Nothing new on the knitting front to show today.
It's gray and rainy --
And I have been thinking still about the sexism and misogyny in this election. It gives me a terrible feeling of sadness accompanied by anger. How can it be that it is still acceptable not only to harbor but to express such attitudes toward women?
I have been heartened that pieces about it have been appearing in newspapers. Earlier this week, as mentioned by The Knitty Professor, was a piece in the Washington Post, Misogyny I Won't Miss.
In it, Marie Cocco delineates many of the examples of misogyny that we have seen and heard, and probably hardly noted because they form a normal background for us. And, she says,
I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card."
Most of all, I will not miss the silence.
I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't publicly uttered a word of outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
I know that my own ear has become more sharply attuned to the casual use of remarks that denigrate, demonize, express violence toward women. They are everywhere.
A friend pointed me today to a piece in the Chicago Tribune, Devil in a pantsuit or the demonization of Hillary Clinton, looking at this phenomenon as an example of a far more pervasive cultural attitude. I began think about this last week when I read Joan Walsh's blog on Salon about Hillary being compared to Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. Walsh commented, I have occasionally wished Obama himself would say something about the often-sexist viciousness Clinton has faced, but it's probably too much to ask in a campaign this contentious.
Why is it too much to ask? Would it be too much to ask were Obama made the object of racial slurs? Why would we let anyone on any side off the hook for either racial or gender slurs? And might it not be the case that the gender slurs and misogyny persist and tolerated precisely because we don't confront them?
In the Tribune piece, Keller concludes,
It's natural to wonder whether Obama approves of the death-haunted images that surround his opponent like a phalanx of vultures. Surely he doesn't. He is an intelligent, sensitive, enlightened man whose life has been enriched, as he frequently acknowledges, by the presence of strong women, most notably his late mother and his wife. I wish, therefore, that he would publicly condemn the trend of evoking death and destruction when it comes to Clinton. Perhaps, someday, he will.
Meanwhile, the pile of death images continues to rise, like corpses outside Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory door. After Clinton's victories in recent primaries, the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert called it a "back-from-the-dead" moment. Walter Shapiro, Washington editor for salon.com, opined last week that Clinton had entered the "death with dignity" phase of her campaign.
Death, death, death. The steady, depressing drumbeat continues. What these commentators seem to seek is not just a proud female's withdrawal from a political contest—but her outright annihilation. They evoke the nightmarish vision of a commanding woman intent on destruction—thus she must be destroyed before she can launch her evil scheme.
In a thriller by Irish novelist Tana French, "In the Woods" (2007), a detective muses about a psychopath who has outwitted him, "I wanted her not just dead but obliterated from the face of the earth—crushed to unidentifiable pulp, pulverized in a shredder, burned to a handful of toxic ash." With that attitude, he won't have to worry if the gumshoe gig ever fails him: He can always apply for a job with MSNBC.
It's worth thinking about what it is that makes us so threatening that we become the object of such violent imagery.
Tomorrow, back to knitting.
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