Rebecca Traister: The Third Rail of Calling 'Sexism'

[tishaLA]

<...> It’s not that Warren hasn’t talked about gender; it’s that until now, she has presented the feminist ambitions of her campaign in a way that hasn’t been about her or her experiences of bias, instead giving a series of big speeches that have subtly reframed the history of American organizing and policy change by foregrounding women. She has talked about the young textile workers who organized in Lowell, Massachusetts; the black washerwomen who went on strike in Atlanta in 1881; and the young women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 and how their fate changed the path of Frances Perkins. Just last week, she gave a New Year’s address at Boston’s Old First in which she spoke of one of its most famous congregants, the poet Phillis Wheatley: “It was a terrifying thought, to some powerful white people,” Warren, “that this young woman, this young enslaved woman, would create something so potent that she challenged the existing order.” <...>


What has been exposed here are some of the complicated, painful, difficult dynamics that have kept women from the presidency for the country’s entire history. Among those dynamics is the chilling fact that talking in any kind of honest way about marginalization becomes a trap for the marginalized. To acknowledge the realities of running as a woman — the double standards, the higher bars, the demands for likability and relatability in a nation that mostly only relates to and likes dudes; the need to be authoritative but not hectoring; to be smart but not a know-it-all; to be cool but not fake; to be warm but not a mommy; to be maternal but not too soft; to have the contours of your life, from your breasts to your skin-care routines to your maternity leaves, treated as foreign and weird and maybe counterfeit by a political media that’s never had to take this stuff seriously before; to be honest but not actually tell the truth about any of this stuff because you’ll sound like a whiner — is a trap. You will be understood as trying to leverage the bleak unfairness of it all to your benefit: as if you are the one to enter the arena with the advantage of getting to cry “Sexism!” and not with the multiple disadvantages of … sexism.

And so you can’t really sit down and talk about it, certainly not in a media landscape that trades in sound bites and takes and lethal tweets; you can’t actually meaningfully reveal the things that drive you nuts or that stop you short or shock you into stunned silence, because how can this still be so ridiculously dumb and obviously unjust? To live this, and to not be able to talk about it, and to be regularly warned about it by even well-meaning people who aren’t experiencing it themselves? It must be galling. <...>
https://www.thecut.com/2020/01/elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-sexism.html

The entire piece deserves a read.