Support For Obama Driven By Sexism?

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 8:27 AM on April 18, 2008.

There were some grumblings in the comments about the blogular silence greeting this Rebecca Traister piece about how a lot of male Obama supporters are relishing this opportunity to indulge their sexist side, but I can say in all honesty, I hadn't blogged it yet because I hadn't seen it. But now that I have, I highly recommend it. Rebecca, of course, is a remarkably good writer, and she articulates beautifully why privileged Democratic men might harbor hostility towards Clinton, hostility white middle class liberals wouldn't show Obama.

In today's United States, racism continues to have more damaging economic and social structural implications for African-Americans than sexism has for women. Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire. And that makes them a more threatening group to the population of white men who have enjoyed unchallenged power -- in the White House and other workplaces -- since the birth of the nation. Those who feel the army of tough ladies breathing down their necks, competing for jobs and salaries and refusing to drop out of the race, are the population of privileged white men from which the elite portion of the Democratic Party is built.

It's not just competing for jobs that fuels this. Middle class liberal straight men benefit in a number of ways from the oppression of women. They get their homes cleaned, their laundry done, their children cared for, their egos fluffed, and birthday cards sent to their mothers, or they have the expectation of these things. (To varying degrees, of course. Some liberal men are much more feminist than others, and how much housework gets done by what pair of hands varies from household to household.) If they're single, they get to take advantage of a dating market where it's still understood that women are selling and men are buying. Now, obviously the investment from man to man varies on this front---there are a number of good guys who would gladly trade it all for an opportunity to date a woman who hasn't been crippled with insecurity from all the sexist mandates put on her (i.e., never again glares at her fat ass in a mirror and berates herself)---but there's plenty enough sexism with liberal dudes, and we all know it. I believe this story, because it just rings true in my experience and from stories I hear from other women about liberal sexism.

But I have to confess---I have not experienced the liberal male hostility to Clinton that has these sexist undertones. Maybe I'm oblivious, but I certainly haven't had any experiences like the ones described in the story.

Meanwhile, I was getting e-mails from men I didn't know well who approached me as a go-to feminist to whom they could express their hatred of Hillary and their anger at her staying in the race -- an anger that seemed to build with every one of her victories. One of my closest girlfriends, an Obama voter, told me of a drink she'd had with a politically progressive man who made a series of legitimate complaints about Clinton's policies before adding that when he hears the senator's voice, he's overcome by an urge to punch her in the face.

A few weeks ago, my friend Becca O'Brien, a lawyer and policy advisor in New Orleans, visited me. She told me about her experience on the morning of the Louisiana primary. O'Brien had been openly torn between Obama and Clinton, and perhaps as a result, she received five phone calls from male friends around the country, urging her to vote for Obama. They were, she understood, just campaigning for their candidate; they didn't realize how many calls she was receiving, or that taken together, they were making her furious. As O'Brien saw it, "The presumption was that I was undecided because I was a young woman, and they could talk some sense into me if they were the last ones I spoke to before I went into the voting booth."

I've talked to a number of liberal male Obama supporters, and on the whole, they either castigate Clinton for her war vote, or say nothing about her except that she is a perfectly fine second choice. I'd like to flatter myself and say that it's because I'm a Known Feminist, but so are a lot of the women in this story that are getting hell from guys they know. What I do suspect might be going on could be called the Ann Richards Factor, though. Richards, of course, was the last Democratic governor of our great state of Texas, and she lost to George W. Bush against an ugly campaign that turned her simple defeat into something close to martyrdom. She's an icon to Texas Democrats, and in the process of her canonization, our middle class liberal men probably overcame a lot of their hostility to the idea of female leadership. And maybe they learned that just because we had a female governor doesn't mean the toilets won't continue to clean themselves.

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Tagged as: obama, clinton, sexism, election

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.