Sexist Race
Rudy Guliani made a comment yesterday that set off my radar:
“I would like you to select me, But if you don’t, every single person who comes up after me — every single one of them — is better than Hillary, Senator Obama and Senator Edwards,”
Mayor Guliani chose to refer to his two male opponents by their last names and their official title, and he chose to refer to Senator Clinton by her first name, and I think that’s a deep sign of disrespect.
Senator Clinton worked just as hard for her title as Senators Edwards and Obama, probably harder. The only reason Guliani calls her Hillary is because, like most men, he has a deeply set sexist belief that women aren’t peers. It’s a digusting belief that we’re born into, and all of us have a responsibility to devote time every day to changing the way we think so that our chilren have a shot at growing up without it.
I think women have a responsibility to men in the gender revolution too, but it’s not clear to me yet what it is.
Hey there Erik – not necessarily. We’ve already had a “Clinton” in office. Saying “Senator Clinton” might create confusion. (W. points out he was never a senator, though he is in any case the more famous of the two.) I’m not saying you don’t have a point; you do. I just think it’s important to exhaust other rationales before claiming sexism.
Perhaps if Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul, ran for governor, his opponents would condescendingly call him “Paul” in an effort to avoid confusing the less popular Paul with the more succesful – and hence more dangerous opponent – his wife.
I think women have a responsibility to men in the gender revolution too, but it’s not clear to me yet what it is.
– I think maybe there are (at least) two parts to it: 1) To make well-meaning guys aware of their less overt behaviors that betray those “deeply set sexist beliefs,” and 2) To encourage men in their own experimentation with gendered norms.
I’ve been thinking (and reading) a lot about race/racism again lately, and while I feel less educated about gender (but more intuitively familar with it), I find that thinking of one in terms of the other is occasionally helpful, or just interesting. For example, whites have a clear responsibilty to non-whites to promote equality, opportunity, voice, etc. What responsibility do non-whites have to whites, if any? If none, why not? Could it be that oppression only affects one side of the equation, and nothing is owed the (hopefully former) oppressor?
In the end, I think everyone (men, women, whites, nonwhites, etc.) are all responsible for keeping the issues on the table – that is, in public discourse. And (I wish!) for pushing the limits of that discourse to see beyond fixing the old problems to discovering new possibilities.
If you can look beyond the cheesiness of that last sentence, and you get what I’m saying here, you might look at Iris Young’s “Justice and the Politics of Difference.” Her writing is borderline awful, but the ideas are great – it’s a classic in political theory, I’m told.
Hey Wendy! I like your numbered suggestions. I think those are good ones.
One of the things I question, and this is a pretty sensitive topic so I’ll try to tread lightly, is the notion that men are the oppressors and women are the victims in the gender revolution. Many issues (domestic violence and reproductive rights at least) have been turned into women’s issues, even though they’re really human rights issues. The problem is that women have a movement, infrastructure, and total control over the rhetoric, and in these spaces at least, men have… well, very little.
On other issues (financial independence, educational access, workplace equality) men are certainly opressors, and I don’t want to downplay that. But I think the women’s advocacy movement has taken control over the entire gender revolution, where in reality I think it’s human advocacy that we need in a lot of cases (and possibly even men’s advocacy in a few!)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I really don’t know what I think about this stuff yet, I’m just playing with ideas.