Sexist Slams are About More Than Hillary Clinton

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 1:04 PM on January 28, 2008.

Wow, a Republican comes up with a decent enough question to address the accusations that all opposition to Hillary Clinton is sexist in nature.

So for those who maintain that they have nothing against women presidents in general, but object to Senator Clinton in particular, I ask this question:

What women would you endorse for president, were they to enter the race tomorrow.

We’ll set aside his weird hostility towards the safety of the workers who keep this country running and focus on the question. I’ll also ignore that two out of three of his picks are “safe” for a conservative, in that those women couldn’t muster up a decent chance of winning, and even Christine Todd Whitman has managed to alienate some party elite, so possibly all three are candidates he can safely endorse in the hypothetical because he’ll never be called up to endorse them in reality. But I would gladly support Nancy Pelosi if she ran, and governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebelius is getting some attention that indicates that she’s a contender in the future. (I would really love Pelosi, in all honesty. She’s not perfect, of course, but she was right about the war from the beginning, and that buys a lot of credibility with me.) And Clinton has my full support if she wins the nomination -- any Democratic contender does, which is why I’m upset by all the dirty politicking going on in the primaries. Someone’s got to win, and when they do, it’s important that their win doesn’t alienate the people who voted for someone else in the primaries, and these kind of dirty politics are polarizing.

There is a reason I bring up possible future candidates of the female persuasion, and it’s to point out that opposition to sexist pandering against Clinton isn’t an endorsement of her, nor is it just about patting one’s self on the back for one’s righteous feminism, though the latter is not an unproductive way to spend your time. It’s about good politics and long-term thinking, which we need a lot more of. Because if we luck out and get to support Candidate Pelosi or Candidate Sebelius in the near future for a presidential bid, we can expect that these images will immediately be transferred from being anti-Clinton to anti-whatever-Democratic-woman-is-running.

There are Republicans out there who find this sort of sexism distasteful, just as there are those out there who are pro-choice. Unfortunately for them, they’ve been effectively shut out of the party at large, which has banked on fear-mongering over gender as a vote-getter in an environment where they represent an elite minority and oppose the economic interests of the vast majority of Americans. Women are an attractive scapegoat to a percentage of working class men who feel emasculated by the decreasing opportunities in America, and the Republicans are not about to give that up.

By the way, the CUNT website has the ubiquitous modeling pose that appears on 99.5 percent of right wing websites hawking T-shirts -- skinny white woman with big boobs, wearing a tight T-shirt (maybe a bit of belly skin) and otherwise sporting clothes that make you flinch because they are so tacky. It’s embarrassingly transparent. But then again, so are a lot of right wing artifacts, like the Confederate flag.

They don’t do us the favor of being subtle, and yet there’s still this fair-and-balanced tendency to try to take this crap seriously.

On another note: I suspect the belief that open racism won’t show its face like open sexism will was an overblown hope.

Tagged as: elections, gender, sexism, hillary clinton

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.