Let’s lower our voices and moderate our tone
Stephan Helgesen
I am not an expert on women, but I see no virtue in pitting American women of any party, race, age, social status or ethnic group against each other, nor do I see any gains to be made from using our differences as a weapon to bloody the opposition.
“We are not amused.” – Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria, now there was one tough lady at a time when toughness was considered the sole province of men. I suppose Hillary Rosen could have said that Queen V hadn’t worked a day in her life either, and she might have been right if she was talking about a 9-5 hourly wage job, but Queen Victoria ruled the British Empire for 63 years, and few doubted her qualifications.
It amazes me that political strategists and pollsters think they can strip away all the accouterments that make up the outward face of women, isolate and label them like an entomologist pinning butterflies to a board. If these professionals think women are nothing more than the sum of disparate parts or can be re-assembled like a Mrs. Potato Head (and messaged to accordingly), they have never met a real woman, let alone lived with one.
Ms. Rosen must have made her now famous comment as a result of an acute case of talkingpointitus or suffered a momentary gender lapse, otherwise she wouldn’t have coughed up such a hairball, especially at the time when her party’s chieftains were mobilizing their troops to ratchet up the War on Women and take it to the Republican barbarian camp and their front-runner, Mitt Romney.
We shouldn’t punish people for speaking their minds on national TV. We should just precede their appearances with a couple of their famous quotes thrown up on the screen for the viewers to see in case they’ve forgotten them. To quote Shakespeare, “The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” but with so much drivel to sort through in any given day, we need to be reminded occasionally of that evil.
Questions
We don’t judge books by their covers, so why should we pigeonhole women voters into stereotypical boxes to fit a political narrative or target group? Are all college-age single women alike? Do all working women (those that have out-of-the-home paying jobs) have the same aspirations or share the same ideologies? Are all wealthy women protected from hardships or immune from life-changing personal challenges?
Do all women want their contraception devices or pills paid for and regulated by the government? Is the sisterhood of NOW and other female organizations only comprised of liberal East Coast academic women? Do middle-aged married Mid-Western women only vote for Republican candidates?
Are women more persuadable than men when it comes to education and health-care issues? Are all women pacifists? Do women love their children more and their jobs less (and men the reverse)? Are they all driven by their protective nurturing nature?
What we do to others we do to ourselves
I swear, sometimes these political strategists are nothing more than vultures perched on the hill intimidating the most vulnerable of the herd, waiting for them to show their weakness. Preying on their fears, they wear down their subjects with incessant rhetoric until they succumb.
One hundred and fifty-four years ago, Abraham Lincoln gave a famous speech in Illinois in which he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That speech didn’t win him the Senate seat he sought, but it did remind a deeply divided nation that it was teetering on the brink of its own dissolution.
I am not an expert on women, but I see no virtue in pitting American women of any party, race, age, social status or ethnic group against each other, nor do I see any gains to be made from using our differences as a weapon to bloody the opposition. What we do to others we do to ourselves, and that inescapable truth ought to be enough to make us want to lower our voices and moderate our tone.
Stephan Helgesen is a former U.S. diplomat and former director of the N.M. Office of Science and Technology. He is currently the honorary German consul in New Mexico and heads up his own export consulting company. He can be reached at helgesen@2ndopinionmarketing.com.
Michael Schneider: While the truth of Ms Rosen’s assessment of Ann Romney is valid for you and many others, I’ll still maintain it was not smart to have said it. We’ll see how the War plays out.
You are one of those post- modern relativists, Stever, to say something like this:
Oh wait that’s my truth not yours.
But I believe in facts. And the fact is that there’s nothing in Ann Romney’s history, experience, or statements to cast any doubt on Ms Rosen”s statement that Ann Romney “never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.”
In fact, it’s something that should be said loudly and often: to a great extent women are getting really crappy treatment from our country.
Is Ann Romney going to be our Queen Victoria? She certainly has the same financial background.
No Michael, in politics, telling the “truth” is not always good because what you consider true, may not be the same as other people. I expect, as a good liberal, that may be an unacceptable thought, generally you are inclined to think anyyone who does see things your way, is a knucledragging neanderthal.
So who will tell the truth about the unsustainable burden of federal entitlements? Oh wait that’s my truth not yours.
It was not dumb because it was true or not true, it was dumb because it was an unforced error that gave her opponents ammunition and could have hurt her side. To what end?
It was a dumb thing to say, regardless of how you want to clarify it.
I’ve always figured that telling the truth was a good thing, and not a dumb thing. What do you think was dumb about her telling the truth?
And note that it wasn’t ME clarifying, all I did was add back in some more of the things SHE said. Saying regardless of how you want to clarify it misstates and misrepresents what she said.
@Michael H Schneider It was a dumb thing to say, regardless of how you want to clarify it.
What Ms. Rosen said was essentially true. Thus, when you say “Ms. Rosen must have made her now famous comment as a result of an acute case of talkingpointitus or suffered a momentary gender lapse… ” you’re assuming the truth of your conclusion as a premise of your argument – and elementary logical fallacy.
Had you not misquoted – or left off an important part of the quote – this would be clear:
Rosen continued by saying Ann Romney had “never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.”
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-04-12/politics/politics_campaign-wrap_1_ann-romney-economic-issues-mitt-romney?_s=PM:POLITICS
I think it’s a shame that Ann and Mitt had to sell some of the stock that his father gave him in order to pay their way through school – but that’s not quite the same as having to work at a Burger King in order to pay for school.
Then you misstate the nature of the war on women: “the time when her party’s chieftains were mobilizing their troops to ratchet up the War on Women … “. The Republicans have launched the War on Women (attacking contraception, choice, Planned Parenthood, and other womens’ issues) and the Democrats are fighting defensively to protect womens’ rights. So it’s not “the” war on women, it’s the Republican war on women.
Women do have political issues that affect them disproportionately. Very few men use contraceptive pills or implants, very few men get pregnant, there are far more single working moms with kids than single working dads with kids, women generally do earn less than men for the same jobs, etc. Failing to recognize that these are issues that affect women disproportionately, as you do when you say “We don’t judge books by their covers, so why should we pigeonhole women voters into stereotypical boxes to fit a political narrative or target group? “, is simply wilful denial.
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