Man I love this primary - pure schadenfraude from having the stock-and-trade accusations of racism and sexism hurled back and forth from the different sides, with nary a white male in sight (Bill doesn’t count). Even the polite crowds are still engaging in the comparative victimology analysis. Maybe at the end of the road, people will actually question having the “ism” of choice be a default accusation that needs to be disproved…
Here’s Salon on how Hillary’s young female supporters are finding sexism abounding:
Excerpt:
[i]I am a loud feminist and a longtime Clinton skeptic who was suddenly feeling that I needed to rationalize, apologize for, or even just stay quiet about my increasing unease with the way Clinton was being discussed. Meanwhile, I was getting e-mails from men I didn’t know well who approached me as a go-to feminist to whom they could express their hatred of Hillary and their anger at her staying in the race – an anger that seemed to build with every one of her victories. One of my closest girlfriends, an Obama voter, told me of a drink she’d had with a politically progressive man who made a series of legitimate complaints about Clinton’s policies before adding that when he hears the senator’s voice, he’s overcome by an urge to punch her in the face.
A few weeks ago, my friend Becca O’Brien, a lawyer and policy advisor in New Orleans, visited me. She told me about her experience on the morning of the Louisiana primary. O’Brien had been openly torn between Obama and Clinton, and perhaps as a result, she received five phone calls from male friends around the country, urging her to vote for Obama. They were, she understood, just campaigning for their candidate; they didn’t realize how many calls she was receiving, or that taken together, they were making her furious. As O’Brien saw it, “The presumption was that I was undecided because I was a young woman, and they could talk some sense into me if they were the last ones I spoke to before I went into the voting booth.”
O’Brien told me she’d heard similar reports of irritation from female friends around the country. I asked her to send them my way, and I put out feelers on my own. Not since I wrote a story about the book “He’s Just Not That Into You” have I received such a tremendous response.
The women who contacted me were almost exclusively well-educated and professional, a culturally and politically elite demographic, to be sure. But they all echoed each other in their complaints, complaints that complicate the dominant narrative about how young female voters are experiencing this presidential election.
I received e-mails and phone calls from women voicing various strains of frustration: They told me about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends; some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women. Others had to find ways to call me out of earshot of their Obama-loving boyfriends. Some women apologized for “sounding so feminist.” Interviewees expressed vexation at not being able to put their finger on what it was about Obama-mania that creeped them out so badly, while maintaining a deep assuredness that something was not quite right. Perhaps most surprising was that the majority of the women I spoke to were not haters: They were Obama supporters, or at least Obama-appreciators. [/i]
