Historiann

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the gendering of the internet, and the ways in which women’s blogs (and feminist blogs in particular) are subject to more intense and more personal attacks by male commenters on the blogger and other blog commenters than blogs by men or that don’t address feminist issues.  Since we’re all feminists here, we probably agree that men (in general) are much more presumptuous about monopolizing or claiming women’s bodies, time, and space (in general) than vice-versa, because that presumption is a large part of the definition of male privilege.  Although it’s no longer technically legal in most cases, male privilege thrives and it it enforced by many men, and women too (sadly).  And this presumption works in similar ways in the blogosphere, as it works in real life.

Historiann was forced to ban a commenter here a few months ago, and in order to clarify things I instituted some rules for commenting.  (Rules which were implicitly understood and observed by the rest of you as the rules of civilized discourse by all but the banned commenter, and an occasional troll here or there who never came back.)  Unsurprisingly, other feminist blogs suffer periodically (or chronically) from one or more presumptuous commenters who identify themselves as male and then go on to lecture the blogger (and/or fellow commenters) about what feminism is, what the problems with feminism are, why her post is totally wrong about X or Y, or her/their utter and complete misunderstanding that men are equally oppressed, etc.

The comments on this post at Echidne are very instructive about how some male commenters can be extraordinarily presumptuous (see the comments by “swampcracker” in particular).  The main techniques are these:  1) assuming that if someone makes a comment that doesn’t exactly describe his life or his point of view, that it’s totally without merit, and 2) being blithely content to jack the thread away from its original point to talk about the issue that he knows he’s right about, no matter what any other (women) commenters have to say about it.  (Other popular themes:  “I’m the father of daughters/a daughter myself,”  “My feminist friends agree wtih me”–a variant on the ever-popular “some of my best friends are feminists”–”I’ve been discriminated against too,” and the always popular tactic of writing longer, angrier, and more patronizing comments the more your comments are mocked or disagreed with.)  This was also a big problem over at Shakesville this spring, where comments on one post in particular about misogyny in the Democratic primary were taken over by men who apparently just couldn’t stand to let feminists talk it over amongst themselves.  Interestingly, I haven’t seen obnoxious or patronizing comments from men who identify themselves as gay–overwhelmingly, the problem commenters seem to be men who identify as straight.  (Maybe my gay men friends and commenters are just especially down with feminism, because they tend to be all scholars in the humanities, but I haven’t run into femophobic or antifeminist gay men on the feminist blogs.)

I guess my question is this:  since these guys can’t just agree to disagree, why don’t they start their own damn feminist (or antifeminist) blogs, if they’re such experts on feminism and gender issues?  Why bother feminist bloggers and their other commenters, when we clearly disagree?  Do you really think you’re so smart or so important that you’re going to change my mind about the most important intellectual issues in my life?  Yeah, nearly 40 years of life experience as a girl and a woman, and twenty years of academic training in American history, women’s history, and feminism, and I’m going to see the light because of an anonymous a-hole on the internet?

That seems to me to be pretty much the definition of male privilege on the world wide timewasting web–the earnest belief of random a-holes that their superior knowledge and rhetorical skills can change the minds of all of us silly, deluded women out there–but I’d like to hear from the rest of you about this.  What are your experiences as either a blogger or a commenter on blogs, and how do you think your sex (or perceived sex/gender identity) has affected the way you’re treated in cyberspace?  What are the other issues that come up for out gay and lesbian bloggers?  Do white commenters plague African American and Latin@ bloggers with patronizing lectures on race?  (I think I know the answer to that one, since so many WOC/POC bloggers moderate their comments…but I’d like to learn more.)  What have you seen or heard?  Sing it, sisters and brothers.

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Well, kids, I finally got away from my endless duties at Historiann.com HQ to see Sex and the City:  The Movie.  And, what can I say?  It was a two-hour-plus excursion to Candy Land for me.  It was also a damn fine character-driven comedy/drama–and how many of those are there out there that don’t star extremely unphotogenic men?  The four main broads in this movie looked like movie stars–and how many movies are there out there that feature adult roles for women in their 40s?  Be warned, if you haven’t seen it yet:  it’s a full three-hanky weeper, much to my surprise.  I’m not sure what the movie would offer someone who’s not already a fan of the show, with an extensive knowledge of each character’s back story, but that viewer is not Historiann.  Anyway, on with the review–spoiler alert!  Don’t click “continue reading” if you don’t want to know!

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UPDATED BELOW

That is the question for today, children.  What do we think?  Are we pro-spousal/partner hires?  Do we resent them, or merely envy them?  (Who other than superstars can bargain for a spousal accommodation now, anyway?  A friend of mine commented recently, “we talk about them all the time, but I don’t know anyone who got one.”)  Are they an urban legend, like the story about the peculiar-looking ravenous stray dog who turned out to be an enormous rat eating a family out of house and home?  (You know the one–you heard that story in college, too, didn’t you?)

Reasons to embrace partner/spousal hires:

1. How the heck else can you lure decent faculty to Waco, Texas, Kearny, Nebraska, Oxford, Ohio, or (for that matter) Fort Collins, Colorado, and keep them there?  If job candidates are married to other academics, institutions should see spousal hires as part of their strategic plan to recruit and retain quality faculty.  And considering that much of the top talent comes either from the two coasts or Chicago, or a few top-notch university towns elsewhere, for universities located in (shall we say?) charmingly pastoral and quiet out-of-the-way towns, you have to figure that you’d dramatically lower your chances of doing a given search over again in 3 years if you can help the successful candidate avoid a lifetime of commuting in-between Bloomington and Philadelphia (for example).
2. It’s an opportunity to increase the number of tenure lines in your department.  If the Dean is offering you a tenure line, take the money and run.  Unless you find the prospective new colleague truly unprepared, incapable of the job, or profoundly objectionable, how does it hurt your department to play ball with the Dean’s office? 
3. If you play ball with the Dean, it might be a favor that is returned to your department.  You never know!
4. It helps with recruiting women faculty especially, since there are still (unfortunately) many more wives who follow their husbands’ careers than husbands who will relocate for their wives’ job opportunities.
5. (Your turn!)

Reasonable reasons to resent or resist partner/spousal hires:

1. They’re just another kind of favoritism that heterosexuals enjoy and gay faculty don’t.  While there are some institutions that offer partner hires, anecdotally I hear that if you’re gay, you have to be a super-duper-superstar to get one (as opposed to the mere superstars that heteros must be.)
2. They’re just another kind of favoritism that partnered people enjoy that single faculty don’t.  (Since the widespread assumption is that unmarried/unpartnered faculty have no personal lives or any need whatsoever for time away from their wonderful colleagues or beloved students, they already get saddled with more than their share of after-hours service, like running the Trivial Pursuit marathon for the History Club.  Hiring more married or partnered people by design will only exacerbate this injustice!)
3. Departments should decide their hiring priorities, not other departments or the Dean’s office.  A common objection raised against spousal hires is that they will “take up” a tenure-track line that a department would otherwise have been able to define as they choose.
4. (Your turn!)

Unreasonable reasons (according to Historiann only) to object to partner/spousal hires:

1. No one ever did anything for your partner/spouse, so you don’t feel inclined to stick your neck out for anyone else.
2. People are responsible for their own personal lives.  Why should a workplace have to come up with two jobs for one family, when there are so many deserving job candidates desperate for just ONE job offer?  Either take the job, or don’t.  Suck it up, or move on. 
3. The reputation of our department will suffer if we hire someone who didn’t survive the rigors of a national or international open search.
4. (Your turn–to agree, disagree, or add to this list.)

UPDATE, later this morning:  Uncharacteristically, I forgot to mention that we’ve got a session that will I’m sure discuss partner and spousal hires at the upcoming Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which meets this June 12-15 at the University of Minnesota.  (Details here, and program here.)  The roundtable is called “DUAL CAREERS IN ACADEMIA: CHALLENGES, EXPERIENCES, AND STRATEGIES,” and features Laura L. Lovett, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “A Campus of One’s Own: The Costs and Benefits of Dual Careers;” Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University, on “Two Historians in the Family;” Eve Weinbaum, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “Union Responses to Work and Family Issues;” and Andrea Davies Henderson, Stanford University, on “Dual-Career Academic Couples.”  Come on down and join the party in Minneapolis, if you can!

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Go read Digby’s excellent post on how Republicans tar Democrats with the lavender brush.  She’s got a great roundup of recent slurs against Obama and the Clintons (homme et femme), as well as a delightful stroll through recent American political history and the Republican penchant for roughing Democrats up by calling them fags and lezzies.  (Heterosexuality:  the last refuge of the scoundrel?)

Now I don’t give a fig about people’s personal lives, but isn’t it strange that the major offenders mentioned here (Ann Coulter, Maureen Dowd, and Kathleen Parker) lead–shall we say?–unconventional women’s lives, or had a less-than-ideal upbringing, whereas the major Dems they attack have very traditional families and personal lives?  To wit:  Neither Coulter nor Dowd have ever been married, and clearly aren’t members of the abstinence wing of the Republican party, since both are urban sophisticates who have had many affairs with prominent men.  (It’s safe to say that they’ve led lives more like Carrie Bradshaw’s than Anita Bryant’s.)  Coulter’s consistent physical presentation (for more than a decade) is that of Malibu Barbie ca. 1977 with her colored hair and thin, tanned arms and legs on full display.  It’s a commitment to a specific aesthetic, like that of a female female impersonator.  No Pat Nixonish pastel suits for her!  (Maybe that’s just her style–and it certainly sets her apart from all other women and men on political chat shows, so it may be part of her effort to brand herself.)  And Dowd herself has written about the difficulty of attracting age-appropriate men, when they seem to prefer younger women who are less successful and less outspoken than she is.  Finally, Parker (according to her bio at Townhall.com) is very conventionally married and has a son, but says that she was raised by four stepmothers.  (Nothing wrong with that–it clearly wasn’t her decision–but she sure does have a lot of opinions about Democratic families and marriages, doesn’t she?)  

Now, let’s look at the Democratic politicians they’ve attacked with such patently gendered and homophobic slurs:  John Edwards (total number of wives: 1, married with children for decades), Bill Clinton (1 wife, married with child for decades, zero divorces), Hillary Clinton (1 husband, married with child for decades, zero divorces), Al Gore (1 wife, married with children for decades, zero divorces), John Kerry (2 wives, 2 children, 1 divorce), and Barack Obama (1 wife, 2 children, zero divorces).  I’m not suggesting that one has to come from a perfect family in order to criticize other families–rather, I’m suggesting that since there is no such thing as a perfect family or a perfect marriage, as they should know, perhaps Coulter, Dowd, and Parker should stop evaluating their political opponents’ masculinity or femininity, lay off calling other people fags and dykes, and judging their marriages and families.  Just a suggestion, girls!  Kthnxbye!

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Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Profs points us to a new article by Marc R. Poirier offering an innovative argument against the opponents of same-sex marriage.  Called “The Cultural Property Claim Within the Same-Sex Marriage Controversy,” Poirier argues that “traditionalist” opponents of same-sex marriage rights are in effect making an illegitamate cultural property claim on the definition and performance of marriage.  From the abstract:  “The protection of shared cultural symbols, rituals and traditions can be approached doctrinally and understood culturally in several ways in addition to a cultural property claim, including trademark dilution (especially trademark tarnishment), intellectual property rights that protect against unauthorized performance, laws against blasphemy and desecration, and environmental prohibitions of pollution and contagion. The article examines each of these, shedding light on the unexplored mechanics of the signal congestion that often lies at the heart of the traditionalist concern.”  And in a nice Judith Butlerian way, the article “focuses not only on the name and status of marriage, but also on the daily performances of gender roles that marriage authorizes and facilitates, and that same sex marriage apparently threatens to dilute or disrupt. The article thus applies both property concepts and gender performance theory to the same sex marriage controversy.”  See especially his discussion of “Marriage as Ongoing Gender Performance” on p. 38, the headline of section IV of his essay.  (Download it here.  Poirier loves him some cultural studies–you’ll find Mary Douglas in his footnotes too.)

Poirier’s analysis offers several fruitful ways to beat the argument about the so-called “threat to traditional marriage” posed by same-sex marriage.  Historiann wishes we would return to traditional marriage, American-style, and define it the way that John Winthrop and Cotton Mather did:  as a civil contract because marriage is a human invention.  (Adam and Eve were merely “shacking up,” in Dr. Laura’s inestimable formulation.)  Remember, folks, desacralizing marriage was one of the indisputably great things to come out of the Protestant Reformation.  This is probably the one area of agreement between John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Historiann.  Americans have redefined marriage throughout history–for example, revising marriage in the mid-19th century so that it didn’t rob women of their property rights; first prohibiting interracial marriage (ca. 1660-1720 in most English colonies), then permitting interracial marriage (in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia); and of course, the no-fault divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, just to name a few of the major revolutions in American marriage history.  On p. 14 of his essay, Poirier indicates too how the legal definition of marriage varies not just across time, but across jurisdictional lines, from state-to-state.  So, including same-sexers in the fun seems like only a minimal revision of the potpourri of rules that we’re already re-writing constantly anyway. 

Poirier gets at the truth of people’s discomfort with same-sex marriage–at least the truth as I’ve always seen it, and explains why gay marriage is seen as a “threat” to “traditional marriage.”  He writes on p. 50, “[T]he injury traditionalists percieve, whether or not they would themselves describe it this way, comes in significant part from the fact that the gender binary is reaffirmed or challenged in the microperformance of couples everywhere, day in, day out. . . . When many people engage in similar gender performance, the normative components of their lived experience around gender, sex roles, and heterosexual components, are reinforced; indeed, they come to seem quite natural and unperformed.”  In other words, without a narrow, state-enforced definition of marriage, how will we know who wears the pants?  How will we know who’s supposed to mow the lawn and who’s supposed to keep the kitchen tidy?  How will we know whose last name the children will have, and who should be paid more for the same work?  (Freedom!  Horrible, horrible freedom!)   Queering marriage means not just permitting same-sexers to motor on down to any Las Vegas wedding chapel, but it also necessarily shatters the illusion that heterosexual marriage is a stable and natural institution.  It doesn’t threaten any marriage in particular, but it does threaten to expose “traditionalist” marriage as something that’s just as constructed and artificial as any other kind of marriage.

I’ve got all kinds of opinions about straight marriages and where they go wrong and where they’re hopelessly screwed up, and I’m sure you do, too.  I probably wouldn’t approve of your ongoing gender performance of marriage (straight or gay), and you probably wouldn’t approve of Historiann’s performance or marriage, if she is married.  So let’s agree to just bitch and gossip about each other privately like we always have, deal with our own happy and/or screwed-up (or happily screwed-up) marriages, and get out of the way of other people’s civil rights–the way adults do in a free society.  M’kay? 

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Once again, via Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla, see this post on gender and intellectual authority by Rebecca Solnit called “Men Explain Things to Me,” in which she describes the experience of being condescended to by a man who patronizingly referred her to a book that she herself wrote.  It took more than one interjection from her companion–alas, another woman–telling him that she wrote that book before he got it, and shut up.  The nut:  “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.  Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.” 

Solnit writes of another instance, in which she was lectured by a man (incorrectly) about the irrelevance of Women Strike for Peace in the fall of the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities).  This anecdote is kind of a two-fer:  a man dismissing a woman intellectual by asserting (falsely) the irrelevance of women ’s political activism in the Cold War.  Well done, Sir!  Or, as Solnit says, “Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.”  Her essay will resonate with those of you who have been following the conversations here and at other blogs about bullying in acdemia.

How many of you have had this sort of experience–as a student, faculty member, or professional; in class, at an academic conference, or in your work environment?  I’ve been wondering about this issue in the blogosphere, especially surrounding Clinton v. Obama supporters and their blogs, but also more generally.  Women get pushed around and called names as women by men in the blogosphere on a regular basis.  Solnit writes only about gender, as though that’s the only operative variable when it comes to intellectual arrogance (or underconfidence), but it’s more complicated than simply gender.  Age and status seems to have put an end to most of the patronizing attitudes and comments that I was subjected to as a student in my twenties, although being in my thirties, having published a book, and being tenured hasn’t insulated me entirely.  (Age, of course, is something used against women on both ends–when we’re young, we’re patronized, and when we’re older, we’re dismissed as irrelevant and pathetic after age 50 or 55).  I’m sure that race is another critical variable in these intellectual foodfights.  Are faculty of color (men and women alike) more likely to be assumed to be students or staff by other faculty?  Do white men ”explain things” to faculty men of color?  Are white women just as patronizing as men to women faculty of color?  Does sexuality affect this phenomenon–are gay men patronized as much as women by straight men, for example? 

How about y’all?  And how has this experience changed (if at all) for you as you got older and achieved greater professional stature?  Are you seeing the down-side of “maturity?”

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Via Roxie’s World, check out this video for the Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice”.  Please, Senator Clinton, dump Celine Dion, for the love of all that is good and right in the world!  Roxie also points to this interview Clinton did with the Philadelphia Gay News.  The article is called “Clinton talks, Obama balks,” and PGN explains:  “PGN invited both Clinton and Obama, as well as presumptive Republican candidate John McCain, to speak with us. Only Clinton granted an interview.”  Hmmm.  Well, maybe Senator Obama read Historiann’s pioneering exploration of the queer vote in 2008?

I caucused for Hillary Clinton because I think she’s got the better policies, especially on reforming health care.  I don’t think she’s perfect, nor do I think she’s run a perfect campaign (lamentably).  If you’re looking for perfection, then go to a house of worship–politics ain’t your game.  (Like I said when I voted to re-elect Ted Kennedy in 1994:  I’m voting for Senator, not for Pope.)  As the campaign has gone on, I’ve become more and more impressed with Clinton’s grace under pressure, and her amazing ability to transcend the ugly attacks and character assassination that she endures now not just from right-wing Republicans and the press and broadcast media, but by people in her very own party who claim to be progressives.  (Oh well–women who step out of their place and into the public square have always been called “F**king Wh*r*es,” haven’t they?  Stay classy, Randi!)  And in spite of the fact that the media are cheering for her downfall, just about half of all Democrats still prefer her.  Gee, I wonder what “the math” would be if we had anything like a fair and self-reflective press and a Democratic party that didn’t try to eat its own?

I understand and respect that millions of Democrats prefer Senator Obama.  I’ve never tried to talk my friends and acquaintances out of supporting him, although many (not all) have tried to talk me out of supporting Clinton by telling me what a corrupt and unscrupulous monster she is.  (Well, maybe they’re right–just look at how her ambition has obviously made her a terrible mother.  Look at her wretched twin daughters, the entitled snots who brim with noblesse but can’t be bothered to muster an ounce of noblige.  Oh–wait.  Nevermind.)  What I find striking is that my conversations with Obama supporters (on-line, by phone, and in person) often devolve quickly into demands that I answer for this or that position of Clinton’s which they cannot abide, as though I’m supporting Charles Manson for president.  The thing they mention more often than any other is the illegal war in Iraq that she started single-handedly, and that she continues to prosecute to this day against all evidence that this makes the United States safer, and against the will of the American people.  (Oh–wait.  Nevermind.)

All kidding aside, we should remember who is really to blame for the past 7 years of disasterous foreign and domestic policy, and his name isn’t Hillary Clinton.   Also, for those of you who are hung up on the AUMF vote, please remember that Clinton cast the same yes vote that every man who ran for President from the Senate in 2004 and 2008 cast, with the exception of Bob Graham, and I don’t recall Democrats getting nearly this worked up about the boys’ votes either in the primary or in the general election.  29 Democrats voted yes, and 21 voted no, and by the way, big Obama supporters Tom Daschle and Chris Dodd voted yes, too.  Also, I don’t recall Bob Graham doing terribly well in the 2003-04 primary race.  How funny, then, that Democrats loyally rallied around John Kerry in 2004 without too much nose-holding.  I guess he had one advantage that Clinton doesn’t have, and that my friends, seems to make all the difference.

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The New York Times today featured a City Room blog post on the evolving gay and lesbian history collection at the New York Public Library.  Although they organized an exhibition in 1994 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the vast majority of their rich queer history sources weren’t catalogued.  Paul LeClerc, the President of the NYPL, said “I was aware that we were amassing one of the greatest collections ever,” however, “the problem with exploiting those collections was that they hadn’t been processed. They consisted of hundreds and hundreds of boxes of material.” 

City Room reports that the archive, which features manuscripts and materials “across numerous disciplines and from several library divisions,” and includes “copies of One and The Ladder magazines from the 50s and 60s, the newspapers Gay and MOJA-Gay and Black, Walt Whitman’s hand-edited version of “Leaves of Grass,” a William Burroughs typescript, letters written by Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde, posters, placards, and a 15th-century edition of an elegy by the Roman poet Tibullus.”  On the left is a photograph of Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten, taken in New York on January 4, 1935, from one of their digital collections.

The NYPL has started a new donor committee called LGBT@NYPL, which apparently has already raised some serious coin–$1.5 million–to help in processing the collection.  They’ve got their own eponymous blog (natch!), edited by the Jason Baumann, staff manager of the LGBT committee and Special Assistant to the Director of the NYPL.  It looks like it will feature some quality gay history and interdisciplinary queer studies blogging–but more importantly, it looks like NYPL will be the place to be for LGBT history!  (Darn it all!  All of you queer studies people will have to sublet your homes in Champaign-Urbana, College Station, Midwestern Funky Town, and Cold CIty every summer to go do your research in New York.  Yes, that’s a real bummer.)

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If like Historiann you’re concerned about the longer-term effects of bias in the media and the left blogosphere against Senator Clinton, check out Susie Madrak’s posts about Escacon ‘08 last weekend at Suburban Guerrila.  Madrak reports on revealing conversations about Hillary hatred with Eric Bohlert of Media Matters, and with Paulie the K., Princeton’s coolest Professor/Columnist/Blogger extraordinaire.  (Apparently, Paulie dished about former student and top Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee over spring rolls and nam pla.  Yum!)  See also this analysis of how the orgy of Clinton-bashing works to keep all of us mouthy broads in our places, and this one too.

I think we need to consider that while Obama’s candidacy benefits now from both Dem-on-Dem insults and media bias, these gendered and sexuality-based insults and press coverage will be used to demean Obama too.  Let’s take a trip down memory lane to recall what damage this kind of bully-boy towel-snapping did to The Breck Girl, or Al Gore and his allegedly feminized Earth Tones.  Now, let’s see what washed up on the beach today:  Yes, Joe Scarborough called Obama “prissy” and “dainty” on the basis of watching Obama bowl, and contrasted his performance with other politicians who looked like “real men.”  (Bowling?  Did I miss Clinton’s “Candlepin Smackdown” in New Hampshire that assured her victory with that state’s voters?)  And let’s not forget that one of Scarborough’s sparring partners today was Congressman Harold Ford (D-TN), who in his Senate run in 2006 was the target of smarmy ads calling him “Fancy Ford” and used race, sexuality, and gender to smear him.

Indulge me in a little nostalgia, in the service of making a larger point:  Historiann attended a women’s college in the 1980s and 90s, and then I taught at one briefly right after I finished my Ph.D. in the late 1990s  One commonality of being affiliated with a women’s college is that as soon as you step off of the campus–and some jerk driving by sees you do it–you’re greeted with hostile screams of “Lezzie!”  “Dyke!”  Now, it didn’t matter if you were alone or with a crowd.  It didn’t matter if you were a femmy girlygirl with long hair and a miniskirt, or if you were a “Dyke to Watch Out For“ in a flannel shirt and jeans.  And as I learned when I was briefly a faculty member at a women’s college, it didn’t matter if you were obviously a professor leading a group of students on a field trip to look at headstones in a local cemetery.  More often than not, we got screamed at, and occasionally, some people had objects thrown at them.  To jerks driving by in cars, the fact that we were affiliated with that campus was the only distinguising feature that mattered, and that distinguishing feature meant that we were subject to constant verbal harassment.

So, I’d like to remind all Democrats that to the rest of the country, it looks like we all live and work on a relatively small campus.  To the rest of the world, we look pretty much the same–when the jerks drive by, they can’t see if it’s a Clinton or an Obama for President button that we’re wearing.  And so, for some of us to tolerate–or even perpetrate–ugly insults based on gender and sexuality–it endangers all of us and our chances for electoral victory.  Because if it’s OK for some of us to be targets, it’s OK for all of us to be targets.

UPDATE, 4/2/08:  Via Suburban Guerilla, here’s an interesting look at what happened with blog traffic last month at 2 pro-Obama blogs, 2 pro-Clinton blogs, and one neutral blog.  Bottom line:   the 2 pro-Obama blogs, which have been the leaders in misogynist invective against Clinton, have seen a drop in unique visits, while the neutral and 2 pro-Clinton blogs have had relatively stable traffic without the noticeable declines that the pro-Obama blogs had.  (This may be because from my observations, the “pro-Obama” blogs are more anti-Clinton, whereas the 2 pro-Clinton blogs really are pro-Clinton rather than anti-Obama, and most Democrats like both candidates and don’t bear extreme animus against one or the other.)

UPDATE, afternoon 4/2/08:  Check out this post by Tom Watson called “MoDo Sets her Gaydar to Stun.”  Money quote:  “Liberals are just so gay. Wink freaking wink. Hillary’s been a lesbian since she first came to public attention. Gore and Kerry - well, a couple of sissy boys. Now it’s Obama’s turn.”

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Andrew Sullivan announced his support for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton (surprise!) because 1) Obama is younger than Clinton, and 2) Obama is a Christian.  Seriously.  He forgot to remind us that 3) Andrew Sullivan would rather stab his own eyeballs out with a dull pencil than endorse Hillary Clinton for anything!  (Sorry, Sully–I just can’t forget or forgive your scurrilous accusation that after 9/11 I was the real enemy as a “decadent leftist” “fifth columnist” humanities prof, and so I suspect your problem with Clinton is just as fear-driven and irrational.)  Although he is a plagiarist-enabling and fantasist-enabling turd, even Sullivan can’t convince himself that Obama is substantively better on the issues than Clinton because they’re so darn similar.  Thus, he offers us the youth and Christianity argument–by that logic, then l’il Ralphie Reed should be his man. 

Meanwhile, back in my world where people know facts ‘n’ stuff, and would lose their jobs if they worked only up to Sully’s shockingly low standards, Professorblackwoman has a nice post up at WOC Ph.D. comparing the two candidates’ records on GLBTQ issues, and it looks like a wash to me in terms of their policy positions.  (IMHO, neither is particularly courageous in affirming that true equality means equal civil rights too.)  Obama does not support gay marriage, while Clinton thinks its legality should be up to the states.  Obama says he supports a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Clinton has suggested only modifying these (Bill Clinton-era) relics.  Obama has a cute rainbow version of his very cool logo, but he also issued that unfortunate invitation to Donnie McClurkin, an anti-gay ex-gay gospel singer.  (Pandagon notes though Obama addressed black homophobia with an African American majority audience last week, and was able to bring them along with him after some initial resistance.)  My guess is that they’d probably appoint similar kinds of people to the federal bench and the Supreme Court. 

Sully aside, Clinton seems to be winning more gay votes by a hefty margin–63% of the gay vote in California, and she’s working hard on reeling them in in Ohio, according to Professorblackwoman’s analysis.  That also tracks with my informal observations–my gay friends support HRC much more faithfully than my breeder friends, which leads me to suspect that queers aren’t as threatened by Hillary’s pantsuits and unapologetic toughness the way straights are (men and women alike).  Ambitious broads just push some people’s buttons, don’t they?  Shout out to Roxie’s World and GayProf to weigh in on this one!  Do you think HRC (this HRC, not that HRC) has more GLBTQ support, and if so, is it justified?  Who do you think is the better candidate for GLBTQ issues?

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