Why misogyny matters
Jill Filipovic notes that a lot of the fallen men in journalism helped Trump win the election.
Sexual harassment, and the sexism it’s predicated on, involves more than the harassers and the harassed; when the harassers are men with loud microphones, their private misogyny has wide-reaching public consequences. One of the most significant: the 2016 election.
Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.
Feel sick enough yet?
A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.
Or, when they’re too old for sex-object status, just going away already.
For arguing that gender shaped the election narrative and its result, feminists have been pooh-poohed, simultaneously told that it was Clinton, not her gender, that was the problem and that her female supporters were voting with their vaginas instead of their brains.
The latest harassment and assault allegations complicate that account and suggest that perhaps many of the high-profile media men covering Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump were the ones leading with their genitals. Mr. Trump was notoriously accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment and assault, and was caught on tape bragging about his proclivity for grabbing women. That several of the men covering the race — shaping the way American voters understood the candidates and what was at stake — were apparently behaving in similarly appalling ways off-camera calls into question not just their objectivity but also their ability to cover the story with the seriousness and urgency it demanded.
They felt a sympathy for Trump that we weren’t aware of, though we may have suspected it.
The theme running through nearly all of the complaints is a man in a position of power who saw the women around him not as competent colleagues or as even sovereign human beings, but as sexual objects he could either proposition to boost his ego or humiliate to feed a desire for domination.
It’s hard to look at these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That’s exactly how Mr. Lauer, Mr. Halperin, Mr. Rose and Mr. Thrush often treated Mrs. Clinton.
I feel more than sick enough now.
And yet, at my playwriting meeting last weekend, when I was reading a play called “Feminazi”, one of the (liberal) men at the group continually insisted that the word “Feminazi” is only ever used against extremists (which when challenged, he vaguely defined as ‘hating men’). When my male friends talk about feminism, they sooner or later come around to “but of course, some of it goes too far”. When pressed for details, they vaguely repeat “goes too far…asks for too much”, again undefined how much is too much, because if they answered it truthfully, too much is equal treatment. Being treated like human beings. Not being whistled at when we walk down the street. Not being talked down to in meetings (even when we have more experience and training than the one talking down to us). Not being mansplained. Not being ‘felt up’. Not being given silly condescending nicknames. Not being the subject of jokes about ‘jumping our bones’ or other crude sexual comments. Not being flirted with when we are trying to work. Not being passed over for promotion of someone less qualified but male. Not missing out on that dream job because of subconscious biases that the personnel officer would deny even holding. Not having to change our name when we are writers because a female writer has only a fraction of the chance of getting read by theatre artistic directors as a male does. Not being told ‘people don’t want to see plays by women because they just write about women’, then turning plays about women written by men into huge blockbusters.
Guess I’ll stop now. If I don’t stop at some arbitrary point, I could continue all day with all the things that men see as “going too far” or “extremist”.
Bullseye!
Men often project everything they dislike about themselves onto women.
Not trying to jump bones, iknklst, it seems you are doing one heck of a job, pushing one rock at a time uphill. Fantastic tenacity. Kudos.
Rrr, just call me Sisyphus.
…and Trump is famously neither of those things?