the first major female presidential candidate, women are split every way they can be. They’re the only voting bloc not voting their bloc.

For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women’s vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?

Penn was right about the importance of the women’s vote. About 57 percent of the voters in the Democratic primaries so far have been women. As of Feb. 12, Clinton had a lead of about seven percentage points over Obama among them (24 points among white women). But the Obama campaign reached out to the fair sex, following Clinton’s announcement of women-oriented programs with similar ones within a matter of weeks. I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, “What’s that song in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’?” Women are fickle.

Turns out it’s true.”

As a feminist who supports Obama, I think I can speak to this one. First, am I fickle? No. I would count as fickle only if I had at some point made a commitment to Hillary Clinton, or to something else that implied that I should support her, and had then reneged. Then Mark Penn, or whoever, could legitimately say: we had a deal. If I put up a good female candidate with strong positions on women’s issues, you would vote for her. But you welshed. You are fickle. — I have made no such deal. (See below.) So I don’t accept this characterization.

Second, does the fact that I and other women support Obama mean that “American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power”? No. The reason is not that we’re not strategic enough. That would be true only if we actually wanted to “form a political movement directed at taking power”, as women, and were dumb enough to think that supporting Obama was the best way to do that. Speaking for myself, I have no such goal.

I am, as I said, a feminist. By that I mean first, that I think that women should be given the same rights and opportunities as men, and should be treated with the same respect; and second, that this is not just something I affirm in the abstract, but that I am committed to trying to work to achieve. This is completely different from “forming a political movement directed at taking power.” I do not want women to exercise power over men per se, or for men to exercise power over women, or anything of that kind. I want everyone to have as rich a set of opportunities as they can possibly have, and for everyone to be treated with equal respect. That is a very, very different thing.

If my main goal in life were to see women exercising power, then I suppose I would have to support any female candidate for any office who had any chance of winning. I might get away with not supporting Lenora Fulani in her hopeless campaigns, but I should certainly have supported Liddy Dole, despite the fact that I disagree with her on most important policy questions. But because getting women — any women — into power is not my main goal in life, the fact that I supported first Bill Bradley and then (after he dropped out) Al Gore does not show that I am fickle or insufficiently strategic.

I do, of course, believe that if women actually had the same opportunities as men, we would have had a female President long ago. I also believe that it would be a wonderful thing if a woman were elected President, both because it would make the idea of having a woman President much more normal, and because it would prove to people (for instance, to girls) that women can and should aim as high as they like. For this reason, given a choice between two candidates who were otherwise basically similar, one of whom was a woman and one of whom was a straight white cisgendered* man, I would vote for the woman. However, it matters that the two candidates be comparable: that one not be significantly better than the other apart from gender. If the straight white man was significantly better, then I would vote for him.

This might be due to straightforwardly feminist concerns. Given a choice between a woman like Liddy Dole, who I thought was unlikely to advance women’s rights in any way other than by being a woman President, and a straight white man who I thought would really work hard to expand the opportunities available to all women, and supposing this to be the most salient difference between them, I would vote for the man, and would do so because I am a feminist. I think that any feminist would have to think that other things equal, it would be great to have a woman President. But being a woman President is not the only thing, or even the most important thing, that a President can do to advance the interests of women. And that means that sometimes a feminist should vote against a female candidate strictly on feminist grounds.

Besides that, though, feminism is not my only serious political commitment. If, for instance, I had to choose between Hillary Clinton and Russ Feingold, I would vote for Feingold because while I trust both Clinton and Feingold to work to advance the opportunities available to women, I trust Feingold’s judgment more on matters of war and peace, civil liberties and open government, and those things matter a lot. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War Resolution. Even leaving aside the obvious fact that the war has hardly been a net plus for Iraqi women, is being a feminist supposed to involve not caring about the destruction of a country and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? Is it supposed to involve not wanting to do everything in my power to make sure that nothing like that happens again? Is it even supposed to involve thinking that avoiding future wars, though important, matters less than electing a woman to the Presidency? I can’t see why.

Finally, I am, as I said, committed to trying to help ensure that everyone has as rich a set of opportunities as possible, and that everyone is treated with equal respect. Sexism is one of the things that stands in the way of that goal, but unfortunately it’s not the only one. That’s why, in my hypothetical examples above, I specified that other things equal, I would vote for a woman over a straight white cisgendered man: because men of color, gay men, and transmen face their own barriers to the Presidency, and those barriers need to be taken down as well.

The idea that feminists (or women) ought to vote for Clinton has always seemed to me to involve serious confusion on this point. It seems to me that if I am a feminist because I think that everyone should have as many opportunities open to them as possible and be treated with full respect, and if I think that for groups who have been historically excluded from high office, seeing one of their own elected President would encourage them to reach for the stars while helping others to regard the idea of members of that group holding high office as completely normal, then I have the same reason to hope that an African American is elected President as I do to hope that a woman is. And that, of course, means that the very same commitments that make me want a woman to be elected President also make me want an African American to be elected President.

Obviously, this means that the commitments that make me a feminist make me think that if either Clinton or Obama is elected President, one set of walls will fall, and that that is a wonderful thing. But they do not give me a reason to prefer seeing a woman beat an African American, or vice versa. They would, of course, if I were committed not to everyone’s enjoying as many opportunities as possible, and to everyone being treated with dignity, but only to securing opportunities and respect for women, or for people like me. But I’m not. And if Linda Hirschman or Mark Penn or Hillary Clinton was mistaken on that point, or thinks that by caring about injustice in all its forms I show myself to be “fickle”, that’s their problem.

I recently got an email from someone who had been to an Obama rally, and who was struck by the number of African American families who had come to that rally with their children. The rally was in the evening. Many of the children were, apparently, quite young, and they were probably up past their bedtimes. But their parents had brought them anyways, so that they could see history being made. My correspondent found the sight of so many black parents bringing their children to see a black man who might become President incredibly moving, and so did I. And the reason I was moved has everything to do with the reasons I’m a feminist.

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by hilzoy

About once a month, I read something that makes me think: this just might be the dumbest thing ever written. Usually, it isn’t, of course. But this piece in today’s Washington Post might be the genuine article:

“”Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?”

That’s near the beginning. It just gets worse and worse and worse, without the slightest hint of irony, until it reaches its finale:

“I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don’t mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don’t think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.”

Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything. You might therefore ask yourself what earthly purpose it serves to have idiots like the one you take yourself to be publishing their thoughts. Is your gig at the Post noticeably different from those game shows in which we get to watch people humiliating themselves on national TV? If so, how?

***

A few more particular points. First, talking about what “we” women (or we liberals/conservatives, or whatever) is almost always just intellectual laziness. Unless the claim is obviously true (e.g., “we human beings are mammals”), the appropriate response is: what do you mean “we”, white man?

Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not “books”, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold. Personally, I think they come out fine in either comparison, but that’s probably because I’m just a dumb woman.

Third, the idea that brain size has anything to do with intelligence was disproven ages ago (at least, if we’re talking about the normal variation in human brain size, as opposed to the difference between human and planarian brains.)

Fourth: doesn’t the Post have editors whose job is to prevent this sort of trainwreck? If so, the editor responsible for allowing this column to waste perfectly good space in the Washington Post should be fired.

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