That's all I have to say about the response to Anna's post yesterday about the misogyny that dogged Hillary Clinton's campaign even before there was an official campaign.
See, the thing is, I think Anna was dead-on. There's a language out there reserved for Hillary Clinton that's unmistakably gender-based, destructive and sexist, it's generally -- and wrongly so, IMHO -- accepted in society, and it's also coming from progressive corners.
Bill Moyers did a segment on this very topic, wa-a-a-a-y back in the Dark Ages of December 2007 when he interviewed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The stuff about Clinton starts at the 6:50 mark.
It's a fantastic interview, one that discusses the language and treatment of the presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, outside the realm of politics.
That's the key, isn't it? It's hard to distinguish hostility driven by negative imagery of Clinton as a woman, from her and President Clinton's involvement and actions, say, in the DLC. This conversation does a very good job of separating Clinton from politics, and simply examines the discourse that has grown around Clinton, and what that means for the state of discourse on the Internet in general.
Well, and at one time there was actually an argument that if women became educated, they would become infertile. There was also, for a long period of time, serious penalties for women who tried to speak in public. And the residue of this is a language that suggests that women in power cannot be women and be in power. And as a result, as Hillary Clinton certifies herself as being tough enough to be president, competent enough to be president, these attacks say then she can't be president because she's not actually a woman. And you can't trust someone who is that inauthentic. So underlying this and underlying the vulgarity and underlying the assertions of raw sexual violence is deep fear about a woman holding power.
But I'm not sure that it's only about that with Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton has been attacked as long as she's been in the public sphere. She came into national public awareness with the candidacy of Bill Clinton. Some of this coincides with attacks on liberals and Hillary Clinton as a liberal woman. Some of this coincides with original attacks when she was in the White House and what was framed as exercise of unelected power. And one of the questions that-- I find interesting is this hypothetical. Let's say if Elizabeth Dole was this far along in the polls for the Republican nomination. Would she be subject to the same kinds of attacks? And I think the answer is no.
[snip]
Well, and we have language is constantly open for discussion. We know what's appropriate and what's inappropriate by the way in which society responds, what our peer group responds, the community we turn to responds. And so when someone uses language that is considered inappropriate and there is a national discussion, we dampen down that use. That's what happened with Imus, who is now just coming back on the air. When something like this happens and we don't have the discussion, we move it in to acceptable use.
[snip]
Perhaps the comments that you're reprising from public space elsewhere, largely on cable or on talk radio, were actually out there but we only had network evening news as a way of getting access to the political world. And they never would have gotten into that forum. So it's possible that nothing has changed except our access to a window on a part of a world. And that we haven't found a way to create boundaries around it and say within it, "Don't you want to have a different kind of discourse here? Do you really want to conventionalize this?"
