doctoral candidate in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication
telling
Yesterday I wrote about a woman being branded by a group of people for calling CPS to protect children.
Today, I’m going to write about the way a female candidate is treated by a certain male journalist.
But first, confirm this for me. We are in the year 2007, right? And people keep saying we’ve reached the threshold of equality, right? I mean, I keep hearing younger people saying that we have complete equality between the sexes.
But…the disparity between us is still huge. Take, for instance, the election for President of the United States.
MediaMatters reports that on the Chris Matthews Show, this took place:
Asked by Time managing editor Richard Stengel, “What are you suggesting by asking does this diminish her as a commander in chief by being surrounded by women?,” Matthews replied: “No, the idea that it — well, let me just get historic. We’ve never had a woman commander in chief.”
Right…historic. Because everything should be based on what has happened in the past. As if going with the status quo — John Wayne and General Patton — has been so great for us.
What really gets me, though, is that people are actually discussing the fact that Clinton has other women surrounding her. That’s a bad thing? And then discussing their hair color. WTF?!?
“It makes a case with a certain demographic, and I noticed the picture on the front of The Washington Post the other day showed her with all these women and her crew, and did you notice, there was only one blonde out of about 15 women, so it sort of — I thought that was very telling.”
Women with needs, Matthews says. Yeah…because, really, we’re either needy, maladjusted women or supposed to be beautiful, barefoot, and in the kitchen waitin’ for our man. We’re not supposed to be ambitious, intelligent, or fraternizing with other ambitious, intelligent women. Cardinal sins, those are.
Be a good girl. Shut your mouth. Don’t try to work outside the box.
I was thinking along the same lines this weekend, because I heard some comments about Clinton’s “style” (meaning her dressing style). It occurred to me that I’ve never heard any male candidate’s “style” discussed before. I recently read “Tough Choices” by Carly Fiorina and she talks about a lot of the issues women continue to face when they take on leadership roles. Whether it’s in business or politics, unfortunately, men (and women too, unfortunately) continue to judge women based not on their skills or accomplishments, but on their looks, personality and “feminine tendancies”. Equality isn’t nearly as close at hand as we’d like to believe it is–for women, or for minorities, who are judged by a completely different set of rules.