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Just when you thought Hillary Clinton and the "did she or didn’t she play the 'gender card'” chaos had passed, Maureen Dowd today wrote this line: “Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.” I’m sure Dowd intended that statement as part of a nuanced argument, but taken on its own, it’s fodder for many an anti-Hillary argument. It also gives credence to a school of thought that women in leadership usually don’t get ahead unless someone (husband, father) gives them a head start. It denies the real power of a leader assuming feminist attitudes. More than her laugh, her supposed coldness, or her changing positions, in the media, gender is Hillary Clinton’s Achilles Heel. Susan Faludi writes that election cycles always invoke the gender card to help portray candidates as strong. But gender serves an entirely different purpose here, and it's an us against them argument.
When I interviewed White House Project Founder Marie Wilson a couple months ago, she said: “Being for women is great for men.” Recent discourse could fool you into thinking just the opposite. It’s fair to assume that if women get more power then men get less, but a) there’s enough leadership challenges to go around, don’t you think, and b) maybe we can redefine power so it makes fewer people miserable.
I don’t have any evidence but I believe once Clinton opened the floodgates and admitted gender bias might be a valid issue in the presidential race, our cultural discourse brought it out in the open and wants to keep it there (check out the spike in traffic for this search term). And there’s always Maureen Dowd to lead the way.
Marie Wilson also shone a welcome light on the term “opt-out revolution” by couching it as a cultural cycle and an attempt to check women's new power. I think we’re seeing one now with Hillary. Wilson noted that basically every ten years, the zeitgeist, the media, or whomever creates a brushfire that encourages women to rethink their advances. Perhaps it’s that women get too close to the nexus of power, and external forces, or even ourselves, reign us in. There were the new traditionalists in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s, remember Susan Faludi’s Backlash? A few years ago, the “opt out revolution,” educated, powerful women returning to the sphere of the home. Now, we’re discussing whether it’s fair to publicly acknowledge the limiting role of gender in public life, and we are watching women pay the price who choose to bring it out in the open.
Beneath all these cultural constructs, men and women are dealing with real fears, essential questions: As they gain power, are women going to leave their men? Will men lose their jobs if women gain power? Are we going to abandon those who need us? The stakes for being wives and mothers grow ever higher as women become more public people.
It’s a cycle, and we can choose to blunt its impact and continue with our work, if we choose to.
Which brings me to Judith Regan (the volatile deposed publisher who is suing employer Harper Collins for $100 million--and threatening that she was forced to keep quiet about some damning information about Rudy Giuliani). In her suit:
[Regan] “complains, for instance, that some unidentified person — …had attributed Regan’s success to her “golden vagina,” but that “when Regan complained about this sexist and insulting remark, nothing was ever done.”
Here is a direct reference to the gilded organ, courtesy of Gawker:
"When it comes to picking books, "Judith doesn't listen to anything or anybody," says brand-identity designer Jeff Stone, who is also the companion of HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman. "A man has a golden gut. She goes with her golden vagina."
I think that's sort of a complliment.
Blunting idea number 1: Let’s take the ultimate symbol of female reproduction and turn it into a powerful business tool. This way, gender becomes the motherlode, not an Achilles heel. Not to get overly Eve Ensler-ish, but it's sort of a rallying cry, the golden vagina giving voice to our differences and our strengths: I'm here, I'm female, I won't apologize or be too tough or too different or bring up my gender and then, deny it matters. Can we move on?"
