The presidential race don’t prove nothin’

Gloria, you’re a bright cookie, but this got up my nose (to use a technical term), I’m afraid.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

[...]

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

The thing is, while Steinem claims not to be “advocating a competition for who has it toughest”, her article is devoted to analyzing who has it, in her view, toughest. It’s certainly true that race and gender are treated differently by the media and the electorate, and that experiences of opression in the form of sexism often do differ from experiences of opression in the form of racism. But that doesn’t establish that it is meaningful to talk about whether gender “trumps” race.

Steinem’s concerns are selective. She is careful to isolate the assumption that male Iowa voters are seen as gender-free — an observation I believe to be accurate. But she doesn’t, for example, comment on the fact that white voters are also seen as race-free, and it is black voters who are seen as biased if they support black candidates and disloyal if they don’t. I also disagree with Steinem in that I think Obama has not been universally seen as “unifying by his race” — a number of op-ed have appeard on my RSS news reader in the last few months along the lines of “Is Obama black enough?” and other similarly incomprehensible (to me) titles. Steinem does not comment on Obama’s “unifying” nature being dependent on his being “black enough” (a racist stereotype), whereas Clinton is expected not to be too feminine in order to be “unifying” (a sexist stereotype). Both candidates face prejudiced stereotypes, but I don’t see what basis Steinem has for concluding that one is “worse” than the other.

I’m also not convinced that once can conclude that racism is negligible in the US when compared the sexism, purely from the media treatment of two people, when there are other variables. It’s equivalent to saying that sexism was negligible in the UK when Margaret Thatcher was elected, which is totally bogus. It’s just not as simple as saying “a black candidate beat a female candidate in the Iowa caucus so racism is secondary to sexism”.

Talking about whether black men or white women are more opressed is meaningless. But people who face racism and people who face sexism may experience opression differently, and the intersection of different kinds of opression is interesting and worth talking about.

For more good commentary on this topic, see Pinko Feminist Hellcat, and BrownFemiPower has a roundup of more good responses to the editorial.

–IP

When is something sexist? Or, a lesson in precision of language

I keep hearing statements that start with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but…” which invariably signals that one of two things is about to happen:

1. the speaker is going to say something sexist, they know it is sexist, and they are not sorry.
2. the speaker is not sure whether it’s sexist or not, so they are covering their back before proceeding to say the thing that may or may not be sexist.

In the first case, I feel this person is something of a lost cause. The view they are about to express is incomensurable with any view that incorporates equality as important.

So let’s move on to the second case. It is usually the case that statements starting with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but…” are sexist, but not always. Just yesterday, a classmate came out with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but women seem to spend more time with kids than men do so this might explain [insert sociolinguistic phenomenon here].” That’s not sexist — that’s a fact. Satistically, women do spend more time with kids than men do. That’s a sexist situation but not a sexist statement. The statement would be sexist if instead of reporting a fact, it was reporting something that should be the case.

So, how do you know when something is sexist? Well, your Auntie Irrational has helpfully compiled a helpful but non-exhaustive list of ways in which a statement can be sexist. If the view that was going to be expressed matches one of the cases below, it’s sexist.

Sexism by sex-role normativity
This is the case we have just examined. Statements of the form “women/men should do x” where the premise is that it is inherent in the nature of men or women that they should do x. For example “women should stay in the kitchen” and “men shouldn’t show emotion” is sexist, but “women tend to do more domestic tasks than men” is a fact, and therefore not sexist.

Sexism by double standard
This is when a certain standard is applied differently to men and women because certain social attributes are considered to be more important for one sex than for the other. For example, it is sexist to say “mothers shouldn’t have jobs” when the assumption is that the same does not hold for fathers.

Sexism by omission
This is where you disproportionately ignore the presence or contributions of women. For example, if I say “the most influential scientists of the last fifty years are…” and list only male scientists, chances are that I am disproportionately ignoring the contributions of women.

Sexism by pseudoscience and inaccuracy
This is where you make a descrpitive statement of the form “men/women don’t do x” that looks like a fact but is not actually a fact, and implies a degree of social judgement For example, “boys don’t cry” is sexist because it implies that boys shouldn’t cry, even though it is a false statment. “Girls don’t do maths” is sexist for the same reason. (See also Sexism by Sex-Role Normativity.)

Hope that’s been helpful.

–IP

Links for your reading pleasure

1. Acceptance of transgenderedness depends on being seen as ill:
   

   “It’s a Catch-22,” O’Donnabhain said. “I have to accept the stigma of being labeled as having a disorder [or] a mental condition … in order to get benefits. I haven’t liked this diagnosis from the very beginning. But I’ve got to play the game.”

2. “Experts” tell women when to have babies:
   

   Egg freezing should not be offered to women who want to put off having a family purely for lifestyle reasons, say experts.

   …An increasing number of women are choosing to freeze their eggs for social reasons in the hope they will be able to have a child when they are older.

   Critics argue they are delaying motherhood for the wrong motives, such as climbing the career ladder or until they have more money.

   Dr Marc Fritz, of the ASRM, said it would be wrong for women who have frozen their eggs to think they had ensured their future fertility.

   So, the idea is that freezing eggs is not a guarantee that women will be able to have kids. That’s fine. But instead of doctors warning women that freezing their eggs is not a guarantee of being able to have kids, and letting women make up their own minds as to whether that’s a risk that they want to take, “experts” are saying that women shouldn’t have the option because women make “bad” choices, like having jobs. (And to hear these experts talk about how wanting earning money is a “bad” lifestyle choice, you’d think raising kids was free.)

3. An earth-like planet may have water
4. A radio play of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” is on Radio 4. Listen Again is a wonderful thing.

–IP