The blogosphere features some excellent feminist blogs led by young women with sensitive sniffers for sexism. Truthfully, my sexism sniffer isn’t that sensitive. I never really felt like the cards were stacked against me, until after I had kids. Then, the problems became so screamingly obvious that I started reading the The Feminine Mystique
while breast feeding. Since then, I’ve become a lot more aware of imbalances.
Palin refuses to leave the news cycle. Reporters and pundits have followed her up to Alaska to ask her about infighting in the Republican camp.
She’s blaming the press and her fellow Republicans of sexism. My first reaction is that her failure to answer basic questions about politics shouldn’t be blamed on sexism, but I’m not ruling it out either. My buddy, Suze, said that she has been dismayed by t-shirts that say "Palin is a cu*t" and Hillary sure had her difficulties with it this year. There is still some resistance to women leaders.
I think it’s very appropriate now that we finally have an African-American president and many people are cheering a post-race society to talk about sexism. How bad is it?
Apt. 11d 
I really liked flea’s take on the whole thing. Why is it Palin’s fault that she was picked? Should we not be talking about the person who made the choice to pick her? (Without even really vetting her, BTW?)
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As a kind of sidebar I think she might’ve been that dumb due to fatigue – still not a quality you want in a leader, but when I had a 5 mo old I thought remembering my middle name was pretty impressive.
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Palin refuses to leave the news cycle.
What? She’s got all the reporters at gunpoint and won’t let them report anything else?
I think you are pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction.
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Pervasive and so common that many people do not even notice it.
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“Why is it Palin’s fault that she was picked?”
Uh, ’cause she could have said no, if she knew she wasn’t ready for the job of being president?
I mean, I’d hope that she’d refuse to perform an appendectomy if someone asked her to. And, I personally, would refuse to do whatever folks do to moose when they cut it up to save for the winter or to can tomatoes. No one should consume either of those, if I’d been involved.
Yes, there’s sexism. Yes, we should talk about it. For me, that means talking about how our internal biases affect our perception.
bj
PS: we should still talk about racism, too. It hasn’t disappeared, in spite of our new African-American/college professor/second generation American/skinny black man/democratic president.
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bj, I just disagree that the unqualified person who was picked is somehow more at fault than the (supposedly) very-qualified person doing the picking. The big point here is that Palin never said she was anything more than she is. She did not pad her resume, or misrepresent her experience. She simply believes she has enough experience and knowledge — a view the rest of us do not share. I really don’t see how she could be expected to recuse herself.
On bj’s point about racism, this is something I’ve been contemplating too. With racism and sexism both, I think we may be mostly past the point where it’s an overt and automatic thing. We have seen women and people of color in positions of power and that no longer seems so jarring to us. But I think there is still a tendency to require more proof of qualifications for such people. A man of color, say a Hispanic man, I believe would be expected to prove himself much more overtly in order to gain credibility.
With the sexism thing I still cannot get over how often people still tell women to sit down and shut up. These days it comes out as, “She’s so combative, she’s just not collegial,” for example. Between that and the obsessive coverage of women’s appearance it’s clear to me that we still have a long ways to go. The coverage of Michelle Obama is also driving me nuts, all the stuff about her clothing and “how she’ll make the White House a true home.” Blech.
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Yeah, totally agree with everything here. Sexism is still a HUGE problem, but it’s so subtle and accepted that we don’t even recognize it anymore. Probably the same is true of racism.
This post was too broad and unfocused partially because I’m being a chicken-shit at the moment. I’m at a cross roads in my career and have to watch everything I write here. In another couple of weeks, I’ll make some decisions about the future and that will free me up to be as bitchy as I wanna be.
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Laura, try LJ. You can register as marual. Only we will know who you are, and you can be as bitchy as you like.
I’m trying to decide if I want to post my full name on my non-LJ blog (or a link to something with my full name). I had an online pub that ended up getting some interesting feedback, and I’d kind of like to share/discuss. But I so hate to put my name out there so overtly.
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Jen — I didn’t say Palin was more at fault, merely that she is also at fault. And, if she truly believes that she’s qualified, she’s at fault for believing that (when it’s palpably wrong), rather than for agreeing to do something she’s unqualified for. I’m not willing to give her a by because sexism impacts our evaluation of her.
“But I think there is still a tendency to require more proof of qualifications for such people.”
There’s masses and masses of evidence on this, most recently cited by Kristof in the NYtimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
“White participants recommend hiring a white applicant with borderline qualifications 76 percent of the time, while recommending an identically qualified black applicant only 45 percent of the time.”
The basic design of these experiments is to produce identical resumes, and merely change the race of the applicants. My guess is that a study with women would show very similar effects.
I’m fascinated by these studies because they appear to have a close relationships to studies of how we make decisions in ambiguous cases (including, for example, how we decided what pictures we can see in a very noisy image).
One new and interesting line of research is to see how these bias effects can be mitigated by appropriate training. There are some interesting reports about how bias effects can be reduced, by, for example, having diverse populations interact in a casual social setting, or by having decisions made in the presence of others.
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” The coverage of Michelle Obama is also driving me nuts, all the stuff about her clothing and “how she’ll make the White House a true home”
But, that’s the persona of a “first lady,” and, one, I think that Obama is not uncomfortable with (unlike, say Hillary, who did not want that role, of being the wife and mother).
I don’t know what to do with the appearance thing. There’s a part of me that is happy with it. I like clothes, and reading and thinking about them, and I actually like that we’re talking about how normally shaped and aged women, like Michelle, and Sarah, and Hillary are dressing. But, I also see how the obsession about it puts burdens on women.
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I know that’s the first lady role, but I just hate it. It’s all so trivial; I feel like it feeds into our cultural tendency to reduce the female contribution down to window dressing.
If Michelle Obama does not feel drowned out or threatened by the overwhelming “wife and mother” role, then more power to her. I personally feel that this archetype is damagingly loud and strong in our society. In my own life I am constantly working to remind others — and myself — that my caretaking relationships are part of my identity, but not the whole thing.
And I can sense the ambivalence in the media — on the one hand they say Ms. Obama is making history. On the other hand they talk yet again about her dress and go into detail about how she’s choosing the girls’ school. It’s almost as if she’s allowed to be a Harvard-trained attorney only if she doesn’t actually act like one.
I don’t know the right answer here. I’m not expecting her to leave her family to twist; in her situation my top priority would also be the kids’ school. And I find Hillary Clinton’s approach of “co-president” to be inappropriate. A woman only needs to be “co-president” when she has no chance of actually achieving the office herself; we should be beyond that. I can see how Michelle Obama would say, for right now, at this point in our family’s life, I have to just be the wife and mother. But I dislike the subtext: that she’s only allowed to be a full person if her family’s circumstances allow for it.
I find myself wondering what Dennis Thatcher did with his time when Maggie was in office.
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Dennis allegedly drank a great deal. I’m thinking I have a choice quote on the subject from Timothy Garton Ash — something like being seated next to him and finding him barely capable of conversation — but I’m sure I won’t be able to lay hands on it in the time I want to spend on a blog comment.
Bobby Jindal apparently took himself out of the running for VP. There are two good reasons to think that Palin should have: one, to know what the modern VP job entails and where her own experience fit in relation to that; and two, to see that McCain was very probably a losing bet and not to want to go down with that ship.
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So, I’ve been saying Palin should have realized and taken herself out of the running. But, in the interests of a discussion about sexism, I have to mention that I also think that GW Bush should have realized he was unqualified and taken himself out of the running. I also think that people don’t say that as much because of the differing sexes between the two.
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Isn’t Ash with the Guardian? I’m thinking I’d probably drink more than usual if I were next to him at dinner. Anyway, maybe I’m just remembering with rose colored glasses, but drinking too much is the one thing that I really have missed since becoming a father.
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“But, in the interests of a discussion about sexism, I have to mention that I also think that GW Bush should have realized he was unqualified and taken himself out of the running.”
Wasn’t there a study a while back that said that incompetent people don’t realize that they are incompetent? And then there was another study recently about how narcissists are more likely to vie for and to be given leadership roles.
I’m not saying that any of the people you’re discussing are either incompetent or narcissists, just that as a general rule, positions of high responsibility will disproportionately attract people who are incompetent and narcissistic.
http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7147
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