Susan Faludi offers a litany of pending women’s issues (not in the quoted section below), in describing the anger among feminists regarding the treatment of the Hillary Clinton candidacy, and offers a timely and appropriate caution against post-feminism or new wave feminism attitudes:

Second-Place Citizens – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

Thanks to her bad-mouthing incisive commentary on Brangelina, Roseanne’s blog is gaining (as she notes) a lot of new audience. I am one of them. And I plan to stay!

As the five of you who read this blog know, the Hillary Clinton primary experience pissed the hell off of an old-fashioned feminist like me and my spouse. And neither of us can stand Hillary, but that is exactly not the issue, as Maureen Dowd and every other “post-feminist” or n-th wave feminist who ♥s Obama but has to find some high-minded justification for the infatuation, don’t get. Roseanne on the other hand, gets it, and that’s why I am staying. Below are two bits from her blog:

Women’s struggle for equity and dignity will not be silenced, cowed, or stopped by any man, or any woman hating females like Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, Randhi Rhoades, Nancy Pelosi, or a host of other running dog lackeys of corporate whoredom. Have a nice day!

And:

It’s all a set up to get the females to think that they are being listened to, but it’s all planned canned and fixed. Obama is the nom, and there is no getting rid of him for the dems. If he had any brains he would announce right now that a vote for him is a vote for hillary, because she is his choice for vice, or his nominee for the supreme court…some triangulation would work for him. He has a blindspot where feminism and females are concerned, and he figures that claire mccaskill (sp) is all he needs. (kind of like when people say…”i asked my maid what she thinks of immigration, and she said”…..). He just doesn’t get it that it is female boomers that have kept the dem party alive since the sixties, and that he has insulted their intelligence. He just doesn’t get it, and neither does david axelrod. I do not think any men get it at all. As it was for me in Hollywoodland, men in power are not comfortable with any woman that is not serving them coffee. They tried to fire me off of my own show, like they have done to hillary clinton. It was her show and they fired her. they got all heady over winning against her, but that was all the winning they could do. now they have to crawl back to her and ask her to win it for them. they look like weak mama’s boys, which they are…however, america loves weak mama’s boys though…john mccain is the embodiment of that…

[ Link ]

Here’s a nice one from Robert Casey (only the Democrats would need a pro-lifer like him to unseat Rick Santorum) speaking about Hillary supporters:

Clinton’s High Profile Healing Process Has Begun | The New York Observer

[...]

Certainly, the dire polling data showing high numbers of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters unwilling to vote for Mr. Obama will settle. But the most committed of her loyalists may be slow to forgive what many of them genuinely saw as a chauvinistic joint effort of the Obama campaign and the media to bully their candidate from the race.

[...]

Senator Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who provided Mr. Obama one of his highest-profile endorsements during the primary, said, “Her speech went very far to help her supporters make that transition, but it is a work in progress. [...]”

Duh! Let’s see… Clinton supporters (and non-supporters like me) see chauvinism in the media and some parts of the Obama campaign/fanbase and the response? A chauvinistic “we’ll help you make that transition”!

[ Link ]

In case it isn’t obvious, I am not a Hillary supporter. I am an old-fashioned leftist and I have severe problems with her positions on Palestine, the Iraq War, US foreign policy and a raft of other issues. I am not a Obama hater either — he is only as far from (and perhaps less so!) the just position on these same issues as Hillary is, by my principles. However, as a feminist I want to write some comments on the subtle and not so subtle sexism and “woman beating” that has occured through this campaign.

What has struck me is the parallels in the technique and rhetoric of Obama supporters (and the campaign itself) and the typical GOP one. One analogy is George Bush’s 2000 image of a friendly, uniting “compassionate conservative”, even as those who pushed his candidacy indulged the most vicious attacks on McCain and then Gore. The GOP uses hired thugs and pundits to carry out this task, while the anti-Hillary campaign has benefitted from voluntary abuse from the so-called “netroots”, media, and public intellectuals (examples are below). Obama himself has taken on right-wing talking points gladly: see Paul Krugman on Obama’s health insurance issue attacks on Hillary, or Obama’s description of blocking Iraq war funding as “playing chicken with the troops“, to offer but two examples. And if the media gave Bush a free ride and now McCain a positive one, they have done much the same with Obama but, again as Paul Krugman points out, done quite the opposite with Hillary.

Any voice that is raised against such abuse is accused of being part of a “lather of angry victim-hood that blames sexism” (Debra Saunders on SFGate) — once again a striking parallel with right-wing rhetoric, which uses such terms to ridicule and deny Black claims, ironically the very group whose success Obama is supposed to represent — even as heavyweights like Barbara Ehrenreich post on Alternet and elsewhere about the lessons to draw about women as a whole from Hillary’s “Nasty, Deceptive” behaviour. In other words, Hillary’s sex matters only in so far as it can be used to critique women — but an attempt to identify attacks on her with her sex would be “angry victim-hood”. We are told (by miscellaneous NYT Op-Ed columnists) not to vote for Hillary because of her being a woman, even as Obama wins Southern states based entirely on black people voting for him (ostensibly, and unsuprisingly/understandably, for his being black and an embodiment of their dreams). Strikingly opposite is the verboten status of any question of Obama’s black identity and experience, even if raised by prominent Black activists.

I am not sure the anti-Hillary camp can have it both ways, at least logically speaking (rhetorically speaking, they are enjoying great success, for sure). So one cannot have Ehrenreich drawing broad conclusions about women on the basis of her understanding of Hillary’s campaign (and throwing the few convicted women of the Abu Ghraib scandal under the bus, to arm her arguments), Maureen Down using gender specific adjectives to describe Clinton’s words in the NYT, the media obsessing about her clothes and cleavage, the Obama campaign using gender specific slang (”Stop the Drama” i.e., Hillary is a drama queen?) as T-shirt slogans, while at the same time exhorting us to abandon our “victim-hood” and not see this as a sexism issue. Here is a simple question: in the tens of anti-Hillary FaceBook groups is one titled “Life’s a bitch, why vote for one?”. Can you search for and find one titled “Your neighbour isn’t a nigger, why vote for one?”. I couldn’t find it. And if some racist idiot where to set one up, how long would it stay up?

The reason why Hillary supporters and non-supporting feminists such as myself have to keep this issue active is not so much to elect Hillary (in which I have no interest) or to defeat Obama (who is infinitely better than McCain but will ultimately end up achieving as little as any other Democrat before him, after Johnson), but to step up when we see a woman getting beaten up. The reason is not so much to stop Obama but to stop the attitude, rhetoric and the threat of the actions that are the consequences of such attitude and rhetoric, that is the staple of a large segment of his supporters.

Some additional data/comments:

RealClearPolitics has the vote totals and among the various numbers, here is one:

Popular Vote (w/MI uncommitted to Obama)

If estimate for caucus states that do not release data is included, and “Uncommitted” in MI is assigned to Obama, Obama comes out a mere 61,703 votes ahead (0.2%).

I wrote above of parallels with right-wing electioneering, and this perhaps offers more in that vein: the question of who won the popular vote (Gore v Bush) and the disenfranchisement of low-income voters (Gore v Bush, Kerry v Bush) — of not since low-income voters break for Clinton over Obama, and they suffer burdens in caucus states that are not felt by their richer Obama-voting counterparts.

… between anti-Hillary rhetoric and right-wing talking points:

Obama-Clinton ticket

Besides, there is something unseemly in the way Clinton worked her supporters into a lather of angry victim-hood that blamed sexism for her failure to win the delegates needed to sew up the nomination, even as her surrogates suggested that a black candidate cannot win in November.

Any of us (including non-Hillary supporters like me) who saw sexism at play are suffering from “angry victim-hood”. Pop psychology of this sort we may never be rid of, but you would think that if you call yourself a Democrat you would at least avoid conservative terminology?

[ Link ]

Hillary bashing is the sport of the day and here is Barbara Ehrenreich taking her best shot:

Hillary Revealed That Women Can Be Nasty, Deceptive Candidates Too

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way — by demonstrating female moral inferiority.

In case you are tickled by this awesome scientific generalisation (Hillary’s campaign tactics are a demonstration of not her individual moral inferiority but “female moral inferiority”), there is good news — the article is chock full of them, as we have Ehrenreich once again attempting to rationalise her arbitrary preference for Obama, this time using an ill-reasoned attack on Hillary. There are a lot of reasons to reject Clinton’s candidacy, but the problem for such intellectuals (as opposed to the garden variety hipster, who constitutes a good part of the Obama fan base, and who is pleased with the warm fuzzies of “hope” and “unity” and all that rot) is that almost all of those reasons ably apply for Obama as well (hence Ehrenreich’s first attempt, a while ago, to support Obama with a “change for its own sake” argument). So, Hillary’s silly story about Bosnia becomes a damnable lie, in Ehrenreich’s (and Maureen Down and every other self-proclaimed feminist opponent of Hillary’s) defensive arguments that equate “fall guys” like Karpinski and England, the ones who were punished, to the perpetrators of the crimes, Rumsfeld and Bush, who remain unpunished.

A whopping 87% of violent crime (as of 1999) is committed by the male of the species. Comparable, in Ehrenreich’s analysis, to “women’s capacity for aggression”, trivialised as “bitchiness” or “inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility”. Not that different, we presume, from rape and murder, 87% of which is accounted for by men. The counter-examples of Thatcher and Clinton, the Ehrenreich reasoning seems to suggest, nullify such statistics.

In one logic-defying stroke, Ehrenreich using the same example(s) — to wit, Hillary Clinton — both rejects female superiority (England, Karpinski and Clinton are the counter-factuals of this hard science) and also proves female moral inferiority.

Supporters of Hillary (and I am not one of them) are told that they should not be supporting her “merely” because she is a woman. That would be foolish, it seems. Is one to prefer then the all-out delusion that is the stock of those who equate Obama to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as a man “who best upholds” virtues?

Writings of women like Ehrenreich and her less intellectual counterpart in the Obama fanbase, Maureen Dowd, are a milder form of the betrayal of feminism that are seen in the actions of Rice or Allbright. Few (among feminists) have the goal of elevating woman as an ideal. The goal has always been to defend her against such unfairness as Ehrenreich’s singling out of England and Karpinski or her presentation of Clinton as an aggressive bitch in comparison to the mythical virtuous persona of Obama.

From the New York Times:

Obama Shifting Focus From Clinton to McCain

[...]

Even in defeat, the spirits were high among Mr. Obama’s aides. A leading reason was that Pennsylvania was in the rear-view mirror — for now, anyway.

On the campaign plane, Mr. Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, the communications director, wore T-shirts with the message: “Stop the drama, vote Obama.”

The “drama”, I am guessing, is a characterisation of Hillary Clinton, and I am not sure in what light this can be seen other than in a gender typing sense (”drama queen”). Again, an example of how sexist attitudes and remarks are pervasive and more easily accepted than racist ones (e.g: the [legitimate] critical response regarding Obama being characterised as “articulate”, I believe by Joe Biden).

[ Link ]

As has become the norm these days, most of the media is agog over Obama’s Race In America speech. To his credit, the man tackled some of the controversies that led to this speech more directly than employ his usual forceful repetition of uplifting trivialities. The intent of this blog post is to ponder on the trend (in the way we talk about things) that seems to have reached its nadir in the rhetoric surrounding his campaign. I will offer two examples, at least one of which any member of the broad left will appreciate.

The first example is that incongruous claim of Fox News: that they are Fair and Balanced. It is not arguable (I hope) that even those who disagree on whether Fox can make this claim will agree that Fair and Balanced is a good goal for a news organisation. I believe that is not necessarily so. Why not instead Objective and Factual? We are aware of the valid critique of notions of objectivity and fact as offered by philosophers, post-modernists and relativists. Yet, all that suggests is that a fair and balanced approach is a good means to the end of informing the public in a critical manner of events and issues. Instead, a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) substitution of terms occurs, where Objective is replaced by Neutral or Centred. As some have said: “Nazis and gypsies/Jews get equal time — we report, you decide!”.

Similarly, you have this class of political citizens now known as “independents” — the name denotes that these individuals are independent of political parties and (by some extension) ideologies. But where do they stand on right and wrong? After all, those who support this or that party or ideology do so (typically) not because of some arbitrary preference, but because they believe their ideology to be right or just. It should perhaps be unsurprising then that independents tend to be those who are least affected by issues of truth and justice.

A second example is the appeal, via Obama, of the term “unity”. We, the public, are “yearning for unity”, some sort of “middle path” (as one New York Times writer, Ron Klain, puts it), implying either that disunity is the primary problem facing us, or that unity can simultaneously serve as both the means and end. The real problem however is that it can be neither, exactly because it cannot be produced from thin air (or hot air, for that matter!), for the resolution of the issues of contention rightly preclude unifying behind a programme, agenda or methodology towards a common goal. We are often offered the analogy of ‘herding cats’ to highlight the problems of extreme fractiousness, and it is not an entirely invalid argument, but it is not the central problem. Feminists, labour activists, minority rights advocates, animal welfare activists and others are not acting out of a sense of feline disobedience, but rather constantly working on reconciling the righteous demands of their cause with the limits of immediate political change.

As in the case of creationism vs evolutionary theory, the divisions among political groups reflect fundamental disagreements in the way we see and project the world, how it is and how it should be. Unity cannot resolve the issues but rather the resolution of these issues can bring about unity: if the parties involved can agree upon a mechanism for resolution. And that, in my humble opinion, is the real issue. The divisions among groups remain intractable because these groups do not even share a methodology for resolving disputes. The routine fallback, in the face of this block, is the invocation of allegedly shared “values”, common roots, mythical glorious pasts, and such bromides. Which incidentally are a large part of many of Obama’s “inspiring” speeches. If you don’t believe me, here are the “greatest hits” from the Race in America speech as they appear in the first few paragraphs:

• Obligatory introductory reference and eulogy to founding fathers
• Unite for “our children and grandchildren” — childless need not apply!
• “Unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”
• “… no other country on Earth is my story even possible” (why not?)
• “we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity” (this is a leap of rhetoric even for Obama, that people hunger not even for “unity” but for a “message” of unity. Jon Stewart pointed out something puzzling about George Bush’s speeches: the man would arrive at various spots facing emergencies and proclaim that he was there to reassure the people, and so on. What Stewart found strange was that Bush would tell us what he was there for, which is more or less obvious, but fail to give us a clue on how he planned to go about this task!).

Obama is possibly a more honest chap than many others in his sphere. Rather than capitalise on the Geraldine Ferraro controversy, by continuing the ongoing “framing” of her comments in a racist context (no doubt ably aided by her continued blathering), he astutely nails the crux of the criticism:

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t speak for Ferraro or her psychologist, but the above is the legitimate form of what I would like to call the “Obama as a non-threatening black man advantage” thesis. And as noted in a previous post, this is the promise offered explicitly by Obama supporters like Oprah Winfrey: “[you] are free from the constraints of gender and race”.

The Democrats finally have their “Mission Accomplished” moment and boy is it good to get all that guilt off your back! In a piece that is embarrassing for not just the lack of content but also the adolescent gushing, Andrew Rosenthal writes in the New York Times:

Michelle, Maria, Caroline and Oprah on the Hustings in California – New York Times

[...]

Ms. Winfrey — finally — spoke to the most emotionally fraught aspect of this contest. “Now look at this campaign: the two front-runners are a black man and a woman,” she said. “What that says to me is we have won the struggle and we have the right to compete.”

Instead of seeing a painful choice, voters, Ms. Winfrey urged, should see a moment when they “are free from the constraints of gender and race.”

After watching the candidates struggle with the issue, painfully and awkwardly, in the past month, it was a relief to hear someone finally frame it in a way that celebrated what the Democratic Party has achieved — and then move beyond it.

[...]

And that ladies and germs, is the promise of Obama (and Hillary too, if you believe Oprah). His candidacy assuages the soft leftist’s guilt about the disparities and discrimination that surround us, offering him the opportunity to cast one small vote for himself but achieve a giant leap for humankind. Vote for Obama and you can keep your SUV and iPod and save the environment too! Vote for Obama and you can move beyond all pain and awkwardness! Free of the constraints of gender and race! This is a competition between unbounded hope and inescapable history. Is it a matter of surprise that older people, women, and those with lesser formal education, choose Clinton over Obama (though they may prefer neither)?

Note that that is the explicit core of the Obama campaign which started out frugally short on detail and gained steam while staying light on substance. As Obama and his wife point out, his campaign is not about him (a messianic Christ-like figure who thunders about “his God”) but about “you”. And if by voting for him and electing him, you have not managed to move beyond the constraints of gender and race, it cannot be your class (which we eliminated from consideration via John Edwards) or the environment you are thrown into, but as Reagan would say, perhaps its your lack of responsibility? (Obama identifies the success of Reagan with dissatisfaction with large government growth and excesses, without accountability).

If there is any further doubt that Obama’s rhetorical dictionary is an approximate facsimile of the Republican one (he has consciously but barely stopped short of calling himself the “uniter”), you can consult Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who points out repeatedly that not only is Obama’s healthcare plan to the right of Hillary, but that his tactic of criticising Hillary’s plan echoes that of conservative and insurance industry operatives in 1992.

Recently, there have been a spate of pro-Obama editorials and opinions on the online pages of the New York Times. One among the many was poignant — it quoted the words of a younger feminist parting ways with her feminist mother on the issue of Obama vs Clinton. The young feminist offered that “her [Clinton's and by extension her mother's] issues are not my issues”. In keeping with Oprah’s proclamation, I guess she felt that she was free from the constraints of gender. But her characterisation is inaccurate. Her mother’s issues will always be her issues (at least so long as she considers herself a feminist), especially if she is unaware of that!

As Gloria Steinem writes writes in the same rag, under the apt title “Women Are Never Front-Runners“:

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

(I would ignore the part about Clinton’s “progressive policies”)

Some very intelligent people whose opinions I respect greatly are supporting Obama today. I do not believe that they are misled by the baseless hope that Obama represents. I do not even think that they are weary of struggle and want for once to taste some victory (even at some cost). Nonetheless, I think they are on the wrong track.

[ Link ]

As the world suffers through another "Diana moment" (and I think the analogy is apt, though not in the manner intended by those who have suggested it), Germaine Greer, writing in the Guardian, brings some perspective to the death of animal clown Steve Irwin:

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress. Every snake badgered by Irwin was at a huge disadvantage, with only a single possible reaction to its terrifying situation, which was to strike. Easy enough to avoid, if you know what’s coming. Even my cat knew that much. Those of us who live with snakes, as I do with no fewer than 12 front-fanged venomous snake species in my bit of Queensland rainforest, know that they will get out of our way if we leave them a choice. Some snakes are described as aggressive, but, if you’re a snake, unprovoked aggression doesn’t make sense. Snakes on a plane only want to get off. But Irwin was an entertainer, a 21st-century version of a lion-tamer, with crocodiles instead of lions.

In 2004, Irwin was accused of illegally encroaching on the space of penguins, seals and humpback whales in Antarctica, where he was filming a documentary called Ice Breaker. An investigation by the Australian Environmental Department resulted in no action being taken, which is not surprising seeing that John Howard, the prime minister, made sure that Irwin was one of the guests invited to a "gala barbecue" for George Bush a few months before. Howard is now Irwin’s chief mourner, which is only fair, seeing that Irwin announced that Howard is the greatest leader the world has ever seen.

The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing 10 times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn.

The response to Greer has been shrill, as can be expected, and rational… or rather not, falling back to the same old criticisms about her being a "man-hater" (comment on digg), "feminist bitch" (Tailrank), a has-been, etc. Really incisive stuff!

Hmm! What could be the reason for this manner of response? At The Age, Tracee Hutchison takes a guess:

If Steve Irwin’s story was a celebration of the boy who wouldn’t grow up, then Greer’s is a modern equivalent to the witch-hunts of Salem.

The outpouring of grief at Irwin’s death has been matched only by the outpouring of vitriol poured on Greer. It has been astounding. Men, mostly, have lined her up and taken aim with the kind of venom you would associate with the kind of snake Irwin was most fond of handling.

And the message has been heard loud and clear; if you’re a woman of a certain age in this country – and a childless one at that – don’t you dare step out of the shadows and shout out that the emperor might not be wearing any clothes. You will be shouted down and marginalised and your situation will be thrown back at you as a weapon.

[...]

Very little of the anti-intellectual hot air blown about this week has been about what Germaine Greer may or may not have thought about Steve Irwin. It had everything to do with a dominant male power-base telling women to be seen and not heard. Of marginalising a particular kind of woman and reducing us to condition and circumstance. Of reminding those of us who like to speak our mind to watch our step, to remember our place and to shut up and agree with the menfolk. We are all a lot poorer for the unsightly fallout.

Men behaving badly defending other men behaving badly? Nah! Seems impossible!