I've noticed something this primary season. Even though we are told that a double standard doesn't exist, it surely does. There were obvious examples of sexism during this heated primary season... like Chris Matthews gaffes that ended with a public apology. But there have been others. Recently, my mother forwarded me an essay by Robin Morgan of the Women's Media Center called Goodbye To All That #2. Robin wrote Goodbye To All That (#1) back in 1970, when she and other feminists took over a counter culture magazine called Rat.
During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women's movements, I've avoided writing another specific "Goodbye . . ." But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities-joint conscience-keepers of this country-been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . . -Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who's emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
-She's "ambitious" but he shows "fire in the belly." (Ever had labor pains?)
-When a sexist idiot screamed "Iron my shirt!" at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted "Shine my shoes!" at BO, it would've inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
-Young political Kennedys-Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.-all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort "See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him." (Personally, I'm unimpressed with Caroline's longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe's suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Here's one I'm really feeling:
Goodbye, goodbye to . . . blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys-though unlike them, he got reported on). Let's get real. If he hadn't campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
Yes! Enough of that. I'd be pissed if I was being skewered for what my husband says like Hillary is.
I hear all the time that Hillary is "opportunistic". That she's "riding on her husband's coattails". Here's what Ms. Morgan has to say about that:
Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts "entitled" when she's worked intensely at everything she's done-including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.
And...
Goodbye to the phrase "polarizing figure" to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women's movement that quipped, "We are becoming the men we wanted to marry." She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged-and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
How true. It's not my imagination. Read the whole essay... it's fantastic. And, for those of us who have been supporting Hillary Clinton for President, it's an answer to that nagging feeling that yes... there is a bloody double standard.
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