Sarah Palin and the Wrong Way to Battle Sexism

By Rebecca Hyman, AlterNet. Posted September 16, 2008.

Palin's VP run reveals more dimensions to sexism in America. And
merely weeding out a few bad apples like Chris Matthews won't solve
the problem.

Now that the "pit bull in lipstick" who got her start in the PTA has
had her honor defended on the national stage, it's only fitting that
we're all waiting for Obama's "female surrogates" to fight back. In
case we were a bit anesthetized, with all that rocking and "change"
chanting, we now have a reason to wake up: hot girl-on-girl action,
Election 2008.

In the two weeks since Sarah Palin was introduced to America, first as
the second-ever female candidate for vice president, and soon after as
the baby-making, gun-toting, wolf-killing beauty queen of the
Christian Right, the question of sexism -- or, more precisely, the
media's use of sexist frames to introduce and belittle female
candidates -- has returned with a vengeance.

The first burst of coverage concentrated nearly exclusively on Palin's
family and appearance. In Lifetime-style soft focus, we learned that
she's married to her high school sweetheart, her fifth child has
Down's syndrome, and her eldest son is bound for Iraq. Then US, People
and the Enquirer sharpened the view. Could the McCain camp truly have
known that Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five
months pregnant? Was Trig really Bristol's first baby? And what about
those persistent rumors that Palin had an affair?

The National Review Online countered these salacious details by
asserting that Palin's family represented "vitality and life -- the
men are virile, the women are fecund." Robert Novak called her
"attractive"; Rush Limbaugh crowed that the Right had the "babe";
bloggers named her McCain's "Trophy Vice"; and Maureen Dowd engaged in
a fantasy about Palin in go-go boots. State-specific political
buttons, produced by day four, proclaimed "Coldest State, Hottest
Governor," and "Hoosiers for the Hot Chick." The New York Times added
some gravity to the gossip mill when it reported that the vetting
process for Palin had been cursory at best. Unnamed sources said that
McCain had wanted the pro-choice Joe Lieberman to be his candidate,
but he had caved under James Dobson's pressure. Palin was a craven
choice; a pair of breasts; an ingenue; a joke.

What has passed for "issue specific" coverage of Palin has focused on
her purported moral hypocrisy: She can't be pro-life if she shoots at
wolves and moose; she can't be pro-abstinence if her daughter isn't a
virgin; she can't be a serious candidate if she won a beauty contest;
she can't be for family values if she refuses to stay at home. The
Times' "Mommy Wars: Campaign Edition" queried mothers about Palin's
prospective work-family balance and found that most were uneasy about
Palin's taking on such a difficult job: "A mother of an infant with
Down syndrome taking up full-time campaigning? Not my value set" was a
typical response. (Not to be outdone, the Washington Post titled its
story on the same theme "Gov. Mom.") Is it any surprise that Rick
Davis, campaign manager for McCain, spoke of needing to revise the
speech that had been written for the prospective vice presidential
candidate because it was "very masculine"?

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, myself included, remain clueless
about the true intellectual and political positions of the person
before us. How "nice" for her to get this kind of a free pass; to only
have to parry comments about her body and her kids. If you're a female
politician, the political is the personal. Your body is the source of
your ideas, and the issues you support are "women's issues." And if
you cross into male territory -- guns, money, security -- your best
response, as Palin seems, intuitively, to get, is camp.

It's obvious that the caricature of Palin to which we're being exposed
is the inverse of the caricature of Hillary Clinton. Even if you'd
missed the first half of the campaign, all you'd have to do is flip
the script. If Palin is "better suited to be a calendar model for a
local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the
land," then Clinton is a dumpy, frigid, post-menopausal, castrating
bluestocking who only got women's votes because she was a victim of
her husband's indiscriminate -- but hell, with that kind of wife? --
sexual transgressions. At least the Right gets the "sexy librarian";
those of us on the other side are stuck with the saccharine Sisterhood
of the Traveling Pantsuits.

The surfeit of ridicule to which female candidates have been exposed
throughout this campaign has sent feminist writers into a tailspin.
Some, like Melody Rose, writing in the Oregonian, have taken to
patiently explaining that women are just a teensy weensy bit
constrained: "A woman has to choose between running as the candidate
with the proper competence -- and thus, being manly -- or as the
candidate who is properly feminine -- and thus, being unqualified,"
she writes. The Nation's Katha Pollitt was more succinct. The McCain
camp must think women have the "IQ of a Tampax," she snorted, to bet
they would switch from Clinton to Palin purely because Palin is a
woman.

Over at Salon, Rebecca Traister's deep disappointment in having to
take Palin seriously was palpable: "What a failure by McCain to have
this woman -- with her pregnancies and progeny and sex life and
child-rearing prowess now being inspected instead of her policy and
voting history -- stand in for, and someday, possibly emblemize, the
political progress of American women ..." And at Feministing, cdnmama
wrote that "Women all over the U.S. must come to terms with the
somewhat disconcerting fact that the ticket in this race that offers a
chance for the improvement of women's economic and political
situations ... is, in fact, made up of two men."

There are a few problems with this kind of point-counterpoint approach
to the question of "sexism" in the press and on the political stage.
The first is that rarely is the situation as neat and tidy as the
recent brouhaha over Palin. It's true that the Women's Media Center
produced a harrowing video of clips, most from FOX and MSNBC,
demonstrating that not only Clinton, but also female commentators and
other women politicians, are regularly sexualized and demeaned by
members of the press. There's no shortage of video, radio, print and
cartoon denigrations of women, particularly female candidates, as the
National Organization for Women's "Media Hall of Shame" has amply
proved.

In isolation, these clips are clearly offensive; the commentators are
abhorrent, especially when they're laughing, or sneering, in the midst
of their remarks. But most political commentary is more slippery than
this. The caricature may look the same, but instead of being the
central focus of the piece, it's the catchy hook; the thing we're not
supposed to take seriously; the appetizer before the serious critique.
A recent piece by Gail Collins in the New York Times is a case in
point. She begins by referencing the "moose-gutting, polar
bear-trashing, aerobics-class-networking vice presidential nominee"
and then moves in to the real content of the piece. It's a rhetorical
flourish, but repeated often enough, these epithets begin to stick.

And then there are the candidates themselves. In order to soften the
incendiary potential of their candidacy, many female politicians will
speak of their politics as stemming from their roles as wives and
mothers, thus legitimizing the very approach for which they'll be
skewered in the press. To ask female politicians to pretend they
aren't women, or mothers, however, is equally absurd.

It's for these reasons, and many others, that I find it troubling that
"feminism" has come to mean the work of pointing out, over and over --
sometimes politely, sometimes with rancor -- specific remarks or
images that are demeaning to women. No longer a movement for social
justice with a goal of freeing both men and women from pernicious and
confining ideas about masculinity and femininity, power and privilege,
feminism is seen today as a game of "gotcha," with women -- mainly
wealthy white women -- playing the game against men to win.

In this caricature of the movement, feminists are just another
"special interest group," showing up on some "Crossfire"-style split
screen to point out Chris Matthews' latest gaffe. And sure, it's good
that as a result of these kinds of critiques, the Times' ombudsman
scoured its coverage of the Clinton campaign and expressed "regret"
for writing about the "Clinton cackle." But does anyone think that
nailing MSNBC -- which, in true cowardly fashion, just demoted both
Matthews and Keith Olbermann in order to look "fair and balanced" --
is going to stop people like Donny Deutsch from calling Palin the "new
feminist ideal" because "men want to mate with her and women want to
be her"? Since when has being a successful sex object been a feminist
cause celebre? And what has happened to the public understanding of
what feminism really means, if the word can be appropriated in such a
fashion?

There's a big difference between identifying sexist acts and
undermining patriarchy, the system of power and privilege that
reinforces and grounds particular stories about how men and women
should behave, how sex and gender should be expressed, about who is
rational and who is emotional, who's a "fighter" and who's a "babe."
These narratives are refracted and reinforced by the media and by
people speaking from podiums, most certainly, but they aren't the work
of a few bad eggs.

To equate feminism with the fight against "sexism" is to imply that
the work of feminism is that of changing or eliminating those
individuals who perpetrate these sexist acts. If we could just stop
the Chris Matthewses and the Norman Mailers, the Maureen Dowds and the
Phyllis Schlaflys, the story goes; if we could just get people to stop
watching FOX News, or write another letter to MSNBC, then somehow,
someday, women will be treated with respect. And it's the idea that
feminists focus on individuals, rather than systems of power, that
grounds the conservative caricature of feminists as a
cardigan-flapping bunch of prudes, censoring a couple of good fellows
who were just making a joke.

If all it took to free women, or African-Americans, or immigrants, or
the poor, from the stories that make them seem "different," menacing,
irrational and emotional was "recognition," then feminists should be
spending their money dropping educational pamphlets from the skies.
But these ideas about masculinity and femininity, sexuality and race
-- ideas that make the joke of the New Yorker cover instantly
comprehensible, no matter what you think of the joke -- are entrenched
and crucial to the ways we in America have made the world make sense.
If it were easy to overturn the history of these stories about blacks
and women, we could simply point out that Palin and Clinton aren't
getting a fair shake and that Michelle Obama is walking a tightrope.
We could expect that the pages of print devoted to scrutinizing the
Clinton coverage would have influenced the coverage of Palin. But
that's just not the case.

At first glance, it seems like a harmless waste of time to devote
political analysis to the question of whether Barack Obama might be
"too thin" to be president, implying he's a bit too faggy for the job,
or to joke about Palin as a dominatrix, spanking McCain. It feels
safe, and comfortable, to bring these candidates out of the
stratosphere and onto the couch. But if we waste the next 60 days on
questions of "personality," with the word standing in for gender and
racial conformity, rather than intellectual heft, the conservatives
could win. And if we keep on with the fiction that racial and gender
stereotypes are held by a few remaining bad eggs, we will severely
underestimate the challenge that this election poses to ourselves as
individuals, and to our nation.

The excitement generated in the first months of the Obama campaign was
at least in part a result of the legacy of movement politics, the
language of which saturated most of Obama's early speeches. It was the
civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement,
the gay rights movement, that spoke of making fundamental, liberating
change. It's that kind of change that roused the people who had never
voted and never cared about voting to think that this time might be
different. It's why Sarah Palin saved her deepest scorn for movement
organizers, to put us on notice that that kind of change is dead. But
there's this thing about movements and change: They don't need heroes;
they don't need magical leaders. All they need, all they ever need, is
time.

Rebecca Hyman is a writer and professor living in Portland.