What Will Suffice

This primary season I have mostly kept my mouth shut.  The fact is, I’m terrible at political predictions.  I have absolutely no idea how the population of any constituency (other than that occupying my head) thinks or reasons.  And since the currency of primary seasons is to talk about “electability” and the ideal characteristics of a President and other concepts upon which I have no consequent ability to opine, I say very little.

And yet.  Man (no pun intended), is all this ex post facto self-flagellation (or, alternately, self-denial) over sexism in the media annoying.  It’s nice to know that someone is even hearing the argument, I guess, because it certainly didn’t seem that way before.  (And where are media navel-gazers when we actually need them? Storing up details for a post-mortem, I guess.)

You don’t have to be a Hillary fan to have been offended by this or this or any one of these.  You don’t even have to dislike Obama to point out that he has a much better card to play to call people out on idiot remarks.  Call Lou Dobbs a racist, and he feels compelled to respond even in light of all the evidence against him.  Call Chris Matthews sexist, and… umm… silence. 

This isn’t really about having a higher trump card, of course – it’s about having the same one. Henrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, appears to think that the fact that there are more women in political office than blacks ought to serve as some kind of palliative – which, of course, misses the point entirely.  The reason that sexist remarks about women are wrong has nothing to do with some sort of idiotic Oppression Olympics.  (I borrow the term from an astute commenter on Jezebel.)  wrong because they’re sexist, and because they perpetuate a particular image of women which, even if not totally fatal – because after all, we have, like, what, three whole governors, right? – is unquestionably damaging. 

Yeah yeah, I know, we bitches are always so angry.