Twice Bitten

Grr.  Twice tonight.  Twice in one night I have, showing my characteristic lack of luck and poor work ethic (I'm supposed to be working, not trolling the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, but anyhow), stumbled upon an article that has outraged me. 

The first one was a review of The Omnivore's Dilemma written by some Atlantic editor who is clearly a vegetarian, although he failed to come right out and say that, and is the sort of vegetarian who is never going to accept for any reason under any circumstance that anyone might have a decent reason for eating meat.  His decision that, in the facile words of The Smiths, "meat is murder" puts him on a higher plane than the rest of us, those of us who are clearly in denial about what it means to take a life in order to sustain our own, those of us too ignorant and immoral to follow him.  Well, you know what, buddy?  Fuck off, alright? 

Yeah, I know, that's not a good argument, but the minds of people like this (which by no means includes all vegetarians, thank heavens) are closed already.  There is no argument that I can make, no amount of elegant prose I can assemble, no moral justification I can muster to convince someone like this that eating meat is not the original sin.  I do want to point out, though, that Michael Pollan (and others--most hunters will tell you this) says that killing for your food puts you in a different relationship with death, makes you face the inevitability of it and the cycle of life in ways that can be disquieting, humbling, and profound.  Vegetarians never seem to believe this, probably because you don't get quite the same shock of our fragility and the eternal cycling of nature by uprooting carrots, but it's true.  Anyway, the fuckwit reviewer says that actually (because he is so much smarter and well read than Pollan, of course!) psychologists tell us otherwise (since when do psychologists know shit?):  As Otto Rank put it, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other."  Our reviewer does not see, apparently, that this is not the opposite of what Pollan said.  The death fear of the fucking ego (sorry for the cursing--if I don't do that, seriously, the pomposity here will make my head explode) comes from our belief that we are separate from nature, that we are above and outside of the circle of life that makes life possible.  Our fear of death is based largely on the fact that we are in denial of it.  When you face the inevitability and even elegance of it, you lose the fear, certainly.  Am I totally wrong here or is this not one of the teachings of Buddhism?  We fear death because in our self-consciousness we see ourselves from outside as if we were outside of the systems and cycles of nature that, honestly, bring death to all--without exception.  We think, in our great big fucking narcissism, that we are so great that we are the exceptions, that our "souls" are so special that they cannot possibly perish.  Whatever you think about the immortality of the soul, though, the bare, ugly fact is that your carbon-based ass is doomed. 

The person who kills her food already admits this and thus, either gradually or suddenly, loses the fear of death and admits, as Heidegger would say, death into her home.  Are people better off when they fear death or when they accept it as natural and right?  You be the judge. 

The second article made me draw one primary conclusion:  Maybe we should just elect Hillary Clinton so that feminists will shut the fuck up.  Good Christ.  If you're a man and you dislike Hillary Clinton, then you are a misogynist because a bunch of youngish women say so.  Period.  If a woman *feels* like your remarks are sexist, then you are a woman-hater.  I love how the author marshalled this evidence primarily from among her friends and none of them can *quite* put their finger on where the sexism is in the remarks of their male, Obamaniac friends--they just kind of feel it's there.  She admits that Hillary's actual policies and positions are sometimes objectionable--the more you look at Hillary's record, the more like a freakin warmonger she seems--but there is a certain rabidity, maybe, that these incredibly sensitive young women are picking up on that just has to be rooted in misogyny.  Not that they have any evidence!  Just their hunches!  Not that their male friends who hate Hillary treat actual women in their lives with any hint of misogyny.  But, obviously, the standard line is that men fear and hate powerful women, so that must be what's going on here.  Right.  Case closed.  Brilliantly reasoned.

Listen, there have been very real cases of sexism directed at Hillary throughout her career in politics.  But not everything is.  Some people have strong dislike of Hillary because they don't feel she's honest, and that is going to draw moral fervor out of some people.  Some people retain intense dislike of Bill that gets transferred onto Hillary, not least because the prospect of Bill back in the White House is unsettling as hell for a lot of us (yes, "us"--ever since NAFTA and welfare reform, I have not been a fan--that's right, I don't support NAFTA).  A lot of people believe that the Clinton White House will again be plagued by scandal and meet resistance from Congress that will hurt their chances of getting anything done--not an unreasonable fear--and this also causes some of the strong anti-Hillary sentiment.  Some of us who were against the war at the start and never believed in the "intelligence" and wept a little at watching poor old Colin Powell prostitute himself by delivering it as fact have a very strong distaste for her because she was apparently too willing to go along and believe--that isn't who I want answering the phone at 3:00 a.m.  So, there's actually quite a lot going on here. 

The problem is that the first serious bid for presidency by a woman is Hillary Clinton, one of the most divisive figures in the current political scene who happens to be married to one of the other most divisive figures.  The problem is that *some* feminists are using Hillary's run as a test case against which to judge how sexist America still is as a nation.  But not all Hillary-hatred has anything to do with her vagina, and indeed much of it has to do with her husband and his Wandering Penis, the investigation of which thoroughly distracted the nation for so long.  This isn't a fair test case, because she isn't some abstract Platonic form WOMAN--she's Hillary Clinton.  It is fair to dislike, even hate, her and still not be a misogynist.  (Yes, again, I do realize there have been sexist comments directed at her, just as there have been racist or at least racist-ish comments directed at Barack.  The question here is really whether those represent the views of a majority, and I think the overwhelming answer is that they do not.  If McCain wins in November, it is not going to be because the Dems had a woman or a black candidate--it's going to be because the Democrats will take whatever advantage they have and piss it away.  I have a silly notion that being fingered as a sexist, not for anything you said but just kinda for the way you said it maybe?, is not going to win over the white male vote.  Call me crazy.)

Finally, I have to take up with this particular sentence for a minute, or many minutes:

"Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire."

Let's take a minute and reflect on those three things she mentions as places where women have not "caught up" to their male counterparts.  Equal pay?  Well, first, a lot of economists don't agree that it exists, once all variables are accounted for.  Variables includes things like the age of the workers (since the Census data includes all workers, and most senior ladies did not build up a career steadily over time, they make less money than men of the same age who put in more work years), time off for parenting (you could argue that gender inequity still exists there, sure, and I will argue that it is going to remain the case that women will more often take/need time off for parenting than men do until such time as we are either all hermaphrodites [which could happen in this great age of plastics] or that we get a kind of Handmaid's Tale society going, where some women do the reproducing and child care for other women so that they don't have to--the more nannies and surrogate moms we get, the closer we come to Margaret Atwood's fantastic utopian novel!  Wait--it is utopian, right?  Only, in our nanny version, the women aren't literally forced to do it, it's just that they have no other options due to the severe economic stratification that has resulted, let's face it, in large part from the lifestyle of the white privileged overclass, women and men alike), career choices (with more women choosing careers in lesser-paid fields and men typically doing more dangerous and rat-racey type work), and so forth.  If you look at the youngest workers in the Census data, the gap is 5 cents, i.e., women make 95 cents for every dollar a man makes, and considering some of those women are most certainly nonworking women and/or mothers, well, it's probably not as big a deal as we're meant to believe it is.  Five cents won't even buy a damned Atomic Fireball anymore.

The other issue here is another kind of economic disparity.  Men still earn most of the money, but women still do most of the spending, possibly as much as 80% of the discretionary spending.  So...so...well, I'll leave it up to you to decide what that means, because I'm once again on the verge of one of my "so, if I was a man, I would be drunk every night and would totally get hookers!" proclamations.  

OK, so the second claim about "domestic expectations."  Well, we've already pretty thoroughly hashed out the division of household chores bit, no?  I think I beat that one into the ground already.  Is there something else that is included in "domestic expectations?"  I don't know--I think it's a bit vague.  Women are expected to be more prettified and take more time with appearances, true, although men are doing it now too, and these days a lot of women are *choosing* this, so...well, so...

And finally--reproductive options.  Right!  Women are so far behind men on this one!  Let's see here:  Men have abstinence and condoms as methods of birth control--ah, and the vasectomy, let's not forget.  If pregnancy happens anyway, they have no choice about what happens to the fetus but will be legally obliged to pay child support, and if you live where I do, will be morally obliged to marry the mother.  And women have--well, it must be fewer options than that, right?  That's the implication.  Yet women also have available to them abstinence and condoms...and also pills and injections of various sorts, IUDs, tubal ligations, sponges and foams, the biorhythm method, the diaphragm, that new vaginal ring thingy, and heaven knows what else.  If unwanted pregnancy occurs, she can choose abortion, she can choose to keep the baby, or she can choose adoption.  Am I wrong?  Am I missing something here?  I think we're way ahead of men in terms of having reproductive options--we're just not necessarily any better than men are at using them.  Oh, right--she does say "secure" reproductive options.  And birth control is not securely available to every woman equally, admittedly, but with Planned Parenthood and public health clinics, it comes pretty close.  We need to close that gap, but women, it should be noted, do still have abstinence and condoms just as securely as men have them.  Available even at Wal-Mart!

So.  I know and understand that there is still sexism (and racism).  But a) her argument admits of no rebuttal--she knows you're going to say that it's just Hillary you're opposed to, not a woman president in general, and she just says that that's just the sort of thing feminism has been trying to fight, because if you really like women in power then I guess you have to accept any woman in power, right?  That seems to be the end of her story, even though she says otherwise earlier in the piece.  And b) these arguments are Simple Simon(e).  When the pay gap is diminishing rapidly, when women are attending college at the same rate as men and getting better grades, when women now share something like an equal amount of the domestic obligations with their husbands, when women no longer *have to* get married and have kids, when most women have a banquet of reproductive options open to them, maybe it's time to reassess what we talk about when we talk about sexism and misogyny.  I would have thought by now that Democrats would have fucking realized that the constant complaints at this very facile, very (let's say it) bitchy level is incredibly alienating to, wow, a lot of people. 

To some of us it seems whiny, elitist, way too feely, and essentially untrue in its major points.  There is nothing like listening to privileged white chicks gripe about the pay gap and their reproductive options to make my blood boil.  Just shutup already.  It is especially irksome to me given the fact that American feminism has little or nothing to offer to women who don't work and almost nothing for working-class women.  I didn't really notice this (I did notice the extreme elitism in most feminist writing, but not the ignoring of mothers) until I became a mother and faced the feminist wrath.  American feminism is not interested in mothers, and some strains of it are extremely hostile to mothers, unless they also work for pay.  Unfortunately, women were mothers long before money was even conceived of, and there is a fundamental bio-logic going on here that you're not going to convince most women to abandon.  That some feminists have become haters of mothers and children only serves to point up how very un-feminine American feminism often is--that you would not only deny but hate that part of who we are as women is misogyny of a far more disturbing sort than a Hillary nutcracker.  The Hillary nutcracker, at least, is meant as a joke--it is crass and unfunny, yes, but the women (and occasionally men) who loathe mothers and children are not even joking.  That's the sexism I worry about.