Clinton and Sexism--Female Comments Requested

[Dr Ron]

The latest attack on Obama is that he made a sexist comment. Following is my response. There is also a video in the post as well as links.

I'm hoping that some female Obama supporters might also add some comments here to strengthen the argument that only fanatic Clinton supporters see this as a sexist remark. (Of course male Obama supporters are also welcome to comment--we're not going to be sexist about this :)

The post is at:

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=2916


Clinton Supporters Make Me Feel Down

When the usual crowd of female Clinton supporters, who clearly support Clinton due to her gender and ignore any meaningful comparisons of the candidates, imagine sexism as an issue in the campaign I’m not surprised. The real sexism here is actually coming from some pro-Clinton sites which rely upon identity politics and regularly bash men to provide an argument to vote for Clinton. It is more surprising when male bloggers such as Big Tent Democrat fall for their claims.

Obama was responding to the many dishonest attacks made by Clinton (which I’ve discussed at length in other posts such as here). He said, “I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.”

Obama is trying to be diplomatic and downplay the dishonesty of the Clinton campaign here, but some portray this as sexist. It takes quite a leap of the imagination to think that “feeling down” is a reference to pre-menstrual tension, stresses of menopause, or in some other way sexist.

It should not come as a surprise that many people seeing a physician, regardless of specialty, have depression either as an underlying component of their medical complaints or sometimes as a consequence of their illness. I see many people who are depressed every day. Many others might not have clinical depression but still feel sad as a consequence of every day stresses, or the stresses of their illness. Sometimes people outright say they feel depressed, but generally they use a number of English phrases. I hear people of both sexes say they feel down many times a week. This has no correlation to either the sex of the patient or menstrual cycles.

It really discredits legitimate feminist goals and makes legitimate complaints of sexism sound less meaningful, when Clinton supporters become this creative in fabricating charges of sexism. The tendency of Clinton, or in this case Clinton supporters, to dwell on non-issues also strengthens the argument that after Clinton’s arguments based upon inevitability and her non-existent greater experience have failed, there really is no good reason to back Clinton.

[Inuca]

1. It's an incredible

tempest in a teapot! What I am sure he meant is that when she IS down (like down in polls, or soembody suggested in the corresponding CDP thread every recent Wednesday after losing on Tuesday), she starts attacking. A misplaced or not very carefully chosen word causing false outrage, a phenomenon that I am sure will ring a painful bell to many here.

[Dr Ron]

7. Good point

The blog post I directly responded to didn't say why it was sexist, but other blog posts have described it as sexist because of connecting being down with a woman's emotional state secondary to issues such as premenstrual tension. Therefore I was thinking of this and responded in terms of being emotionally down--which can be independent of sex. However it certainly is possible that Obama could have intended being down in the race. If I had thought of that I would have made that point in the post also.

[StoryTeller]

2. Definitely not sexist

In context, the comment clearly refers to the numbers--down in the polls, down in vote totals, down in contribution numbers.

And even if it was referring to an emotional state, it's no different than when either side makes comments about the other side "feeling frustrated."

How absurd to try to spin it any other way.

[wildflowergardener]

3. not sexist

Not remotely sexist - in fact I'd say it's more sexist of the people who claim when he says she's feeling down that it must be because of the reasons you say - pre-menstrual, menopause -etc. Whey would someone even jump to that conclusion - was that a man who said that?

Meg

[Dr Ron]

6. I believe it was women Clinton supporters

I could be wrong as I'm sure not going to waste much time tracking this discussion around the blogosphere, but I believe the first mention of this as sexist came from female bloggers for Clinton. Big Tent Democrat picked it up later. I primarily linked to his blog post in my post at Liberal Values as this one was featured in Memeorandum. By linking to his post it was added on, sort of as a rebuttal to his anti-Obama post at Memeorandum (and possibly other sites which list blog posts in a similar manner).

[ginnyinWI]

4. I commented over there. n/t

[MarjorieG]

5. Shades of the botched joke.