The biggest unsettled question of the 2016 campaign is whether Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton, or if she lost simply due to ingrained, institutional sexism. Clearly, something went catastrophically wrong, when a seasoned public servant like Clinton, admittedly the most qualified candidate ever to run on the Democratic ticket, loses to a pompous ass reality-TV star with zero experience in government. So what happened? (as Clinton herself titled her book.)
One thing that happened, is that the media spent a lot of time beating Hillary up, reporting stories which talked about her smiling too much, smiling too little, and such trivia, plus the obsession with the now-legendary emails, because Trump’s faux pas were endless and some effort had to be made at finding equal flaws in both candidates. So email hysteria was born, for the purpose of driving a race horse narrative, to hook viewers, rather than factually reporting that Trump was a complete buffoon and Clinton was the one talking policy. That would have been considered bias, although it was the plain truth.
If the experience Hillary Clinton had with the media in 2016 was over and done with, it would make for an interesting learning experience. But it doesn’t look like anything has been learned, and in fact, the media is doing exactly the same thing to the women who have declared their candidacy in the 2020 campaign.
Like Hillary Clinton, the women of the 2020 campaign are “uninspiring,” “flawed,” and “unappealing,” according to the media, which treats the white, male Democratic candidates like budding rock stars. The women, though are simultaneously too heavy on policy and too light on details. And despite long résumés and accomplished careers, they are, like Hillary, getting a fraction of the attention, adulation, and value of their male peers. This is the reality of misogyny, and it would be foolhardy to imagine that the next woman nominee would be less vulnerable to it than the last.
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To recognize this is to illuminate the myriad ways that misogyny guides and defines our polity. We routinely discuss income inequality and wealth concentration, but rarely mention that women and children make up 70 percent of the impoverished, and that men are 83 percent of the 1 percent. Despite the fact that women make up just over half of the population and an even greater portion of voters, we treat “women’s issues”—reproductive rights, child-care costs, and the pervasive damage of domestic violence—as niche concerns, part of the “culture wars,” untethered from our broader politics. Consider: Half the country elected a man who openly bragged about sexual assault and ogling underage girls, and within weeks of doing so, our polity told his opponent, the first woman to headline a major party presidential ticket, to go home “and knit.”
So is it all that surprising then, that we see tremendous gaps in coverage between the pile of white male candidates and the five female veteran lawmakers contending for the Democratic nomination?, It’s the product of disproportionately white, male-led newsrooms that rarely celebrate the feminine as “cool” and make assumptions about who is worthy of consideration. When Beto O’Rourke says that he wings speeches and is “born” to lead in a race with numerous prepared, engaged women who had to fight sexism even after being elected to high office, who come to the table with policies they’ve sponsored and proposals at the ready, it is an ugly reminder of the work women have to do to be considered competent versus the unearned entitlement of men. And when we engage in defenses and normalization of a senator and then a VP touching women and girls in intimate ways without their consent, we are really having a dialogue about women as things that men are entitled to rather than people who deserve to have their boundaries respected.
You may recall Canadian feminist Charlotte Whitton’s sardonic comment, “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”
Be that as it may, the media had a hand in shaping Donald Trump’s journey down the escalator and into the Oval Office and maybe the same thing is going to happen again. That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it, would be to simply accept the fact that only a white male will be able to beat Trump, and maybe, if institutionalized sexism is at the core of our societal problems, maybe it’s best to go that direction. Because the truth of the matter is that the only issue in 2020 is beating Donald Trump. If that’s Bernie, Beto, Biden, whomever, beating Trump and taking back the White House is the only consideration any Democrat should have.
Once we get rid of Trump, we can rethink standards of media coverage and see what changes can take place in that institution.
Just a thought.