Yesterday, Gawker published an anonymous hit-job describing a drunken sexual encounter with Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party candidate from Delaware most famous for being anti-masturbation and not being a witch. I didn't link to it yesterday because it's bad taste and sexism was apparent, and it shouldn't surprise anyone; Gawker is a site that runs many things in poor taste and is more concerned with generating click-inducing buzz than with journalistic integrity. (I'm not linking to it for that reason; trust me, the piece is findable.)
In a perfect world, we'd be able to call out the hypocrisy of O'Donnell, who would advocate policies discouraging sex before marriage if she were actually in power to do so, without stories being colored by sexism. But as Scott noted below, that is often a pretext. The particularly offensive moments of the Gawker piece were the parts in which it became clear the author thought not that O'Donnell had violated her own personal code of ethics but some standard of womanhood that he held. He makes comments about her drunkenness and her appearance -- what he perceives to be her lack of personal grooming -- and the subtext is, of course, that she's an out-of-control party girl and that's inappropriate because women shouldn't act that way. It's probably impossible to separate a story about a female politician's sex life from the sexist world in which it occurred, but this post reveled in sexism.
In conversation yesterday, someone mentioned that this incident is part of the era of Facebook politics, of politicians running in a world where there's a wealth of drunk pictures tucked somewhere on the Internet waiting for someone to dig up. That's surely true: Something similar happened to Krystal Ball, a 29-year-old who is running for Congress in Virginia. Pictures surfaced of her wearing a Santa hat and a leotard, pictures which of course have nothing to do with her ability to govern and everything to do with embarrassing her.
But it's also no accident that these two candidates are both women. It's not that men wouldn't have embarrassing pictures surface; it's that what counts as potentially career-damaging episodes are different for men and women. It's also true that we're less adept at handling sexism in the political sphere -- not because it didn't exist before but because only recently has most of society agreed that it's a bad thing -- and we haven't navigated its effects on female candidates. Surely, there were moments in the Bill Clinton impeachment trial that were ridiculous and embarrassing for both him and Monica Lewinsky, but we viewed it differently. And few took pity on Mark Sanford's public near breakdown after his famed trip to the Appalachain Trail Argentina, though what unfolded before us at that press conference was, on its face, pitiful. The way we responded in those situations was no more or less influenced by sexism in society than the Gawker letter. And, as Scott said, the point of public humiliation starts to outweigh legitimate public interest really quickly.
-- Monica Potts
