Nancy Pelosi doesn’t really care what you think of her. Also, she seems to live on a diet of chocolate ice cream. These two points are hammered home many times in New York magazine profile of the current speaker of the House written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who also seems to attribute nearly mythic significance to the politician’s ubiquitous smile -- her mask, if you will - as a smoke screen for her steely will.
What one thinks of Pelosi’s steeliness largely depends on whether she’s playing for your team. This is a woman who can send her enemies into apoplectic frenzy. The choicer tidbits cited by Grigoriadis include the insult “Mussolini in a skirt,” and a disturbing number of threats to do bodily harm -- Glenn Beck joked (ha! ha!) that he’d like to poison her wine; Joe the Plumber said he wanted to “beat the living tar out of her” and a radio host once said he wanted to punch her in the face. (Not to be outdone, a New York magazine reader chimes in that he’d like to “throw up in her face and says she is the “Penguin to Obama’s Joker.”)
When presented with this laundry list of rhetorical violence, Pelosi responds to her interviewer with serene equanimity in the face of a schoolyard bully. “It’s really sad. They really don’t understand how inappropriate that is. That language is something I haven’t heard in decades.” She really isn’t angry with you, you see, just disappointed in you. But that’s the smiley side talking. And there is most definitely another side. In Grigoriadis’ telling, “She’s a kind of Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, impervious with her power and relishing her ability to attack, dropping bombs like, ‘If people are ripping your face off, you have to rip their faces off.” Note to Glenn Beck and Joe the Plumber: Watch your back in those dark alleys.
These two sides of Pelosi seem to duke it out throughout the profile. On the one hand, Grigoriadis sees “feminine touches” in Pelosi’s governing style -- she sends flowers and thank you notes, remembers to call colleagues' sick family members and tends to use “more carrot and less stick” in bringing people over to her way of thinking (though it certainly helps that her position gives her an awful lot of carrots at her disposal). She is occasionally self-effacing: She dislikes the notion of, in Grigoriadis’ words, “hogging credit” for healthcare reform, insists that her staff not use the word “I” when writing about her, and says that if healthcare reform passes, “It won’t be my legacy. It will be everyone’s legacy.” She talks to her grandchildren as a form of “power naps” and one of her biographers told Grigoriadis that every person he interviewed – including, presumably, her enemies -- thought to bring up her good looks. Most disturbing, we learn that Rahm Emanuel has nicknamed her “Mommy” (as opposed to her grandchildren, who call her “Mimi.”)
Then again, quite a few people have also pointed out that her boss is easy on the eyes, and he, too, has been known to bring up children and family as political metaphors. But unlike Obama, Pelosi seems to care much more about getting her way than being loved. Although her approval ratings have recently taken a “queasy” 14-point nose dive, she doesn’t seem to care. She lives in a “bubble,” according to Grigoriadis -- carries a crappy cellphone, can’t tell Sean Hannity from the rest of the Fox News gang, and is only interested in bipartisanship insofar as she can turn it to her own advantage -- in which paying attention to her detractors is a distraction from her “historic work.” Opponents are to be vanquished, not appeased (says one associate, “Her attitude is, ‘God bless their souls, but these people don’t believe in global warming,'”) and she has no problem dividing the word into moral absolutes. (She recently said of insurance companies, “It’s almost immoral, what they are doing. They are the villains in this.”) In her disregard for public opinion, and her belief in moral absolutes, one can almost hear a bit of an echo here of a certain former president -- which might go a long way toward explaining what makes her critics so batshit crazy. But if one happens to agree -- and I do -- that providing healthcare to men, women and children is a moral absolute and that certain practices of certain health insurance companies are pretty villainous, it’s nice to have a fire-breather in one’s corner. Just because we once elected someone who was certain and, to some of us, wrong, doesn’t mean we have to believe one can’t be certain, and right.
Some have seen Grigoriadis’ version of Pelosi as a “hatchet job,” yet another example of a woman bringing down another woman of the sisterhood. I have to admit, I don’t see that. Yes, suggesting that a person wears a “mask” is one way of saying that person is two-faced. But what politician doesn’t have a public persona? Moreover, the strongest thing that comes out in the piece is that Nancy Pelosi is concerned with getting the job done. It’s also worth noting that when Pelosi came up into politics, during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the world was a very different place for women politicians, even in the liberal bastion of San Francisco. At the time, writes Grigoriadis, Pelosi was “a complicated symbol for some feminists -- she was demeaned by opponents as a rich mom, a dilettante, a Pacific Heights party girl, and they weren’t sure she wasn’t.” Although she came from a political family (both her father and brother served as Baltimore mayors; her father was in Congress as well), things were different for her:
It felt like an extension of my role as mother ... From my view, the best thing for my children was for them to live in a world where other children had opportunities, too, where the environment was safe and clean. Back then, there was a tendency for women to minimize what you could bring to the table in intellect and strategic thinking. But men don’t have any secret sauce. So every step of the way, I said to myself, ‘I can do that.’ And then I knew I could win elections. That’s when I had my breakthrough. I said to myself, ‘You know what? I really know how to do this.’ You know, even being picked as leader of the minority in Congress was a great honor, because they’d never had a woman. Never thought of it. And I’d never have said to someone, ‘Well, isn’t it time we had a woman?’ That would have killed you in terms of votes.
It’s probably no accident, then, that Grigoriadis sees a parallel in temperament -- if not in political ideology -- between Pelosi and perhaps the best-known female politician of the ‘80s, Margaret Thatcher. Pelosi, she notes, seemed almost “embarrassed” about her press conference on Sept. 17, when she was brought to tears while describing the parallels she saw between the hateful right-wing rhetoric of today and the kind she saw in San Francisco in the ‘70s, that culminated in the shootings of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. “We have to talk about ideas and where we go from there,” said Pelosi, “and not characterize personal experiences.” While that’s nearly as perfect an inversion as you can get to the feminist maxim that the personal is political, it’s not hard to understand why an old-school female politician might be wary of showing emotion in public.
To look weak in public, well, that’s Pelosi’s worse nightmare. Hillary might cry to boost her poll numbers, but a powerful woman nearing 70 always keeps a stiff upper lip, never showing more emotion than Maggie Thatcher. And in a way, it works for Pelosi, having the world see only the hard shell, thinking she’s an archetypal female monster with a pasted-on smile. The smile is meant to balance out her aggressive rhetoric, to calm men down, to seem less threatening (it doesn’t work, of course); but it’s also a way of shutting people out of her true emotions, who she really is. But that’s OK -- she’s willing to have people not understand her. If need be, she’s willing to be hated. Not caring makes Nancy Pelosi powerful. She’ll listen to her poll numbers from her staff, but she doesn’t really process them. "I’ll take the hit," she likes to say, waving a hand. “I’ll take the hit.”
We like to describe those who believe the ends justify the means as mercenary. But whatever else you can say about Nancy Pelosi, that woman is a warrior. While all of us would prefer a world in which a woman doesn’t need to paste on a cut-out smiley face to defuse her aggressive ideals, the strategies employed by Pelosi certainly seemed to work well enough make her the most powerful female politician in the country today. Let’s hope she gets us some decent healthcare, too.
Back in August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "There's no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option. Unless someone comes up with a better idea, that's how we're going forth in the House."
On Thursday, though, Pelosi appeared to back away from that position, dropping the part about not being able to pass a bill without a public option and inching towards supporting the deal that Senate Democrats worked out earlier this week.
"Well, what I said -- it is a two-part statement that quotes what the President has said. We believe, we in the House believe that the public option is the best way to hold insurance companies honest -- to keep them honest and also to increase competition. If there is a better way, put it on the table," Pelosi said at her weekly press conference, in response to a question about her August comments.
"As soon as we see something in writing from the Senate, we will be able to make a judgment about that. But our standards are that we have affordability for the middle class, security for our seniors, closing the donut hole and sustaining the solvency of Medicare. Responsibility to our children, so not one dime is added to the deficit. And accountability of insurance companies. We will take a measure of that bill in those regards."
These comments are being portrayed as Pelosi outright abandoning the public option. Clearly, she wasn't quite that definitive. But she's certainly leaving the door open to the Senate deal, and -- especially given these remarks -- it wouldn't be at all surprising to see her come out in support of it fairly soon. If the agreement is the only way any bill passes the Senate, it's not like she has much choice in the matter.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.
It was a stunningly impressive recovery for someone who seemed to be coming apart at the seams last summer, when a sputtering, rattled Pelosi struggled to deal with the nationwide insurgency of town hall protesters -- reputable, concerned citizens whom she outrageously tried to tar as Nazis. Whether or not her bill survives in the Senate is immaterial: Pelosi's hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.
A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!
And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings accounts is a crock -- something that, given the astronomical costs of major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even average household income.
International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what's the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.
How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.
Last week's startling gubernatorial victories by Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey were routinely dismissed as local aberrations by the liberal media or inflated as referendums on President Obama by the conservative media. But voters were clearly revolting against the deranged excess spending of government at both state and federal levels. So it was as much a protest against Congress as against the White House.
Obama sure needed a lift and got it from Pelosi. The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan -- another rats' nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama's flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall -- which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president's principal advisors. And Obama's muted response to last week's massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden -- a prize that can become a curse.
On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on -- lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went "Psycho" weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) -- as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need -- which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.
Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.
Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.
In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate.
What mal-education goes on at killer prices at the elite schools! Skyrocketing tuition costs are legalized piracy. It's a national scandal, which the mainstream media has shamefully neglected. A few weeks ago, I was bemused to discover the bill from my first semester (fall 1964) at Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The tuition was $200, which was offset by my state scholarship for that amount. My shared room was $150; linen was $6.50. Board at the cafeteria was $225. The physical education fee was $2, and there was an activity fee of $17.50 and a general college fee of $12.50. The grand total my parents owed for the semester was $413.50 -- for which I received the superb education that is still the basis of my professional life as a teacher and writer. If only the billions upon billions that this country has thrown down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan had been redirected to education and healthcare!
Now on, with relief, to pop! I've been enjoying "Gainsbourg Forever," a two-disc set made in France of the best songs of Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91). It came as a surprise that he wrote big-beat techno songs at the end of his career. I adore "Mon Légionnaire" (1989), which ends the collection and which I've been playing over and over in my car. This video doesn't quite capture the delicious crispness of the synthesizer and twangy guitar licks, but you get the idea. I nearly drove off the road when I heard "Bonnie and Clyde," Gainsbourg's 1968 duet with Brigitte Bardot, a homage to the epochal Arthur Penn film starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty of the prior year. In the video, Bardot (as amusingly deadpan as Nico fronting the Velvet Underground) shows a lot of leg and can be heard oddly whooping in the background. Check out Gainsbourg's mug in this vid, and don't tell me that he, Bob Dylan and Canada's Leonard Cohen weren't close cousins a few generations back in the old country (Eastern Europe and Russia). There's some shared genius DNA going on there.
A quick segue from grizzled, decadent experience to lyrical, springtime innocence: Here's Emily and Fiona, two young English sisters living in Germany who do amazingly deft versions of classic 1960s songs (presumably based on their parents' collection). When I recently stumbled on Emily and Fiona gravely performing "House of the Rising Sun," I literally got goose bumps. I felt that I was seeing apparitions from the 17th century -- the small-town singers of British and Scots-Irish folk ballads that would bewitch the Romantic poets and eventually produce American country music, centered in Appalachia. Emily and Fiona do a creditable job with the Mamas and Papas' "California Dreamin," as well as their less well-known "Creeque Alley," an autobiographical summary of the group's knockabout early years. (Creeque Alley is a tiny old town street in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was ecstatic when I discovered it by accident six years ago.) Cheers to Emily and Fiona for their harmonizing gifts and musical mission!
Bouncing back to hard-bitten experience: This week, the U.K.'s Daily Mail published several photos of Lady Gaga on a German TV show. Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old? I've been in advanced doubt about it for a while, particularly after seeing this video of early photos of her hanging with some mighty tough critters. (A friend of mine said of Gaga in this vid: "Too many miles of bad road there.") I think Gaga was a hell of a lot sexier as a fun Italian-American brunette. This artificial, masklike, over-the-top Club Kids thing that she's now into seems compulsive and wearily passé. Give it a rest, and focus on the music!
And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil! The poverty-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro are her latest charity -- presumably because dusty, distant Malawi is too bare of the hordes of paparazzi required to record the latest feats of Our Lady Bountiful. How convenient that the best hotels of Ipanema are only minutes away from the Rio slums! Oh, that girl -- always thinking, ain't she?
Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil? And that she is contemplating buying a house there? Is she planning to take tutorials from the queen of axe, Salvador da Bahia's very own superstar, Daniela Mercury? Well, it's kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna's much-delayed self-education.
Daniela herself has had a hectic few months, touring Brazil, Portugal and Argentina for her new album, "Canibalia."
NOTE: Two weeks ago, my essay collection "Vamps & Tramps: New Essays"
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
Congress' consideration of healthcare reform legislation has largely been a pretty slow process. But things are beginning to speed up.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi debuted her chamber's version of a reform bill. This week, she reportedly plans to introduce it, perhaps even today. That means a vote in the full House could come as soon as Thursday.
Whenever Pelosi does introduce the bill, expect at least a 72-hour delay before it comes to the floor of the House. That's because the speaker has bowed to Republican demands that the legislation be available to the public for at least three days before any vote.
As the Hill's Jared Allen and Mike Soraghan note, however, there are other considerations at plan in determining timing on any vote: "[I]t’s possible Pelosi won’t have the votes by Thursday, and leaders have already warned their caucus that they could be working all weekend and into next week to win a vote on President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority."
The Senate has been getting all the attention during the debate over healthcare reform, but the House needs its day in the sun, too. That turned out to be Thursday, as House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unveiled their version of the legislation, which weighs in at almost 2,000 pages and has an estimated cost of $894 billion. (Despite the cost, it's still estimated to reduce the federal deficit by roughly $30 billion over 10 years.)
The bill does include a public option, though it's not as "robust" as House progressives wanted it to be. Considering the problems the public option has in the Senate, though, that might not end up being the most noteworthy part of the House's legislation. There are two other provisions in the bill that should get some attention. The first is one that would expand Medicaid eligibility to those earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level. The second is a tax on the wealthy -- individuals earning more than $500,000 and couples earning more than $1 million. That differs from the Senate bill, which taxes "Cadillac" insurance plans.
Republican opposition, naturally, has begun in full force. As with the attacks on the Senate Finance Committee's bill, early criticism has focused on the length of the legislation -- part of a campaign aimed at convincing voters that Democrats haven't been transparent or forthcoming about what's in the bill.
At 11:06 a.m. EDT on Tuesday morning, a "GOP Leader Alert" e-mail landed in my inbox. From House Minority Leader John Boehner's office, it was headlined, "Great work, Congress: Speaker Pelosi's House to honor Confucius' birthday as unemployment nears 10 percent."
The e-mail continued:
These are your hard-earned tax dollars at work: with millions of Americans looking for jobs and the nation’s unemployment rate nearing 10 percent, the U.S. House of Representatives today will take up a grand total of four non-controversial "suspension" bills. Four.
One (H. Res. 784) marks the birthday of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who was welcomed into the world 2,327 years before the 13 colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. With so many of Democrats’ top priorities lagging and their leaders ensconced behind closed doors plotting their government takeover of health care, Congress has been “playing hooky” and settling into a “leisurely routine.” It’s unacceptable for Congress to take it easy at a time when out-of-work families struggling to make ends meet are asking “where are the jobs?” That’s why House Republicans will take to the floor this afternoon to talk about our better solutions to help small businesses create jobs and make health care more affordable and accessible for America's seniors.
You can't make a real case against Boehner's argument here -- Congress often takes up meaningless resolutions while not working very hard on things that actually matter. But he should probably remember that people in Congress are generally very unwise to throw stones. When Republicans were in power, they too had a real problem with short workweeks. Plus, they too like to introduce a pointless resolution or two.
Just 20 minutes before Boehner's e-mail came in, there was another e-mail from House Republicans. This one was from the Republican Study Committee, a conservative group within the House GOP, and it was announcing a resolution to honor the marchers who came out for the tea party protest in Washington, D.C. on September 12th. As of that e-mail, 76 Republicans had signed on as co-sponsors of the resolution.
On Sunday in a New York Times editorial titled "The Mismeasure of Woman," former Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman -- whose magazine folded six months ago, almost to the day -- argued that women have been toiling under the collective delusion of progress. We have fooled ourselves by defining our gains "too narrowly." We have focused on the "numbers at the expense of attitudes." Lately, there has been a lot of noise about the Shriver Report, with its cheerful pronouncement that, in 40 percent of families, women are the primary breadwinners; about the "He-cession" that has hit men harder than women (hardly positive news, but certainly thought-provoking); about Pelosi and Clinton and Sotomayor and the 17 female senators and 74 women in the House. But none of that is indicative of the actual state of the female union, not when (as Lipman points out) Hillary Clinton can still be mocked for her "cankles" and Keith Olbermann can call Michelle Malkin "a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it." "In recent years," writes Lipman, "progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward."
Since the article published, Lipman has been taken to task for her tendentiousness and factual inaccuracies, for her "gratingly pompous" tone and "insanely massive overwhelming ego" -- her ego, I have to confess, was refreshing -- as well as her bizarre argumentative mash-up connecting 9/11 to the supposed flame-out of female advancement. (This argument, a colleague of mine pointed out, was first made by Susan Faludi, though I would say not very convincingly then, either.) But what of Lipman's declaration that cultural attitudes toward women have regressed? Have they gone the way of the caveman in recent years?
It's unlikely there's a woman who writes for a living, or whose work has made her subject to public judgment of any kind -- hell, it's unlikely there's a woman living in America today -- who would argue with the assertion that the "conversation online about women" is "just plain ugly," as Lipman writes. She tells readers that she has been called "a witch and a bimbo." Most women, at some point in their lives, publicly or privately, have been insulted similarly, or worse. (When I wrote for Salon about my faulty iPhone, the reaction was overwhelmingly sexist, with letter writers calling me, in various colorful phrases, a dumb girl.) The Internet, of course, is a magnifying glass for all forms of vituperation, with bloggers and commentators drawing on a rich fund of misogynist language. And the sexist talk of male media personalities, including many of the supposedly liberal persuasion -- Keith Olbermann and David Letterman and Chris Matthews and Bill Maher -- is often shocking, especially when they are criticizing women reviled by their fellow liberals, like Michelle Malkin or Sarah Palin (or Hillary Clinton).
This sort of abuse needs to end. But are the attitudes on display new? Didn't the Internet just provide a novel, free, easy-access, anonymous pasture for the age-old dinosaur of sexism to roam? Perhaps more to the point, do such attitudes, even if they are more public or available or distributable than they once were, indicate a corresponding stall-out of progress? Might they actually be a result of progress? During the presidential election, in an essay I wrote about Hillary Clinton, I argued that the success of her candidacy had brought long-latent fears about women and power to light. The criticism is loudest when the successor is approaching the throne. Seventy-seven cents on the male-earned dollar, or the dearth of women in corporate boardrooms, are indeed pitiful statistics, but I'm not sure they indicate backsliding, or even that progress has ground to a halt. What about the proliferation of feminist Web sites and mommy blogs? What about those women in Congress? What about all the "great news" with which Lipman opens her essay? The picture may not yet be rosy, but I'd still say we are inching along.
Lipman is right to argue for an overhaul of "popular perceptions" vis-à-vis women. In order for women to, well, progress there needs to be a change in the way we are perceived. But for this to happen, we must put an end to the notion that we are fundamentally different or "Other" -- a few short steps to "inferior." Tossing out Lipman's own gender "exceptionalisms," as Jezebel's Anna North calls them, would be a start. Lipman tells us that women are risk-averse (and thus hesitate to ask for things, like raises), that they tend not to laugh at their mistakes, that they are "built to withstand hardship and pain," and that they "are less likely to define themselves by their job." I am a ninny about pain, and if I lost my job, my identity would suffer. I know I'm not alone. Friends who work as accountants and software executives and real estate agents in the Midwest, where I was raised -- women who, unlike me, have children and houses and husbands -- would feel the same. My mother, who runs a marketing company, tells me her female employees do in fact ask for promotions and raises, often with a greater sense of entitlement than the men. You might say that Lipman's own attitudes about gender are as antiquated as the more poisonous ones she decries.
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