From the great Gloria Steinem, an op-ed in the LA Times today and also posted at the Women’s Media Center on Sarah Palin’s vice-president candidacy. She makes an interesting point about what this says about women’s political power:

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing—the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party—are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president.

But of course, Sarah Palin is a decidedly anti-feminist candidate. As Steinem writes, if McCain hoped bringing a female vice president onto his campaign was going to bring the women to him in droves, it’s not going to work:

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence–only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high–school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but she supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

For one of the most powerful denunciations of McCain’s pick, go here.

Image credit.

Two new books on men have captured my attention this month: Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men and Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care. The first, by a well-known sociologist and gender scholar, I recommend. The second, by a so-called “cultural provocateur,” not so much.

Kimmel’s is an Ophelia-like look at what’s going on inside the minds of 16-26 year old young men. Parker’s is a wry and shoddily researched look at men under seige by guess who. Check out this Q&A with Kimmel in Inside Higher Ed and this review of Parker’s over at About Fathers. I wrote a commentary hooked on Kimmel’s findings that will be up at the Women’s Media Center next week. Will post when it goes live 🙂

(Thanks to Paul Raeburn for the link!)

And while I’m at it, two interesting reports from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a nonpartisan research center studying youth civic engagement. I drew on these in putting together the talk I’m giving here at the University of South Carolina Upstate tonight and wanted to share them with ya’ll too.

Here tis, as promised, from the White House Project, the Women’s Media Center, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and written by moi:

Just when we thought we’d had enough of media (and everyone else’s) sexism. Sigh. For a Sarah Palin Sexism Watch, hop on over to Shakesville. They’re doing a great job. And meanwhile do check out Marco’s post over at Open Salon, “Mom, Guns, and Apple Pie.”

Me, I’m heading off today for South Carolina, where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at the University of South Carolina Upstate. I just added a TON about Palin and the sexism coming her way after only less than 48 hours. Here’s the description:

Talkin ’bout My Generation: Youth, Gender, Race, Class and the 2008 Election

SYNOPSIS: Young voters—and female ones in particular—have been the subject of heated debate in an election when race and gender matter like never before. But what do young voters really think about gender, feminism, race, and the Presidential election? In this talk, cultural critic and feminist Deborah Siegel sheds fresh light on media myths and real-life generational rifts that surfaced during primary season, creating an interactive forum in which members of the so-called postfeminist, post-Civil Rights generation are invited to freely speak their minds.

(And hey – to bring me to your campus, contact info@speakingmatters.org !)

As promised, a post on McCain’s choice for running mate from first-time blogger at Girl with Pen, Emma Douglas. Emma is a radical red-headed feminist who hopes to be liberated from graduate school in December so that she can read things that are more enlightened than public administration theory. She also spends most of her time working to end violence against women as a member of the only program on domestic violence in the country. She also likes Chihuahuas a lot. We are very pleased to have her here to talk about why Sarah Palin’s appropriation of Hillary Clinton’s “glass ceiling” has outraged so many feminists. -Kristen

Rebuilding the Glass Ceiling
by Emma Douglas

“McCain Chooses Palin as Running Mate”

The text alert noting breaking news from the New York Times lit up my cell phone almost immediately before I received a wave of flabbergasted messages from my circle of friends. The news settled in when it splashed across the television swallowing (as it was intended to) news about Obama’s larger-than-life speech the night before. Having just finished attending a week of convention brouhaha including Obama’s speech at Mile High the night before I stood astounded and thought to myself, “McCain is using Sarah Palin for her tits!”

The choice of Palin, currently the governor of Alaska, as the Vice Presidential nominee says so much about the GOP and the upcoming election, most apparent the party’s desire to share in the sexism that has been rampant in this election. Gov. Palin on the ticket looks like a desperate attempt to reel in Hillary supporters the Republican’s are hoping are disgruntled enough and apparently uneducated enough to switch sides; it’s insulting to women.

Hillary supporters have become the holy grail of the presidential election. Throughout the primaries and now into the general election season this group of people, specifically women, have been fought over by the left and the right. Clinton’s presidential bid was historic and can hardly be counted as unsuccessful. She, unlike Palin, and like Senator Obama, did not conservatize her politics to appeal to a broader electorate. Palin, who herself made reference to Hillary’s 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling in her acceptance speech, is using her conservative ideology as a caulking gun to seal those cracks.

The governor from Alaska is even more conservative than McCain: she is pro-life, anti-gay (though she says she has friends who are gay!), pro-gun, wants to teach creationism in Alaska’s public schools, is in favor of capitol punishment, thinks that global warming is not man-made, doesn’t think that polar bears should be on the endangered species list because it would interfere with Alaska’s ability to drill for oil and, she is of course, in favor of drilling in Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge.

McCain’s pick also opened up the door for more of the sexist political commentary that flooded main-stream media while Hillary was running. For example this Youtube video which uses a voice over for McCain portrays him leering after Palin while she is giving her acceptance speech. Comments following a Huffington Post article on the “Six things the Palin Pick says about McCain” refer to Palin in the standard “reduces a woman to her looks and ability to get coffee” remarks.

Palin’s socially conservative politics, coupled with her gender, are terrifying for women. I can hear the booming conservative voice now, sneering, every time our rights are ripped from us, “but she is a woman!”

A guest post coming your way soon on McCain’s odd choice. In the meantime, some links that have come my way:

Joan Walsh, “What Sarah Palin Means”
Gail Collins, “McCain’s Baked Alaska”
Kristen Powers, “A Brilliant Trap Makes the Dems the Male Chauvinists”
Jonathan Alter, “Why McCain’s Veep Choice Is Likely to Flop”
Women’s Media Center
Gotham Girl

On other fronts, I’ll be offline for a bit. My other grandmother died last night. She was always in the know on all things political and pundit-ish and I often looked to her opinion to get a gauge on the world. For many other reasons, I will miss her very, very much.

You may have heard that the Bush administration’s latest attempt to infringe on women’s reproductive rights could give health-care workers the right to refuse contraception to their patients. Yes, it all sounds a bit pre-Griswoldian. I’d like to say I’m shocked. But I’m not. After all, we live in a world of abstinence-only sex ed and, for a time, Eric Keroack. More especially, we live in a cultural climate intent on pathologizing and condemning young people’s sexual practices, and governmental encroachment on the sexual habits of legal adults seems like the obvious next step. But let’s be honest, they’re really concerned with the sexual habits of young women, and are we surprised?

In 2007 when I first opened the Atlantic Monthly to discover Caitlin Flanagan’s take on Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked, which chronicles “the semi-anonymous ‘hooking up’ that is now the norm,” I was floored. After noting Stepp’s conclusion that the “girls” were “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually” by the practice, Flanagan carried on her own paternalistic diatribe on “girls” who change “in some ugly ways when left on their own.” I was shocked. They were talking about me. Or, at least, they thought they were talking about me. After all, I was a 23-year-old woman who had hooked up with men I was not nearly in love with throughout college. Did this make me an “ugly-wayed” girl?

With other things on my mind (a grad school thesis, job search, friends and flings), I promptly forgot about it. However, soon I realized that this trend wasn’t going away. What has followed, from both the religious right and so-called cultural studies of my generation such as Unhooked and Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit, has been an attempt to convince young women that by engaging in pre-marital, or more broadly “pre-love,” sexual activity, they risk their emotional and psychological well-being. With women no longer prohibited by fear of pregnancy or STDs, purity propagators are now on a mission to tell women that, like smoking and fatty foods, sex is bad for their health.

The recent publication by the The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute of Sense and Sexuality, subtitled: “The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world” highlights this fact.
According to Sense and Sexuality, girls should avoid hookups because oxytocin, released during sex, will cause a girl to “develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you.” Further, it scientifically observes that “as the number of casual sex partners in the past year increased, so did signs of depression in college women.” In sum, once you have sex with a guy, you’re a goner. You fall in love, you get attached, you’re bound to become love-sick and depressed when it doesn’t work– all because you had intercourse.

Don’t you find it odd that such arbiters of high culture and higher religion center their definition of “love” on sexual intercourse? While troubadours once spun tales of romantic despair and literal illness caused by love unrequited, today’s story-tellers have pared that soulful feeling down to a simple physical act. As my generation would say, how ironic. As I would say, how wrong. In a recent Vanity Fair article, British bon vivant Nicky Haslam, now 68 and with many lovers come and gone, says, “The truth is I’m not that interested in sex… I’m about love. It’s wonderful once or something. The quickest way to fall out of love is to sleep with somebody. Don’t shatter the crystal.” Go ahead. Call me a romantic. But my greatest heartache was not caused by the guy who hopped in and out of my bed and got away, but by the guy who seemed to fulfill my ideal of what I want in a partner, and got away.

Let’s talk about agency and subjectivity, because I think it’s about time the media published more first-hand accounts from the “hookup” generation itself. Tracy Clark-Flory, my own age (24), wrote a great article at Salon about her “hookup” experience–she’s had about three times as many hookups as relationships, and concludes, “like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.” Like many my age, who will wait to marry until they are well into their late twenties and thirties, she has found hookups to be a way to romantically vet men. I whole-heartedly agree.

And about that term “hookup”–so amorphous, so undefined. To be clear, if I tell a friend that I “hooked up” with so-and-so last night, her first reaction will be “So how far’d you go?” A “hookup” can range anywhere from making out to a full romp in bed. It might include slinking out at midnight or staying over, cuddling in the morning, going out for brunch. It is one of the most ill-defined terms of my generation, which makes it surprising that so many adults have such firm opinions on it. And while a hookup may be “semi-anonymous” as Flanagan says, it often involves a classmate or an acquaintance or friend you’ve known for years. It can last a night, a month, or three years on and off.

In college and beyond, the line between hooking up and dating has become increasingly blurred. I’ve known couples now engaged who began with an orientation-week hookup. I’ve known wine-and-dine daters who have dropped out of the picture with nary an explanation. Do I worry about girls who engage in hookups because they think the only thing they have to give are their bodies? Of course. And as Shira Tarrant recently noted in Bitch, “the modesty movement makes some good points about the effect a hypersexual culture can have on women’s well-being and sense of self.”

Yet why are our moral watchdogs so quick to condemn women’s sex-positive behavior as primary culprit? As Tarrant goes on to argue, such an analysis leaves women with only two choices: to be either virgin or whore. And personally, I’d like to think of myself as neither. Writes Tarrant, “If we refuse to acknowledge that judgments about women and modesty come from an extremely narrow-minded, controlling view that has more to do with punishing female sexual agency than with modesty itself, all we’re doing is restating that good girls don’t, bad girls do, and each gets what’s coming to her. 
” By targeting immodesty and hookups, in fact, such commentators only undermine their mission, ignoring the complex social influences that actually do lead some women to value their bodies over their selves. Self-destructive sex is a symptom of a greater social pathology–not the cause.

But haven’t I ever felt “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually” from “hooking up”? Yes, sometimes, just as I’ve felt exhausted by tested friendships and challenged beliefs. Show me a Bildungsroman protagonist, or an average American college student, who doesn’t need to go through emotionally and physically trying times to develop a better understanding of what he or she wants in a career, a friendship, a partner, in him- or herself.

At the end of her Atlantic article, Flanagan writes: “The bitter pill for many parents sending their daughters to college is that there is no possible way to protect them from what they will encounter once they have been dropped off at the freshman dorm.” As a woman who is very different today from the tremendously introverted and scared 18-year-old her parents dropped off at her freshman dorm, all I can say is: thank goodness for that.

-Kristen Loveland

I’ve definitely been having a hard time understanding the poll earlier this week that showed 25 percent of Hillary’s supporters voicing their disappointment by voting for John McCain. I mean, I’m hardly the first to say it, but excuse me, just what kind of feminist protest is that? (See previous post if remotely unconvinced.)

In her Aug. 25 op-ed in the NYTimes (“Second-Place Citizens”), Susan Faludi attempts to explain not this insanity but merely these Hillary supporters’ disappointment by offering a suggestive comparative analysis to an earlier moment in time–the 1920s, after women won the vote. Check it out, if you haven’t. She raises some excellent points.