They called
us Senator, Madame Speaker, and nappy-headed ho.
Whatever. We rocked!
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.”
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