Lunch Room, Locker Room, Bar Room, Board Room...

Zuzu passed along this great piece by James Wolcott about the continued acceptability of overt sexism, which I recommend reading in its entirety, although here's a snippet: "Lunch room, locker room: the trash talk is still being batted around about women as if everything's the fault of a few feminist bitches with frigid temperatures and Tilda Swinton hauteur who insist on being where they're not wanted, going where they don't belong."

(Shades of Mr. Shakes' "from the barroom to the boardroom" comment, evocative of the pervasive cultural narrative of defining masculinity in women-free spaces and in contradistinction to the feminine.)

Meanwhile, also in my inbox, I find from Shaker B the link to a YouTube video made by an Obama supporter which sets imagery of Obama and the Clintons (yes, both) to Jay-Z's "99 Problems (But a Bitch Ain't One)." The comments are predictably grim: "props, tell that hoe sit down" and "lmao @ strong arm a ho" and "shut up bitch! heheh..sorry I had to say it." Hating on women has never been quite so fun!

Which reminds me of this post by The Ghost of Dr. Violet Socks (emphasis mine):

See, if you're a decrepit old person like me and you came of age in the 70s, it is painfully obvious that my generation, the feminist generation that grew up with the Second Wave, is an aberrant hiccup. Before us there was the Rat Pack world of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, where all the women were broads and dames; after us is the hip-hop world of Snoop Dogg and Joe Francis, where all the women are hos and bitches. It's the post-backlash, kill-the-feminazis, all-porn-all-the-time culture of exuberant misogyny. My generation certainly included plenty of sexists, but we also created a brief moment in time when it was actually cool to be a feminist. When respect for women as fully realized human beings was the "in" thing. Those days are long gone. Even while the political demands of liberal feminism have become mainstream — equal pay, etc. — social attitudes towards women are more dismissive and degrading than I've ever seen in my life.

I came into the world in the 70s, during the very time when Violet and her cohort came of age. When I was born, Golda Meir led Israel, and one of my earliest political memories is hearing a man on the news say, "Women run Great Britain," when Margaret Thatcher became head of government alongside head of state Queen Elizabeth II. I was five years old. I remember it still: Women run Great Britain.

I didn't know anything about Thatcherism; I probably didn't even yet know the word "politics." What I knew what that it was possible for a woman to run a nation. And, a few years later, I found out that a woman had never run ours.

I'll be 34 this year, and not only am I still waiting to see this great nation of alleged equality elect a woman as its leader, but I'm looking at a Congress which is still only 16% female, and where there are legions of assholes who can't even spell "ho" correctly but are nonetheless convinced they're superior to Hillary Clinton just because she's got a vagina.