House of Eratosthenes

Last weekend, I had indulged in a fanciful bit of creative writing trying to figure out what it would look like if a certain Clinton sycophant had such undying adoration for me, as he in fact has for Hillary Clinton — and had written a diary entry about my relatively humdrum existence. You might have thought at that time, that myself and others had brought to you the most incredible, amazing, outrageous example of Clinton-worship disguised as even-handed analysis, that you were likely to see in this generation.

In my view, you could be forgiven for such a mistake. The link immediately preceding, points to the only occurrence on the innernets I could find of this piece, written up by one Jonathan Tilove at Newhouse News Service, about the “gauntlet” being run by our former First Lady and current Junior Senator from the state of New York.

In the coming months, America will decide whether to elect its first female president. And amid a techno-media landscape where the wall between private vitriol and public debate has been reduced to rubble, Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression.

Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in “bitch,” “slut,” “skank,” “whore” and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language.

We have never been here before.

No woman has run quite the same gantlet. And of course, no man.

Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

In times past, this coarser conversation would have remained mostly personal and subterranean. But now we have a blogosphere, where no holds are barred and vituperative speech is prized. We have social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, with their limitless ability to make the personal public.
There are no rules. And so far there is little recognition in the political and media mainstream of the teeming misogyny only a mouseclick away.

Oh dear oh dear, how is hapless Hillary ever going to survive?

Okay…we’ve learned our lesson now, right? There is more to come.

So funny. A relatively unexciting and stuffy white male Republican President botches something…and you know, a lot of folks have lost sight of this, but you can still make a logically sound argument that it wasn’t a botch…and our press demands to know things like — what’ll it take for him to recognize his mistake. What’ll it take for us to recognize it. What’ll it take for an impeachment to get going.

God help us if Hillary is elected. What are the questions going to be if/when she starts cranking out mistakes? How it makes her feel…what kind of pig-headed chauvinists are in our midst, their dangerous and childish passions now being stoked by whatever –gate scandal just happened to Hillary. Not that she caused. But that happened to her.

Well, just for the record. I’m all for women keeping all the rights and privileges they have. Voting, running for office, earning the same as men…but also for the record, let’s take note of what this all means. Here, in this blizzard of Hillary-worship coming from an ostensibly unbiased and objective media, is a great reason for barring women from public office. As potent as any you will ever find.

They can’t be criticized. They can’t be inspected. They can’t be slimed. In fact it’s worse than that — a woman takes it on herself to do the criticizing, even going so far as to forsake all other avenues of communication as Hillary has done, becoming the ultimate Toxic Candidate — whatever sore feelings she causes by doing so, are the fault of whoever does the complaining. Not her. She is not to blame. She is a victim of misogyny.

Maybe it would be different if she had the letter “R” after her name. I dunno.

But this is nuts. And it’s more the rule than the exception…so expect to see a lot more of it.

I’m surprised there ain’t more “stuff” out there like the link you posted, Morgan. Oh…but wait! There is! In the “sleeping with the enemy” category of discussion, I watched Bill Moyers’ Journal in its entirety this past Friday evening, and it was fascinating. I really mean that: fascinating. Because he had an extended interview with some female linguistics expert who went on and on and on about the unprecedented nature of the misogynistic attacks on Her Hillaryness….with lotsa examples designed to get the Moyers Faithfull’s knickers seriously bunched up.

Nonetheless, it was interesting. You really should go scan the dialog. Transcript here. And here’s a sample:

BILL MOYERS: Here are some of the entries from Facebook, you know? “Hillary can’t handle one man; how can she handle 150 million of them? Send her back to the kitchen to get a sandwich. She belongs back with the dishes, not upfront with the leaders.” It goes on and on like that. I mean, and it is fairly misogynist, but it isn’t just the Internet. I mean on Rush Limbaugh, he talks about Clinton’s testicle lockbox. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson says there’s just something about her that feels castrating. One of his guests, a former spokesman from the Republican National Committee, Clifford May, says that if Clinton is going to appeal to women for support on the basis of her gender, at least call her a vaginal-American. I mean, in fact, isn’t the sexist vilification of Hillary Clinton being set by the mainstream media?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: It’s being set by both. The mainstream media has a much larger audience. When you look to the size of the groups that have this sort of vulgar, gross language on them about Hillary Clinton, their membership is actually very low. Where mainstream media can reach that number of people with the first second that it’s articulated. Underlying this is a long-lived fear of women in politics. For example, we know that there’s language to condemn female speech that doesn’t exist for male speech. We call women’s speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton’s laugh was being described as a cackle–

You’ll LURVE it.
- Buck | 12/10/2007 @ 14:40
Where were these people when all that was being directed at Condoleeza Rice?
- Cris | 12/10/2007 @ 19:45

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More Hillary-FawningMonday, December 10th, 2007

More Hillary-Fawning
Monday, December 10th, 2007