What do yesterday's election results mean for women? Salon asks Rebecca Traister.
We saw the continued expansion and revitalization of conversations about what it means to be a woman in politics, what it means to be a feminist, what sexist coverage looks and sounds like, what kind of impact it has on candidates, and how female candidates might respond to it.
Traister points to campaign incidents such as Christine O'Donnell and Krystall Ball's sex lives becoming issues, Nancy Pelosi being portrayed as the Wicked Witch of the West, Meg Whitman and Lisa Murkowski being referred to as prostitutes, Ken Buck saying voters should choose him because he doesn't wear heels. Her point is that we're now talking more openly about sexism than we have in decades.
For decades, women in US politics didn't talk a lot about sexism. If you did, it was playing the 'victim card', or drawing attention to yourself in a way you didn't want. If you were female and running for high political office, you didn't want to be the 'woman candidate'. You wanted to be 'one of the boys', just another candidate judged on the same standards as everyone else. So you tried to ignore gender. If you faced sexism, your best strategy was to just ignore it and hope it minimized itself. This is no longer true.
The gender card has suddenly gained renewed currency. Even for completely joke candidates that no one with half a brain would think of supporting for the US Senate, such as Christine O'Donnell, sexist mockery will be called out and criticized. When Jay Leno made a sexual joke about O'Donnell's position on masturbation, Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon asked "Is it harmless comedy or sexist commentary?". When an anonymous source publisehd a salacious account of sex between himself and O'Donnell, as the left-wing British Guardian noted, it was called out by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and promptly denounced on twitter and online from across the political spectrum. Even O'Donnell's rival Chris Coons attacked the piece, saying "The Gawker item is despicable, cowardly and has absolutely no value at all to any Delaware voters. We denounce it with great vigor."
In the 1990s, gender was subordinated to politics. When Bill Clinton faced sexual harassment attacks from Paula Jones and then was caught in having sex with a young intern, feminist groups were reluctant to be seen as allying with deeply reactionary political forces that would roll back womens' rights. In the 2000s, the 9/11 attacks ushed in a more militaristic and macho culture, epitomized by Arnold Schwarzenegger calling for more "manly men" in politics. The 's word' - sexism - practically disappeared from political discourse, seemingly destined to follow words like 'groovy' and 'far out' in the dust bin of late 20th century American culture.
But today, defending candidates against sexism is no longer a matter of purely electoral politics. When the women at left-wing feminist site Feministing condemned the use of 'whore' to describe Meg Whitman, they made it clear that they weren't endorsing Whitman, only calling out sexism in this one instance. Calling out sexism against a candidate no longer means (or implies) supporting that candidate.
That women candidates are no longer afraid to confront sexism and that we as a society are no longer afraid to talk about it is a big step forward and a sign of a revitalized urgency of women and politics and the realization that urgent discussion of womens' role in society is incomplete. What changed? To me, it seems obvious. Hillary Clinton's campaign, which Rebecca Traister wrote about, which was a complete disaster on all conventional fronts, except one. Starting out as a prohibitive favorite, Clinton listened to cynical advisors such as Mark Penn, and ran a campaign often filled with disgraces. She deserved to lose. But her campaign did do one good thing. It awakened in many people revitalized awareness of sex as an issue in politics, that this is an issue with high stakes for both parties, and the realization that deep sexism still pervades society. Ever since then, we have been having a new conversation. That is the one true and good gift that Hillary's candidacy has left us.