How long have I had this novella, Une si longue lettre, on my shelf, picking at it, reading a page or two and setting it down again and again? It’s difficult to carve out the time and concentration space to focus on reading books in languages that are not my own. I have until this year packed my life with so much (meaningless) work and ‘stuff’ that I have rarely read books faithfully in my own language, let alone in other languages, except when required.
I have demanded of myself, though, that things change this year. If not dramatically, at least incrementally – and intellectually. It is not that demanding or time consuming to read a book that is just 130 pages long, in French or otherwise. In a relatively brief and personal story, Mariama Ba provides a glimpse at feminism and equality through the lens of being both an African and a Muslim woman. Many evaluations of this book will describe it as something akin to “Africa’s first feminist novel”, a “portrait of the struggle between modernity and tradition” (the story concerns polygamy and its effects on women and society as a whole).
And the bits that spoke to me most loudly:
The book, written as a long letter, takes place after the protagonist’s husband dies, and she is forced to mourn alongside his second wife. She writes to her friend, who has done what she did not have the strength to do – the friend leaves her husband when he takes a second wife. On the endurance of friendship: “L’amitié a des grandeurs inconnues de l’amour. Elle se fortifier dans les difficultés, alors que les contraintes massacrent l’amour. Elle résiste au temps qui lasse et désunit les couples. Elle a des élévations inconnues de l’amour.”
After the narrator/protagonist’s husband dies and her former suitor returns and offers to marry her, she considers seriously and declines, asking instead for his friendship. He responds, “Tout ou rien. Adieu.”
While not succumbing to or fully recognizing the “inevitability” of Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ pick for US presidential candidate, I do think it’s fair to dig in to see if I can at least extend the benefit of the doubt to her, as an entitled and “moderate Republican” Democrat.
After all, if she is ultimately the nominee, what alternative is there? Certainly not a Republican, probably not a third-party candidate … not voting at all?
I read an article about women around my age, who fall into the gap between the over-45 women who support Hillary and the Millennial women who overwhelmingly support Bernie. A Gen-X Hillary problem. As the writer points out, people our age think “Hillary is fine” without being particularly interested or in support of her. Her biggest, loudest supporters, though, tend to be rabidly loyal assholes, to put it mildly, who don’t inspire confidence or support for Hillary in others. (And this, coupled with loads of historical reading that make Clinton seem testy, secretive and non-collaborative, for example, in designing and trying to implement the universal healthcare plan in Bill Clinton’s administration, makes me cringe.)
We also have felt safe and distant from the kind of broad and loud feminism that women of Hillary’s generation had to champion. We have not been subjected to the same kinds of workplace humiliation (most of the time – and I know this article, and my thoughts now, are written from a particular perspective under layers of privilege, so I won’t pretend that everyone has it so easy). We, on the whole, can make the choices we want, have the careers we want and generally do not run into the same conflicts Hillary ran into as First Lady during Bill Clinton’s first term (i.e., widespread media opinion that Hillary should be more of a “housewife” with a gentler image). Needless to say, this was the beginning of Hillary’s national-level pandering and image “crafting”, trying to spin herself into something the American public could like (as the article points out, she published a cookie recipe in a popular “women’s” magazine). She’s been shape-shifting her way through her career ever since.
The fact that this is necessary (and this touches on the heart of the article), this is just sad. We never demand that men do anything like this. Hillary’s every action, every word, was questioned and analyzed through the “woman” lens and the expectations (spoken or not) that society has for women. The article’s writer questioned the insidiousness of hidden sexism – she believed that we were beyond a point that we should vote for a woman just because she is a woman. But then heard a man ask Hillary a question on the radio, and she was struck by the tone – condescending.
“It was subtle, but there was something in his tone I recognized. It was not a tone you would use to speak to someone who was a former secretary of state and senator. It was the tone you reserve for that dumb chick in your meeting who probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It was a tone I’d heard countless times over the course of my career, and in that moment I suddenly saw Hillary Clinton in an entirely different light.”
She recognized it from her own experiences – just so well-hidden in her daily reality that she had never stopped to think about it. Everyday conversations that inherently undermine the woman’s qualifications and abilities. Maybe she is just overly sensitive, but in truth, it happens all the time. There is a wall that you never quite scale as a woman (and this is not always true, but is frequent enough that it is troubling and needs to be acknowledged), and the wall is built with bricks of condescending and/or backhanded praise.
Even acknowledging this, though, and feeling like maybe I could take a second look and view Hillary through that lens, there always ends up being a stumbling block.
Every time I try to look beyond the Clinton fatigue, the Wall Street connections, the lip service and her moderate Republican record, with which my beliefs do not align, some new evidence bubbles up that shows this disingenuous nature and snippy impatience and temperament that I feel form the basis of Hillary’s real personality. We all have bad days, we all lash out and get snippy – but unless you are an orange Teflon ape – politicians on the stump, trying to get into the land’s highest office, cannot afford to let the mask slip. A recent clip of Clinton talking to a Somali-American woman, basically making her standard speech (and not making eye contact, you notice), shows Clinton lose her cool and tell the woman to “go run for something yourself then”! Naturally, she almost immediately tried to fold herself neatly back into form, pretending like the comment was actually one of encouragement, as though she wanted the woman to stand up and be more civic-minded and involved, but the fake pasted-on smile and dying-hen/witch cackling that followed the encounter were telling.
I don’t really want to be told by old-guard “feminists” (or anyone for that matter) that my support for anyone other than Hillary Clinton is wrong. Or why it’s wrong. The voices of feminist leaders, such as Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright, trailblazers and leaders in theory and practice, are normally so measured and reasonable. While they have taken on the mantle of speaking for many in the past, which has been appreciated, co-opting the voices and choices of other women now is inappropriate. It is no wonder that women of all ages are angry. The idea that we should be told for whom to vote under any circumstances is egregious and over the line. To be told we betray all women by not voting for Hillary Clinton is feminist apostasy.
In defending Hillary Clinton and her candidacy for president, both women have pulled out the generation card and slammed the younger generation of women in what can only be called a sexist way by claiming that younger women’s support for Bernie Sanders stems from following the path where they might find boys at the other end. Not only does it imply that young women’s only concern is meeting, impressing and gaining the attention of boys – it discounts the well-reasoned support women of all ages have for other candidates. (And couldn’t the same have been argued so long ago when Steinem went to work at the Playboy Club in the service of getting an undercover expose? She was going to bat for true feminist causes but was doing so by “going where the boys are”.) I am not discounting the value of this work, but if looked at only on the surface, which is about how Albright and Steinem looked at young women’s political choices right now, they look about equal.
I think anyone alive today knows that it is not done – not for women’s equality, not for racial equality, not for economic or social justice at all. We know that Roe v Wade is never a done deal. We know that there are still massive strides to take in getting equal pay. We know, in fact, that families – men and women both – are struggling with the consequences and sacrifices they have to make to have families. Women end up struggling more, on the whole, because of the inequalities at work and because of the biology of their having to be the ones to carry and give birth to children. That is not going to change, but society’s approach can.
So no, no one imagines that the work is finished. Yes, we may take for granted the work that has been done – for example, no one demanded that I get him a coffee when I entered the workforce. I took for granted that no one could have such an expectation of a professional woman (or man). An older colleague who worked in a technical capacity since the 1970s schooled me on my obliviousness and ignorance (she and her few female colleagues were often maligned this way or saddled with extra “women’s work” like fetching coffee or something that had no formal place in their work description). Perhaps it is good that people my age and younger grew up completely ignorant of the fact that it was once acceptable to make these kinds of petty demands of you just because you were the female employee in the room. But forgetting may, in fact, lead to complacency – and I suppose this is at the heart of Albright and Steinem’s argument.
But being complacent about how far we still need to travel to get to gender parity is not the same thing as making a conscious, well-informed decision not to support Hillary Clinton.
By not supporting Hillary, are people somehow not supporting all other women (as Albright implies, saying there is a “special place in hell” for women who do not support other women)? Are we obligated to support Hillary just because she is a woman, particularly when she has let her views, her talking points, her votes, her perspectives, shift casually to suit her purposes at any given moment – sometimes in ways that damage equality and grant favor to corporate over human interests?
Other than “Hillary fatigue”, the urge to fight against the sense of inevitability and her attitude as though it’s “her turn” now – I have to ask, “Does she deserve the support?” At this stage, no. If she ultimately gets the nomination, I will support her. She will still be better than whatever the alternatives are. Hillary is not my first choice because Hillary feels insincere, insubstantial and untrustworthy. It is not that she cannot get the job done. It is not because her views change because in fact, if someone’s views change and grow more nuanced, that is one thing. But changing to pander to the rising voices of the day – that’s disingenuous. Her time on the world’s stage has been so long and public that we have a very clear view of just how disingenuous she has been over the course of time.
While I very much support Bernie Sanders’s aims and like the idea of the US moving toward “democratic socialism”, I am a bit burned out on the whole idea that there are not more of Sanders’s ilk among younger politicians. I will vote for Sanders or Clinton, whichever gets the nomination, but the idea that we can be carried forward by the oldest of the Baby Boomers (in fact Sanders was born at the tail-end of the previous generation) is a sad commentary on the state of American progressivism. Clinton is a tired reminder of the old guard, and the Baby Boomers in general need to start handing over the reins already. I feel as though we took many steps forward with Obama in handing over responsibility to a new generation of leaders, but the only reasonable voice we have is an old man. (And the young politicians are snake-like zealots and anxiety-riddled, almost-human robots. Nothing remotely presidential… or sane.)
The tension and irritation has been building up in me for a long time, even though I was unaware of its presence and imperceptible growth. I am not an athlete nor am I someone who has been vocally feminist for much of my life. I had a few conversations with former colleagues – women who were much older than me, who had been through some of the trials of being the only woman working in a completely male-dominated workplace (an air traffic control center). It’s not as though women are not expected somehow – still – to take notes and make the coffee, but back then it was not just understood but was blatantly stated as a requirement and not questioned. Fighting against these slights in daily work life has never been a conscious part of my life. But strides made by women who came before me paved the way for me not to have to think about such things (as well as the installation of automatic coffee machines!).
I believe wholeheartedly in equality for everyone – and I mean everyone – but when I undertook a master’s program in gender studies, the extremes of feminist theory put me off by being so anti-man. I have not personally suffered – to my knowledge – for being a woman, and I am sure that in some measure this is because I am a white woman who, in the Nordic countries where I live, blends into the scenery and enjoys the privilege that comes from so many different aspects of the accident of my birth and the conscious choice of where I live (which is another layer of privilege – having the choice to decide where to live and to go there).
Similarly Scandinavia conscientiously attempts to lead the way on matters of equality. It does not always succeed, sometimes tripping over itself trying to be “too fair” or politically correct and coming out looking foolish. But the thinking is in the right place. I also say that I have not “consciously” suffered because I don’t know that we are always aware of the things we are numb or indoctrinated to. While no man is outwardly making lewd remarks or insisting that I do something degrading or something that is anything other than equal to what he would do, there have probably been times that I was perceived or treated as “lesser than” because I am a woman. I have been blissfully ignorant to this, if and when it did happen, because my life has still been lived on my terms and has been relatively easy to boot.
Revealing this as my backdrop, I can’t really explain what incensed me and pushed me over the edge about sexism, misogyny and racism in women’s athletics. Not even looking at the flat-out stereotypes any longer (as though all women athletes must exist at caricature-like extremes, i.e. either women who appear as masculine, steroid-pumped sportsmen-lesbians from Cold War era East Germany or ultra-feminine, would-be fashion models who look cute in a short skirt). Either direction these stereotypes travel, they smack of objectification and are on display for the criticism and analysis of the world (and it’s not just men engaging in the bitterest criticism). Not because they are athletes in the public eye but because they are women.
We can see this dynamic quite publicly and visibly played out in the form of Bruce Jenner, former Olympic champion, who is now known as Caitlyn Jenner. As Bruce the athlete, no one would have questioned how he looked or would have sexualized his existence to the degree that all women athletes put up with today. And as Caitlyn, she is suddenly subject to this kind of scrutiny. Jon Stewart explained it best in a recent episode of The Daily Show. Now, suddenly, as a woman, Jenner’s worth is all tied up in her “fuckability” and her beauty.
All of this is frustrating but not quite the infuriating push I needed to get really angry. Instead, Serena Williams’s win at the French Open this weekend finally made me seethe with rage. Looking at her winning history, she is singularly the greatest female tennis player ever to play the game. Can she be recognized simply for these record-breaking achievements in athleticism and sporting victory? No.
If all female pro-athletes, particularly in a “demure” arena like tennis, are treated like sex objects who should be supermodels, what can we expect? And when the kind of racially charged, barely veiled racist language cues come into play on top of the sexism and objectifying, shouldn’t every woman be angry?
**Edited later to note that The Atlanticpublished a piece on French Open men’s champion, Stan Wawrinka, which states: “It’s that Wawrinka doesn’t look or comport himself like a Grand Slam champion. From his bright pink “pajama” shorts to his faintly dadboddish physique, the Swiss native looks more like someone you’d find at Home Depot than Roland Garros.” Finally someone jumps on what a man looks like and how he “comports” himself. Equality, right?
My change of heart in this case was not so much changing my mind about Amy Schumer herself or her comedy because, frankly, I had never really heard of her or her work. My instant dislike stemmed from the endless advertisements for her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, which appeared constantly in every single commercial break while streaming The Daily Show and The Colbert Report online. Is it Ms Schumer’s fault that 1. the ad nauseam ad campaign was overkill and turned people (namely me) off before they could even give her show a chance and 2. the ads Comedy Central makes for its stable of shows feature the most obnoxious bits and bobs, making the shows appear annoying and unwatchable, also before potential viewers could give them a chance? No. I had the same problem with another of the overkill ad campaigns propelled like an enemy sortie at the unsuspecting target when Comedy Central promoted the brilliant Broad City in exactly the same fashion. Granted ads are ads – they are so short that they can’t reflect a whole lot of the intelligent humor and depth that give these shows their cachet. But can’t the ads and those who make them dream up some way to make their shows seem less one-dimensional?
I thought Broad City looked dumb but gave it a chance – but Inside Amy Schumer got the shortest straw. I saw the ads, which made her look like a self-absorbed, vapid, sex-obsessed idiot playing stereotypes for laughs, and I immediately thought she and the show were anything but groundbreaking and inventive. Turns out, though, that while Schumer has written some skits in which she plays a self-absorbed, vapid, sex-obsessed (to a mad degree) character, her comedy swims in thrashingly funny but incisive commentary – deeply feminist, hypocrisy-poking/exposing, hyperbolic, sarcastic. I’ve been gasping and then laughing my way through both seasons of the show. It’s sometimes shocking in its sudden lack of political correctness (as most of the best comedy is), painful in its mix of humor – swinging between self-absorption and self-deprecation, much of it quite topical (see the skit about the combat video game in which the female video game character suffers and reports an assault and is faced by a screen reading “Character Assassination Complete”; not only is the idea behind the video game reminiscent of the recent controversies about sexual assault in the military with the reaction of the guy friend with whom Amy’s character is playing video games, telling her, “You obviously did something wrong – maybe you just shouldn’t play” a further level of commentary ) and most of it universal (see the “Stolen Years” jewelry collection ad, the ISP customer service freakout session skit, the superfluous nature of enormous penises bit in her standup act, all the skits about groups of female friends being competitively self-deprecating … and pretty much every skit and standup bit in the show)…
A handful of things were extra fabulous: Josh Charles’s appearance on an episode just after his shocking departure from The Good Wife – Schumer and Charles make glorious fun of the pomposity of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, which was absolutely necessary.
An offhand reference to the Operation Smile charity (which my company works with and sends volunteers to). Mentioning jokingly that TMZ maybe thought she was Paula Deen (which might not have made me spit my coffee out – in laughter – if I had not been lambasting Paula Deen a whole lot lately with my Firewall – check out Paula Deen “oiling up a bird” and deep-frying it with her Aunt Peggy, who has a very “Derek-esque“, vacant smile going on here).
Some of the over-the-top, possibly over-the-line humor – the “We’ve all been a little raped”/”grey area of rape” bit, the “AIDS/dealbreaker/gluten allergy” date – a bit gasp-worthy, then laugh-worthy and then thought-provoking. How many times have we all been on a date or in a situation where someone tells us something really uncomfortable and offered us an “out” but we still sit there, awkward, convincing ourselves that we’re okay with something that is really not okay with us or that makes us tongue-tied to the extent that, as Schumer blurts out, “I don’t know what I’m saying.” You might be able to say something eloquent and articulate and thoughtful if you’re not blindsided – but unprepared, how do you not stumble? “Is that a dealbreaker for you?”
“No, it’s great!”
Amy Schumer is a smart woman holding a mirror up to herself, to all of us, to society – willing to (like most good comedians) be vulnerable, embarrassed and embarrassing.
The other day, cultural reference point and professor Anita Hill, was Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show. It has been 22 years since the US Senate judiciary hearings that preceded the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. Hill has lived what most would see as a fairly private life since the hearings, in which she was subjected against her will to all kinds of humiliating and embarrassing questioning before a panel of all-white, all-male senators. Thomas was confirmed (by a narrow margin), but Hill’s testimony perhaps shed a light on the issue of sexual harassment in ways it had never been before. As she explained on The Daily Show, a younger generation of women, who may have heard of her, do not know the whole story behind why she is known. A new documentary about her story, Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, debuts in theatres soon – and the story is one that needs to be told.
I have often reflected on how hard it is to fully understand history and precedent without context. One example is that of the struggle for women’s equality and feminist theory. It is misleading to frame – or phrase – it this way because there really is too much nuance and depth just in this struggle – too many offshoots and movements in every struggle. That is, women’s studies can be a very broad umbrella covering everything from women in history to “mainstream” feminism to radical feminism – to all kinds of perspectives about “subcategories” of these “feminisms”. I put quotation marks around all these terms because they have been analyzed to such extremes by the academics in gender, cultural, anthropological and sociological studies, that, even if I could make sense of all the categories, I don’t think this is the place to go into it. It’s enough just to say that discussing one woman (Hill) who “spoke truth to power” crosses into multiple categories and is intrinsic to so many of the narratives of these categories. But ultimately it comes down to the story of one woman, which, when put into context, shows the outline of a much bigger, longer and more complex struggle.
When I dubiously undertook an MA degree in gender studies a number of years ago (which I just as casually dropped), I found it easy to dismiss a lot of the rhetoric and theory around women’s studies. A lot of it, it seemed, was anti-man/anti-human in many ways and tried to assign some kind of superiority to women. I was not interested in that. But if one were to continue reading and digging in, it would be possible to find the important links between theory and academic rigor on the subject and real-life applications. When I was enrolled in the program, I found myself complaining to a former colleague, a woman who was much older than me (my parents’ age), who had been working in a male-dominated, highly technical US government agency for her entire career. While she took some of her opinions (anti-man) to extremes, she made good points about how she had seen things markedly change in the workplace for women over the course of her career, even if on some level it still felt backwards at times. When she began, the sexual harassment Anita Hill highlighted as well as the tendency for male employees to treat female employees, at whatever level, as their personal secretaries (at best) or as sexual objects (at worst) was commonplace and accepted. And what woman, perhaps just glad that she was able to get the job she had, was going to make waves about that?
My former colleague’s point contextualized a lot of the theory I read about – institutional discrimination and the unspoken, tacit acceptance of harassment (and the lack of a definition of, let alone a prohibition of, said harassment) were also the norm for a long time. Only slow, incremental work against these ingrained ways of existing in workplaces and the courage of the women who stepped forward – either in their workplaces or in the scholastic realm (or a combination of both) could create the environment I took for granted when I started reading these gender studies texts.
This dovetails with an unrelated story I recently read about the need for academics and intellectuals to engage in public discourse and be actively on political and policy issues. The article discusses two professors who were recently dismissed for reasons related to not bringing in enough grant money; not because they did not deliver quality education, mentorship or broad political engagement. The whole thing disturbed me, as I realized that these professors, and professors like Anita Hill, are essential to both good education and to public and civil dialogue and policymaking. When I read my gender studies textbooks and was mystified by a lot of nonsense that needed to be waded through to get to genuine understanding of issues, I needed this kind of leadership and mentorship to contextualize the work.
The Nation article referenced above cites a New York Times op-ed article, which entreats academics to get involved in public debate, stating that today’s academics “have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”. This captured exactly what I felt – the “hyperspecialization” had erased context from the sometimes very thoughtful and rigorous academic work. True mentors, engaged politically and in society, provide perspective and context and an historical framework. While the professors cited in the article have been asked to leave their positions for fundraising reasons, I suspect the whole higher education system in America is following the corporate model, and these professors are marginalized by doing what they really should be doing. And Anita Hill – well, she has found her niche – but not without having been punished publicly and by much of society for having been a kind of whistleblower for the real issues that underpin the academic thinking that she (and other gender studies/women’s studies professors) works to make a larger part of public discourse. People trying to make real change and have a lasting impact get punished no matter how they go about it.
This is not to say that sexual harassment no longer exists – I am quite sure it does. But a sensitivity to it has been raised, at least in most private and public sector workplaces. There are mechanisms in place to try to deal with it. Is the system perfect? No. But the Anita Hills of the world helped us reach a place where sexual harassment is not tolerated as just a part of doing business.
On an only semi-related note, when I saw that Anita Hill was the guest on The Daily Show, the first thing that came to mind for me was a line from a Sonic Youth song (“Youth Against Fascism”: “I believe Anita Hill…”). I often think about these kinds of cultural references in songs. They are so timely in the moment, and the people embracing these songs can instantly connect to what these references mean. But without reminders some of the references become lost. I should probably make a list of 1990s references just for the sake of seeing how often this happens and how often I find myself explaining these references to younger people.
For now, I can only immediately think of references from Ice-T’s O.G. album in which he referred to Tipper Gore and later to “Bush and his crippled bitch”. What person today (not of my generation) is even going to remember what these mentions referred to? People barely even remember Tipper as the unfortunate victim of Al Gore’s staged kiss during the 2000 presidential election, let alone remember her as the crusader who wanted to put parental labels on CDs warning about explicit lyrics. This was a major, burning issue at the time, challenging First Amendment issues about free speech and censorship. But now – most young people would question, “CDs? What are CDs?” And Ice-T referred to Bush Sr and his wife. And kids – would they even know that Ice-T was ever something other than a cop on TV and a reality-TV star? Haha.
