This entry is written as a response to Rebecca Traister’s “Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!”1 Before you read my response, I highly suggest you go and read Traister’s entire Salon.com article: it is well-written and reasonably argued. I take issue with only a small portion of it, and wish to clarify other bits
That out of the way, Traister makes an argument that the extremely enthusiastic (some would say bombastic) support of Senator Obama among young male Democrats marginalizes women who follow Senator Clinton. In order to avoid seeming to vote for Hillary “just because she’s a woman,” young female Dems are rhetorically coerced into (at least publicly) singing the praises of Barack Obama.
In much the same way political and gender theorists have had to grind their teeth through students and peers saying “I’m not a feminist, but…”, we now need to deal with Democrats using the caveat “I’m an Obama supporter, but…” before saying anything positive about Sen. Clinton.
Traister, quite rightly, points out a latent sexism in this arrangement: the vehement hatred towards Senator Clinton is incommensurate with anything she’s done. This stands as an excellent microcosm of the sort of institutional sexism feminist scholars often cite—there is a system in place which makes supporting Obama the norm, so that supporting Clinton is seen as different and wrong. This kind of scenario is, oddly enough, called a normative system.
Normative systems are one of the hallmarks of insidious or institutional sexism (and racism, but that’s a different story): women’s roles are defined in opposition to men’s. Therefore, a powerful woman in the public sphere (workforce, government, etc.) is still seen as an exception. An aberration. Ideally, it is hoped that a critical mass of women in these positions will eventually normalize the concept. That is, if enough women are CEOs, Government officials, and the like, then it will cease to be a big deal. That makes sense, and we seem to be on our way to just that situation.
What we see with young Dems today, though, is a smaller, more vehement kind of institutionalized bias. As I’ve discussed in a previous article, Barack Obama is a charismatic leader on par with any this generation has seen. His following, then, needs to be seen as a social institution. His campaign has inspired a normally dormant demographic. Having been recently mobilized, this group is vocal expressly because they feel that they are Vox Populi—the voice of the people.
Now, as that previous article shows, I’m a huge fan of just that reaction to Senator Obama. Firey, outspoken patriotism gets me choked up. I think it’s healthy for a nation to get energized—for a people to be implicated in their own future. However, the feeling that such change is inevitable turns such a movement from the popular to the zealous.
So, the dominant Democratic discourse is that Obama is the change candidate—he’s the way forward. Any other stance—from merely tentative support of Senator Obama, to policy-based preference for Senator Clinton, to cross-party glancing in the directions of McCain or Nader—is defined in opposition to the dominant discourse. I don’t necessarily believe, then, that the rage Obama supporters feel is directed at Senator Clinton because she’s a woman (though I acknowledge it may be). It is because she’s Not Obama.
This is the worst part of dualism—a philosophy we will, no doubt, discuss in great detail in future articles.
What dualism says, to be brief, is that things are broken down into pairs of opposites: hot and cold, white and black, man and woman, civlization and nature. Any number of opposites can be posited. The problem is, these are always placed in hierarchies (to make them complementary is called binarism, which is dangerous in it’s own right). So you get man over woman, civilization over nature, etc. It seems easy to break out of this, because it is: clearly we know that there’s no inherent superiority in any of these pairs. Unfortunately, Western logic is deeply rooted in dualism.
This means that, when faced with something we are not being self-critical about—say, a candidate who stirs our emotions and awakens a patriotism we didn’t know we had—we let this dualism slip in. To zealots of the Obama camp (and I compare the guy to Caesar Augustus, so I’m as guilty as the next person), it ceases being Obama or Hillary. It is Obama or Not Obama.
Dualism, nominally a philosophy of two, is actually a stealthy philosophy of one: one right answer, one universal truth. Everything else is simply wrong or inferior. Degrees of wrongness or inferiority are irrelevant. Normative systems, like the assumption that all young democrats are for Obama, rely on this concept: from heterosexuality to monotheism, the dominant position is made out to be the correct one, with other beliefs or lifestyles falling into nebulous categories like ‘queer’ or ‘pagan.’ Difference is seen as threat—and when something threatens “truth,” there’s going to be some backlash.
Senator Clinton doesn’t help this situation. I link to a video in my previous article wherein Clinton mocks Obama’s message of change. Directly insulting the beliefs and views of an already zealous demographic will only solidify your base. It won’t win you converts. It also sends the message that the gloves are off. When Senator Clinton started not only attacking Senator Obama (it’s politics, it happens), but the very beliefs that were driving the movement that supports him, she seemed to justify the idea of conflict.
So, this takes us back to the rather tenuous position of young women who support Clinton. Their candidate has been knocked out of legitimacy by the dominant discourse of the Democratic Party. Publicly supporting Senator Clinton, as Traister points out, is an open invitation to get slammed. Even if the person supporting Clinton is an Obama fanatic, pointing out her good side is tantamount to treason. Add on top of this the dismissal aspect that women face—“you’re just supporting Clinton because you’re a woman”—and you get a pretty dismal situation.
I think the argument that Traister makes, that anti-Clinton sentiment is sexist because Dodd supporters didn’t get hit this hard, doesn’t hold. The media has basically declared both that Obama is going to win, and that he should. If Dodd were still in the race, I think his supporters would feel as much heat as Senator Clinton’s. The Obama camp sees the nomination as locked up, and sees Senator Clinton as an interloper—merely a spoiler as far as national attention goes.
That isn’t to say this discourse isn’t sexist, but the sexism is not directed at the candidate. It’s directed at her supporters. And not as a concerted effort, but as a vessel for dismissing what zealous Obama supporters see as already irrelevant: any Democratic resistance. Such sexism, the belief that a woman is only supporting Clinton out of some sense of feminist duty, is telling. It doesn’t necessarily show how openly sexist we still are. It does show how conscious of our sexism we have to be to keep it in check. We have learned to accept multiple roles for multiple genders. We have learned that some of our knee-jerk reactions are poorly informed and outright ignorant. We have learned to work around, against, and through our biases. That doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated them.
When we get too fired up, when we fall into starry-eyed awe of a candidate or idea, we lose self-awareness. And when we start shouting, when we find ourselves embracing a conflict, often the worst parts of what we thought we had conquered show through. Does this make young male Obama supporters sexist? No. It shows that we have always been sexist, and have learned to control it.
There’s no shame in acknowledging that something we were raised with, or developed, is wrong. The shame comes when we stop caring about rising above this worst self. The shame comes when we let passions override, instead of fuel, our reason.
If we Obama supporters, we zealots, are going to claim to be part of a movement of ideals and change, we had best hold onto those ideals we held beforehand. If we don’t, we’re merely followers—and we’re not worthy of bearing the standard of change.
References
Traister, Rebecca. “Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!” Salon.com. 14 Apr 2008. Available at: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/04/14/obama_supporters/
Genghis Philip
Gordon Levine
I don’t understand. Obama has a good following. That isn’t a problem. She makes appeals that Clinton and Obama aren’t different, and frankly, nothing could be further from the truth. They are entirely different candidates. Its difficult to take seriously an argument that includes such lines as “I was confused by the saucer-eyed, unquestioning devotion shown by my formerly cynical cohorts.” Yea, and yuk-yuk, I heard Bush had an IQ of 2!
And of course, the largest problem is that Obama himself is part of a minority himself. If you’re going to call Obama supporters sexist, you may as well call Hillary supports racist. Last time I was thinking about this (back when I was arguing with George about Romney’s viability), the polls were showing that nearly the same amount of voters claimed they would not vote for a black man as a claimed they would not vote for a woman, with two or three percentage points more claiming they would not vote for a woman.
In contrast, twenty to twenty-five percent said they would not vote for a Mormon. Just throwing that out there, because I think it shows the difference between groups that people no longer feel it is proper to undermine in a public setting, and those groups that people still feel comfortable discriminating against while in the public eye.
But I do understand the unsettled feeling that Hillary is based on something people don’t want to talk about, I often hover around the Something Awful debate and discussion forums, and it is impossible not to notice a strange hate for Hilliary. It is not an Obama vs. Hilliary problem, however; it existed FAR before they were ever pitted head-to-head. Its difficult, however, to really accuse anyone of sexism because of this vague notion, because A: it is a very vague feeling, and only rarely does someone say something that unveils themselves as sexist (and hell, at least on Something Awful, the population is so hugely male that hardly anyone calls out those who do), because B: The same sort of hate-filled things are said about Bush and Cheney and Ron Paul and hell, almost everyone except mostly Obama, and C: Hilliary is the only female running for president we’ve ever had, and its impossible to identify a systematic problem based on a single instance.
I agree something troubling lurks here, but it would be FAR better to start arguing about, say, the wage gap between men and women. There is plenty of evidence for making solid arguments there, and I’d really love to see the “Women are paid less because they might get preggo and leave!” arguments knocked down. You’re not going to get anywhere talking about Hilliary and sexism, because the possibility exists that Hilliary just isn’t a charismatic person.
You know, I’d like to edit my comment to say that I only now realized that there is a second and third page to the article, so if I seem entirely off-base that could be the problem.
“Dualism, nominally a philosophy of two, is actually a stealthy philosophy of one: one right answer, one universal truth. Everything else is simply wrong or inferior.”
Funny. I was trying to articulate this very idea today. However, you seem to have done so much more simplistically. That’s a gift for communication, Sir.
Nicely done.
Cheers for the comments, both.
To Mattsmith: I think the rest of the article -does- help here, so I won’t go into a lot. The argument being made in the article is, I agree, slightly off-base. Like I said, I think the sexism coming out in this campaign is directed at the women who support Hillary, not necessarily Hillary herself.
Gordon had a really good line about it when we were discussing just this idea yesterday. He said that the sexism was ‘the means’ not ‘the end.’ It’s not that Obama fanatics are really seething about the idea of women in office (or women voting for women). What they’re looking to do is tear apart the opposition: and the easy way to do that is to insult, using whatever ammo is available. Zealous Obama supporters would be making hay over regional affiliation or religion if it were a factor, but it’s not– gender’s the easy target.
To Carly: Many thanks. Though that description, like much of the theory I (and possibly Gordon too) talk about, is a paraphrase of instruction by Lisa Haines Wright, a professor at Beloit College. I’m not even standing on the shoulders of giants, I’m pretty much summarizing what the giant narrates. :)
Thanks for the entry – I enjoyed it and also the article. In that little bit of campaign (new hampshire?) when the cheek-pinching, “omg she cried”, etc was a huge deal, I still didn’t like Hillary, but I also felt very protective of her. I think the people who responded to that incident with “women like her cause she cried!!”were off-base. But the way she was treated over those few days (including that incident) was so disrespectful and sexist that the urge to stand up and say “I’m not tolerating this” by voting for her was strong.
(I think sexism is partly “the end” as well. Anti-Hillary sentiment ran really strong in many camps long before she was running for President. And people loathed her long before she started mocking Obama.)
This is a generally pointless comment, but I’ve finally had time to read through this blog and it’s really enjoyable.
Nice work.