Sherry Chandler » Devil in a pantsuit
Devil in a pantsuit
Via Melissa McEwan, Julia Keller brings the whole demonization of Hillary Clinton back where it belongs. Into literature and the history of western (so-called) culture:
This is not simply sexism or racism. Those prejudices are familiar, if still repugnant, and leaders as strong as Clinton and her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, have faced them many times. This, though, is something different and more sinister, because it is not just a commentator’s opinion about a person’s fitness or unfitness for public office. It is not about using colorful, vivid language in order to wish that a person might or might not continue a campaign. It is an unprecedented public call—albeit metaphorically, but still violently and persistently—for a person’s death.
In their landmark book of literary criticism “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination” (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were among the first to spotlight this noxious theme, this isolation and ridicule of powerful women by labeling them crazy, hysterical, perverse, monstrous. To challenge male domination—of the world, or just of oneself—was to be risk being marginalized, ostracized, locked away like Rochester’s wife in “Jane Eyre” (1847), the fate that gave the book its title. In real life, behavior that strayed from the polite, demure norm expected of women in the 19th Century was rewarded with psychiatric evaluations and often, imprisonment and death.
…
The notion of a powerful, driven, influential woman as a hideous threat—a threat that can be curtailed only with her death—ripples through literature, from the D.H. Lawrence novel “Sons and Lovers” (1913), with its protagonist’s conviction that he must escape the clutches of his looming, clingy mother if he is ever to realize his destiny, to the 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey, with its way-scary female character: the loathsome, larger-than-life Nurse Ratched. The joyless, hulking harridan who wants to keep her patients drugged and miserable so she can control them. From the Furies in Greek literature onward, the women-as-mythical-monsters theme has shrieked, flapped and lurched its way through the arts.
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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.
I strongly suggest that you read the whole of this excellent article, because, as Melissa says:
It’s a distinction that is lost on every person who’s accused me of being in the bag for Clinton. Feminism/womanism is a cultural critique first and foremost, and, although Chris Matthews calling Clinton a she-devil piques my political ire in the same way pernicious media misrepresentations of Al Gore did, the way the MSM’s disfavor toward Democratic candidates always does, but that Matthews specifically goes for misogynist attacks against Clinton is not a political concern for me nearly as much as it’s a cultural concern, akin to Jay Leno’s homophobia and sexism and racism, David Letterman’s transphobia, Adam Carolla’s sexism and homophobia and fat hatred and transphobia, Bill Maher’s sexism and rape jokes, and on and on and on. Our media is a giant tool of the kyriarchy, and, while there are certainly exceptions (we’ve spoken before in a great QotD thread about films that opened our minds about something), the MSM is largely little more than a jack-booted thug enforcing the biases that protect existent privilege, and politics is only a tiny part of that.
The Sexism Watch has way more to do with the larger culture than it does to do with the subculture of political discourse. Keller’s piece clarifies beautifully how a critique of the rhetorical cudgels being wielded against Clinton is a cultural issue, not a specifically political one. And thusly, it underlines once again how a failure to address what’s being done to Clinton is not justifiable because she’s not your candidate, or because she voted for the AUMF, or because because because…
Not if you care about women and the means of their subjugation. Not if you’re a progressive.
Meanwhile, Anglachel gives a really nice portrait of the Hillary Clinton her supporters see:
I don’t see the Hillary campaign saying a bad word about the voters, even those who vote for her opponents. I don’t see the campaign explaining away their losses because of some flaw or failing in the voters. Even the group of Obama voters most vociferous and adamant in their objections to her do not get criticized or condemned. To the contrary, she defended MoveOn from politically motivated attacks. She went to Yearly Kos and spoke without rancor or defensiveness to a deeply hostile group.
When she says she is impervious to attacks from the right-wing noise machine, the MSM and political opponents, it shows up in the way she will not be badgered and baited. She can look Richard Scaife in the eye and tell him exactly what she intends to do as President without belligerance and without apology. Their cruelty and crudeness cannot disrupt her calm civility, though she may poke some sly fun at them.
This is not someone who has burned bridges on the Democratic side. In a hard-fought campaign, she has been firm that there will be nothing from her side to prevent resolution and reconciliation within the party. She pulls no punches on issues, but has not stooped to personal attacks of the kind leveled at her by her opponents and even by some party leaders. When somone on her campaign has behaved dishonorably, they are told to leave at once.
Unity is not obedience or falling into line. It is being able to strongly and persuasively present yourself and your objectives and be victorious, but do so in a way that does not demand the humiliation, denegration or destruction of your opponents. It is to treat others as valued colleagues to be won over, not as enemies to be obliterated.
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