I’d recommend watching these two videos by Rebecca Watson.
The main subject of the videos is a deconstruction of a Michael Moore tweet in which he suggests that we should vote for Clinton because women are just not as blood thirsty and destructive as men.
Watson highlights this as an example of “benevolent sexism”.
“Benevolent sexism” is the attitude that women are inherently better than men but that men, because they are more naturally hostile, have kept women down because they haven’t been strong enough to fight back.
The thing that struck me watching these videos is that “benevolent sexism” could go a long way towards explaining the hostility toward Clinton and women leaders in general. Why is it, for example, that we (the generic we) seem to hold women leaders to a higher standard of behavior than men? Why do we excuse the serial lying by Trump while raking Clinton over the coals for pedestrian political lies?
Maybe it’s because we have this belief that a women leader should be inherently better than a male leader and, when they inevitably fails to meet that unreasonable standard, we judge them more harshly than we do men? When a man fails he’s just being a man. When a woman fails she is failing her whole sex.
Perhaps this is how people who think women can be good leaders may also hobble those leaders in before they even start leading.
(BTW, I think a similar dynamic held after the 2008 election when some on the left held Obama to an impossible standard because they just thought black people should be better at this than white people because they, somehow, understand the world in ways that white people could never appreciate (Think Bill Maher’s comments about Obama not being “gangster” enough).)
Something to think about. Not just for this election but for the inevitable firestorms that will come in the next four years as everyone, both right and left, tries to tear Clinton down.
Monday, Nov 7, 2016 · 11:19:33 PM +00:00
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Chris Andersen
Some have criticized the use of the word “benevolent” to describe this form of sexism. The point, I think, of the term is to say that is sexism that comes with a sense that the sexist thinks they are being kind to women when in fact they are hurting them by putting them at an unearned level of esteem and thus making it harder for the woman to actually live up to the ideal.
This page uses the term “ambivalent sexism” as an alternative. Perhaps that would be acceptable?
