In politics, gender matters.

It's a year before the elections begin but we're certainly all aware that a woman is running for president. In a lot of ways, it's bigger news that the African-American or the Mormon candidates, although that varies by who you're polling. Does anyone know that Senator Hilary Clinton is not the first woman to run for that office? In fact, 26 women before her have run for president, beginning with the fiery Victoria Woodhull, a full 48 years before women ever even earned the right to vote. Although we'd like to think things have changed since then, and many people who either love or loathe Senator Clinton suggest that her gender is no longer an issue in our modern times, this is absolutely untrue.

Gender roles confine Senator Clinton. It seems like every other week, an article comes out dealing with the way she styled her hair, or a recent change to her outfit. Just this week, I read a blog hosted on the Washington post, no mere rag of a newspaper, talking about how she wore boots with her pantsuit at a recent rally (and that the pants were, gasp, a few inches too short). The blogger felt that the boots would help her—citing a previous candidate who wore combat boots, and citing Condeleeza Rice's position as “fashion icon” of the Bush administration.¹ No surprise that Condeleeza is the fashion icon and the high profile woman of the group. When was the last time we saw critiqued Barrack Obama's choice of footwear? Also by that blogger, an assessment of Nancy Pelosi's scarves. Do we care what Fred Thompson wears around his neck? The double standards are ridiculous. Short of showing up in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, the male politicians are left to their own devices. It's only the females who are picked apart on their clothing.

Further in Senator Clinton's past, an artist known for his shocking and scandalizing sculptures made a hyper-sexualized sculpture of her breasts, inspired, he says, by a quote from Sharon Stone: “a woman should be past her sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power, and I don't think people will accept that. It's too threatening."² Thank you, Sharon Stone, for once again reducing a woman to her sexuality. When Bill Clinton ran for office, he was considered very sexual. To this day, he's known for his charisma, charm, and sexual appeal. But for him, note, it was an asset. It was something to set him apart from the masses. Male sexuality=good, female sexuality=bad. Male sexuality is power and virility, masculinity at its finest. Female sexuality is seductive and mysterious, misleading and dangerous. Why do we even care? I mean, in both cases, why do we care? It's completely irrelevant to their potential leadership capabilities.

Most recently, actually earlier this week, John McCain and his supporters committed quite the snafu (to say the least) when an overeager crowd member asked McCain, “So, how do we beat the bitch?” McCain laughed uncomfortably, but in the end told the woman “That's an excellent question,” and without a beat, started talking about his competition with Senator Clinton. After all, who else could that particular vulgarity refer to? Yes, sometimes men are called bitches when they are to be made feminized or weak, but who in their right mind would refer to a male politician by an expletive? It's acceptable to call a woman names, it's not acceptable to call a man names. I think Ann Althouse says it best:

But I don't think "bitch" is a word that can be used in political discourse around a presidential candidate. Imagine if the questioner had asked — referring to Obama — "how do we beat the [n-word]?" He would have immediately voiced his rejection of that word. Laughing and pretending to wipe away sweat and so forth would never have been good enough and he would have known it.³

Just imagine how that would have gone over. Imagine the outrage. Imagine Sharpton and Jackson calling for their heads. But who comes to the aid of Senator Clinton? A few outraged feminist bloggers but where is our unified movement? Dead by backlash. But that's another story. In a less severe example, but one I think possibly even more relevant, what if someone had asked McCain “How do we beat the prick?” For one thing, he wouldn't have known who they were talking about without the gender specific slur. For another, the asker of the question would likely have been shunned for the use of such language. Doesn't it even seem harsher and more vulgar? And isn't that interesting?

The use of the word “bitch” is a powerful one. It's been used since its onset to keep women acting within the proper confines of their gender roles. As Joreen puts it in the famous second-wave feminist treatise “Bitch Manifesto”: “It is also generally agreed that a Bitch is aggressive, and therefore unfeminine ... But she is never a 'true woman.'”⁴ When a woman oversteps her role as a woman, she's a bitch. And in order to compete in the male world of politics, she has to do so. The following characteristics are cited by Joreen as being characteristics of bitches. Read them and consider how many are necessary for competition in politics. I will bold the ones I consider so (and this is the idealistic list, which is to say traits politicians should have, not including ones they often do that aren't so positive):

Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-skinned, hard-headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushey, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatning, scarey, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous, and turbulent.⁴

Senator Clinton has taken on many of these characteristics in order to compete in the world of politics where males set the rules and males have been the standard in this country since its founding. And, here's a thought, maybe she actually possesses some of them on her own, as “unfeminine” as that would be. But at the same time as these traits are helping her to gain favor, they're also causing a rift between the fact that she is female and how she behaves to gain political power.

Much could be said about her choice in words, pandering to the patriarchy by saying “I'm your girl” (emphasis mine), and various problems with her campaign. In short, this is not a show of endorsement. I would like to see more women in US politics as much as the next person, or maybe more, but I don't think Senator Clinton is the “girl” for the job. I write this simply to point out that sexism is alive and well in our most visible of arenas. The fact that many choose not to term it as such, thinking instead that their critiques are viable political assessments rather than baseless gendered attacks, is just another example of how in the US, we think we're past all our history of sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of prejudice but in reality it's all still here just in different forms. But in the case of “the bitch,” how different is it really?

1http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/11/sen_clinton_these_boots_were_m.html

2http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/harpy_hero_heretic_hillary.html

3http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-do-we-beat-bitch.html

4http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/bitch/