Sexism deniers

A duet of stories today denying the existence of sexism in the coverage of Senator Clinton's presidential campaign: this one from the Friday NY Times and this one from Christopher Hitchens at Slate.com. Before I respond to either one, a clarification: I am not one of those people who considers gendered media coverage of Senator Clinton's campaign to be the sole reason for the campaign's demise. There are a host of reasons she didn't prevail - a poorly organized strategy that did not account for Obama until it was too late, an intelligent candidate with a nuanced grasp of the issues who nevertheless has an almost pathological inability to engage individual voters, too much reliance on Bill Clinton as a surrogate campaigner - the list goes on and on. Among these many reasons for her defeat, sexism is hardly the most insidious.

Nevertheless, sexism was a factor in this campaign and I find it disingenuous in the least to completely disregard its effects. This is, however, exactly what the NY Times is apparently aiming for in its discussion of sexism on the 2008 campaign trail. While it lists a few of the more egregious instances of sexism directed toward Senator Clinton, the article generally takes the view of "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann, quoted as saying that "while there were 'individual, sexist, mistakes,' there was no overall sexism" in the media's campaign coverage.

If this were, in fact, true, it would be quite literally the first time in the history of women and higher political office that sexism had not been evident in campaign media coverage. This media bias has been fairly conclusively documented, most recently in Erika Falk's Women for President: Media Bias in Eight Campaigns. Falk's work, however, is hardly the first to argue that the media treat female candidates for elective office distinctly differently than men. Kim Fridkin Kahn has written on this phenomenon ("Assessing the Media's Impact on the Political Fortunes of Women") as have Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis in their Madam President: Women Blazing the Leadership Trail. And these are just the works on this issue that I happen to have on my bookshelf. That are undoubtedly others. What they all have in common is their contention that there is a distinct differentiation between the way male and female political campaigns are covered by the news media and that this differentiation is almost uniformly detrimental to the female candidate. That the NY Times should fail to consider this scholarly data in favor of giving the very media outlets accused of the worst instances of sexism and gender bias the opportunity to pass the buck only serves to make clear how pervasive this sexism really is in the mainstream media.

As for Christopher Hitchens, I'm sure it's no surprise that I've never been a fan. However, his ridiculous attempt to explain away some of the worst instances of sexism against Clinton leaves me feeling truly sorry for his wife. Hitchens begins his tirade by suggesting that its ridiculous to compare instances of racisim to instances of sexism because race is a non-existent social construct and gender is representative of actual difference since some of us have a penis and some of us have a vagina. We'll go ahead and gloss right over the fact that gender is just as much a social construct as race is and move on to the seemingly logical conclusion to Hitchens' argument - that it's perfectly okay to make fun of people who really are different than you are.

Oh, wait. There's more.

Hitchens goes on to defend the NY Times' description of Senator Clinton's laugh as a "cackle" because it's the most accurate word to "convey what her awkward noise sounded like." In the process, Hitchens conveniently misses the obvious connotation behind the use of a word like "cackle" to describe Senator Clinton - that of the wicked witch. In his big finale, Hitchens bemoans the fact that

People who favor Sen. Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the United States in time of war only because she would be the first vagina-possessing person to hold the job. But—and here's the catch—people who do not favor her are not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and has feminine characteristics.

If by "feminine characteristics" Hitchens is referring to the fact that those who do not favor Senator Clinton should refrain from describing her as a cackling witch with a cleavage problem who'll turn psychotic as soon as you stop banging her, then I am forced to agree with him. Those are exactly the "feminine characteristics" that should never be alluded to.