I just returned from three days in Stratford and Oxford to find that the American political landscape had significantly shifted. (Funny, I didn’t see any headlines about it in the English countryside.) Most of the Brits I’ve talked to have certainly heard of Hillary (and more so her husband) but they’re not sure who this Obama character is. “I’m not sure, either,” I tell them. “But I expect we’ll find out.”
As I cruised the Web, I found myself nodding at what media blogger Nancy Nall said in her summary of the campaign:
I’m thinking what happened to Hillary is what happens to people who live in a human cocoon, surrounded by ass-kissers and pillow-plumpers who either a) spend all their time covering their own; or b) telling you what you want to hear.
But I was especially interested — and saddened — by NYTimes columnist Judith Warner’s commentary juxtaposing Hillary’s decline with the ascendancy of “Sex and the City”:
In a culture that’s reached such a level of ostensible enlightenment as ours, calling a powerful woman “castrating” — however you choose to put it — ought to be seen as just as offensive as rubbing your fingers together to convey a love of gold coinage when you talk about a Jew. It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real national shame.
And she has quite a scatological list of jabs made by the media. (Yuck.)
I first got aggravated about this on-going sexism — and it is sexism — early on when that gasbag Rush Limbaugh complained about being forced to watch Clinton age over the course of the election, and I’ve watched the whole media circus with sadness and some disgust ever since.
In contrast, the frothy tale of Carrie Bradshaw and her fellow sex kittens is the antithesis of Clinton’s outspoken stance. “‘Sex and the City’ is the perfect movie for our allegedly ever-so-promising post-feminist era, when ‘angry’ is out and Restalyne is in, and virtually all our country’s most powerful women look younger now than they did 20 years ago,” says Warner.
Was the backlash solely because Hillary is a woman, or was she set-up for the cat-calls by being the stoic wife to a philandering husband? Did the media see that as a weakness? Did she really make more missteps than Obama? Or, as some have posited, did the Democratic voters, faced with deciding between a female candidate and a black candidate, conclude that sexism was less offensive than racism? I dunno. I’m still not sure I would have voted for her, but I certainly have taken her seriously.
I just honestly thought that, come November, she would be the one to beat.
June 7, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Okay, madam, how about going further with that Sex and the City idea for a post for MidLifeBloggers. I keep coming across all these comments about how Carrie’s in her 40s and Samantha’s in her 50s–and I’m thinking, 40 is the new 20, 50 is the new 30, and 60 is the new 40. Definitely have to do something about SATC-TM on the site.