Summary: This post is about the concerted efforts by partisan, neo-conservative, and evangelical-backed activists to ignore most human trafficking in order to better prosecute involuntary and voluntary prostitution. I’m on record as supporting non-coerced prostitution but I’m bitterly opposed to both sex trafficking and all other forms, a position I share, as you will see, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

So this is a real pisser! I was just reading E. Benjamin Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous, Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, in the chapter about how a Reagan-era neocon named Michael Horowitz hooked up with Southern Baptist evangelicals in the 1990s to forge and pass first a “Christian Martyrdom” foreign policy bill and then, on the heels of that success, an anti-trafficking initiative.

Skinner says that even though the Clinton administration was also becoming pretty activist about the emerging problem with trafficking, including sex-trafficking (for instance then-first lady Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as the President himself were both concerned and involved) Horowitz, an acid-partisan Republican, worked hard to make the issue as partisan as possible.

Democrats, generally more concerned about general human rights, argued more broadly that all human trafficking is a problem. Skinner says

The late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota sponsored legislation that would have put the United states in the vanguard of abolishing all forms of slavery, including labor trafficking, forced domestic servitude, and debt bondage. Wellstones’ staff studied modern-day slavery closely. They found that it required more than a robust enforcement of laws, that poverty was a central factor.

This of course makes perfect sense. Most people who are trafficked aren’t Shanghaied, unwillingly subdued and stuffed into the hold of a ship. Instead, due to economics or, less often, by local ethnic or religious persecution, they seek out traffickers who offer to help them illegally immigrate to countries with better wages and conditions. Sometimes they even pay their traffickers. The problem being that very often the traffickers appropriate the would-be immigrant’s documentation and force them into outright slavery — either by direct coercion (violence and/or threats to turn their victims over to the authorities) or by debt (company-store style policies where they’re obliged to “work off” the cost of transportation and ongoing “food and lodgings” in the brothel, sweatshop, or domestic situation.) The point being that no poverty no trafficking.

Horowitz, his ally Charles Colson the prison-converted Watergate Felon, and other partisan Republicans talk of poverty is like a crucifix to a vampire. Skinner says

When I presented him with Wellstone’s general approach [Horowitz] shouted an explitive.

“That’s the lie! That’s the lie!” he yelled, slamming his desk and pointing at me. “The idea that you can sit back while these mafias are out there buying and selling women and say ‘Wll, there’s nothing much I can do about these guys because there’s poverty on the earth’ is a moral cop-out and a lie.”

I never had the chance to ask Wellstone for a response, as he died in a plane crash the year that I began to research this book. But his closest aid on the issue told me that the senator shared Horowitz’s deep revulsion at sex slavery, and spoke of his desire to see every trafficker doing hard time. The single most moving experience for him as a senator, he once said, was meeting trafficked women from Russia, his father’s birth country. It’s just that Wellstone also learned that, sadly, sex slaves were far from the only ones in abominable bondage.

Now, can I just take a moment here to remind everyone that Michael Horowitz’s main allies were evangelicals from the Southern Baptist Conference. And can I take another moment to remind everyone that there’s only one, single, solitary and absolutely God-damnable reason there’s such a thing as Southern Baptists? Southern Baptists were founded in 1845 because America’s real Baptists strongly opposed slavery. The Southern Baptists (including my great-great-grandfather) came into being only and exclusively in order to promote the idea that Christians should be able to enslave other human beings and to use violence and murder to force those enslaved human beings to labor for their captors for no pay. And yeah, yeah, that was a long time ago but just to be clear that’s who Michael Horowitz was cozied up to, that’s who supported Horowitz’s feuds with progressives, and if he and his evangelical coven seemed concerned only about sexual slavery (as we shall see) then you have a little more context for why this might be.

At any rate, when Wellstone introduced an anti-trafficking bill that didn’t prioritize one form of slavery over another Horowitz and his gang of anti-prostitution but soft-on-slavery sought to scale it back to just sex trafficking.

“If you want to end the enslavement of those in debt bondage in the brick factories in India, the best thing you can do is put all of the sex traffickers in jail, and just drive a stake right through the heart of that system,” he continued. “The connection is these ripple effects, where if you succeed in taking out some people, you send a message to everybody else saying: ‘You’re next.’”

Gotta love them neocons, even then they were all about “ripple effects.” I can just see it now — what better way to send a message to child-slavers in Haiti and agricultural traffickers in Asia, Africa and South America that “ooh, once we shut down all sex trafficking everywhere we’re turning our attention on you!“ As opposed to, say, turning their attention on them at the same time.

Anyway,

Horowitz wanted to define slavery narrowly, but at a January 2000 conference in Vienna, representatives form the President’s Interagency Council on Women chaired by Hillary CLinton defined the issue a bit too narrowly. Arguing for international antitrafficking protocols to combat “forced prostitution,” the officials — Horowitz contended — implied that “voluntary prostitution” was possible. To many conservative Christians and hard-line feminists, all prostitutes were slaves.

Seizing its chance to savage Hillary Clinton, who was absent form Vienna, and who condemned trafficking as “the dark underbelly of globalization,” the Horowitz coalition pounced. Chuck Colson co-authored a January 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “the Clintons Shrug at Sex Trafficking,” in which he claimed that the “actions in Vienna will be counted as yet one more shameful act committed by this deeply corrupt administration.” Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Conventions’ political arm, followed suit with a damning editorial in the conservative Washington Times. Clinton, two months into her first Senate campating, retreated from the issue.

Horowitz won the battle to sideline Hillary Clinton…

Later, after George Walker Bush was “elected” a Clinton-administration (and Bush I, Reagan, and Ford-administration) holdover Ambassador Nancy Ely-Raphel prepared a 2002 State Department report on international human trafficking and, in Horowitz’s eyes, stupidly wasted space on human slavery and building an anti-slavery culture in the State Department instead of dedicating the whole fucking thing to the fact that Germany and the Netherlands had legalized prostitution. In a meeting Horowitz told Ely-Raphel “I want to get rid of you, and I will get rid of you.” Cool dude, eh?

So. As luck would have it, Grist, the environmental advocacy site, has an article called Slave Ethanol about an Amnesty International report on forced labor in Brazil’s sugarcane fields.

Sugarcane is a deeply ironic crop on which to hang a “sustainable energy revolution.” Historically, the spread of sugarcane in Caribbean islands and South America involved vast clear-cutting of coastal forests.

Socially, its legacy may be worse. To run the bustling cane plantations of the Americas during the colonial period, European powers relied on ruthlessly exploited African slaves.

Still a highly labor-intensive crop, cane evidently remains under the shadow of that atrocious past. Even today, Brazil’s much-heralded ethanol miracle is built on the backs of “forced” cane workers. From a Reuters story:

Amnesty International criticized poor working conditions and forced labor in Brazil’s fast-growing sugar cane sector on Wednesday, as the government tries to promote the cane-based ethanol industry as a way to reduce poverty.

Sometimes the circumstances involved not cane fields, but ethanol refineries:

Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

Read the Grist article here

Thanks to Michael Horowitz and his partisan neoconservative Republican ripple-effecting buddies, who recruited activist feminist groups like Equality Now and the National Organization for Women by branding sex-trafficking “the great women’s issue of our time” and rallied them against Paul Wellstone and Hillary Rodham Clinton, those trafficked workers in Brazil don’t count.

Now as it happens, I’ve cared deeply about human trafficking of all sorts ever since I found out that my own great-great grandfather, a slave-owner, was an inaugural convert from Baptist to Southern Baptist ministers. And I admired then, and admire now the work undertaken against trafficking — all trafficking — by the very cool Senator Wellstone and equally cool First-Lady Clinton.

Anyway, that’s why, in a nutshell, I have a very hard time when people try and tell me that “human trafficking” is a euphemism coined by the sex industry. Instead it’s almost exactly the opposite. And given that sex traffickers and every other kind of traffickers use pretty much the same networks, pay pretty much the same bribes, and (Southern Baptist protestations notwithstanding) sell their victims to pretty similar people, to claim that “human trafficking” should be exclusively and internationally defined as involuntary and voluntary prostitution instead is worse than counterproductive. Michael Horowitz is exactly wrong: attack all human trafficking because rather than “sending ripples” it would rip out the greater infrastructure in which sex trafficking thrives. Oh yeah, that plus worrying only about victims of sex trafficking condemns the other fifteen out of sixteen internationally trafficked slaves to lives of… more slavery.

So. Where do you stand on the position Michael Horowitz and his allies have crafted?

Photo by Flickr user Our Lady of Disgrace. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Quick follow up on a previous post, “Because Motivation Isn’t Enough Without Opportunity and, Especially, Means“ about Philip Weiss’s male-infidelity article in New York magazine a few weeks ago. Weiss rehearsed all the well-worn reasons why “only” men want to cheat, and also indulged the tradition of overlooking relative income and opportunity imbalances as the biggest reason for the imbalance.

Our tendency to experience only local economics might have something to do with that universalizing impression but… sort of by definition local conditions don’t necessarily dictate universal truths. I’m thinking of, for instance, about how in Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years and I think at least one other book Pepper Schwartz has documented what amounts to sex tourism for women in, especially, the South Pacific. Affluent and… generally single women go to, say, Bali, hang out on the beach, take up with generally-financially-desperate but handsome young men, spring for their meals, clothes, and possibly lodging for the duration, and then say good bye when they head back to the U.S., Canada, Western Europe or wherever.

True, it’s not straight-up prostitution, but it is more like men keeping straight-up short-term “mistresses” relationships where the power, status, wealth, age (often), class, access to information, and most importantly the ability to leave are all in the hands of the provider and not so much in the hands of the provided for. The point being that Weiss (and a millions of others) claim that only men desire or participate in such relationships, whereas Schwartz’s data suggests it’s not a matter of gender** but instead a matter of relative privilege.

[** And just to be clear, though I don’t think I need to say it, this is not an assertion that “women are just as ‘bad’ as men.” Just that we frequently mistake privileged behavior for gendered behavior because privilege has accrued to men so consistently and for so long that people like Weiss can mistakenly equate the two. —fl]

Photo by Flickr user exakta. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Emily Anthes of Slate Magazine’s “Medical Examiner” column says

Sex and the City, which, as it’s hard not to know by now, comes to the big screen this weekend, rarely ventured beyond the island of Manhattan in its six years on television. When the women did find themselves elsewhere, they weren’t usually happy about it. This was especially the case in Season 4, when Carrie’s boyfriend, Aidan, hamstrings her into a trek to his rustic cabin upstate. Carrie, in turn, pressures Samantha into tagging along, and urban-misfit misadventures ensue—until Samantha spots a hunky, half-naked farmer and seduces him out of his overalls. And thus the show discovers what researchers have been documenting over the last decade or more: It’s the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is.

Read the rest of the article here.

Anthes goes on to list a range of reasons why out-lying kids tend to wind up having more, earlier, and less safety-aware sex and drug-related activities. I’d like to point out what was, in my experience, a very big reason: very often the parents who move out to the suburbs or exurbs to “get away from the danger of the city” nevertheless commute to the city, leaving their, especially teenaged, children unattended for very long periods between when school gets out and the parents (finally) get home.

It’s certainly the case that when I was a teenager with a motorcycle I spent a lot of 1970s after-high-school afternoons visiting friends who lived out in the county for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Oh, and alcohol too. Depending on circumstances parents sometimes weren’t home till suppertime. That was (almost) always long enough to come down, sober up, and/or get dressed without raising suspicions.

Thirty years later and on the other side of the country a good friend’s niece died while she and her methed-up friends were rat-racing back from some kind of party even further out in the Seattle exurbs and drove the car they were in under the wheels of a logging truck. The irony, of course, was that her parents never let her go “into that Seattle” for fear of all the immorality and violence!

Again, I’m not saying Anthes other reasons aren’t valid, in fact they’re great. I’m just saying the list is incomplete without accounting for a) early high-school release times and b) extended commutes by custodial adults.

Photo by Flickr user Spiff_27.
Used under a Creative Commons license.Another one of the other tricky bits about Alptraum’s question and Nastey’s answer in that previous post about sexual availability and standards is that for 10,000 reasons even in the most wide-open, polyamorous, germ-free, oppression-free pollyana adjacent universe imaginable not everyone is or ever would be a potential partner!

Which is just one of the reasons it’s so self-limiting when we apply our standards of attraction to people who aren’t our partners: however “fuckable” one might imagine Clive Owen to be for desirability, or however “unfuckable” one might assert Ann Coulter (or, from the 1990s, Janet Reno) to be, it’s, well, fucking irrelevant unless we’re their prospective partners as well.

At population 6,000,000,000 and climbing “if he/she was the last man/woman on Earth” assessments aren’t very useful metrics. :-)

Photo on Photobucket via Melissa McEwan’s Shakespeare’s Sister.

Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY asks a question that, combined with a Clive Owen/ Photoshop un-mashup that’s been going around seems like a perfect excuse for an HNT editorial

A recent post from College Candy posits that women who aren’t getting laid just aren’t trying hard enough — or maybe just aren’t willing to lower their standards enough

...

Is it true? Is it that easy for ladies to find some action — or that hard for guys?

As a lady with a few dry spells under her belt, I’d like to think it’s a little more complicated than all that: but what do you think?

Read the quote, plus Alptraum’s quote of College Candy, in context here.

My experience, personally and in conversation with male and female friends who’ve range from still-waiting 40-year-old traditional Christians to “why waste time learning to masturbate” classmates in high-school is yeah, it’s a lot more complicated. And yeah, “standards” have a heck of a lot to do with the complications.

I first got my eyes opened to the standards thing right after I started blogging, with a, well, eye-opening post from the great but now-long-gone Cat Nastey who wondered if maybe straight vanilla people, straight men especially, complain about how hard it is to find partners because they’re just way more fussy about who they’re willing to count as potential partners when it came to age, social and marital status, class, looks, reputation, current or previous partner “number”, and, of course, preferred gender.

Anyway, my first, second, and third-hand experience is that it’s a bit of a myth that men have a hard time and that women “could always” find a partner. The key, I think, is Alptraum’s point about standards and what, exactly, constitutes “reasonably attractive and intelligent.” (And the blocks aren’t necessarily the sterotypical ones: classic eye-hurting beautiful men often feel too self-conscious about something else to ask anyone out, and often eye-hurtingly beautiful women never get asked out because — unless they’re jerks, which would be Problem B — guys assume they just have to have giant neck-breaking boyfriends in the background.)

On the other hand, of course, the reasons often are sterotypical where women are supposed to conform to height/weight/Prada-shoe beauty-trap standards, men are supposed to conform to the job/car/devil-may-car standards of the worthiness trap. And everyone’s supposed to agree that sex should be a bit scarce that men can gain status by getting and women can gain it by holding back.

Actually I think a year or so ago there was an article about a down-state New York college where, the story went, women outnumbered men just enough that men discovered that in fact they wouldn’t say yes to just anyone and women discovered they couldn’t assume men would say yes if they asked. The point being that a lot of what we’re raised to believe about who can and can’t “get laid” if they “really wanted to” and were “willing to lower their standards enough” are more gender-constructed than real.

And… ok, actually, you know what I think is the trick with “standards” in the phrase “lower your standards enough?” I think the problem is that when we say it we’re talking about not our standards but off-the-shelf standards that we haven’t necessarily done much to customize. Except, of course, in terms of “lowering” them to meet… ok, reality, sure, but even that’s a construction. Check out, for instance, those side-by-side photos of Clive Owen, one made up, lit, and photoshopped baby smooth and the other still craggy-handsome but far less idealized with wrinkles, pores, and other normal characteristics of an actual human face. The point being that if all we knew (and that’s all a lot of, especially, younger people know) is the idealized Owen face then one would have to be “lowering one’s standards” to hook up with the actual Clive Owen! Let alone the other mere mortals we meet after work.

Anyway, this is getting long and jumbled because I’m trying to make two points at the same time, but if everyone tried to test the “women could get laid if they tried hard enough” theory almost everybody would discover it was more complicated than they thought. Especially if they all tried it without questioning their assumptions about standards and, especially, making the mistake that adjusting ones standards to meet reality equals “settling.”

One last thing, by the way, I’m not saying I think we should have no standards at all. We do. We’re people. Goodness knows I have… focal points that revolve around media influences, the way older athletic/farmer-trending family members tended to look, and… for some reason, an inexplicable, roughly 75% attraction to former-Catholics with birthdays between mid-September and mid-October (!?!?!?) No idea what that’s about, especially since I’ve never really been one to ask about birthdays in the first place. The point being that until I noticed I had those standards I didn’t really think much about how important outdoorsiness was to me in a long-term partner, or how irrelevant birthdays were. And once I got that then they were my standards and that let me relax about everyone else’s… and, for that matter, everyone else.

Nor did I recognize how much they constrained my partnership opportunities. Which is sort of the point I think I’ve been trying to get to. We usually understand “standards” to mean “an ideal to hold out for.” Instead they’re often “limits on opportunities for partnership.” The problem isn’t the one or the other, it’s, as Cat Nastey saw it, failing to recognize that you can’t have one without the other, and therefore you can’t logically brag about the upside while complaining about the downside.

And, by the way, this all gets back to what’s so subversive about Osbasso’s HNT meme: when almost everyone posts their first photo they’re posting with those off-the-shelf standards in mind and, consequently, the accompanying text almost always includes some overt or covert variation on “please be kind.” And you know what? All but the very occasional troll is kind. And not because we’re settling but because… hey, real people are pretty cool even without $6,000 worth of agency Photoshopping. Even Clive Owen. :-)

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Last week Osbasso posted a really cool photo from his laundry room. This week I should be so lucky. :-)

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Via Ezra Klein (again) Ross Douthat of The Atlantic grouses about liberal guilt

Its political consequences aside, is guilt an appropriate response to the sins of your ancestors (whether biological or ideological)? Or is it a character flaw – a form of self-congratulatory scrupulosity? I’m not sure what my answer would be, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the latter argument “doesn’t actually make any sense.”

He said it here.

Personally? I think a way more positive, not to mention effective, way to deal with ancestor issues is to think how much electricity you could generate from spinning your ancestors in their graves.

Me? If I had to deal with ancestral guilt then even with a lot of laudable ancestors I might be crushed flat. My great-grandfather was one of the authors and promoters of Christian Fundamentalism. His brother wrote the screenplay “Birth of a Nation,” for D.W. Griffith, based on his best-selling novels about the Ku-Klux Klan’s battles against reconstruction. His sister ghost-wrote the first best-seller Presidential assassination conspiracy theory book. They were born into a slave-owning family. Their father, an active minister who joined the new-formed Southern Baptist church after the real Baptists repudiated slavery, was in his twenties when he married their already-pregnant 13-year-old mother! (Note: For all my family history I’ve inherited a 42-pound stack of books and a little more than a hundred dollars. I don’t think anyone else wants the books.)

Anyway, my alternative to liberal guilt to spin them hard enough to replace every coal-fired steam plant east of the Mississippi.

One hopes other people’s mileage varies from mine ancestor-wise but the point remains: you could mope around the way we did in the sixties and seventies, or you can get out there as a progressive activist and really make your ancestors ashamed of you!

Photo by Flickr user travelsheep2004. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Ezra Klein makes a strong point about long-term vs. short-term impact of vice-presidential choices. (Emphasis mine.)

[Candidate’s] supporters, who have a tendency to focus on this election, are talking about this much more in terms of who helps win the next election rather than who would be a good stand-in or successor. But the evidence is very weak that vice presidents ever help win elections, and very strong that vice presidents frequently go on to become presidents. Johnson succeeded Kennedy, Nixon (eventually) succeeded Eisenhower, Ford succeeded Nixon, Bush succeeded Reagan, and if there hadn’t been vote chicanery in Florida, Gore would have succeeded Clinton. Obviously, you can’t toss out political concerns entirely, but they really need to be paired with a discussion of who would actually make a good president.

He said it here.

Issac Chotiner, guest blogging for Matthew Yglesias says it even more clearly. (Emphasis again mine.)

Rather than obsessing over the short term political gain—which according to the available evidence may not even exist—candidates selecting running mates should focus on the fact that their choice will be closely identified with their party for decades to come.

He said it here.

Meanwhile this morning Dana Goldstein of TAPPED has been talking about the “generational” divisiveness in the Democratic primaries in a way, I think, that pulls in the same direction.

Jessica Valenti has a great essay in The Nation urging feminists not to run away from “infighting” over the Clinton-Obama race, but rather to “own the conflict. ... Instead of the group hug approach, let’s focus on tangible goals: fostering youth leadership, working from the margins in and using intersectionality as our lens — instead of just a talking point.”

She said it here.

And then earlier she said

...with Hillary Clinton’s probable exit from the race, organizations such as NOW and EMILY’s List, as well as the many second-wave leaders who’ve publicly questioned young women’s feminist credentials if they don’t support Clinton, will have to work to convince younger generations that they remain committed to their core missions more than they are committed to a specific candidate. The EMILY in EMILY’s List, for example, is actually an acronym meaning “Early Money is Like Yeast.” Supporting early and mid-career politicians has always been a better way to ensure we’ll someday have a female president than focusing solely on Hillary Clinton, who is in many ways an outlier as a female candidate. Ann Friedman will have much more on all this in TAP’s July print issue, so I’ll stop here.

She said it here.

In the final post I’m going to link to here, Goldstein makes a solid case for selecting popular, accomplished, and rising star Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to be Obama’s running mate.

I recently traveled to Phoenix to interview Janet Napolitano for an upcoming print profile. What struck me was how instructive her tenure is to those wondering what Obama’s compromise between “unity” and party-building would look like in practice. Napolitano has governed according to that exact model in Arizona, forming coalitions with business and moderate Republicans that have brought state Democrats to the point of possibly retaking the very conservative Arizona state legislature this November.

Goldstein further details why that Napolitano would be a good choice here.

If you just wanted to be cynical you could point out that Napolitano brings a lot of the credibility that “conservative” VP choices like Jim Webb or regional choices like New Mexico’s Bill Richardson bring without, um, some of the latter two’s histories.

It doesn’t have to be Napolitano as there are some other pretty interesting politicians, male and female, who’ll make a huge difference in the next generation and who could, if and only if tragedy dictated, rise to the occasion before 2016. But I agree with Goldstein and others that if one cared to support or promote the Democratic party (to be fair to other partisans not everyone does) she’d help balance the ticket as well as more superficially balancing the ticket.

Quick follow-up on Sen. Clinton as the new Ralph Nader and why criticizing her, or anyone else, inside any kind of gendered framework reflects rather harshly on the critic and not really at all on her.

First of all, gendered criticism, even from progressives, is no small problem. Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors cites… more than a handful of sexist slurs from various, and nominally progressive, Democrats compiled by Erica Barnett

I’ve said it before–but because some Slog readers seem to still think I believe any attack on Clinton is a sexist attack, I’ll say it again: The misogyny from the media, from supposedly liberal blogger doodz, commenters on this blog, and just about everywhere during this campaign has been despicable. This kind of shit ought to be behind us: Hillary Clinton is a bitch. A big ol’ bitchy bitch. And a cunt. A “big fucking whore.” Fortunately, you can “call a woman anything.” She’s “Nurse Ratched.” She’ll castrate you if she gets a chance. She would like that. She’s a “She-Devil.” She’s a madam, and her daughter’s a whore. She’s frigid, and she can’t give head. She’s a “She-Devil.” A lesbian. A nag. When things get tough, she cries like a big dumb GIRL. In fact, she’s just that — a “little girl.” In FACT, she wants to “cry her way to the White House.” To be, ahem, “Crybaby-in-Chief.” That proves that she’s not tough enough. But she’s also not feminine enough. She’s “screechy.” She’s an “aging, resentful female.” She’s “Sister Frigidaire.” She really ought to quit running for President and stick to housework. She basically spent her entire times as First Lady going to tea parties. She’s a monster whojust won’t die. In fact, she really should just die. You can buy a urinal target with her face on it to express what you really think of her. OMG she’s got claws! She’s crazy. In fact, she’s a lunatic. She’s petty and vindictive and entitled. She’s a washed-up old hag. She’s “everybody’s first wifestanding outside probate court.” She’s a “scolding mother.” She’s shrill… shrill… shrill. She can’t take it when people are mean to her. She’s a “hellish housewife.” She’s Tanya Harding. She CAN’T be President, what with the mood swings and the menses.Any woman who votes for her is voting with her vagina, not her brain. Women only like Hillary because she’s a fellow Vagina-American. And because they vote with their feelings. Frankly, anyone who still thinks we need “feminine role models” should get over it and move on, already. Oh, and men who supporters are castratos in the eunuch chorus. You shouldn’t make her President because she wants it too much. She’s totally just banking on support from ugly old feminists. And she looooves to “play the victim.” She cackles! And cackles. And cackles. It’s like she’s a witch or something! She’s definitely“witchy.” And now you can buy her cackle as your ring tone. Her voice, too, is “grating”–like “fingernails on a blackboard” to “some men.” She’s hiding behind her gender. She isn’t a “convincing mom” because she’s too strident. She never did anything on her own. Her husband keeps her on a leash. She hates men. Her campaign is a “catfight.” She makes people want to kill themselves, is like a “domineering mother,” and is cold. And OMG she has boobies! All of which are reasons to hate her. (And boy, could I go on.)

Barnett said it here.

Ann Bartow adds, among other things, that gender insulting Clinton isn’t limited to Clinton!

And hey, guess what? Not being Hillary Clinton will not protect you. If Obama secures the nomination, the same sexism will soon find exclusive focus on Michelle Obama. She too is getting the Uppity Woman smack down. SheCodes at Black Women Vote discussed this in a general way...

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, I haven’t been reading enough ‘winger opposition sources to be up on this but I think I’ve noticed opening salvos in supermarket-style tabloid venues like the front page of the National Enquirer and Mickey Kaus’s blog.

I’ll just repeat that as with all gendered aspersions they’re not just bullshit they’re distractions! For instance aren’t the almost exclusively male consultants Clinton employs and personally directs, let alone her husband, just as “castrating” as she is? Um, yeah, except men usually get called “rabid” or even just “aggressively partisan.” And isn’t it a bigger problem anyway that Clinton keeps picking such a pack of thumb-fingered, foot-shooting asshats and showboats to be her personal Karl Roves, John Yoos, Dick Cheneys and Charlie Blacks? Why yes, as a matter of fact it is.

The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton isn’t a bitch! She’s not “castrating.” She’s not a “cunt,” or a “whore” or “shrill”** or “witchy” or anything like it. She has a Ralph Nader-sized ego, yes. She’s got a divisive, Bush-doctrine-like 50%-plus-one approach to politics, yes. She’s got a Bush-like obsession with one-way loyalty and secrecy, yes. She’s got a (sorry Prof. Bartow) an egregiously lawyerly attitude towards what should count as evidence and what “opposing council” and “the jury” should be allowed to hear that may or may not be fine in court but kind of sucks in terms of electoral politics. But where’s the gender in any of that?

In fact the closest thing to a legitimate gender issue is that Clinton has a family member she’s using to blind the public, but not herself via conversation with her partner, “personal loans” derived from from unhealthily large “foundation” contributions. And that’s not really a gender issue at all, Senator McCain enjoys the same benefit with his partner, as would anyone else of any gender (or combination of genders) with legally recognized family privileges.

So! You want to be a twit about Senator Clinton’s gender fine but to do so is to deliberately sideline discussion of substantive issues. Conversely if you have substantive, legitimate concerns then don’t be a twit.

[** In fact one serious criticism of Senator Clinton is that, based on her campaign, she’s not “Order of the Shrill“ at all! —fl]

Photo by Flickr user g-hat. Used under a Creative Commons license.

“I don’t know if she really wants Obama dead, but to say that she was “calling for his assassination” is a little absurd.” — Anonymous commenter on Liz Trotta’s Wikipedia:talk page

Via multiple sources but this one’s via Firedoglake

Liz Trotta: “and now we have what … uh…some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama …uh..um..Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor]....well both if we could [laughing]”

Other Fox News talking head: Talk about how you really feel?

Read the quote in context here.

It seems to me that everyone who’s willing to give Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her remarks about Robert Kennedy’s assassination ought to be willing to give Liz Trotta the benefit of the doubt as well.

Sure, with Ronald Reagan’s Roger Ailes running it FOX News has been a purely Republican organization. It’s less well known, however, that FOX owner Rupurt Murdoch backs Clinton, at least to the extent of having held a fundraiser for her. Also her husband Bill included Murdoch in at least two of his Clinton Global Initiative conferences.

So my point is that Liz Trotta, a Murcoch employee, yes, but also a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alum from back in the early 1960’s, the first woman war reporter on television**, a three-time Emmy and two-time Overseas Press Club award winner who’s biography, Fighting for Air: In the Trenches With Television News includes accounts of her front-line reporting from Viet Nam to Terhan as well as the incredible sex discrimination she faced in the newsrooms at home, probably intended “somebody knock off… Obama” to mean only “electorally remove an obstacle to a FOX-favored candidate” as “assassinate” when making yet another routinely tasteless joke reflecting her, her colleagues, and her employer’s strong preferences for the two remaining candidates other than Barack Obama.

I mean, if you don’t give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt then it’s fine not to extend it to Trotta either. On the other hand if you’re going to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt then you ought to be willing to let Trotta’s remarks slide as well. (Full disclosure: Like the original Wikipedia commenter I’m sure neither Clinton nor Trotta hopes Obama will be assassinated, but at this point I don’t have much respect left for them either.)

—-

Update Here’s another charming little brick in the wall: It’s a Craig’s List item and so I don’t know how long it’ll remain available, but just so you know, there’s an anonymous post titled “Liz Trotta of Fox deserves cancer” that opines that she’s “nothing more than a [all-caps anatomical Anglo-Saxon noun]” and “[Anglo-Saxon verb] her if you can stand the stench.” Sentiments she’s no doubt had to endure since she had the temerity to enroll in Columbia roughly the same year Betty Friedan was finishing The Feminine Mystique. But in fact Trotta deserves neither cancer or the gendered aspersions. Sure, like the rest of her colleagues she’s a contemptable, tasteless, nominally conservative partisan hack who’s serially in need of the benefit of the doubt, but gender has nothing to do with that.

—-

Update:

On the other hand, via Shakespeare’s Sister, Kevin of A Slant Truth points out that both Liz Trotta and Hillary Clinton (who would also have been 16 in 1963 and in college in 1968) ought to remember the murders of John Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and crippling of George Wallace pretty bloody well — well enough to remember darn well how that seemingly endless stream of mid-day announcements affected America (as it affected my elementary school teachers… as it affected even little 3rd-graders like me, and later, again, even 5th- or 6th-graders like me.) So if they do remember then it’s even more tasteless to mention it, if they don’t remember they must have been really busy with something else!

Yet another update: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says

Yesterday, we flagged the comments of Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor, joking about wanting to off both Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. A laugh a minute, you might say. Today she gave what I guess is called an ‘apology.’ Says Trotta, it was a “lame attempt at humor.”

Another “sorry you were offended apologies, and not quite owning her shit, but a start.

[** Link via Juan Cole. —fl]