A Glaring Double Standard

A glaring double standard
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For every 'presidential' and 'charismatic' bestowed on Barack Obama, there are 10 adjectives commentators have used to put down the way Hillary Clinton dresses, talks and emotes. Call this what it is – blatant sexism

JUDITH TIMSON

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
February 26, 2008 at 2:05 AM EST

Guess what they call powerful and strong women who support Barack Obama? Obamazons. And what about powerful women who support Hillary Clinton? In Hillaryland, they're probably too damn tired, mystified and disappointed to care all that much about cutesy names.
A week before the Texas and Ohio primaries, the political obituaries are already being prepared – perhaps still prematurely – on Ms. Clinton's presidential bid.

I wonder if they will include the ugly truth that sexism has played a disturbing role in this riveting primary campaign.

There are certainly legitimate reasons not to like Ms. Clinton, but that doesn't explain the very different treatment she has received in the media. While grown media men and women have swooned over Mr. Obama, confessing that he is so charismatic he gives them goosebumps, Ms. Clinton has been mocked, trivialized and denigrated in a way that should give every woman pause.

Her laugh is a “cackle.” Her daughter Chelsea is being “pimped out.” She is only there because of her husband. She is “inauthentic” and manipulative, especially that time she cried in New Hampshire (and she didn't actually cry, by the way, even though anti-Clinton forces quickly had T-shirts made that said “Cry Baby” on them.)

When Ms. Clinton wasn't very occasionally showing her soft side, she was characterized as grating and aggressive. When she demonstrated how much she knew about so many issues, she was trying too hard to be “the smartest girl in the room.”
Young women rushed to loftily disassociate their perky post-feminist selves from a middle-aged female presidential candidate who is probably the most assured and knowledgeable woman any of them has ever seen running for high public office.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews even called Ms. Clinton an “uppity woman.” Imagine any commentator calling Mr. Obama an “uppity black” and keeping his job.
Author and commentator Barbara Ehrenreich also took a gratuitously nasty swipe in the Huffington Post at Ms. Clinton's platform style: “The frozen smile has to go, too, along with the [metronomic] nodding, which sometimes goes on long enough to suggest a placement within the autism spectrum.” Oh, come on.

And Slate.com's female commentators merrily dissected Ms. Clinton's female factor, ostensibly unaware of the self-hatred it revealed: “One of Hillary Clinton's great weaknesses as a candidate is that – fair or not – she seems so completely familiar to us. Not just because she's been around for years, but because the characteristics for which she's inevitably criticized are themselves these centuries-old archetypes: the castrating shrew, the righteous scold, the manipulative weeper …”

After the debate last week, Mr. Obama was described as “looking very presidential” or “like a Roman senator” while Ms. Clinton was mocked for wearing a pantsuit with yellow stripes on the jacket that made her look like “a modern major-general” or “a guest star on Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

To me, she looked as she always did, both polished and strong.
And besides, how is the first serious female contender for the most powerful office on Earth supposed to look or laugh or show emotion or compete?

In a blistering commentary that many women forwarded to each other, feminist author Robin Morgan decried some of the most egregious sexism, including former Nixonite Roger Stone's new Hillary-hating group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (examine the capital letters); John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!”; and “the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan ‘If only Hillary had married O.J. instead!'”

Ms. Morgan wrote: “This is not just Hillary-hating. This is sociopathic woman-hating.”
Of course, many commentators, male and female, have written admiringly about Ms. Clinton, endorsing her outright as The New York Times did, or suggesting that, however flawed, she is clearly the best-qualified candidate to be U.S. president.

And Mr. Obama is a supple and inspiring politician who has run an astonishing campaign. It is Hillary's bad luck (she who hasn't had much luck with men) to have been opposed by this juggernaut after she launched her once-thought-to-be unassailable bid for the Democratic nomination.

On one particularly bad day, The New York Times's Maureen Dowd weighed in with one comedian's joke about Mr. Obama winning every recent primary: “Hillary says it's not fair, because they're being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there's no White Bitch Month.”

Well, here's a thought: Perhaps every day is white bitch month for powerful women, and every ambitious and successful woman who is honest with herself and others knows this: As she gets up each morning and slaps on her knee-highs and her pantsuit and goes into the office to prove – yet again – that she is the smartest and most capable person there, she too can quickly engender the same kind of hate that Ms. Clinton has put up with on the campaign trail. Just by being herself.

It's all about the narrowness of roles for women, or, as Ms. Clinton herself said in a New Yorker interview, “I think that the world is only beginning to recognize that women should be permitted the same range of leadership styles that we permit men.”

Whatever happens next week or beyond, and even if Ms. Clinton manages to get the nomination, this sexism should be named and discussed for what it is.
Which doesn't mean I think every Hillary joke making the rounds is sexist. I laughed out loud at this one: Chelsea Clinton goes up to a returning American soldier and says, “What do you fear the most?” And he says: “Osama, Obama, yo' mama.”

Well, at least she was only the third most scary item on his list.