Argh.

[saffronhare]

Just saw a comment on somebody else's journal that really chapped my ass. (Not important who it was...respecting free speech and all, not really knowing this person.) But it totally chapped my ass.

I guess Hillary Clinton said something in an interview about how she'd love spend a quiet Saturday cleaning and organizing drawers...that she'd find it "extremely gratifying." The blogger thought the comment was "stomach-churning" because it "panders" to certain female voters and does anybody believe a smart woman would rather clean on one of those rare, empty Saturdays?

Um, yeah. ::raises hand::
Pandering or not, I do believe it.

Comments

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

I don't know that the person was stupid...but they certainly had a pretty limited view of what "smart women" would think was worthwhile or rewarding. Nice little feminist backlash, that. :)

I'm not saying Hillary didn't calculate the impact of that statement, either. HC is no dummy and I seriously doubt an uncalculated word leaves her mouth. Ill-advised, maybe. But not uncalculated.

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

Not knowing who the person is, but assuming they might be a friend, I will make a more neutral assumption along the same slant.

I'll be willing to guess that the person who figured it was only pandering probably has some pretty disorganized drawers. Bonus points if their place is low-level squalor. I'm not even a "blue-collar woman" and even *I* can comprehend her statement.

Now on the other side... (damn centrists!) Hillary Clinton is the pandering-est candidate I have seen in some time. I figured the Theatre crowd would love her because she puts on so many different faces she's like Zartan*. I think she has done this to her detriment because with youtube and the web, people can see her being anything from a downtrodden black woman to a yuppie suburbanite. Many of us have experienced a range of situations, but my question would be – when she is done pandering and in office, which personality will she use to run the country?

I don’t dislike Hillary, I disagree with her sticking by Bill, but that’s a personal call. I think she hurt herself with her campaign much like Rudy hurt himself by focusing too much on 9/11, or like Dean did during his “Bush is bad, I am not-Bush” phase. I think the longer and longer campaign times have hurt a lot of good leaders because it’s a REALLY long marketing blitz.

*- Zartan was the GI Joe character that raised a rukus in the 1980s because he was a schizophrenic, and had so many different personalities that the person that he actually -was- had been lost over time. (The problem being that this portrayed schizophrenics as ‘bad’ people.)

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

I won't pretend that my objections to the opinion were political in the sense that they have anything to do with H's platform or pandering. Hillary is a problematic candidate at best --and, hell, I even *worked* for her husband's campaign back in 1992. (When I had "Hillary Duty," ferrying her and Tipper around South Dakota, arranging appearances, and all that jazz.)

I'll own that what I really hated was the implication (perhaps not even there, but ripe for my misinterpretation) that doing something as basic as housekeeping can't be smart or enjoyable or preferable to other "smart women" things. I hoped feminism had grown up a bit more than that.

It's a burr under my saddle, is all.*

*And what an unfortunate, thread-jacking comment THAT is.

[zylch.livejournal.com]

This theatre person hardly thinks she's like Zartan at all. She doesn't yodel, or live in the jungle, and most importantly, she's not purple.

I admit that I don't particularly like Hillary, and I worry about the people who say that they'll vote for her because they liked Bill and they think this is a good way to get some of his leadership back in office. I don't approve of dynastic families in power and leadership. I know too much about how the Roman Republic fell to ever be comfortable with that.

The double standard that still applies to the sexes concerns me, though. For instance, what would the press' reaction be if one of the male Republican candidates had expressed a similar sentiment, or had shed a few tears in an interview? Or even one of the male Democrats?

It just seems so strange to me that countries which came much later to the democratic process, and with what would seem to be much more strongly entrenched patriarchal systems, have had female heads-of-state for many years now. And yet our process repeatedly turns up folks who represent ethnically and... er, genderally? a relatively small percentage of our population. A sign, I think, of a badly broken system.