Massachusetts elected Scott Brown today over Martha Coakley. Watching Rachel Maddow right now and she's discussing the fact that Massachusetts has not elected women in strong leadership positions. The person she's interviewing is saying that how bad Coakley's campaign was was the problem and it's not a gender issue. I find it so problematic that women in particular, but anyone in general thinks gender doesn't play a huge role. It's also intriguing that she said gender doesn't matter but is criticizing Coakley for not appealing more to women. Such a Catch 22, damned if you make gender an issue, damned if you don't. And the guy elected joked about the sexual availability of his daughters in his acceptance speech. He also is against Health Reform and for waterboarding.
I was out with an intelligent woman last night who also thought that gender didn't really matter. That women (which really meant white women), have lots of privilege and should focus on their privilege. While I hear her point of view and understand that there are many a valid points in trying to create greater bridges between movements and understanding our privilege and how our privilege can help others.
The thing is, gender is insanely important. Sexism and heterosexism greatly impact every facet of our lives and the lives of women globally. We still aren't even 20% of Congress and the numbers are lower for women leaders in business (although women are leading in the creation of small businesses). Women are also lagging behind in participation in hard sciences and trust me, from the experiences of my friends who were math majors, it's not because they're not smart enough or women aren't good at math - it's because there's only so much sexism a person can take before they opt-out and decide to use their intelligence in fields where they can spend the energy on the field and not overcoming / dealing with the hostility and the discrimination.
Anyway, I can go on and will go on, but I should do other things.
I'm also again totally distracted by the tragedy of Haiti. Here is a place where devastation seems to know no gender. But it would be wrong to say it doesn't know race. It flies in the face of history to not understand that this country has been exploited, often by the white north. The debt of the country, corruption in leadership, made it a poor country with terrible physical infrastructure that compounded the devastation. My heart goes out these people.
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2 comments:
I think that perhaps the fact that her campaign had one of the most embarrassing snafu's of any election next to Barry Goldwater's daisy girl commercial: Massachusetts was spelled wrong in her campaign ad. Oh and she chalks her foreign policy experience up owing to the fact her sister lives in Europe. I think in this case, the good state of Massachusetts was simply attempting to choose the lesser of two evils. While I don't disagree that gender discrimination is still rampant in our day and age, I think in this case her gender wasn't the issue at hand; it was her capability.
I do not believe that gender can be separated. Sexism seeps into our psyche in such a way that we might not even realize what we're thinking and saying is based on internalized sexism that women are inferior. Politics is messy and I'm sure there were a whole bunch of blunders by her opponent. And yes, if her campaign and the Democrats had done a better job, maybe she would have won. If Democrats had actually been able to get Health Care passed, maybe she would have been re-elected. There's a ton of maybes, and one, very real and legitimate maybe is that sexism played a role in what people did when they went to the ballot. Women still comprise less than 20% of Congress, peaking in the mid-1990s. There's systematic sexism going on there - it's not all about the individual.
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