I got into a discussion the other night with a poster at Salon.com, after reading Joan Walsh's excellent article on Hillary Clinton's "concession" speech.
There are several articulate women at Salon who are more than a little ticked at the way Clinton was treated during the primary season. Several more women who regularly post letters/comments at Salon have written that they refuse to fall in line and support Barack Obama for POTUS, for which many men are giving them great grief.
I'm not going to argue the merits of their position right now. What I want to address is the attitude (among Obama loyalists) that anger is not a healthy emotion; that it serves no useful purpose and is, in fact, dangerous. Posters I encountered pointed to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as examples of "anger" run amok and used this to "guilt trip" Hillary's supporters into doing something productive instead of being angry. It's interesting to me that more than a handful of these same posters see nothing at all wrong with using anger to verbally abuse women who support(ed) Hillary Clinton and engage in the same behavior now to whip women into shape and support Barack Obama. Anybody for more heaping doses of misogyny?
Of course, when I responded to a couple of these posters, pointing out how narrow and condescending their "anti-anger" tsk-tsk-tsk was (primarily toward Hillary supporters), I was told that I was being "irrational" and reminded, again, that anger is not "rational." Surprise! Where have I heard this before? It struck me as something that the very "logical" psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud said about women in the 1880s (that women aren't "rational")! And we all know how Freud's views of women have influenced and profoundly hurt women for almost a century.
Comments about our anger first surfaced (as noted above) when Clinton loyalists refused to bow to unity and instead said they will sit out the election, write-in Clinton's name on the ballot, or vote for John McCain. But when we started discussing specific ways that we might channel our anger and develop constructive strategies to alter how media report on and treat powerful women, we were chastised further for our anger. My point then, as now, is that anger is a very useful emotion when it is channeled constructively.
With this in mind, I am going to start a dialogue about what is wrong with the media in their portrayal of, reporting on, and analysis about women. The purpose(s) are these:
- To understand what the state of current media coverage are with respect to women;
- To move forward in a (hopefully) unified effort to change the course of media coverage of women.
And several possible scenarios were advanced to address the second point:
- Boycott of the major cable news network (MSNBC) most responsible for the misogynistic coverage of Clinton's campaign;
- A boycott of MSNBC's sponsors (by not buying their products/services), along with, perhaps, a letter-writing campaign to these sponsors.
There are probably other options and other iterations of these two options. I hope we can develop strategies that are short- and long-term, because I am just sick to death of media bias and sexism. This election has reawakened my feminist spirit and I hope other women (and men) are also so inclined.
For now, I leave you with this introduction to think about and mull.
One last thing...
What's missing from this MSNBC "poll"?
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