My friend David Roberts, a staff writer at Grist, sent me this over e-mail, and it was too good to keep in my inbox.
I'll grant upfront that my thoughts on misogyny and racism in the campaign are somewhat fraught, since as your run-of-the-mill privileged white dude, I hardly have the most direct window into their effects. Nonetheless, I'll venture an observation: misogyny is a much bigger player in this election than racism.When Obama and Clinton first started running, I cringed in advance. I expected all sorts of crude race and gender stereotypes to come bubbling up -- not only from the right, where you'd expect it, but from the media and even from some quarters of the left.When it comes to racism, I've been somewhat surprised to find that I was wrong. Very little of the narrative around Obama's run has touched on race; very few of the attacks on him have been coded racism, and those that have -- the occasional mention of his drug use, the links to his "madrassa" -- have come off as unspeakably crude and sunk like a stone,registering only in the fever swamps. If anything, the perception of Obama as "post-racial" (yes, I know there's no such thing) has been an asset, almost an insulator. (Expect that to change, obviously, if he makes it to the general. Jonah Goldberg's "the coloreds will riot!" post of last week is a preview.)On misogyny, though, I've been shocked in the other direction: it's been more overt, more odious, and more unashamed that I could have predicted. The serial depictions of Clinton in the media (and yes, in blogs and op-eds both right and left) are a veritable hit parade of stereotypes about women: She's humorless. No, she cackles. She's a cold robot. No, she's a hysterical crybaby. She wears ugly pant suits. No, she's showing too much cleavage. Virgin, whore. Ballbreaker, weakling. Chris Matthews has been the standard-bearer here, but he's just the leader of an astonishingly large chorus of crude gender resentment -- a chorus that lamentably contains quite a few women.I'm not a Hillary voter, for any number of reasons. I happen to think she's the wrong candidate for the historical moment. But I'd be crying too if I were her. This stuff is just gross.
