While I’m talking about, oh, whatever I’m talking about, I’ll refer back to the national discussion about whether Harriet Miers should be confirmed by the Senate to the Supreme Court of the United States. There was an interesting article by Tina Brown in yesterday’s Post called You've Come a Long Way, Ladies, which attempts to place Ms. Miers in some sort of socio-historical context, but mostly points out that the real benchmark is that women do not appear the need to defend her out of identity politics or, as she calls it, reflexive solidarity. Ms. Brown does not specifically credit Our Previous President for this, although it seems to me obvious that his unprecedented decision that we could have two women on the court means that women don’t feel that they would be left entirely without representation should Ms. Miers withdraw. However, the larger point is well-taken, although the fact that she has to make it works against it in the bigger picture.
Howard Kurtz, on today’s site, writes about Sex and the Courts, among other things, and looks at that aspect from a different vantage point. At last, he appears to be saying, a man can criticize a woman nominated to the Supreme Court without being sexist. Well, and I suppose in theory one could. I hope I did, for one thing. However, I suspect that in a Republican party known for sexism and chauvinism, it isn’t necessary to assume that sexism plays no part in the criticism. I have never previously read Mr. Kurtz work, bye-the-bye, but he does appear to be a bit of an idiot. Still, that’s neither here nor there; the point that I was making was that whether or not we have as a culture progressed beyond the point where women feel they must reflexively defend women, and men who do not want to appear sexist feel they must reflexively defend women, we have certainly not progressed beyond a point where the nomination of a woman is No Big Deal. Clearly, a part of the national conversation about Ms. Miers is the national conversation about Women, and Men, and how we can have conversations about Women and Men, or even about specific women and specific men.
Before I segue into my real point, though, I would like to point out that the satiric Harriet Miers blog exploits for its humor a particular stereotype of girls (I might say women, but then I might not) that is part of a patriarchal culture. I don’t mean to say that whoever is running the blog is sexist, or that the blog itself is sexist and serves to narrow the choices of women generally or specifically. But its power derives from an aspect of those narrowed choices. It’s hard to imagine a similar satiric blog about, say, Mr. Brown, or Mr. Bolton, or Mr. Kerik having much the same impact.
Which is where I go to the Danbury [CT] News-Times, which this morning had on its front page this morning a story called Face Off, about how the Ridgefield Republican Town Committee had got itself into trouble by linking to this idiocy, which seems to think that Linda Bush is more attractive than Barbra Streisand. Ah, well.
Digression: What is with this trope that Hillary Clinton is unattractive? I mean, she doesn’t do a hell of a lot forYHB (although I have only seen her in person once, through a window, at a distance of ten or twelve feet), but she is scarcely a yug-ugg. I mean, if I were attempting to pick unattractive women associated with the Democrats, I certainly wouldn’t pick her. But it does seem to be a sort of running gag amongst the right, that she’s a harridan, a harpy and a hag. I don’t get it. No more do I get the idea that Michelle Malkin is unattractive, or that posting pictures of her with contorted facial expressions is not mean-spirited, or that it’s appropriate to make fun of her supposed unattractiveness but not that of, say, Paul Krugman or Jesse Taylor, both of whom are undistinguished in the looks department, but we could easily unearth photos of them that appear truly unappetizing. But ain’t none of them yug-uggs. End Digression.
Susan Tuz, writing for The News-Times, says that “No one was laughing when the town's Republican Town Committee linked its Web site to an Internet jokester who portrayed famous GOP women as supermodels and Democrats as hags.” But surely, somebody was laughing. I mean, this stuff is considered funny. At least by the person who put the thing up, in a folder marked funny, and the person who put it together, and the person who passed the link on. The acting chairman of the Republican Town Committee says, “It certainly isn't chauvinistic or a feminist issue.” And, you know, when a nice man like that says that it isn’t a feminist issue, clearly any women who complain must be harridans, harpies and hags. Because there’s nothing chauvinistic about that joke, is there? Um, hello?
Look, the one nice thing about the conversation about Harriet Miers is that we aren’t being inundated with caricatures about how unattractive she is. At least I’m not. And I don’t wish to be. I have seen that sort of comment brought up on the Left (and the center, which now frequents Lefty blogs out of desperation, I think), but I don’t think it’s terribly widespread. Of course, were she unusually attractive, there would be a lot of jokes about that, and her close relationship to the president, which would be unfortunate as well. However, the conversation about her reeks with reaction to the simple fact that she violates our expectations, and those expectations are the chauvinist ones, the narrowing ones, the expectations that grow rigid and have had to be broken again and again, just for women to have reasonably wide expectations. We can’t, we just can’t have a national conversation about her without talking about those expectations, without those expectations coming into play.
My earlier post on sexiness and categorization is well within those cultural expectations. I get that. I am within my culture, and I swim in the water we all swim in. I don’t even object to it; I want to participate in my culture, to the extent that I can do so without doing much harm. Nor is my vision of a better culture one where nobody notices anybody else’s physical appearance. But there are ugly aspects to that culture, and one of those aspects is the idiocy I linked to above, and the story about it as well, and most of all the decision by a local Republican organization to link to that idiocy. Most of all, I suppose, the impression by somebody that the joke was not mean-spirited, or at least that it was mean only to some people who deserved it. Geh.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.