A while ago, in a story about feminism and TV, I quoted the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon says that, in the upcoming election, there’s an 80 percent chance that she will tell her friends she’s voting for Barack Obama but will secretly vote for John McCain. It turns out, though, that Tina Fey disagrees with Liz Lemon–or, at least, the Tina Fey who defended Hillary Clinton in the hilarious “women’s news” segment on the Weekend Update of the first post-strike SNL:
What moved Tina Fey to have this public political break with, well, herself?
So far the Obama campaign has had a monopoly on viral videos that appeal to young voters, while the Clinton campaign has made do with stuff like this. Fey’s funny dissection of the dumber arguments against Hillary is the kind of thing a campaign needs going for it nowadays. Somewhere out there, some enterprising Hillary volunteer must be putting “Bitch Is the New Black” on an unauthorized campaign T-shirt, no? Of course the bit–which defends Hillary against Rush Limbaugh’s saying Americans don’t want to see a woman get old in the White House–comes in the middle of a routine that includes jokes about Lindsay Lohan looking old and Kirstie Alley looking fat, so take it as seriously as you want to.
In the serious-media world of perceptions-about-Hillary news, ABC News’ Jake Tapper asks whether it was sexist for him to say that Clinton’s “Shame on you” attack against Obama was “scolding.” To which I’d answer–well, no, but it’s not the dumbeest question in the world to ask. As Tapper notes: “Shame on you” is pretty much textbook scolding. The verb is not limited to female politicians, nor is blowback from sounding like a scold.
See, for instance, the entire presidential-candidate career of Bob Dole. (“Stop lying about my record!” “Where is the outrage?”) Dole found, repeatedly, that Americans generally like to vote for optimists, not for men or women who come off as cranky and hectoring. The term that tended to attach to Dole was “hatchet man,” which, I don’t know, maybe is reverse sexist, but whatever. The principle is gender-neutral–even if it’s true that women politicians are more likely to get called scolds even when they’re not scolding.
There has, definitely, been sexist language attached to the Clinton campaign: “shrill,” famously, is an adjective almost exclusively used for women, and even if the media couch the term in voters’ perceptions of Clinton, it’s still been used unfairly. But the fact that there’s still sexism out there shouldn’t keep anyone from calling a scolding a scolding.