Woman of My Year

Coming out for Hillary Clinton is like coming out as a lesbian. (I’m the lesbian, not Hillary, despite the sledgehammered innuendos of Ann Coulter.) In conversations with friends, family, and random airline seatmates, before I declare my orientation for Hillary, I think, Do I have the energy or interest to deal with the inevitable Hillar-phobic blowback? Frankly, not always, but I do it. Just as I come out as a lesbian to smash homophobia, I come out for Hillary to challenge sexism.

At the gym, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, about how 9/11 has been seized as a way to restore “traditional” heterosexual manhood, marriage, and maternity. While my gym mates crunch along to “We Are the Champions,” my reps sound like “1, 2, 3—Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I’m sure the guys working out at the gym are puzzled by my glowering at them in the mirror.

No matter what you think of her, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has restarted our national conversation about gender, which had stalled out again in 2001. And boi, do we ever need to keep talking. I try to do my part to keep the conversation from being reduced to little more than a dismissive crack about “playing the gender card.”

In 2007 gender was at the heart of all kinds of seemingly unrelated events. Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi was maligned for not reaching political benchmarks -- the implication being that she fell short because she’s a woman. But I like to point out that doing things constitutionally in the bright light of day takes longer than doing them unconstitutionally in the dark of night. I wish Pelosi had had thought bubbles over her head during Bush’s State of the Union (a.k.a. the “If I Did It”) address.

When Don Imus referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s,” it was not a proud moment for people holding the white race cards. But the women’s real offense was that they were playing like boys. Actually, better.

The Imus mess did give us a chance to read about women in sports, or at least near sports. Perhaps because The New York Times is an inch and a half narrower and New York sports teams are so good, the sports section is unable to cover more -- or any -- women’s sports. It’s not limited to sports. If you were to read the obits every morning to your girlfriend, as I do, you’d be able to announce after a quick scan, “Great news, honey, absolutely no women died today.”