The Weepy Witch & the Secret Muslim

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted January 21, 2008.

The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial. So much we've learned from the mass hysteria over Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment" in New Hampshire. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson: "She morphed into a 'compassion brand'--like, irony of ironies, Kleenex"; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?") Even Southern charmer John Edwards couldn't resist observing that a commander in chief needed "strength and resolve"--a view echoed by Fox commentator Dick Morris ("There could well come a time when there is such a serious threat to the United States that she breaks down") and given full misogynous display by nationally syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant's "Madam President Meets the Bad Guys," portraying a dumpy, tearful Hillary surrounded by Osama, Kim Jong Il and similar. All this fuss over a welling of the eyes so brief that if you blinked your own you'd miss it. I have moments like that every day! This was the Dean Scream all over again: a nano-nothing whipped into a self-congratulatory media typhoon.

In the 24/7 chat room, reality never dawns: the narrative is tweaked, not junked. Thus, when Hillary dared to win the New Hampshire primary although pundits had already gleefully hustled her off the stage, the script was quickly rewritten from Tears Sink Woman to Tears Save Woman: 46 percent of women voters, the silly dears, supported a "humanized" Hillary, according to exit polls. (Bill Maher: "They wanted to see the robot cry.") But maybe women supported Hillary this one time to protest cable blowhards like Chris Matthews, who capped his long career of insane Hillary hatred with this zinger: "The reason she's a front-runner is because her husband messed around." Or perhaps, as Susan Faludi and Gail Collins suggested, middle-aged women see in Hillary a calm and competent multitasker like themselves. Lost in the kerfuffle: Hillary won not only among women but also among voters over 40 and those without a college degree.

I've written many times about sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton as an old, ugly, castrating witch-and-what-rhymes-with-it, but Gloria Steinem's New York Times op-ed in defense of her, "Women Are Never the Front-Runners," was not helpful, to put it mildly. "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life," Steinem wrote. "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter)." Yes, black men got the vote first, although they could be lynched for using it. Shirley Chisholm, the black Congresswoman who ran for President in 1972, did famously write, "Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black." But Barack Obama is only the third black senator in the modern era; Deval Patrick is only the second black governor. It may be true, as Steinem suggests, that "the sex barrier [is] not taken as seriously as the racial one." But that doesn't mean the racial barrier really is less serious. It just means that the public expression of racism is beyond the pale in a way that the public expression of misogyny is not.

See more stories tagged with: elections, gender, race, barack obama, hillary clinton

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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