My Blog

I am sitting in a small café in Ithaca in upstate New York while FLYING is playing across the street at the Cornell Cinema.
The snow began falling this afternoon and has been falling at a good
pace into the night. Despite the travel warnings, the theater is full
and the room felt full of excitement when I snuck out as the lights
went down to watch Chapters Three and Four of FLYING. Now it is just
waiting time. I hurry across the street to buy a Chai and sit on a
stool in the coffee shop surrounded by the warm smell of toasting
bagels as students wander in to get late night dinners and snacks.
Today my co-worker, Adella, passed me an article in the New York Times,
an op-ed piece: When Women Rule.
The article really crystallized something I have been thinking about a
lot and want to discuss. I am by far not a political expert, having
come to politics late in my life. I always feel I should let others
speak first on the subject and do a lot of listening:

I don’t believe in telling people whom you voted for – to me it’s a
personal choice. Of course this may have come out of the fact that I
grew up in a family where my father — a staunch Republican — ran our
household. Debate in my family consisted of my father lecturing us on
his beliefs and if anyone dared cross him, he would smirk a little with
a veneer of kind tolerance, then proceed to destroy the others argument
with all he had read on the subject. My Aunt Shirley, an ardent
Democrat, couldn’t stand my fathers opinions and was the only one I
ever saw go up against my father at the dinner table. My aunt was
highly intelligent and also well read – but emotional in her opinions –
and my father always won the fights by picking on her ‘hysterical
(subtext female) views’ to the point that she sometimes ended up in
tears at the end of the meal. Basically this meant that there was no
debate at our dinner table, but a whole lot of little heads nodding in
agreement at my brilliant, beloved father. (It was only when we were
much older that we realized that my father never actually read the books he quoted– but would skim them to get his talking points together. We realized my dad only read the cliff notes.)

As the story goes, my mom was a Democrat when she married my father.
Even I remember her being one when I was still in elementary school.
But, as my Aunt says, “how could you live in that house with
your father and not become a Republican?” Well, my aunt must be right,
because it is clear that somewhere along the lines my mother ‘slipped
over’ and started voting Republican. As for me, well you would think I
had the word ‘Democrat’ stamped on my forehead when I was born, but I
am ashamed to say it, it took me till my forties to speak out about
anything political. My fear, my need and my love of my father was so
deeply ingrained that it was impossible to have a conscious political
opinion, dare I loose him as my protector and advocate. When I did
start speaking about my political beliefs, I was just as surprised as
my father to discover that what I believed in was diametrically opposed
to what he believed in, but by this time I was at least hopefully a
little on my own feet – as I said about 40 odd years old. (And my
unconscious prediction was right all along: taking a different
political stand than my father has drove a wedge between us that has
been hard to reconcile.)

Growing
up, my father had a lot to do with my struggle with how to be strong,
powerful — and a woman. He wasn’t alone though, because my gram, aunt
and mom also contributed to my confusion. There were so many messages
coming at me back then, its no wonder I went into the proverbial closet
for years. One thing though was sure: strong women were masculine in a
bad way. If a woman wanted to be powerful she had to get there
surreptitiously and on the back of a man. I can’t say anyone told me
this directly, but I watched these principles every day in my family’s
negotiations. My dad had the so-called power and my mom had to
negotiate with him to get what she wanted. She was trained well – she
used everything from cooking (“Feed your husband before you talk to him
about anything!” was my grams advice), to beauty (I remember hours of
pinning dresses and putting on makeup so that my mom, a mother of 5
screaming children, could walk out the house at seven pm with my father
to a fancy party, and look like a queen, like a woman who could seduce
any man…) and talking of seduction, I am sure she also used sex (five
kids don’t come out of no where, do they?).

Now as I write all this, I feel sad, as if I am in some way
betraying my mother. My mother loved being a woman and loved these
‘womanly arts’ and tried her best to teach them to me. So it’s not as
if she was up in arms about the whole thing. Absolutely not! Would she
have liked more power? Sure. But I don’t think she realized that the
dance she did for my father’s approval was as much to blame as he was
for the problem. But what strikes me most is that while I am writing
about my mother — a 50’s bride and 60’s, 70’s, 80’s housewife – I could
be writing about almost any woman in history. The rules have almost
always been the same. Women must seduce; men can demand. And the crazy
thing is there are few women – or men - in the world that have not been
indoctrinated in this way. And the proof of it is as much in these
current election primaries as anything.

Now, as I said, I am not going to tell you whom I voted for, because honestly both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
have similar platforms and they are both talented, bright people. And
on the other hand I have my criticisms of both of them for different
reasons. But I am going to point out that no matter how many people
tell me – “it’s not that Hillary is a woman, I just don’t like her.” I
think America needs to do a reality check: Every time Hillary is
attacked or criticized it is often on the same old fashion gender
bashing standards that we have seen through out history – and that I
always heard from my oh so male father. Almost every political cartoon
of Hillary shows her as a phallic man with a woman’s face! Now what
message is that? That to be a strong woman – just like my father said —
you’ve got to be a closet ‘ball buster’? That for a woman to act like a
man – hence be strong, clear, demonstrative, intelligent – is the most
abhorrent thing for society bar none. It certainly was the thing my
father hated most. And where would it get Hilary to be more feminine
and “soft”? Do we really think America is going to vote for a woman
that is not tough? Especially now, with the emphasis on the terrorist
threat and the future of the war in Iraq….

So the message is clear – to be tough, you’re too manly; to be soft,
you are weak, too feminine. Has anything changed in gender relations?
Can a woman ever win? What is it about our country that it is hard to
imagine a woman making it through the gender gauntlet to be elected
president? I have no doubt in my mind that black men are absolutely at
the bottom of the totem pole in every way in America – except possibly
one. Although racism is still an obvious problem in this country,
sexism seems to go virtually unchecked and seems to be a bigger
hindrance in a political race than I would ever expect. And the proof
seems to be in the pudding: When I picked up the copy of USA today
sitting on the floor outside my hotel room door, the top headline was
about how Obama swept VA, MD, D.C. in the Democratic Primaries. But
when I read further, I noticed the line, “Clinton lead among White
women, but Obama lead among White men.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.