Showing posts with label Today in Misogyny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Today in Misogyny. Show all posts

An Observation

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, May 03, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

I think it's positively adorable (ahem) that misogynist haters of Hillary Clinton think we can't tell the difference between someone who dislikes her policies and someone who hates her for who she is.

Guess what, fuckers? We can.

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My Point, Here It Is

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, April 25, 2017
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Last night, Chelsea Clinton was trending on Twitter, in part because she was obliged to respond (again) to male journalists insisting that she was running for office, despite the fact that she has not said that she has plans to run for office.


I had a few thoughts about that.


That is not to suggest, naturally, that Ivanka Trump is not intelligent. But she is not knowledgable, and she is not keenly concerned with facts and reality.

People can be intelligent, and still not be very smart—or wise, if you prefer.

Certainly, central to Ivanka Trump's personal branding is that she is a "brilliant" businesswoman, savvy and cunning, but decidedly not central to her personal branding is that she is a wonky nerdlady armed with solid facts and earned expertise.

To the absolute contrary, central to the entire Trump brand is being "business geniuses" while routinely claiming a lack of knowledge on an array of policy subjects to rationalize their tremendous fuck-ups.

Of course the movement against smart women doesn't target women whose innate intelligence doesn't threaten the status quo, who are armed with talking points and never facts, but instead targets women whose knowledge is used to agitate against privilege.

And whose competency itself indicts the status quo, by highlighting the cavernous disparity of opportunities between the smart women who are outside power centers looking in at the mediocre men running them.

Which is why no matter what indefensible horseshit comes out of Ivanka's mouth, there are large swaths of the political press who will either give it cursory scrutiny or none at all, or actively defend her—while Chelsea Clinton can insist all day every day that she's not running for office, and there are members of the political press who will effectively call her a fucking liar. Because they assert to know her better than she knows herself.

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The Movement Against Smart Women

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, April 24, 2017
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We are in a moment in the United States in which millions of women across the nation feel, quite rightly, like the presidential election was a referendum on how we are valued by our country. Given the choice between a proudly feminist candidate and a confessed serial sexual abuser, the latter now occupies the Oval Office.

That general election followed a primary in which the proudly feminist candidate, who is the most qualified person ever to seek the presidency, was denounced by her (then) Democratic opponent as an "establishment" candidate, which was an inherently misogynistic argument, being made by a man with tremendously less policy knowledge than she has.

Following the election, we have been subjected to a national gaslighting, a central part of which is telling that historic female candidate to "go away" and telling the women who want to talk about her to "get over it" and STFU.

Despite that fact she was right about the current president, and lots and lots of other stuff, and that many of her prominent female supporters were a bunch of goddamned Cassandras who were right not only about her general election opponent but her primary opponent, as well.

And now, if any of the people who were profoundly, insistently, dangerously wrong can even bring themselves to begrudgingly admit we were right, it is followed immediately by the belligerent assertion that it doesn't matter. A line is drawn: Sure, you were right, but now we are where we are, so let's move on.

Let's not.

Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign can be seen as a turning point at which the harassment of and 'splaining at knowledgeable—and correct—women reached such epic and visible proportions that it became difficult to ignore, even to those most determined to ignore it.

But it was not, as it is sometimes regarded, the instigation of this dynamic. It was the nadir. It was the broadest (pun intended) issue around which people on either side of the dynamic coalesced, the one to which mass media paid the most attention.

Clinton's campaign was the inevitable culmination of a movement against smart women which has been underway for quite some time.

One might reasonably argue that this movement's genesis is virtually impossible to pinpoint, as there are examples of smart women being ignored, shouted down, and harmed stretching back to the origins of the country, and then back before that.

There is a long and ugly tradition into which neatly fits what might called a new iteration of an ancient movement.

This new iteration is heavily centered around online discourse, and the many ways the internet has abetted its rise. By giving women more opportunities to speak, to participate in the public conversation with lower barriers to entry, the internet also provided more opportunity for people to insert themselves as arbiters, contrarians, devil's advocates, disruptors, and silencers.

And while there is no shortage of sadistic abusers who try to silence smart women via threats and harassment, the movement against smart women is largely led by (primarily although not exclusively) white men whose interactions with us are not evidently abusive, but are insistently disrespectful, condescending, patronizing, and hallmarked by pervasive wrongness about basic facts.

Whatever our areas of expertise, they are worthless to these men who have contempt for smart women. There is no deference to our knowledge, no matter how frequently and unassailably demonstrated. Armed with nothing but their own certitude and some reductive bullshit they gleaned from a social media meme, they come at us with hostile lectures, laughable in their inaccuracy.

Any attempt to engage, to provide the actual facts or relevant context or necessary history, is met not with thoughtful discussion but an unaccountable insistence that they are right, that the details don't matter, that their opinions are just as valid as our facts, and, inevitably, that we are bitches.

We are not even allowed to be authorities on our own lives, no less anything else.

On occasions when they are proven indisputably incorrect, they do not concede or apologize or credit us with bettering them. They disappear.

These interpersonal dynamics are replicated across the culture: In almost every industry, women are underrepresented in leadership roles; in academia, female professors are obliged to fret about self-aggrandizing male students giving them poor reviews because their instructors refused to defer to their claimed expertise; in hardware stores and at car dealerships, knowledgeable women are treated like ninny-brained know-nothings.

And of course this infects our politics.


Proof of competency, no matter how consistent, does not qualify smart women as experts. To the absolute contrary, the more a woman is consistently right, the more likely she is to be likely to be treated with hostility.

That is the signature of the movement against strong women.

The more you demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, the more you are hated.

It is a feminist backlash, but a very specific one: Women who are smart—and attendantly capable and independent—are threatening. And must be stopped.


It's no surprise that the campaign of Hillary Clinton, one of the most competent and knowledgeable women on the planet, became the focal point of this movement against smart women, who have no truck with the idea that coasting on privilege is men's birthright.

But this movement is bigger than the campaign, even as the campaign has highlighted one of its essential truths with which we refuse to meaningfully reckon: The mostly white men—and the exceptionalized women who share their meme-based educations, or proudly boast about their "alternative facts"—are resentful about losing their privilege.

They have been activated by being held to the same expectations as women and other marginalized people. And smart women, and other marginalized people, who Know Things are visible evidence that their fortunes aren't exclusively dictated by banks, billionaires, and trade policy.

Faced with the erosion of their privilege, the members of the movement against smart women have done what they've accused marginalized people of doing lo these many years—playing the victim.

Which is not to say that there aren't policies which are harmful to privileged men. Of course there are. But those men aren't turning to the smart women who have solid plans for addressing those policies, because those plans include the expectation of yielding the privilege underwriting the luxury on which they've traded for their whole lives.

They don't want serious solutions. They want their privilege restored.

And they view smart women as a deep and abiding threat to the restoration of that privilege. For good reason, as we aren't keen to remain second-class citizens in deference to lazy men's egos.

So they're coming after the smart women.

And that is in no small part because masculinity has defined itself exclusively in contradistinction to the feminine for so long that challenges to the idea of inherent male superiority has left millions of American men floundering—and the best answer most of them have found for the question "What is my role if not a keeper of women?" is "I am a victim of oppression by women." Femininity has become the center-pin around which masculinity pivots—on one side there is dominion; on the other side, subjugation.

A great number of men have responded to this by being overt oppressors. And a great many more have responded by ostensibly arguing for equality, while remaining firmly indifferent to social justice.

They want to talk about their own dwindling opportunities in an increasingly corporatized, automated state while ignoring that, where their opportunities are limited, so are everyone else's, but they retain the privilege that preferences them.

Justice doesn't look like upholding those rules. Justice looks like changing the rules altogether—which is something smart women have known for a very long time.

Women have had to change the rules, because we were told "You can't," because we had seemingly unnavigable barriers put in our way by people who didn't want us to succeed, because the rules were designed so that we fail. For many of us, the odds have been against us our whole lives; everything we've ever done has been in defiance of the distinct likelihood—and expectation—that we would settle for less than we wanted.

But we wanted more, and so we changed the rules—primarily by raising the bar.

The men who resent that the bar has been raised, their unearned privilege undermined and replaced with an expectation to achieve to the same level as women who hadn't their head start, can now do naught but whine about victimhood. They haven't yet realized that they are not victims of women, who only want the equality that's been denied them, but victims of a patriarchal culture that has spoiled men with the promise of success without effort, and robbed them of the will to expect more of themselves.

Intersectional Feminism/Womanism has built a framework for implementing new rules. And, yes, that progress is a long slog. Instant gratification isn't part of the deal—but smart women who tell you the truth, rather than what you want to hear, is.

And we all need to get real about the fact that there is a vast and reprehensible movement being orchestrated against Smart Women Who Know Things, by men who think the truth sucks.


The endemic rejection of smart women is a problem. It is one of the key reasons we are now saddled with a president who doesn't know anything about the job. It is one of the key reasons why the Democrats are running away from Hillary Clinton and elevating Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that his economic credentials are absurd. It is one of the key reasons that lots of good ideas aren't heard, until a man says them—and sometimes that doesn't happen quickly enough, or at all.

This movement, which transcends political affiliation, must be called out, examined, and dismantled. It is having catastrophic consequences, which is to say nothing of the harm done to individual women by regarding us with contempt.

One doesn't have to be a woman, or even particularly smart, to see that.

Open Wide...
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Bernie Sanders, My Autonomy Is Not Negotiable

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, April 21, 2017
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As Aphra_Behn reported on Wednesday, Bernie Sanders, in his capacity as co-chair of Democratic outreach, said flatly of Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff: "He's not a progressive," while declaring as "progressive" Nebraska Democrat Heath Mello, despite the fact that Mello has sponsored legislation that would restrict abortion rights.

Yesterday, Sanders defended that position to NPR Politics:

Sanders pushed back against the criticism. "The truth is that in some conservative states there will be candidates that are popular candidates who may not agree with me on every issue. I understand it. That's what politics is about," Sanders told NPR.

"If we are going to protect a woman's right to choose, at the end of the day we're going to need Democratic control over the House and the Senate, and state governments all over this nation," he said. "And we have got to appreciate where people come from, and do our best to fight for the pro-choice agenda. But I think you just can't exclude people who disagree with us on one issue."
This is absolutely incredible. After holding Ossoff to a litmus test on vaguely defined "economic issues," he gives Mello a pass on abortion rights because there are candidates "who may not agree with [him] on every issue."

Economic issues are non-negotiable, but abortion is. It's just "one issue."


Bernie Sanders does not have the right to casually negotiate away my bodily autonomy. But he believes he does—no less under the auspices of centering economic issues as paramount, despite the fact that control over our reproduction is a crucial economic issue for women. Indeed, our self-determination regarding reproductive choices is the key indicator of women's financial security.

That Sanders fails to regard reproductive rights as a central economic issue is perfectly, terribly reflective of his comprehensive failure of intersectional analysis and policy.

That is the problem that I, and many others, have had with Sanders all along.

This isn't just an issue of Sanders prioritizing reproductive rights over economic issues: It's an issue of Sanders failing to understand, or acknowledge, that reproductive rights is a key economic issue.

Either he doesn't understand that, or he simply doesn't care, because it isn't a key economic issue for (cis) men.

And if Sanders were just another old dosey relic quickly approaching the end of an inglorious political career, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But he isn't. He is operating in an official Democratic Party capacity (a decision by the Democrats almost as inexplicable as allowing him to run as a Democrat in the first place).

Further to that, he has positioned himself as the arbiter of What Is Progressive. And treating women's autonomy, agency, consent, and very equality under the law as negotiable is a colossally retrogressive position. It is the opposite of progressive.

I am angry that Sanders is obliging me to fight against his profoundly unprogressive ideas, when I've got enough to fucking worry about fighting against Trump and the rest of the dirtbags in the Republican Party.

And I am angry that the Democrats, in continuing to give a platform to these garbage ideas, is shitting all over the work Hillary Clinton busted her ass doing to activate 10 million new Democrats who I'm guessing won't compromise on women's personhood, since they supported the candidate who was vocal and unyielding in her support of reproductive rights.

Any movement that wants to redefine "progressive" in a way that deprioritizes women's personhood is a movement of which I want no part.

Bernie Sanders' "progressivism" is toxic. The Democratic leadership needs to wake up to that reality, and fast.

Open Wide...
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Gee, This Seems Familiar

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, April 07, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

Step One: A bunch of entirely premature articles run about how this female Democratic candidate will/should definitely run for president in an election that is still very far away.

Step Two: A bunch of thinkpieces run about how that woman is insufficiently progressive, citing positions she once held but on which she has since moved leftward.

Step Three: Her motives, integrity, and authenticity are questioned. Her leftward movement is deemed suspect and opportunistic.

Step Four: Before this woman has even said she is running for president, a movement to STOP HER emerges.

Am I talking about Hillary Clinton? Well, yes. But I am also talking about Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

Case in point: In February, a slew of "Gillibrand 2020" stories were published, such as the New York Times' "Kirsten Gillibrand and the Anti-Trump Left: 2020 Foresight?," USA Today's "Gillibrand 2020? Senator Talks Future," and Syracuse's "Will Kirsten Gillibrand Run for President in 2020?," among others, many of which ran even after Gillibrand said she was not planning on running for president.

And now this [H/T to Amadi]: A Vice piece by Eve Peyser titled "The Resistance's Latest Hero Used to Be Pro-Gun and Anti-Immigration," and subtitled "New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is fighting against Trump, but will the left buy her conversion story?"

What's particularly obnoxious about this piece is that it links to the Rebecca Traister article I mentioned the other day, in which Gillibrand talks explicitly about changing her views after listening to people affected by the policies she supported. Which is ostensibly what we want progressives to do.

If that sounds familiar, it's possibly because I've made the same point about Hillary Clinton dozens of times. For example:

Progressives always say that we want Democrats to get more progressive, to admit their failures, to meaningfully apologize when they fuck up, to embrace better policies when shitty policies they endorsed fail, to progress. But when Clinton does precisely that, instead of being commended for doing exactly what progressives ostensibly want Democratic politicians to do, she's just a terrible harpy who only "evolves" for political expediency.

...[O]n a personal level, as someone who has publicly learned and changed her mind dramatically about a number of issues over the decade I've been doing this, I just find it really obnoxious when people are held to positions they've changed and mistakes they've made, for which they've apologized. Progressives are meant to progress.

...And then there's this: Holding the same views for decades is antithetical to progressivism. The world changes; views and policies need to change. Consistency isn't always a positive, when circumstances demand otherwise.
This seems like a fairly straightforward concept. Yet here we are again.

This is a dynamic to which white male politicians are simply not held. Never mind positions on which they've evolved or for which they've apologized; they are also not inescapably haunted by their worst moments outside of policy. There are legions of young (and not so young) Democrats who have never even heard about beloved "Uncle Joe" Biden's plagiarism scandal, nor his disgraceful behavior toward Anita Hill, nor his long history of "inappropriate" jokes.

The only time a white male candidate's ancient policies and flaws seem to matter is when he is running on the same ticket as a woman.

Anyway. This demonstrable dynamic tells us a lot about how far we have to go in terms of fair treatment of female politicians.

It also further exposes the lie (already made plain by the way people turned on Senator Elizabeth Warren when she endorsed Clinton) that "it's not that Clinton is a woman; I'd vote for a different woman." Sure sure. Except every woman mysteriously gets destroyed in precisely the same way, providing the same excuses not to vote for her.

Funny, that.

Open Wide...
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How to Help Extraterrestrials Deduce the Nature of Mike Pence's Chivalry

Posted by Fannie Wolfe at Thursday, April 06, 2017
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[Content Note: Rape culture, description of sexual assault, misogyny.]

When our extra-terrestrial (ET) overlords arrive in the US and demand to be taken to our dear leaders, what will we say when they ask about human propriety, respect, and etiquette?

Do we tell them, this, of Trump: He has admitted on tape to grabbing women's genitals without their consent, he has been accused of walking in on female, teenage pageant contestants in various states of undress, and he's been accused by multiple women of assault, groping, and harassment. He also regularly condoned chants of "lock her up" against his his female opponent in the 2016 Election and promised to imprison her if he won. His female opponent, we must explain, has been convicted of no crime.

Also, per Donald Trump, "Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!"

Accordingly, our ET friends would ask, So, given the definition of respect on your planet, we shall introduce ourselves by reaching for the nearest set of genitals?

Well, I would explain, other views exist.

We would then turn to Pence: He is a politician who famously refuses to have dinner alone with women if his wife is not present. This refusal is respectful, we are to believe, as it is an avoidance of temptation and a way to honor his commitment to his wife.

Well, that seems better, the ET would say.  However, approximately half the humans Pence deigns to serve as a politician are women, yes?


I would answer in the affirmative.

They might continue: Then how can a man who can't be trusted to dine alone with women be trusted to make policy decisions affecting women? Isn't that sort of a wolf guarding the sheep-house situation?

I would correct their idiom usage but assure them that, yes, I believe their basic observation to be correct. It certainly does seem as though if a person is only able to see women through the prism "sexual temptation" that person might be unqualified to hold public office in a nation in which women exist.

Starting to get on a roll, our ET friends would continue: Then, can a man who can't be trusted to dine alone with women furthermore be trusted to even be alone in any space with them? Of all human  interactions that occur, what is the unique danger that dining poses to women, when men are nearby?

A logical question. And, perhaps at this juncture our ET friends would remember Donald's behavior toward women and would experience an ah-ha moment of sorts! Ah yes, they would speculate. Men must not eat alone with women because men run the risk of spontaneously grabbing women's genitals whilst dining and the way to keep women safe from men is to therefore exclude women from things.

I would try to interrupt our ET friends, letting them know that not all men (hashtag) are like that. But, if they were intelligent creatures (which they would be, having requested to speak with the feminists first), they would likely continue the line of logical inquiry: If men are so easily tempted and unable to control their sexual impulses during the course of basic bodily nourishment, as this Mike Pence suggests, why is it that men, rather than women, are in charge of so very many things on your planet? Why is not a more responsible gender in charge?

But the question, of course, would answer itself. And, together, ETs and I would enter a Sapir-Whorfian feminist hivemind of perfect knowledge: When men rule, men make the rules.

The rules do not have to be logical, they just have to ensure that the continuation of male supremacy is embedded as a consequence of the rules, even if the rules contain other, polite features. Pence's rule, for instance, ensures that women remain classified as "sexual temptation," but has the added bonus of, for him, eliminating infidelity opportunities.

So, despite what on the surface might look like Donald and Pence being very different sorts of men treating women very disparately, our ET visitors might deduce quite quickly that a wish for continued male supremacy is a bond that unites many men across the political spectrum like almost nothing else.

It is only the manifestations of this wish that differ and the extent to which it's cloaked.

Trump's brand of male supremacy is overt: Women's bodies can be violated simply because a powerful man wills it. Women are, under this doctrine, objects who lack full autonomy and whose boundaries are violable.

Pence's brand of male supremacy is similar, but on the surface—like himself—more polite. It's so polite-seeming that we endure endless rounds of critics asking, What's the big deal, even? So what that he won't eat with women!

What's the big deal? Well, it's like I always say.

Show me a man who insists on treating a woman like a lady, and you can almost always guarantee that he expects to be treated Like a Man. That is to say, as women's superior. Acknowledgement of this gender balance is one the many bargains women are continually asked to strike when it comes to Pence-esque "chivalry" or "benevolent" sexism.

Inherent in this bargain is that it's an agreement of sorts: conditions exist for both sides. For women, chivalry is not granted to all women, but only to certain classes of compliant women. Karen Pence, for instance, but usually not poor women, or women of color, or trans women, or queer women, or fat women, or butch women, or ambitious women. And so on.

Consider, for instance, that Pence-who-is-too-respectful-to-eat-with-women just cast a rare tie-breaking vote to withhold federal funding from Planned Parenthood. Our ET friends might ask, If this man is respectful of women, why would he decrease women's access to healthcare?

Here, I would remind them that when faced with such illogic, the more relevant question is usually, How does this action benefit male supremacy?
 
A second aspect of the "chivalry" bargain is that you best be grateful for it, women!  Here I would invite our ETs to, during their time on Earth, refuse a man's offered chivalry and then to report back how that worked out for them.

A third aspect of "chivalry," I would explain, is accepting the worldview that men and women have different, but complementary, roles with respect to one another—with the man on top. That these traits are ever-shifting across time, place, and culture speaks to their fragility, but the bargain requires us to pretend that these traits are, instead, fixed and universal.

Take a man who's used to treating only certain classes of men as his intellectual peers, remove him from his male-discourse-only bubble, and plop him instead into, say, a roomful of feminist women (the horror!). Suddenly, his roadmap for interaction is gone. The women are no longer reading from his preferred subservient script. Anything can happen and—

Wait! Our ET observers would interrupt with excitement. Could these fragile myths about gender, of which you speak, possibly manifest as the deliberate avoidance of women in certain public settings, because interacting with women in non-controlled settings might cause his "knowns" about the class "woman" to fall away? And if these "knowns" start to fall away, what other "knowns"—particularly the "known" of male superiority—might disintegrate?

At this point, I would beam with pride at our ET visitors and tell them what astute observations they have made thus far. To reward them, I would invite them into my home for dinner, because I'm afraid of neither aliens nor accidentally cheating on my spouse during meals.

I would end by politely asking for a cruise in their pod and suggesting that, considering what we've learned thus far, we skip the part where I take them to our leaders. After all, a far more decent, capable, and interesting person might be walking in the woods somewhere, and wouldn't it be something if we ran into her?

*whispers* The truth is out there.

Open Wide...
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Three More Reasons I Won't Get Over It

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, April 04, 2017
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Last week, I wrote that one of the many reasons I can't and won't get over the results of the election is that "Every time Trump says, does, endorses, proposes, or signs anything, I know what Clinton's position would have been. Every time he nominates someone, I know what Clinton's administration would have looked like. Every time he comments on some piece of shit legislation Congressional Republicans are conspiring to unleash on the public, I know what Clinton would have said about it. ...They are stark, these disparities between what is and what could have been."

In the news this morning are three critically important examples of the differences between these two candidates, about whom far, far too many people said there was no discernible difference.

1. [Content Note: Police brutality; racism] Sari Horwitz, Mark Berman, and Wesley Lowery at the Washington Post: Sessions Orders Justice Department to Review All Police Reform Agreements.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Justice Department officials to review reform agreements with troubled police forces nationwide, saying it was necessary to ensure that these pacts do not work against the Trump administration's goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.

In a two-page memo released Monday, Sessions said agreements reached previously between the department's civil rights division and local police departments — a key legacy of the Obama administration — will be subject to review by his two top deputies, throwing into question whether all of the agreements will stay in place.

...Since 2009, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into law enforcement agencies and has been enforcing 14 consent decrees, along with some other agreements. Civil rights advocates fear that Sessions's memo could particularly imperil the status of agreements that have yet to be finalized, such as a pending agreement with the Chicago Police Department.

"This is terrifying," said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, who spent five years as the department's chief of special litigation, overseeing investigations into 23 police departments such as New Orleans, Cleveland, and Ferguson, Mo. "This raises the question of whether, under the current attorney general, the Department of Justice is going to walk away from its obligation to ensure that law enforcement across the country is following the Constitution."
Emphasis mine.

Donald Trump's exclusive priority is "promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime," which deliberately ignores that many of the people killed by police aren't engaged in violent crime when they are killed. Many deadly police shootings start with municipal violations, or allegations of petty crimes, or "compliance failures" resulting from disability and/or mental illness. And they are disproportionately governed by racism.

Trump, with his white supremacist co-conspirator Sessions, are endeavoring to bury all of this with "law and order" policies rooted in racist narratives that appeal to Trump's voter base, who don't want to hear anything contradictory to their firmly held belief that all police officers are heroes whose lives are constantly at risk because of violent swarthy thugs.

This was not Hillary Clinton's view. To the absolute contrary, she proposed that the federal government had an obligation to work with police forces to address overt racism, implicit bias, and woefully insufficient training on interacting with people with mental illness. Which she made clear many times along the campaign trail and during the first presidential debate:

LESTER HOLT: Secretary Clinton, last week, you said we've got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias. Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people?

HILLARY CLINTON: Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way? But when it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.

I've met with a group of very distinguished, experienced police chiefs a few weeks ago. They admit it's an issue. They've got a lot of concerns. Mental health is one of the biggest concerns, because now police are having to handle a lot of really difficult mental health problems on the street. They want support, they want more training, they want more assistance. And I think the federal government could be in a position where we would offer and provide that.
People will die because of Trump's indifference to these issues. I have no inclination to get over that.

2. [CN: Misogyny] Laura Bassett at the Huffington Post: Donald Trump Defunds Global Maternal Health Organization.
Days after Melania Trump presented courage awards to 13 women working for gender equity around the globe, [Donald] Trump's administration halted all U.S. grants to the United Nations Population Fund, an international humanitarian aid organization that provides reproductive health care and works to end child marriage and female genital cutting in more than 150 countries.

The State Department invoked the 1985 Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which he said will ensure that "U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization." President George W. Bush used the same policy to defund the UNFPA from 2002 to 2008, arguing that the organization's presence in China constituted participation in the country's "one child" coercive family planning policy.

The UNFPA does not provide or promote abortions. The organization works in China to make reproductive health program voluntary and rights-based and has advocated against the country's one-child policy. The Trump administration did not explain exactly how it determined that the UNFPA violated any U.S. law.

"The UNFPA no longer provides any financial support to the Chinese government to support its family planning program. Not a dollar," said Peter Yeo, vice president of public policy at the United Nations Foundation. "So I'm not quite frankly sure how you make this Kemp-Kasten determination with a straight face."

Trump's move will pull $76 million from the UNFPA ― about 7 percent of its budget. In 2016, the funding provided access to contraceptives to 800,000 people around the world and prevented an estimated 100,000 unsafe abortions and 10,000 maternal deaths, according to the organization.
By way of reminder, during the third presidential debate, Trump claimed that nobody respects women more than he does, right before he called Clinton a "nasty woman."

TRUMP: Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody. Nobody has more respect. [edit] Such a nasty woman.
Someone who has even a modicum of respect for women does not use a demonstrably dishonest argument to justify defunding a program that has "prevented an estimated 100,000 unsafe abortions and 10,000 maternal deaths."

This program, it should go without saying, would never have been defunded under a Hillary Clinton administration.

People will die because of Trump's hostility toward women's global healthcare. I have no inclination to get over that.

3. [CN: Homophobia; violence; death] Tanya Lokshina at Human Rights Watch: Anti-LGBT Violence in Chechnya: When Filing "Official Complaints" Isn't an Option.
For several weeks now, a brutal campaign against LGBT people has been sweeping through Chechnya. Law enforcement and security agency officials under control of the ruthless head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, have rounded up dozens of men on suspicion of being gay, torturing and humiliating the victims. Some of the men have forcibly disappeared. Others were returned to their families barely alive from beatings. At least three men apparently have died since this brutal campaign began.

...Kadyrov's press secretary immediately described the report as "absolute lies and disinformation," contending that there were no gay people in Chechnya and then adding cynically, "If there were such people in Chechnya, law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning."

...The information published by Novaya Gazeta is consistent with the reports Human Rights Watch recently received from numerous trusted sources, including sources on the ground. The number of sources and the consistency of the stories leaves us with no doubt that these devastating developments have indeed occurred.

...On Monday, 3 April President Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, stated that the Kremlin was previously not aware of the situation, but that law enforcement authorities would look into these media reports. On the one hand, this seems like good news, a signal to investigative officials to run a check promptly. On the other hand, Peskov also suggested that people who supposedly suffered from abuses by law enforcement officials should "file official complaints" and "go to court" without indicating what, if anything, Russian authorities are planning to do to protect them.

...Filing an official complaint against local security officials is extremely dangerous, as retaliation by local authorities is practically inevitable.
Putin's administration is recommending that LGBTQ people file official complaints if they want help, despite the fact that it's law enforcement and security agency officials who are waging the campaign of violence. In other words: Putin will do nothing. And of course that was always going to be the case, because Putin is virulently anti-LGBTQ.

Trump will remain utterly silent about this brutal campaign against LGBTQ Russians, because he is no friend to the LGBTQ community and because he is Putin's puppet.

Clinton, by contrast, had no qualms about criticizing Putin (hence the Russian meddling in the election), and promised as far back as her 2008 campaign to make to make global LGBTQ rights an active "part of American foreign policy," which is a promise she kept as Secretary of State.

Now, because of Trump's obsequience to Putin and his indifference to the safety of LGBTQ people, people will die. I have no inclination to get over that.

* * *

Irrespective of increasingly popular assertions that racism, misogyny, and homophobia played no role in the last election, they are irrefutably playing a role in the Trump administration now.

They were always going to play a role. Anyone who imagined otherwise is being willfully ignorant.

And anyone who promulgated the despicable narrative that Clinton and Trump were "basically the same" bears responsibility for elevating the candidate who shamelessly trafficks in deadly bigotry, while undermining the candidate whose policies and personal decency would have made the difference between life and death for the marginalized people who will suffer under Trump's reprehensible presidency.

Elections have consequences. That is not a bumper sticker slogan. It is an immense truth, in three deceptively simple words.

I'm not making this point to be "right." I'm making it because I never, ever, want this country to make the same catastrophic mistake again.

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Hillary Clinton, Y'all

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, March 29, 2017
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[Content Note: Discussion of misogyny and racism.]

Hillary Clinton spoke to the Professional Business Women California Conference yesterday, and, during a section in which she spoke about facing misogyny in the workplace, she addressed the vile mistreatment of Rep. Maxine Waters and April Ryan, noting that these are indignities women face—and are obliged to keep doing their jobs despite—every day on the job. (Including her.)

...to get ahead. I bet just about everyone in this room has had the experience of saying something in a meeting that gets ignored; ten, twenty minutes later, a man says the same thing and everybody thinks it's genius! [appreciative laughter and applause from the audience]

And I think we should pool our respective reactions so that you have right at your fingertips [snaps her fingers] exactly what to say. "Nice thought. A little slow on the uptake, but good idea." [laughter and applause]

And where everyday sexism and structural barriers were once blatant, today they're sometimes harder to spot, but, make no mistake, they're still with us. Just look at all that's happened in the last few days to women who were simply doing their jobs.

April Ryan, a respected journalist with unrivaled integrity, was doing her job just this afternoon in the White House press room, when she was patronized and cut off, trying to ask a question. One of your own California congresswomen, Maxine Waters, was taunted with a racist joke about her hair.

Now, too many women, especially women of color, have had a lifetime of practice taking precisely these kinds of indignities in stride. But why should we have to?

And any woman who thinks this couldn't be directed at her is living in a dreamworld. [applause]

I mean, it's not like I didn't know all the nasty things they were saying about me. [laughter] Some of them were actually quite creative; ones I hadn't heard before! [laughter]

But you just have to keep going.
This, among many other reasons, is why I will never ever get over it. She is a woman who stands up for women.

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These Are Terrible Men

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, March 28, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogynoir.]

As I mentioned in today's We Resist thread, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly said an appalling racist and misogynist thing about Rep. Maxine Waters: "I didn't hear a word she said; I was looking at the James Brown wig."

Waters, it should be noted, is one of Trump's fiercest critics, while O'Reilly is one of Trump's most shameless water carriers.

O'Reilly was not alone: His Fox colleague Eric Bolling also responded to a clip of Waters criticizing Trump by admonishing her to "step away from the crack pipe."

BOLLING: How's this, Congresswoman? You saw what happened to Whitney Houston. Step away from the crack pipe. [His off-camera colleagues laugh.] Step away from the xanax. Step away from the lorazepam. Because it's gonna get you in trouble. How else does she explain those comments?
Just horrible.

Then, at today's White House Press Briefing, Sean Spicer scolded April Ryan, a Black reporter, for shaking her head in response to his usual disgorgement of nonsense and lies.

SPICER: ...which is the president— I'm sorry, please— Stop shaking your head again.
April Ryan's response on Twitter: "Lawd!!!!"

Lawd indeed. These are terrible men. Terrible men who telegraph in every conceivable way (ahem) that women—and particularly women of color—are not welcome at their table. Black women are not even allowed to express themselves publicly without being audited and shamed.

Black women are indispensably important to Democratic politics, progressive organizing, and social justice. These terrible men are well aware of that (even if a lot of white progressives remain stubbornly resistant to this idea).


I take up space in solidarity with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, reporter April Ryan, and all the Black women who are especially targeted directly and indirectly by the words, deeds, and policies of this administration and its surrogates.

And to these terrible men, I say: I see you.

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The "Healthcare" Vote Is Today

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, March 24, 2017
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After calling off the scheduled vote last night, House Republicans will, at Donald Trump's urging, have the vote today at 10:00am ET.


Especially if your rep is a Republican who is on the fence, make those calls to urge them to vote no. Here is a thread about how that went for me with my Republican rep yesterday. Call call call!

[Content Note: Misogyny.]

Trump started the day by tweeting this garbage: "The irony is that the Freedom Caucus, which is very pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue if they stop this plan!"


Trump is using his Twitter account to advertise reducing healthcare access for women and trans people as a feature of the GOP plan. (And furthering the lie that federal tax dollars are used to fund abortion. Not a dime of it is.)

The media is almost universally reporting on this tweet as Trump going after his own party. Sure. But how he's doing it is the real story.

A profoundly misogynist president is taunting the men (used advisedly) of his profoundly misogynist party to vote for a "healthcare" reform bill so that they don't look like pussies (again, used advisedly) for refusing to be utterly cruel to women and trans people (in particular) who depend on Planned Parenthood for healthcare.

It doesn't get any more despicable than that.

Although, a very close second is the report last night that members of the House GOP caucus were crying at their own heroics:


Some reports say that the House GOP now has the numbers to pass the bill. Others say they still don't have them. But my assumption is that this thing is going to pass. I hope I'm wrong.


KEEP CALLING. That's all we can do right now.

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His Extremely Presidential Voice

Posted by Fannie Wolfe at Thursday, March 23, 2017
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[Content Note: Description of sexual assault; misogyny.]

Via Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair (emphasis added):

"Trump's one brief moment of acting presidential—when he read off a teleprompter for 60 minutes and 10 seconds during his address to Congress—served only to show just how low the bar for presidential behavior has plummeted since January. Watching TV commentators applaud him for containing himself for a little over an hour was like hearing a parent praise a difficult child for not pooping in his pants during a pre-school interview. Besides, vintage Trump is not going anywhere anytime soon. A couple of weeks earlier, during a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator's breasts—although he expressed this in his own, fragrant fashion."
I know we have a seemingly never-ending cascade of items to resist with respect to Donald Trump and his Republican administration.

But, I will never forget that, at 70 years of age, misogyny and imagined male supremacy are inextricably embedded within the fabric of the man's deplorable personality.

As such, even though some media elites might fawn over his ability to, from time to time, read from a teleprompter without pulling out his penis and plopping it onto the podium for all to admire, at his core he is a misogynist who has admitted on tape to grabbing women's genitals without their consent. Many people voted for him, not in spite of what having a misogynist as president symbolizes in terms of gender dynamics, but precisely because of it.

Now, I think that after all that has transpired in the past couple of months, we can drop the pretense that those "lock her up" chants were actually about a concern for criminal wrongdoing or treason and instead admit that maybe, just maybe, they were about something else entirely.

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There Is No Excuse for This

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, March 20, 2017
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On Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with Donald Trump at the White House. During a press appearance, the two sat side-by-side in familiar chairs, while the sounds of cameras clicked away. The press called for a handshake. Merkel asked Trump if he wanted to do a handshake, the same handshake that U.S. presidents do with visiting foreign dignitaries in those chairs each time. Trump ignored the requests. They did not shake hands.

Later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer would claim that Trump simply did not hear the requests. The video makes that explanation seem very unlikely.

TRUMP: Send a good picture back to Germany, please. Make sure.

MERKEL: [chuckles]

REPORTER: How did your talks go, Mr. President?

TRUMP: Very good.

REPORTER: Talk about NATO?

TRUMP: [nods] Many things.

MERKEL: [answers in German]

REPORTERS: Handshake? Handshake?

MERKEL: Do you want to— Mr. President? Can we have a handshake, please?

TRUMP: [continues to look straight ahead, as Merkel leans toward him; ignores her utterly]

REPORTERS: Handshake?

WH HANDLER: Okay. Thank you, fellas. Thank you. Over here.
The debate, such as it is, since then has been about whether Trump heard the requests for a handshake. Spicer told the German newspaper Der Spiegel that Trump hadn't heard them. Were that indeed the case, and given the ensuing commentary about how rude he'd been to the leader of a key U.S. ally, one might imagine Trump would issue an apology. He has not.

But. BUT. All of that misses the larger point, which is that, even if it were true that Trump simply did not hear the press nor Merkel request a handshake, he shouldn't have to be prompted to engage in what is a basic (and expected) diplomatic gesture.

If Trump didn't hear the prompting, all that means is that he needed to in order to do his job. One of the most rudimentary functions of his job.

I don't know why any American would find it satisfactory that the president can't perform basic diplomatic tasks with our allies, without being instructed to do so. Especially the Tremendously Successful Businessman Donald Trump, who wrote (ahem) an entire book on "the art" of U.S.-centered business deal-making, which virtually always ends in a handshake.

By saying he simply didn't hear the request, they're essentially arguing: "Oh he wasn't being rude! He's just catastrophically ignorant about his job!" Anyone who finds that reassuring has set a bar for the presidency so low that any expectation of competence is "unfair" to Trump.

If you don't believe a president shouldn't have to be told to shake a foreign leader's hand, I can't imagine what basic competency is reasonable to expect.

Do you think Hillary Clinton would've needed to be prompted to shake Angela Merkel's hand? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no.

There is also this: Trump has previously made headlines by shaking men's hands in a way that is inappropriate. I wrote previously: "Trump's handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe today was distressing. He held the PM's hand far too long, jerking him toward him, just like he did to Neil Gorsuch during the SCOTUS nomination announcement. It is also a feature of serial abusers of women that they have no respect for men's bodies/consent either. It just manifests differently."

He also tried it with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but was infamously thwarted.

That we know Trump habitually uses handshakes as displays of dominance is just another datapoint suggesting it wasn't that he "didn't hear" the request to shake Merkel's hand, but ignored it. To prove a point.

The only point he made, however, is that he is a man who will boast about grabbing women to humiliate them against their wills, and refuse to shake a woman's hand in a sign of respect at her request.

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The Trump Effect

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, March 13, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

This story is a week old now, but I only just saw it yesterday. Jena McGregor at the Washington Post: Men's Negotiating Styles Toward Women Grew More Aggressive after Trump's Election, Study Shows.

Wharton assistant professor Corinne Low didn't set out to test the effect Donald Trump's election might have on men's and women's negotiating patterns last year. A gender and family economist, she was looking more broadly into gender differences in communication styles, using experiments to look at how men and women negotiate with one another in a lab at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.

But after the November election, she noticed something interesting in her data. Comparing the results from lab tests she ran during early and late October with tests she ran the week after the election, she noticed a change she called "extremely stark:" On the whole, negotiating partners were more adversarial in their chat-based communication threads. In particular, men were more aggressive when they negotiated with counterparts they knew they were female, using hardball tactics more often.

..."Not only was the communication more aggressive, it was also less effective," she said.
Low notes that their dataset can't tell them whether it's a phenomenon contained to the immediate aftermath of the election, which will diminish with time, or whether "it is something that's shifted and is going to last the entire presidency." But it was a marked departure among men, in the wake of Trump's election.

What I suspect is that Low's finding is not an anomaly. There are almost certainly measurable changes in behavior, specifically behavior of men toward women, across a wide spectrum of interactions. I don't imagine for a moment this increased aggression is limited to negotiation.

And that is very concerning.

Trump's election empowered a lot of ugliness, and now his administration endeavors each day to codify that empowerment.

I don't know where it will end. It will take a long time for us to recover, if we can.

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Republicans Should Not Be in Charge of Healthcare Policy

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, March 10, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny; classism.]

There are a lot of reasons Republicans should not be in charge of healthcare policy, like: Not believing that healthcare is a right; prioritizing corporate profits over people's health and very lives; not regarding abortion (and, in many cases, even contraception) as basic parts of healthcare. As but a few examples.

Over the past few days, Republican men in particular have been showing their asses on healthcare policy, demonstrating exactly why they cannot and should not be entrusted to decide healthcare policy for anyone.

First, there was Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, saying: "Americans have choices. And they've gotta make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they wanna go spend hundreds of dollars of that, maybe they should invest it in their own healthcare."

Then, there was Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, invoking that old chestnut about how everyone can get healthcare at emergency rooms. As though a federal law mandating emergency treatment is a solution for terminal disease. Or chronic illness. Or disability. Or preventative care.

Then, there was White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer refusing to answer how many people would be covered (or lose coverage) under the Republican healthcare proposal, and instead deflecting to commentary about access, as if how many people have (or don't have) health insurance isn't a key part of the access issue.

Then, there was Speaker Paul Ryan, the intellectual [sic] leader of the GOP, revealing he does not understand and/or does not care how insurance works at the most fundamental level.


Then, there was Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois demanding to know why men should have to pay for prenatal healthcare coverage.
Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania: I'd just like to say to our friend from Oklahoma: None of us think this bill is perfect. I've never heard a single Democrat say that this bill was perfect. We knew that it needed work, and we wanted for the last seven years to work with Republicans to try to improve this bill. You guys weren't very interested in that. I'm not sure what the gentleman is talking about when he talks about mandates. What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with? Certainly not with preexisting conditions, or caps on benefits, or letting your child stay on the policy to 26. So I'm curious, what is it we're mandating—

Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois: Will the gentleman yield?

Doyle: Yeah, sure.

Shimkus: What about men having to purchase prenatal care? [Doyle stutters in disbelief; murmurs throughout the chamber] I'm just— Is that not correct?

Doyle: Ah, ah, reclaiming my time!

Shimkus: Should they?!

Doyle: Reclaiming my time! There's no such thing as ala carte— [call for order] There's no such thing as ala carte insurance, John. You don't, you don't get a list and say, "Gimme that."

Shimkus: That's the point! That's the point! We want the consumer to be able to go to the insurance market and be able to negotiate on a plan—

Doyle: You tell— Reclaiming my time! [call for order] You tell me what insurance company will do that. There isn't a single insurance company in the world that does that, John. So you're talking about something that doesn't exist!
And then there was Rep. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who incredibly argued that poor people "just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

In response to a question about Medicaid expansion, Marshall said:
"Just like Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us,'" he said. "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged.

"Just, like, homeless people. …I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don't want health care," he said. "The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I'm not judging, I'm just saying socially that's where they are. So there's a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER."
Echoes of Mitt Romney's 47 percent of people refuse to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" comments. It was ignorant, indecent rubbish then, and it's ignorant, indecent rubbish now.

And finally, of course, there was Donald Trump, skipping out on promoting his party's healthcare proposal, and instead just tweeting: "Despite what you hear in the press, healthcare is coming along great. We are talking to many groups and it will end in a beautiful picture!"

And in the sense that there's a chance it could end in a photo of him at a desk, signing a piece of garbage legislation, I suppose it could end in a picture. But given that it would be a picture of a cruel man signing people's death sentences, it would hardly be a beautiful one, as far as I'm concerned. Leave it to Trump to describe the endgame of this horror show in terms of optics, whether he meant so literally or figuratively.

I just don't know how much more evidence any person could need that the Republican Party is catastrophically unfit to be tasked with healthcare policy. They have zero credibility—and, more importantly, they have zero compassion.

Healthcare policy that does not center compassion is healthcare policy not worth consideration.

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Excellent Points as Always, Misogynists!

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, March 08, 2017
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So, an independent, feminist, woman-owned bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio, "has made a graphic illustration of the position of female writers by [turning] the spines and covers of books by men to face the wall in the shop's 10,000-title fiction section," thus leaving visible only the spines of books authored by women for Women's History Month.

"In essence [we are] not just highlighting the disparity but bringing more focus to the women's books now, because they're the only ones legible on the shelf," [Harriett Logan, the bookstore's founder and owner said]. She added that although she had conceived the display to make a point, when completed it had an even stronger impact than she had expected.

...Loganberry is a feminist bookshop that retails new, used and rare books with an emphasis on women's history and literature. The move is intended to be a conspicuous illustration of the current representation of women in print.
Sounds very effective!

Naturally, some of the responses to Loganberry's move have been amazing. And by "amazing," I mean "totally predictable and absurd."
However, not all reactions were positive, with complaints that Logan should be running a "men's history month" to balance the promotion, and that the display was not about women's voices, but about "hating men."

Editor and writing coach John Ettorre tweeted: "Simply unbelievable. Promoting women's voices by symbolically silencing men's. By an independent bookstore! Shame on you, Harriett." He added: "Did they settle on this path after deciding burning books by men was just too over the top? I'm stunned."
He's STUNNED!

Obviously, my favorite of these was the call for a "men's history month." Missing the point award.

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Because Women Are Human

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, March 07, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

Yesterday, I wrote this piece: "The Word That Shall Not Be Spoken: Misogyny." It's about my lingering anger and grief that we collectively continue to refuse meaningful conversations about the role misogyny played in the last election.

I wrote: "I need to talk about it, not just because it is an important and necessary conversation to fix what is broken, but also because the insistence that there is no need to talk about it is tacit acceptance. ...And then there is this: I think the lingering grief I feel would be easier if we at least talked about it."

That is all true. And so is this: I want to talk about it because I owe it to Hillary Clinton.

After everything that Clinton gave us in running for president, I feel indebted to her, even though I'm reasonably certain she wouldn't feel the same. She worked and asked for my support and my vote, and she got both.

But my feelings of indebtedness extend beyond the 2016 election. In 1995, I was 21 years old, and my First Lady said this:


"If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all. And among those rights are the right to speak freely, and the right to be heard."

The first part of that is well remembered. The second part, less so.

The right to speak freely, and the right to be heard.

Those, Hillary Clinton told the world, were rights that women have. To speak freely. To be heard. And because she said that radical thing, I owe her to speak, irrespective of whether I will be heard, about the misogyny to which she was subjected during her campaign for the U.S. presidency.

And I owe her reminding people that she, too, is human. Like she pointedly noted all women are.

For that reason, her humanity, I also need to talk about the misogyny during the campaign, because it was directed at her. Because misogyny is systemic, and it is also personal. Because I am angry about the way she was treated, as a human being.

Because misogyny was used to try to dehumanize her, over and over, whether casting her as an emotionless robot or a monster or the devil, or simply by concealing all evidence of her humanity.

I owe it to her for running, and to all the women who worked for her, and to all the women who publicly supported her, at the cost of unfathomable torrents of disgorged misogyny. I owe it thus to myself, as well.

We often talk about oppressions—misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, fat hatred, etc.—as though they exist only in the abstract; as though they aren't perpetuated by individual people and aren't directed at individual people.

And, in this way, even when misogyny is discussed in the context of the election, it is often done in that sort of framework. That misogyny "played a role." Rarely is anyone willing to say plainly that misogyny was used against Hillary Clinton and her supporters.

I am saying that plainly. I am saying that misogyny was used against Hillary Clinton. Because she is a woman.

And I am saying plainly, like Clinton did so many years ago, that women are human beings. And I am very angry that this human being, who ran for president, was treated like shit on the basis of her womanhood.

I am angry that people targeted her with misogyny.

And when we decline to speak about that fact, we are erasing her humanity. Again.

I just absolutely refuse to do that. And so should you.

image of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, standing in front of a US flag, smiling
[Photo: Michael Davidson for Hillary for America.]

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The Word That Shall Not Be Spoken: Misogyny

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, March 06, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

black and white image of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, waving to a crowd from the stage
[Photo: Barbara Kinney for Hillary for America.]

Spending my days immersed in the cavalcade of impending constitutional crises and reprehensible bigotry emanating from the Trump administration is a colossal, heartbreaking drag.

It always would have filled me with despair and grief and rage, but there is the additional heartbreak of juxtaposing it against where we could have been. As I expressed to Iain in a particularly low moment last week: "I was supposed to be writing about the Hillary Clinton administration."

I am still not over Hillary Clinton not being president. I never will be.

One of the things that makes that loss—not just the election loss, but the loss of a future which would have looked vastly different—even tougher is the oppressive silence about the role misogyny played in this election.

The misogyny that was directed at Clinton herself, by the media and by her opponents, embedded in the narratives they used against her and centered shamelessly in the chants they led about her.

The misogyny of voters who couldn't say what exactly it was they didn't like about her, but just couldn't bring themselves to vote for her.

The continuing misogyny of Occam's Big Paisley Tie-ing every conceivable explanation, no matter how unlikely, for Obama voters flipping to Trump, without even the merest mention of the possibility that a person who has always voted for men before just wanted to keep on doing it.

There is no meaningful public conversation about the role misogyny played in the election, in which the first ever major-party female candidate lost to a confessed serial sexual abuser, while simultaneously winning by 3 million votes. There is no discussion of how the media covered her email for 600 days, nor how a photo of her reading the headline about Mike Pence's email has been treated more like a punchline than a cause for national grief.


There has been not the slightest attempt from the mainstream political press to engage in robust self-reflection about the misogyny in which they engaged, implicitly and overtly, treating her differently in subtle ways and brazenly convening panels to discuss her voice, her tone, her clothes.

In the middle of writing this piece, I read Sady Doyle's terrific essay about misogyny as a unifying political force. I also saw Donald Trump advisor and close friend Roger Stone's misogynist tirade against Caroline O. There has been little public discussion about these things, and what it means that powerful men are not merely vessels of rank misogyny, but are animated and motivated by rank misogyny.

That misogyny is an organizational center for large swaths of the American electorate—on both the right and the left.

Every woman experiences misogyny virtually every day of her life, in big and small ways. In ways that we sometimes understand only instinctually and have difficulty putting into words. From strangers, from men we trust, from other women. Every woman, irrespective of whether she acknowledges it, is subject to misogyny—because that's how institutional oppression works.

And yet. We are supposed to accept that misogyny didn't play a role in this election. Or played a part so minor it isn't even worth comment. We are meant to believe that when all the sexists who direct sexism at women every day went into a voting booth, they left their sexism on the other side of the curtain.

I don't believe that.

That isn't to suggest that misogyny is the only reason a person could have conceivably failed to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton. But just because there exist potential other reasons categorically does not mean we get to ignore that misogyny was a big fucking reason.

Especially when the "other reasons" aren't really separate from gender at all.

I want to talk about the role misogyny played in electing Donald Trump. I need to talk about it, not just because it is an important and necessary conversation to fix what is broken, but also because the insistence that there is no need to talk about it is tacit acceptance. I don't accept it. And I don't accept the cultural gaslighting implicit in ignoring or silencing women (and men) who saw what happened and are now dismissed like cranks or fools or sour-grapes hysterics.

And then there is this: I think the lingering grief I feel would be easier if we at least talked about it.

Many people have observed Clinton's loss felt like a death. It feels like that to me, in the way that death also breaks the promise of a future. So not talking about it feels as though my friend died, but I'm not allowed to talk about what killed them.

I want to talk about what killed this future I wanted so much. All of the things that derailed it, but especially this one.

Denying it is replicating it. And I suspect, for many of the people who engaged in or chose to ignore misogyny in the first place, that is precisely the point.

Which is perhaps the most compelling argument for this conversation.

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I Write Letters

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, February 27, 2017
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[Content Note: Misogyny.]

Dear Men:

Stop telling me how I should feel or what I should be doing about Trump.

Now, just to be clear, right up front: What I'm not talking about is respectful, good-faith discussions among colleagues and peers about big-picture strategy or even minutiae like the efficacy of calling a Senator's office versus emailing.

What I am talking about is the steady drumbeat, day after grim day, of men telling women that our feelings or priorities are wrong.

Men who insert and assert themselves to tell us that our responses to Trump aren't the "right" responses, or that we shouldn't be writing about, or protesting, or tweeting this but instead should be dedicating our time and energy to that.

I don't want to hear your opinions of how I should be feeling, or how I should be spending my time resisting, or on what you think I should be focused. I don't want to hear your condescending lectures about how I should be feeling or interacting with Trump supporters. I don't want a single syllable of your unsolicited advice.

It doesn't matter if you're Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times or some rando on Twitter. Keep that shit to yourself.

If you want to use "I" language to talk about how you feel or what you are doing in this moment of rising fascism or what you believe is the best approach or primary area of focus, have at it. Set an example, in your own space, if believe your strategy is better. But don't get up in my grill to audit me.

I didn't ask you, and I don't care.

I am not new. More than 20 years ago, I dived into activism by protesting my university using student funds to bring Ralph Reed to campus as a speaker. (We won, by the way.) There are 13 years of public archives of my written work. I'm a 42-year-old fat feminist woman whose body has been politicized her entire life.

And yet you talk to me like I'm a ninnybrained noob who's never thought about this stuff before.

Trust this: I have.

Now I would like you to think about this: Telling women what to do is one of the most pernicious and inescapable aspects of institutional misogyny. It doesn't matter how independent, how smart, how tough, how educated, how successful, how financially independent, how close to bearing the highly subjective cultural markers of "respect-deserving" a woman is. It doesn't matter how determined we are to persist. It doesn't matter if we have reached a certain age, or journeyed well beyond.

There are still men, not deterred by an urge for decency nor by their own intellectual mediocrity, who think they have the right to tell us how we should feel and how we should behave.

It is, though they would surely bitterly resist acknowledging it, evidence of their intractable belief that they own us. And that they are further obliged, by virtue of said ownership, to instruct us; to insert themselves uninvited into the lives and spaces of women they don't even know, in order to tell us what we should be feeling and thinking and doing.

You don't own women.

And if you're a man who reflexively agrees with that—maybe even feels his hackles slightly raising that I would even presume to say it, the mere statement itself an offense with its implication there are men who don't agree—yet you're also a man who feels it's his right to tell a woman she is not complying with his ideas about the way she feels and spends her time, then you need to have a long think about what it is that you think confers that right upon you.

Because guess what? It's a feeling of entitlement, which is rooted in cultural narratives of ownership.

And that thing you insist is "disagreement" is actually auditing. You are positioning yourself as an auditor when you cannot abide silently a woman doing something in a way you would not do it, but instead must interlope to try to "correct" her.

Even before you try listening, to see if maybe it's not that you disagree but that you don't understand.

You are, of course, welcome to disagree with my priorities all the fuck you want. But you are not welcome to tell me about it and expect me to give a shit.

And if, for whatever contemptible reasons, you cannot keep your auditing to yourselves, and you come into my space or orbit with a patronizing lecture or admonishments to follow your roadmap rather than my own, then don't be surprised when I push back.

You can tell me, in response to my defending my own boundaries and right not to be audited by every dude who happens across my timeline or blog, that I'm a fucking cunt, and that I'm the reason that we can't have unity, but understand this: It is you who are the barrier to unity. You and your shitty entitlement and your asserted "right" to audit women.

I never want to hear again some dude who's come at me with what I should be feeling or how I should be responding to Trump, positioning his opinion as the objective truth, and then respond to my lack of gratitude by scolding me for not appreciating that he's "on my side."

If you are lecturing me instead of listening to me, you're not on my side.

And if you cannot contain yourselves from pestering me about how I should be spending my time out of a sense of basic decency, then do it to avoid looking unfathomably stupid. Because no matter how I'm spending my time, I can guarantee it's more productive than spending it telling other people how they should feel.

Sincerely,
Liss

Open Wide...
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