Oh, the Misogyny!

Historians, sociologists, and feminist scholars, in the months and years ahead, will no doubt be busy sorting out all the gender implications of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

I spend a lot of time on women's equality issues on my sections on civil rights in my courses, so naturally I've paid attention to developments. Indeed, I've joked about some of the feminist outrage of campaign '08, for example, on the backlash following Charlotte Allen's tongue-in-cheek essay in March, "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?"

Remember what Noemie Emery wrote about the episode:

LAST SUNDAY, OUR friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, "dim." Readers swooned, feminists shrieked (Katha Pollitt in a riposte on the Post's website), and Post higher-ups raised the white flag of contrition, unaware, so it seems, that exactly two days later--on Tuesday, March 4--the paper itself had run two major stories that proved every point Allen made.

Well it turns out that even if the Post's own reporting bears out some of Allen's points, perhaps the feminists have a case on gender-baiting mysogyny this season.

Marie Cocco has an interesting piece providing evidence to that effect:

As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

I won't miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a "big [expletive] whore" and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters -- one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee's official campaign Web site.

I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, begone.

There's more at the link, but it's hard to miss Cocco's message.

I'm a McCain man, but I'd be supporting Hillary over Obama in the Democratic primaries (so no mysogyny here!). Not only can she pound 'em back like a parched West Virginia coal miner, she's tough on the Iranians too!

So, readers should't read too much into my fun-feminist posts. I've already lost one reader who didn't appreciate the political humor!