Weekend Focus: Race, Sex and Hillary Clinton

Starting this weekend, a couple of features on the Women's Village and elsewhere across the IMDiversity network attempt to look back at the week's hub-bub surrounding the race-gender split arising in the Democratic Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

First, we track a series of Clinton-Obama analyses of from the Associated Press that provide different takes on the tit-for-tat between the campaigns, and looking at how race and gender, racism and mysogyny, play into the coverage. It also looks at the impact of women voters, as well as the importance to the campaigns of parsing out that vote by generation, class, race and philosohpy.

In another feature, Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso reflects on the (false?) dichotomy threatening to divide voters' loyalties in the party, in Race and Gender at Odds Again as Steinem Wades into the Clinton-Obama Fray.

On the African American Village, frequent contributor Kam Williams looks back at the N.H. results and seeks to put the focus elsewhere: on the Diebold Corporation. "For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.," Williams writes. Suspicious of dubious vote tallying, Williams concludes "we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give an the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud."

Additional features will unfold, as our editors and visitors try to interpret the events in what is becoming an unhappily tense time in an otherwise historic election. One reader said that she liked Obama and Clinton "almost equally," and would support either in a general election, but "as a woman, I have to go with Clinton now."

Another wrote that she "resented having to choose" between candidates who each represented a historic political milestone she'd been "waiting for my whole life."

And, should it matter?

We ask in our blog poll for the week: Would you lay issues aside and vote for Hillary Clinton for president for the historic precedent of having a woman in the White House?

What do you think?

Is the "B-Word" Ever Okay? Part 2

Good responses to last month's post's question, "Is the B-Word ever okay?" and some further looking around and asking around gave us additional food for thought.


So far, the general consensus answer seems to say, "Maybe". Or, more precisely, perhaps it's that it's not "okay," but society is becoming more resigned to the idea that its widespread casual use is a little distasteful, but above all inevitable. Some respondents (most of whom chose to post anonymously, so far) seem to suggest that we must try to read between the lines, divining when real mysogyny is intended, and when it's more just a ironic stance that a younger generation takes "to shock us."



For what it's worth, I agree. In real life, conversing with people -- with friends, coworkers -- we can tell a lot about intended meaning from their expression, tone, an ironic smile, a wink.


But, looking around last week, it still occurred to me that it's not always so easy to decipher in other forms of communication -- say, corporate brand communications.



In the last post, I mentioned Bitch Magazine, which clearly announces itself as representing (or seeking to represent) "a feminist response to pop culture," right there in its subtitle on every cover. And within, it often carries through with thoughtful and substantive content.


But the other day at my local wine shop, for example, I was surprised to come across a case of Bitch wine, an Aussie import distiguished for being "loud," pink and cheap.


As Carl S. Taylor, an urban culture expert from Michigan State, observed in the AP article by MEGAN K. SCOTT, which inspired this discussion thread, the playful woman-to-woman use of the word is “like a family affair. Family members can talk about each other, but if someone outside the circle says the same thing, it's offensive.”


If this is true, maybe the question is: Can any corporate entity really count on being "a member of this family," or is it just asking for trouble by -- even inadvertantly -- propagating a term that is inherently mysogynistic? Can a company give a "knowing wink"?


What do you think?

Village Focus: Is the "B-Word" Ever Okay?

A special feature added this weekend at the Professional Women's Village:

In a provocative and multilayered feature for the Associated Press, writer MEGAN K. SCOTT asks:

Is it ever OK to call a woman the "b-word"? Once not too long ago, the answer would be, obviously, no. But, now the term has such currency in our hip-hop saturated popular culture, she suggests, it may well be that context is everything. "Or," she muses, "does it depend who's using that little word that rhymes with witch?"

Sure, the word is fraught -- it shifts under the weight of class, race, the speaker and the spoken to -- and there are an increasing number of views of and uses for it. One that has been discussed a great deal in our publications, at least, is that it is a scourge of Black women spread through popular culture. It is also increasingly a wedge between Black men and women that some activists, from MLK's daughter Bernice King to student groups, are combating through media protests, lectures, and on campuses. (Also see Kam Williams' review, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women.)

But, as Scott observes, it can also be -- presumably ironically -- a term of endearment, even pride. It's commonly used by entertainment celebrities, including African American women such as Mo'Nique who used it ostensibly as a "term of endearment" while performing a comedy show at a women's prison. And then there's the Bitch Magazine -- a proud, loud, ironic, new-school "feminist response to popular culture" -- which revels in the co-optation of a term that was once generally hurtful, but now is worn seemingly as a badge of defiance, a sign of grrrrrlll-power attitude.

In these uses though, it seems to me, the intent seems to be to show a kind of power, a thickness of skin. It conveys a sign of toughness, a sticks-and-stones-ness, an I'll-kick-your-assness -- perhaps a maleness -- that puts me in mind of some women executives I've known and worked under in my time. I recall that, well before the total dominance of hip hop over popular culture, working at not one but two women-owned advertising agencies back in my college days where, interestingly, both presidents were wont to refer to themselves, rather than other women who offended them, as "bitches". I recall one boss telling me she decided to start her own firm because she was "too big a bitch" to work for someone else. "You know why I had the highest-grossing sales at my last job?" she said another time. "Because I'm a real bitch." The implication being: I'm tough and dogged. I'm the alpha dog.

Most recently, I've come to notice that more than a few of my gay male friends have taken to referring to each other as bitches -- or sometimes, more animatedly, as "biyatches" -- quite freely. And, I guess I'm dating myself, but I have to say it still strikes my ear as sounding very odd -- similar to the now-common phenomenon of young white men in baggy jeans referring to each other unselfconsciously as "niggas".

Now, as a man, a straight man, who sees such permissive use of the word in the culture around me, I'm left to wonder what would happen if I were to go to my old boss and greet her with the "B-word" now. Can it be that it's so ubiquitous that it has really lost its meaning, its power to sting?

If I were to use it, would it be safe?

I think the jury's still out. But take a look at Scott's article, and see what you think.