A Double Standard

I've been thinking about women lately. No, not in the same way that 90% of the male population does, but more along the lines of what is considered acceptable portrayal of women in topics of national debate.

Attacking women personally for their beliefs is nothing new. Recently, Yahoo had a pictorial story featuring anti-voting posters that appeared during the universal suffrage debate of the early 1900s. Apparently, lacking a well-thought out, reasonable argument against allowing women to vote (because there isn't one), those opposed showed women demanding equality as:

• Ugly, bitter spinsters
• Not smart enough to make decisions
• Wanting to subjugate men 

Clearly, those predicting that wives voting means husbands will be caring for children and doing housework (gasp!) are aimed at men. But I'm not sure if those attacking the perceived attractiveness and marital status of suffragists is aimed at the men, or an attempt to prevent more women from joining the movement.
Take a look at some of the posters:

And if you think these arguments disappeared with the passage of the 19th Amendment, look at some of the visuals used against former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 100 years after the above posters.

Yeah, blame the wife for the husband's infidelities.

Now to be fair, the "iron my shirt" poster was an attention gimmick hatched by a couple of local "shock jocks."   That's their intern holding the sign. Nothing new there - when we lived in San Francisco, a radio crew closed down the Bay Bridge so their intern could get a haircut after President Clinton held up runaway traffic at SFO aboard Air Force One for the same reason.

But what strikes me as telling, is that the radio crew thought it was acceptable for them to make a sexist reference. Why didn't they go after the frontrunner, then Senator Barak Obama with a sign that read, "Shine my shoes?" Because that in-your-face racism is unacceptable. (Instead, we'll concoct one of the silliest conspiracies in human history: that a very pregnant Mrs. Obama flew to Kenya, had a baby, immediately flew back to Hawaii, where co-conspirators had placed an announcement in the newspaper and created a fake birth certificate so that one day this baby could become president...)
 
And then there was a recent attack on a young woman's character during the debate about Obamacare. "Talk" show host Rush Limbaugh referred to law student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" after she testified to Congress about the need for all employers to cover contraception on their health plans regardless of personal or religious beliefs.

Everyone who reads this blog knows my political bent, but I wanted to see if any conservative women faced similar issues. I searched for images of former Alaska Governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and US Representative from Minnesota Michele Bachmann - by far the highest profile women in the GOP. Both women took hits, but none based on their gender. Not one.

Most of the attacks against Gov. Palin were based on her seeming lack of understanding issues and a what is perceived to be an inability to express her views in a concrete, coherent manner: People think she's dumb.

With Rep. Bachmann, again there's no overt sexism. Instead she's also portrayed as not being very smart with the added insult of being unbalanced.

And, if you think of it, male politicians are frequently attacked for not being too bright and a bit nutty. Just ask former President George W. Bush and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean:

But there wasn't any propaganda about Pres. Bush being ugly, or Gov. Dean shoveling walks.

I hope as I help guide my boys to manhood, I can impart on them a sense of justice that men of quality have nothing to fear from women of equality. And there's something wrong with men if our only retort to a woman's argument is based on her looks.