Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - Posts
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While we wonder whether our sensitivity to sexist press coverage of elite women candidates is a good or bad sign—thanks and welcome to XX Factor, Eve—ordinary working women out there are still losing their jobs because some guy thinks their breasts double as doorknobs, available for anyone to squeeze. Check out Rebekah Spicuglia's painfully specific post about how her sister lost her waitressing job at Chili's. Notice the very best part:
When my sister, Rachel Spicuglia, a five-year employee of Chili's Restaurant (owned by Brinker International), reported to her manager the escalating sexual harassment she was receiving from the cooks, which had culminated in an assault that morning in the walk-in refrigerator, the manager asked Rachel if the offending employee had gotten a "full cup" when he had grabbed her breasts.
I post this not because this case is unusual, but precisely because it isn't. This one just happens to be written up publicly. As I found while collaborating on Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even, American companies shell out millions upon millions of dollars each year to make up for truly vile sexual harassment—assault, groping, stalking, and deeply disgusting daily comments. Waitresses in particular should get hazard pay. And the waitress cases aren't as bad as the ones I read involving aspiring electricians, videographers, higher-paid factory workers, women in finance, and other cases in which women try to get "men's" jobs—those stories start reading like terror on the job.
I'll write more about this another day but reading this just now on HuffPo, I snapped. According to the largest and most credible study—of the federal workforce—approximately 3 percent of women report being sexually assaulted at work. That's millions of women a year. The lower down the food chain you are, the more likely you will be harassed—holding down your earnings significantly while you fight or flee. Which is why sexual harassment is against the law, by the way—because it stops women from earning a fair living.
Why should so many women have to risk their bodily integrity just to feed their families?
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E.J. Dionne channeled some of the I'm-fine-with-Rick-Warren arguments on this blog in his Post column today, which suggests that the brilliance of the Rick Warren choice is that it challenges everybody, not just lefties:
By inviting Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, President-elect Barack Obama has alienated some of his friends on the left. By accepting, Warren has enraged some of his allies on the right.
There's this notion out there—call it the equivalence of outrage—that right-wingers are just as upset with Warren for agreeing to bless Obama as left-wingers are upset with Obama for asking Warren for his blessing. But where are these explosions of rage on the right happening? I can't find them. I went to National Review's lively "Corner" blog and couldn't detect any irritation. ("I haven't gotten a single angry email from a reader about this, and usually when conservatives are enraged by something, somebody emails me about it," NR's Jonah Goldberg noted.) No rage immediately evident in quick skims of Michelle Malkin, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades, or RedState, either. Christian Broadcasting News even rhapsodized that Obama "said he was tired of the same old 'us vs. them' mentality in DC and beyond. Well, picking Warren does the trick."
To try to get to the bottom of this—maybe it's the conservative rank-and-file that's upset?—I did a highly scientific study of three right-wing friends of mine, none of them pundits, asking them the question, "What do you think of Obama's decision to have Rick Warren deliver his inaugural convocation?" Here were the responses:
I'm not too sure yet ... On the one hand, he is trying to keep some of the dissatisfied Republicans he obviously picked up in this past election. On the other hand, the reaction from the LGBT community shows that Obama will find himself all too often ticking off either his political base OR America at large as he tries to do this.
I am mildly amused by the idea that some liberals are disappointed in Obama already.
I imagine he [Warren] would have a lot of good things to say and I will take him over Obama's pastors any day!
If that's anger, then Mister Rogers had an anger problem. I'm just not sure E.J.'s on target that "so many" on the right are upset with Warren. And unfortunately, his celebration of Warren kind of hangs on the equivalence of outrage—on the idea that Obama and Warren have both shown courage in bucking their supporters' wishes, and that Obama, in choosing Warren, is approving not of the politics of evangelical Christianity as they traditionally have been, but as they could be:
Warren appears to be genuinely interested in broadening evangelical Christianity's public agenda. In a recent interview with Steve Waldman of Beliefnet.com, Warren compared gay marriage to "an older guy marrying a child," and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." But he also called upon evangelicals to be "the social change leaders in our society" engaged with "poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice."
Obama wants to encourage this move, which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural. Although I support gay marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama's success in causing so much consternation on the right.
Let's see Warren make a few moves that do provoke a little consternation on the right, and then we can be impressed. (E.J. actually offers some good ideas in his column.)
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Emily, totally fair point about the Iseman and Hunter stories—they were examples of other kinds of basic journalistic malfeasance. And Politico didn't point out that a number of its top press screw-ups were sexism. But neither did it really "mount a broader critique" of the media's coverage of, in particular, Hillary. All the blunders Politico named that related to Hillary (there were three) had to do with Team Hillary or the candidate's supporters crying foul on sexism in the press.
Which is a little funny, because I always thought the media's coverage of Sarah Palin was more sex-based than its coverage of Hillary. (I don't mean "sexist," exactly, but perpetually tinged—positively or negatively—by its consciousness of her sex. What's the word for this? It's like the difference between racism and racialism, but is there a word?) The condescending pats on the head from conservatives when the li'l gal did good, the sniggers at her Miss South Carolina-esque ditziness when she did bad, the titanic obsession with her wardrobe (Sen. Norm Coleman didn't get so much heat when somebody bought him fancy suits from the same Minneapolis Neiman Marcus) ... Of course, the McCain campaign invited all this by cynically selecting Palin over other reformers for her anatomical features in the first place.
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Welcome, Eve, and good call about Politico's top 10 blunders. The piece doesn't itself point out that the screw-ups it lists were sexist (though Fox does get dinged for taking two "racially tinged shots at Michelle Obama"). I'm with you in not complaining. Better to mount a broader critique of some of the coverage of Michelle and Hillary and Sarah Palin than to slap a sexist label on it. As we watched all of this unfold over the past year, what drew us in, I think, were the ambiguities and complexities, as well as the high drama. Maybe that, too, is a reason to take heart--as we got to know these women as public figures, we kept coming back for more because they only got more interesting.
Also, a quibble: I don't agree entirely with your list. The NYT's presentation of Vicki Iseman's affair-nonaffair with John McCain was an old-fashioned story without the goods—or at least, without the goods in print. I'm not sure it's more problematic than that. And the failure of the mainstream press to run with John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, after the National Enquirer nabbed them—well, nobody likes to get beat, and once the tabloids make a story their own, it's tainted from the point of view of major newspapers and TV. I'm not defending the laggards—as I said ad nauseam at the time, the Edwards story was wholly legit. But I'm not sure you can chalk up the way the press handled it to the pitfalls of covering women.
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