Party Crashers at the Old Boys' Club

Below the Belt: A Biweekly Column by NOW President Kim Gandy

April 3, 2007

For a change, none of us felt like party crashers at the good old boys' club. On March 28, I had the honor of standing in the historic home of suffrage leader (and ERA author) Alice Paul, surrounded by cheering women's rights activists, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at my side.

What a moment. The occasion was the NOW Political Action Committee's announcement of its endorsement of Senator Clinton for president of the United States. Those of us, like me, who have been working and waiting decades for a woman to get this close to the presidency, were more than a bit choked up. Young women, who see Hillary Clinton as confirmation that they really can do anything, crowded around the candidate for handshakes and photos.

Women have run for U.S. president before, strong feminists like Hon. Shirley Chisholm, Hon. Patricia Schroeder and Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, but Hillary Clinton is the first to be the frontrunner for a major party nomination. A victory for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and then in the general election would be a tremendous leap for women.

The sight of a woman taking the oath of office in front of the Capitol, sitting behind that grand desk in the Oval Office, meeting with heads of state around the globe, giving the State of the Union address — all these firsts will help reshape the narrow image of power that still exists in our minds and our culture.

But image isn't everything, despite what the commercials tell us. If Senator Clinton were merely a symbol without substance, the NOW PAC would not, could not, have endorsed her. Let the record show that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the side of women's rights and social justice for a long time. One recent example comes to mind:

For the past two years, Senator Clinton has taken on George W. Bush and his "politics over science" ideology in refusing to approve emergency contraception (EC) for over-the-counter sale. She and Senator Patty Murray put a hold on the confirmation of first Lester Crawford and then Andrew von Eschenbach, both Bush nominees for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner. The strategy worked, and the FDA finally followed expert recommendations and approved non-prescription EC, though only for women over age 17, and it became available in January. Anyone who says that Senator Clinton has not been a leader on the issue of reproductive freedom must be forgetting these gutsy moves, along with her consistent votes on behalf of abortion rights and family planning funding. And the fact that she made over a quarter of a million robo-calls into California last year to help defeat the parental notification ballot measure. She doesn't just vote right on reproductive health issues — she is a leader and takes action to make a difference.

What's shaping up to be the most controversial issue for Senator Clinton is her 2002 vote that was ultimately used by Bush to wage war in Iraq. This vote was wrong, without a doubt, and thousands of U.S. troops and countless Iraqis have been killed because Congress handed over its war powers to Bush.

NOW has been a lead organizer in mass actions against the war in Iraq, and we are the first to say that "peace is a feminist issue." Senator Clinton has acknowledged that she and other senators were misled, and that she would have voted differently in 2002 if Bush hadn't lied.

On February 10, 2007, Senator Clinton said this, when asked about her vote: "I have said, and I will repeat it, that knowing what I know now, I would never have voted for it. But I also — and, I mean, obviously you have to weigh everything as you make your decision — I have taken responsibility for my vote. The mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress into a war that should not have been waged."

Indeed, a large majority of Congress members gave the benefit of the doubt to President Bush and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The administration, with the help of the media, was whipping the country into a frenzy of fear. The climate was such that a current rival for the nomination, Sen. John Edwards, and the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry, both voted the same way Senator Clinton voted. All have agreed that they would have voted differently if they had known that the administration had lied to them. Senator Barack Obama, another leading contender, was not in the Senate in 2002.

Rethinking one's individual vote in a different time, with new information and a much less popular president, is a rather unhelpful exercise, but Senator Clinton has done that exercise and said she would have voted differently. Is it the apology that some demand? No, but let's put the emphasis where it belongs, on an administration that lied to Congress and the public in order to wage war.

Lest this fact be lost: Hillary Clinton has said repeatedly that we must end this war, and that if she is elected and Congress hasn't ended the war by January 2009, she will end it as president. Supporters are counting on her to take leadership to end the war, and we expect no less.

Whoever inherits this horrendous war from Bush will have a huge challenge ahead of them. I believe that Hillary Clinton, with her experience and skill in diplomacy, her personal relationships with heads of state around the world, and her genuine compassion for women and children, is the best candidate to reverse the hell this administration created in Iraq and restore the leadership of the United States as a model of democracy and freedom.

But will the media give voters a chance to get to know Hillary Clinton's positions on the issues, her record and her qualifications?

That's where the good old boys' club is alive and well.

Even before our PAC made its endorsement, NOW decided to take a look at how the media were handling Hillary Rodham Clinton and her candidacy. We discovered that where top political women are concerned, too many members of the media focus on style rather than substance. They perpetuate gender stereotypes while criticizing Senator Clinton based on her appearance, attire and other superficial characteristics. Determined to hold the media accountable, NOW created a petition urging the press to report responsibly on the presidential candidates. All candidates deserve to be treated seriously — but the media need extra reminding when it comes to female politicians.

To help make our point, we called this petition "Presidential Election Not 'America's Next Top Model.'" Little did we know at the time how low this reality show would sink in its treatment of women.

On a recent episode, America's Next Top Model (ANTM) asked the young women in the competition to pose as crime scene victims for that week's big photo shoot. Maybe the show was borrowing from the larger fashion and advertising industries from which it springs — industries that have never shied away from objectifying and dehumanizing women. This practice might be common, but it's not pretty, and that evening it was downright ugly and abusive.

The gimmick was that each model had been killed by another model jealous of her dress, her breasts or... whatever. Each murder was more gruesome than the next. The models were made up to look as if they had been strangled, gutted, shot, drowned, electrocuted, and, yes, decapitated.

In order to succeed at this assignment, the models were encouraged to look convincingly dead, while conveying "high fashion" attitude and "a little life" at the same time. The one model who actually looked the most corpse-like in her photo was sent home that week. Too much reality for host Tyra Banks and the judges, I suppose. And, oh, the judges. Some of their comments were quite telling. One judge referred to the young women as "busted up, old broken down dolls" just in case the viewers and the models themselves hadn't yet gotten the message that they had been stripped of their humanity.

Didn't we just go through this? The Dolce & Gabbana ad where a group of men appeared to be getting ready to gang rape a woman was pulled after a huge outcry. Graphic and nauseating billboard ads for a new movie glamorizing the abduction and torture of a young woman have also been removed. And after a few days of calls and emails from Hollywood NOW, the Motion Picture Association of American suspended the movie's rating, which will delay its distribution and cost the producers handsomely. The studio execs? They said it was all a big mistake, and they didn't even know all those billboards had been put up. Right.

How many times do we have to point out to these producers, photographers, designers and marketers that women are people? That in a world where violence against women is a very real problem, images that glorify it are more than a little sick, and may lead to more violence?

What will it take for all of us to stop thinking of girls and women as dolls made for busting up and breaking down? Will a woman president make a difference? I hope we'll have a chance to find out.

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