It's good to be the Honey Badger

Any woman who goes into politics, regardless of her political party or philosophical leanings, must know, unless she's a total idiot, that she's going to be a victim of the double standard. The media and quite often the voters as well will look at her and the first questions that come to mind will be about her appearance.

Is she pretty?

Who does her hair?

Where does she buy her clothes and what designers does she use?

Is she maybe just a little bit pudgy?

Not to put too fine a point on it, is her butt too big?

Does she have wrinkles in her face?

Does she ever appear to be tired?

After all that, if there's any time left, they may consider what her stands are on "women's issues." Heaven forbid that she should have any opinions on the larger issues that face the country and the world! I can only imagine how very frustrating that must be for a serious woman with serious and informed opinions and well-reasoned views about the world. A woman like - oh, I don't know - Hillary Clinton, for example.

Clinton, throughout her career in public life, has been a lightning rod for haters who love to excoriate her for her hairstyles, her pantsuits, her figure, and anything else about her appearance that doesn't meet their strict definition of beauty. But, while this might have been hurtful to Hillary at earlier points in her life, she has now reached a point - an age - where she really doesn't give a crap what you think about her appearance! Mary Elizabeth Williams had a nice column in Salon.com today that made that point very well.

“Would you ever ask a man that question?” Hillary Clinton gave that reply two years ago, when an interviewer in Kyrgyzstan innocently asked the secretary of state, “Which designers do you prefer?” But when the Boston Review posted the exchange on its site Wednesday, it became a viral sensation — and just the newest example of how much kicking butt and taking names Ms. Clinton is doing lately.

For those of us who admire the woman, as, clearly, I do, it is really nice to see her able to relax and enjoy herself, enjoy her role as Secretary of State, and concentrate on the things that are important to her, not on what she will wear or how she will style her hair tomorrow. She looks like a 64-year-old, hard-working, well-traveled woman, a woman who has important things to do and accomplish for herself and for her country. As Williams says in her article, Clinton has become the Honey Badger who is just going to be herself no matter what you think.  Yeah, it is really, really good to be the Honey Badger.

The civilizing influence

"Must women 'civilize' men?" Joan Walsh asks in her column today in Salon.com. After all, it is the position of many conservative thinkers (See Charles Murray) and politicians (See Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, et. al.) that this is the role of women in society. That it is the only role they should play in society. They must stay home, tend the fires, raise the kids, and be there whenever their husbands want them. This is the basis of all human civilization and when women seek to play any other role, that civilization begins to break down. In this worldview, all the problems of our society today can be traced back to women trying to break out of the mold that genetics put them into, and everything would be fine again if women would just shut up and fit themselves back into that mold.

And why should it be women's responsibility to provide that civilizing influence? Are men such wild and base creatures that they have no instinct for civilized behavior on their own? What an insulting idea.

The conservative model for family is set in stone. It consists of a man and a woman and children, with the man the head of the household and the provider and everyone else subservient to him. If you take away from the man that role of family ruler then you have taken away his whole reason for being and the thing which gives him the veneer of civilization, the thing that distinguishes him from beasts. Wives who enter the workforce are demeaning their husbands and usurping their role of provider. And in the philosophy of today's conservatives, women who seek to control their own bodies and the number of children which they have are interfering with the husband's responsibility and prerogative. Yes, some people who live here in the second decade of the 21st century do actually think like that. You can hear them on conservative talk-radio or, for that matter, on the Fox News Network any hour of the day.

My thought is - and I think Joan Walsh would agree with me - that the sexes civilize each other. We complete each other. We form a unit, two halves of a whole. We create a family together and that is the basis of our civilization. But civilization is not the sole responsibility of one sex or the other. It is in every way a joint undertaking. And it works best and is most successful when both parts of the unit are equally valued and respected and when each has the capacity to bring out the best that is in the other. We each rub off the rough edges on the other and that is the real civilizing influence.