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Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales |
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By KATE ZERNIKE PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.” It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women? Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying. It’s hardly that all women are on the same side — there were plenty of women making the points men were about prostitution after Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned following the news that he had paid perhaps tens of thousands of dollars for sex. But there seemed to be a starker split between men’s and women’s reactions to the scandal. And women who for a long time felt they were on opposite sides of a generational divide on gender issues were finding things in common. “It’s a little bit like the Anita Hill moment, when all of a sudden everybody is talking about something that probably always goes on, and there really is a fundamental difference in who the men and the women identify with,” said Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of several books on the ways men and women communicate. Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia and director of its sexuality and gender law clinic, called the current climate “a perfect storm.” “Before Spitzer, there had been a great focus on women as presidential candidates and women as voters,” she said. “Now we add to that women as political spouses.” “I’m not such a Mars-Venus person but this is one of those moments where gender is at least a partial explanation, it affects how people hear campaign rhetoric, how people see political downfalls,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Even people who were unwilling to see it before are more likely to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes.” At one extreme there was the bald outrage of Geraldine Ferraro, who complained that Barack Obama would not have come as far as he had if he were a white man or a woman of any race — comments that led her to resign from the Clinton campaign last week. Ms. Ferraro tripped right into the race minefield in her big rush to make her point about the gender minefield. But all along, many women who fought the first wave of battles for gender equality have seen a bias against Mrs. Clinton — which helps explain why older women form the core of her support. Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found. “Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.” It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.” “During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest stir are the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men,” she wrote. “I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.” A year ago, it all seemed so different. If the nation wasn’t quite gender-blind, still, a woman stood poised to become president, didn’t she? So unskeptical were women about that possibility that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for “the woman candidate”; it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate — or John Edwards or any of the other men running, although it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic. But it has proved harder to move the country beyond stereotypes. In an essay she wrote last fall for the new book “30 Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers,” the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt declared that the “sulfurous emanations” about Mrs. Clinton made her want to write a check to her campaign, knock on doors, vote for her twice — even though she’d probably choose another candidate on policy grounds. “The hysterical insults flung at Hillary Clinton are just a franker, crazier version of the everyday insults — shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive — that are flung at any vaguely liberal mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence,” she wrote, “who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn’t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question.” “Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing well, especially in a field in which men also contend,” Ms. Pollitt wrote, “deals with some version of this.” The bridge from Ms. Pollitt’s generation to its successors was apparent last month in an e-mail message a friend of Chelsea Clinton’s sent around. Attached was an article by the early and unreconstructed feminist Robin Morgan that detailed in full-throated outrage the bias against Mrs. Clinton, and women. Chelsea herself apparently appended a note saying that while she did not agree entirely with Ms. Morgan’s point, she was starting to understand what older women were complaining about. “I confess that I did not entirely ‘get it’ until not only guys stood up and shouted, ‘iron my shirts’ but the media reacted with amusement, not outrage,” the note attributed to Ms. Clinton said. Writing about the e-mail message on Slate, Emily Bazelon asked, “Even if we don’t agree with all of what Morgan has to say, either because we just don’t or because we’re not of her generation, should the reception to Hillary’s candidacy radicalize us? Or is this just all too unhinged?” The group of women on her e-mail list, she said, “were split.” A contest between a woman and an African-American raises the inevitable question about whether it is harder to overcome racial bias than gender bias. Few claim to know the answer, and many argue it’s too hard to tease out the ways each plays a role. But some also argue that the media is not as quick to recognize misogyny as it is to recognize racism. “The media is on eggshells about race, but has blinders on about sex and gender stereotyping,” said Ms. Goldberg of Columbia. Kate Michelman, a former president of Naral Pro-Choice America, who is an adviser to Mr. Obama, said in an interview that “racism has risen to a level of social consciousness that sexism has not.” Of course, it was comedy that crystallized the moment. “Saturday Night Live” mocked reporters falling faint over Mr. Obama (Sample debate question: “Are you mad at me?”) and cutting off Mrs. Clinton for being that irritating bore talking about health care again. Meanwhile, on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central last week, Samantha Bee played the role of the philandering wife, standing behind a podium contritely acknowledging her offense while her husband stood behind her with the downcast eyes so familiar from Silda Wall Spitzer and the political wives who had come before. It was, of course, preposterous — and not just because Ms. Bee’s husband was wearing pearls. The Spitzer scandal seemed to stoke particular outrage among women. On Slate, Hanna Rosin wrote of her “Ashley Dupré” moment — referring to the name Mr. Spitzer’s prostitute uses. “I read her story and the old ’70s feminist in me (admittedly a tiny presence) rears up.” Ms. Rosin was a child in the ’70s, but Ms. Michelman, a veteran of that feminist era, saw something in last week’s scandal too. “I was upset with Bill Clinton but there’s something about this one that has gotten to me more,” she said. “Maybe because Spitzer has carved out for himself these high ethical standards.” And, of course, many women fighting sex trafficking considered him an ally, since that was one of his causes as a prosecutor. But Ms. Michelman is not changing her vote: “I do think women are angry, but anger doesn’t get us very far. It’s a motivator, but it’s not enough.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company |
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