The casual-izing of misogyny
The premise of Q-anon, that there's a cabal of elites that are boorish, exploitative, and that prey on young women (and men) turns out to be true. Sophie GIlbert does an outstanding job in her latest on The Atlantic.
Trump has been having a bad few weeks, and try as he might, he can't suppress the Epstein files brouhaha.
And boy-howdy has he tried.
On Airforce One, he was asked a question about them by a Bloomberg correspondent, a woman, and instead of his usual cack-handed response, he turned to his tried and true deflection, some horrendous misogynous statement. He told her "Quiet. Quiet Piggy".
Now, that has made a little splash in the shit storm that surrounds him and his press gaggles[1] and even some prime reporting.
But at 0'dark-thirty this morning I was perusing The Atlantic, and Sophie Gilbert's article caught my eye (the headline on my iPad Atlantic app was not this mundane):
You might just want to go read the whole thing, it is outstanding, and Ms. Gilbert does an outstanding job laying out the theme, and delivers on all the goods. I am going to quote from this liberally, but I would like to start off with how this boorish behavior has offended me pretty much my entire professional career.
Early on, I had a woman as a boss (hi Inge!) who was the first of many great women I have worked for. In fact, all the shitty bosses I have had were men, and all of the women I have worked for have been standard deviations above the mean in awesomeness.
My first brush with this boorish behavior in the workplace was circa 1996, when I was working at this small company that made high presicion measuring microscopes. I was an applications engineer (that is sort of a super user) and the other applications engineer I worked with was Suzanne. Like me, she had a physics degree (she was a notch above me, with a M.Sc. in high energy physics), so we both really knew our shit.
Anyhow, there was an issue with the system, something optical (lenses, light, sensors) and she pointed it out to the lead engineer. They acknowledged it, and then told her to get out of their way, the "men" were going to fix it.
Later that day, we were driving to a customer site to do some acceptance work and training, and she fucking unloaded on me. She literally knew more about optics, the physics, and what was wrong, and these "men" dismissed her while they went on to fumble with this for several weeks (fact: they never really solved the issue, they made a ham-fisted software hack to hide it)
It was that moment when I realized how fucked the playing field was for my sisters in this highly technical world. Since then, I have been a strong advocate to promote and elevate the women I work with.
Ok, on to the story!
Ms. Gilbert starts with these two 'graphs that will lay the foundation:
The roughly six months that have made up November this year have—it’s fair to say—not been a high point for women, journalism, women in journalism, women with jobs, or anyone following the news.
A quick recap: On Friday, Donald Trump said to a reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy,” when she tried to complete the most basic requirement of her job by asking a question. Earlier this week, when a reporter at the White House asked Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, about the determination by U.S. intelligence that he was complicit in the killing of a Washington Post journalist—a finding that bin Salman has denied—Trump viciously scolded her for her “horrible, insubordinate” question. On the flip side, a reporter, doing herself zero favors in the take-me-seriously department, published an excerpt from her memoir—in which she describes her love for a man she calls the “Politician” (clearly the much older Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), whom she’d ostensibly been profiling—after which one of the reporter’s (also much older) exes piled on with claims of his own.
No shit, it seems like the first two weeks of November have been 6 fucking months long. Still, she mentions the "Quiet Piggy" episode, the brush-off of the reporter asking MBS why he killed Kashoggi, and finally the fuckery of Olivia Nuzzi being airbrushed back into the media's good graces.
Lordy, what a cluster.
She follows that up with a concise encapsulation of the state of play. This is neither new, nor novel:
Somehow, it all feels connected: the denigration of professionals doing their job, the fetishization of young women, the older men’s blindness to their own abuse of power. I’ve felt, consuming the news with no little amount of nausea these past few weeks, like we’re revisiting the same characters over and over, with no consequences and no forward momentum.
Amen Sister!
Then she notes that the hullabaloo that I wrote about recently:
Geoff Anderson
What I didn't mention is that Helen Andrews' impetus for this whole tirade was the "overblown" and "out of context" and "well ackshully" comments by his saintliness Lawrence Summers who as president of Harvard in 2006 uttered some hogwash about how women were just not as good at maths and sciences as men-folk, and the backlash was unfair to Summers.[2]
Her words:
A month or so ago—you may remember—the political commentator Helen Andrews published an essay for Compact magazine titled “The Great Feminization,” arguing at length that the defenestration of Larry Summers as president of Harvard in 2006, after he suggested that women had less natural aptitude for math and science than men, was the catastrophic and unjust work of a feminized woke mob, proof of how unreasonable and vindictive women can be when you give us any power.
I guess that's why she works at The Atlantic (and deserves it) while I am a lowly product manager. She was able to use "defenestration" appropriately in a sentence! Still, that was what originally propelled Ms. Andrews into the spotlight.
Yet, last week, when the ever talented Comer-Fudd decided to combat the three emails that the Dem's from the oversight committee released by unloading a 20k email and text message tranch for real journalists to go sifting through, instead of burying the "oh fucks" of the three emails and their implications for the orange turd blossom, unleashed a lot of things that powerful people probably will rue until their deaths that they communicated with Jeffery Epstein about.
In this there were several exchanges with... Lawrence Summers, who asked Epstein for dating advice, for advice how to get one of his new Econ interns "horizontal" (my skin crawls just writing that) and also commenting about how Trump is the worst person Epstein knew.
Oops.
More from Ms. Gilbert:
A common thread weaves through all of these stories, these outbursts, these leaked emails and petulant tantrums and collusions and cursed blogs. Some men, possibly many men, have always believed that women are simply not their equal. Some women have believed or internalized this idea, too: that women can and should be fetishized, sexualized, domesticized, but not respected. In the recent past, as women gained rights and men seemed to gain enlightenment, the public tended to frown on these beliefs, which is why all the jokes about teenagers in Epstein’s birthday book were supposed to be private, and why Summers concluded an observation to Epstein about men who “hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank” with the all-caps qualifier “DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.” The impulse to dehumanize women used to be something that people had to hide. (In her recent memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre—who died by suicide earlier this year, and who alleged that Epstein had trafficked her to many rich and powerful men—noted that Epstein also used to say that a woman’s primary value was being “a life-support system for a vagina.”)
A "life-support system for a vagina"? Jesus Christ on a crouton, that is so fucked up, yet there is so much evidence that far too much of the world's population believes a variant of this, and in fact, this has been a driving motivator for millennia of religion and patriarchy.
I will leave you with one last pull-quote, where I think Sophie hits it out of the park. In short, this has ALWAYS been the case, it has just been hidden behind nods, winks, and some knowing nods. What has changed?
What’s changed is Donald Trump. In the decade since he became the singular influence on American politics, he has completely and thoroughly dispensed with concepts of shame, of decency, of equality. He has proved himself time and again to be entirely self-seeking, totally amoral, cruel by nature, and impossibly fragile. And the rewards he’s gained in the process have emboldened others to be just as unabashedly themselves as he is.
Alas, this rings true. All the gains that women have made professionally and in society have been overshadowed by this undercurrent.
It’s exhausting. It’s enraging. The past decade has been a gloomy lesson in how limited a proportion of men actually see women as equal human beings. The fact that many men believe they no longer even have to pretend to respect women in order to participate in public life makes it unlikely that anything will change anytime soon. The fish rots from the head. The pig is in the Oval Office.
Amen Ms. Gilbert.
Not all men, but far too many, and if I hear one more "Trump is the response to #metoo" I am liable to go postal. Trump is the reponse to the patriarchy being cre3dibly challenged, and being unable to defend themselves, so they reverted to the shadows, and intensified their piggish-ness.
I doubt this will be undone by even this dose of sunlight, but getting this aboveboard is a positive first step, no matter how foul the stench is.
1 - It fucking infuriates me that all through the Biden administration, that the so called friendly Never Trump crews (and plenty of left of center media too) bitched about how Biden didn't do all this access. They want this sort of shit, I guess that is the easy layup for reporters too lazy to dig...
2 - honestly, writing that out made my eyes roll hard enough that I need concussion protocols.
