[Marxism] Sexism against HRC

[Fred Feldman]

On 3/31/08, Kathleen de la Peña McCook <kmccook at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> One thing is certain, her politics aside--this race with Hillary has
> reminded us that bias against women is still in the psyche of the
> U.S. press.

Robin Morgan's essay, link below, reminds us of the rampant sexism
that characterized much of the punditocracy as recently as two months ago.

How many people on this list knew that someone manufactured a nutcracker
shaped like Hillary Clinton with metal spikes between her thighs?

How many of you are laughing? I know someone is, because I myself laughed
when I heard about it. How deep is that? Very.

Fred replies:

Steffie, Kathleen, and Robin -- glad to see she's still in action after all
these years -- make some very sound points. (Yes, I still remember her as, I
think, the young daughter Dagmar in the early 1950s tv series, "I Remember
Mama" as well as for Sisterhood is Powerful. That's how far I go back, not
to mention her, although I think she was younger than me at the time.)

But I think it is dangerous to effectively dissolve Clinton's political
record into her sex so that the issue becomes simply do you support the
first Black president or the first woman president.  On that basis, it is
hard not to suspect that white people who support Obama are so upset at the
prospect of a woman president that they will support even an inexperienced
Black man against this woman who been everywhere and done everything and has
been a national leader since the early 90s.  That, of course, is what is
really breaking the back of the Clinton campaign, not a mass upsurge of
sexism that prefers even -- horror or horrors! -- a Black president to the
prospect of a -- even more horror of horrors -- woman president.

Of course, it is the fact that Hilary has been at the center of leadership
in this country since 1992 -- when the Clinton-Bush course, which has now
hit a wall, began to be charted -- is the real key to the decline of her
campaign. It is wrong to reduce the Obama-Clinton race to a purely
racial-sexual conflict.  The issue of "change" -- abstract though the word
is and meaning different things to different groups -- is very much
involved. If you don't understand Hilary's committed basic continuity with
the Clinton-Bush course -- dictated by her whole experience of "what works"
-- you cannot understand why more and more ruling class figures are turning
on her. And by the way, John McCain is in the same boat, far from adequately
protected by the fact that he is very white and very male (whatever that
means).

Steffie's comment about the anti-Clinton statuette with the spikes coming
out of her vagina highlights the way that the sexist anti-Clintonism  shades
over into the issue of violence against women. Remember Bill was always held
in contempt on the right because he treated his wife a legitimate political
leader in her own right. He didn't "put her in her place" and "shut her up,"
as was his male duty.  

I introduce this with a proviso: I am still a Freudian of sorts and  an
advocate of some of the views of the late Andrea Dworkin. I believe the
spikes emerging from Clinton's vagina are an example of making the victim
into the criminal. That is, the real image is of the spikes going the other
way, INTO the vagina of the offending woman and tearing her innards apart in
vengeance for her defiance and particularly for her ability to inspire fear
in men that she would be dangerous to "fuck with."