[Vision2020] Sexism’s Puzzling Stamina

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
June 10, 2013
Sexism’s Puzzling Stamina By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

This month the Supreme Court will issue raptly awaited decisions about
affirmative action and gay marriage. But what’s been foremost in my
thoughts isn’t race, sexual orientation or our country’s deeply flawed
handling of both.

It’s gender — and all the recent reminders of how often women are still
victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty
male chauvinism endures. On this front even more than the others, I somehow
thought we’d be further along by now.

I can’t get past that widely noted
image<http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/visual-guide-gender-diversity-senates-hearing-sexual-assault-military/65884/>from
a week ago, of the Senate hearing into the epidemic of sexual assault
in the military. It showed an initial panel of witnesses: 11 men, one
woman. It also showed the backs of some of the senators listening to them:
five men and one woman, from a Senate committee encompassing 19 men and
seven women in all. Under discussion was the violation of women and how to
stop it. And men, once again, were getting more say.

I keep flashing back more than two decades, to 1991. That was the year of
the Tailhook incident<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/booming/revisiting-the-militarys-tailhook-scandal-video.html>,
in which some 100 Navy and Marine aviators were accused of sexually
assaulting scores of women. It was the year of Susan Faludi’s runaway best
seller, “Backlash,” on the “war against American women,” as the subtitle
said. It was when the issue of sexual harassment took center stage in
Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

All in all it was a festival of teachable moments, raising our
consciousness into the stratosphere. So where are we, fully 22 years later?

We’re listening to Saxby Chambliss, a senator from Georgia,
attribute<http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/04/politics/chambliss-sexual-assaults>sexual
abuse in the military to the ineluctable “hormone level” of virile
young men in proximity to nubile young women.

We’re congratulating ourselves on the historic high of 20 women in the
Senate, even though there are still four men to every one of them and,
among governors, nine men to every woman.

I’ll leave aside boardrooms; they’ve been amply covered in Sheryl
Sandberg’s book tour.

But what about movies? It was all the way back in 1986 that Sigourney
Weaver trounced “Aliens” and landed on the
cover<http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19860728,00.html>of
Time, supposedly presaging an era of action heroines. But there
haven’t
been so many: Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” adventures, “Salt” and a
few other hectic flicks; Jennifer Lawrence in the unfolding “Hunger Games”
serial. Last summer Kristen Stewart’s “Snow White” needed a “Huntsman” at
her side, and this summer? I see an “Iron Man,” a “Man of Steel” and Will
Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Channing Tatum all shouldering the weight
of civilization’s future. I see no comparable crew of warrior goddesses.

Heroines fare better on TV, but even there I’m struck by the persistent
stereotype of a woman whose career devotion is both seed and flower of a
tortured private life. Claire Danes in “Homeland,” Mireille Enos in “The
Killing,” Dana Delany in “Body of Proof” and even Mariska Hargitay in “Law
& Order: SVU” all fit this bill.

The idea that professional and domestic concerns can’t be balanced isn’t
confined to the tube. A recent Pew Research Center report showing that
women had become the primary
providers<http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/29/breadwinner-moms/>in
40 percent of American households with at least one child under 18
prompted the conservative commentators Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson to
fret, respectively, over the dissolution of society and the endangerment of
children. When Megyn Kelly challenged
them<http://www.salon.com/2013/05/31/megyn_kelly_slams_erick_erickson_lou_dobbs_over_sexist_breadwinners_comments/>on
Fox News, they responded in a patronizing manner that they’d never use
with a male news anchor.

Title IX, enacted in 1972, hasn’t led to an impressive advancement of women
in pro sports. The country is now on its *third* attempt at a commercially
viable women’s soccer
league<http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-02/the-new-pro-womens-soccer-league-might-actually-have-a-chance>.
The Women’s National Basketball Association lags far behind the men’s
N.B.A. in visibility and revenue.

Even in the putatively high-minded realm of literature, there’s a gender
gap, with male authors accorded the lion’s share of prominent reviews, as
the annual VIDA
survey<http://www.vidaweb.org/vida-count-2012-mic-check-redux>documents.
Reflecting on that in Salon last week, the critic Laura
Miller acutely noted<http://www.salon.com/2013/06/05/rachel_kushners_ambitious_new_novel_scares_male_critics/>:
“There’s a grandiose self-presentation, a swagger, that goes along with
advancing your book as a Great American Novel that many women find
impossible or silly.”

I congratulate them for that. They let less hot air into their heads.

But about the larger picture, I’m mystified. Our racial bigotry has often
been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a
failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect.

Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other
side of the bed. Almost every man has a mother he has known and probably
cared about; most also have a wife, daughter, sister, aunt or niece as
well. Our stubborn sexisms harms and holds back them, not strangers. Still
it survives.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>
.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130611/7e0a841f/attachment.html>