The Election Aftermath: How Women Might Feel

TheDailyBeast.com, Tina Brown's latest publishing enterprise, published a poll today on how women feel post-election. I don't have the credentials to discern whether the poll is accurate or conforms to the rigor of polling, like the polls analyzed by fivethirtyeight.com, the premiere election site. What it shows is an underlying dissatisfaction among women that women don't get a fair shake in the media, at work, at home, or anyplace.

"By an overwhelming 61% to 19% margin, women believe there is a gender bias in the media."

I agree. I believe that public women are still judged differently than men and often by bizarrely unconscious standards. It doesn't seem to matter whether the judging is coming from men or women. Take Maureen Dowd as an example. She seems to hate all women whether their name is Hillary or Sarah.

"48% of women thought Hillary Clinton received fair media treatment and only 29% believed Sarah Palin was treated fairly."

Hillary has never been treated fairly by the media. She has been portrayed as a bitch, a scold, a ball-buster. When she stood by her man, she was critiqued unmercifully for it by everyone, even the Christian Right. I've met her. She is charming, attentive, shrewd, and brilliant. She lost the primary for many complicated reasons, one of which might have been media bias. But let's not forget her husband Bill and her own reactionary political tactics.

The Sunday before the New York primary on Super Tuesday, I spent the day in bed with my laptop, trying to decide between Clinton and Obama. I didn't find much "dirt" on Obama that day, but a helluva lot about Clinton. Of course, she is married to Bill and had been First Lady under assault from the extreme Right for eight years. She wasn't being paranoid. She was attacked.

However, I disagree with the perception that Sarah Palin was treated unfairly by the press. She was the wrong pick; she didn't have the credentials, the knowledge, or the expertise to be vice president. She was treated as Dan Quayle had been during the Bush I run and presidency. Let's recall that Dan Quayle is best remembered for his attack on the morals of Murphy Brown, a fictional television character.

As reported then in Time: And yet the Vice President dared to argue last week in a San Francisco speech that the Los Angeles riots were caused in part by a "poverty of values" that included the acceptance of unwed motherhood, as celebrated in popular culture by the CBS comedy series Murphy Brown. The title character, a divorced news anchorwoman, got pregnant and chose to have the baby, a boy, who was delivered on last Monday's episode, watched by 38 million Americans. "It doesn't help matters," Quayle complained, when Brown, "a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman" is portrayed as "mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another 'life-style choice.' "

Quayle was cute and telegenic, just like Palin. He couldn't read a script as well and didn't have her fantastic comedic timing. But Palin didn't have to go on Saturday Night Live. She didn't have to sit through that degrading rap during the news segment. She chose to be a media hog and was properly criticized for her narcissistic desires for attention. If you haven't seen Amy Poehler's rap, click here.

I don't believe it was sexism that brought Sarah Palin down, but her own and McCain's incompetence.

Where I do see sexism, however, is on behalf of the McCain aides who chose to deflect criticism away from how the McCain campaign was run by picking on Palin. John McCain is responsible for his loss, no one else.

We are all weary of the hysteria of the election, yet strangely, I'm longing for the intensity. President-elect Obama is keeping cool in his Chicago transition office, making decisions behind closed doors. Joe Lieberman keeps his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, a decision I deeply regret. Eric H. Holder, Jr. is tapped, perhaps, as Attorney General, a decision I support. Hopefully, the Obama administration won't be Clinton III, although it is looking that way.

What Obama will have to deal with is the rage of women, especially Democratic women, whose fury might have solidified and been named by the inadequate substitution of Sarah Palin for Hillary Clinton. Whether it was the press; the Democratic Party; the men we are living with ( 4 in 10 men freely admit sexist attitudes towards a female president. 39% of men say that a male is “naturally more suited” to carrying out the duties of the office.); our jobs, bosses, and colleagues at work, we know that something was let out of Pandora's Box, according to this survey, and we while we are dealing with our racism, let's deal with sexism, too.