Letters to the Editor
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I never said 'ever'
I gave you a specific historic example of how factory owners would hire mostly women because women could be paid less. Ipso facto, women were paid less then men, and that caused exactly what you deny to ever have happened.
Women work for less money because they enjoy the low paying work more than men do, this still happens today.
For women, enjoying the work seems to be a bigger priority than is earning more money, otherwise women would chase after the jobs that paid better.
Employers have a right to pay as much or as little as they please. Employees can take it or leave it, they are not forced to work there.
This works for BOTH sexes.
If women choose 'women's studies' or 'liberal arts' to learn in college, and noone is willing to pay them big bucks so they can mouth off, only the women are to blame for this.
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@ Calvin Coolidge
Yeah, basically, in perfect capitalism, women would demand higher wages, but as long as there were women willing to work for lower wages than men and higher-wage-demanding women, wages could still remain lower for women on average.
Why would women be more willing to work for lower wages? Two big reasons. One is the classic feminist reason, that women, being socialized to be more submissive, accepting, quiet, demure than men, are less likely to demand higher wages, individually and as a group. The second is that back in the 19th century, those factory owners also wondered why women were willing to work for lower wages, and they discovered: many of them were not the sole providers for their families, so their income was supplementary, and thus, they would take anything they could, including lower pay. It's a mentality issue. Thus, when some women were willing to work for lower wages because they were married and did not depend on that income solely, the women who WERE dependent on that income were competing with the non-dependents, and to get jobs, had to accept lower wages.
This "race to the bottom" scenario is the reason we have minimum wage laws -- you don't allow people to have the choice of accepting work for lower wages, which would depress wages.
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Mysogyny, racism and all of that do still exist
You only need to look at the stories that came out of West Virgina to see the racism and the rightwing is made up of sexist racist pigs.
But how big an effect it had on these elections? I don't think it did much.
Particularly when one of the examples being sited happens to be T-Shirts from a website specialising in objectionable T-Shirts.
Seriously, "Are you tighter than a 5th grader" and these are the political sloganeers for any Democrat? Or even any Republican for that matter?
Yes there has been sexism in this race. There has also been racism. there have also been all of the high passions and negative emotions generally associated with political races.
And yes Chris Mathews is a neocon dirtbag who has been despised by the leftwing for a lot longer than this race has been going on. That he claims to be a Democrat is to try and present his unbalanced idiocy as being somehow to the centre, it isn't to make a case of Democrats.
And lets be honest here, every time we get this bitter shit which we have been outright accused of, where we do feel on the defensive over it because we feel we are being accused of something of which we are honestly innocent. We are not responsible for what some conservative nut says on TV, on the radio or in someone newspaper.
We aren't voting against Hillary because she is female. We are voting against her for a variety of reasons including votes she has taken that we disagree with, her hawkish stance on world affairs when the bill will fall due some day, and that though we are willing to defend Bill, we don't particularly want him back.
And we also disagree with ever-so-subtle-but-not-quite-subtle-enough race baiting. The Democratic party, having hosted the Dixiecrat movement once doesn't want it back, and that is what we got from SC, from Ferraro acting like Obama was the affirmative action candidate and ultimately "working, hard working, uneducated blue collar Americans."
This issue has been blown up because we Obama supporters are getting blamed for what people who support Bush have to say. Why? Because it is a more convenient electoral narrative than actually admitting that the older female vote backed a candidate who just didn't inspire the rest of the party to follow along.
There is no shame in backing a losing candidate, you thought your candidate was best, the rest of us disagreed - it isn't saying you are a bad person that we disagreed.
You are not Hillary Clinton, anymore than we are Barrack Obama, and we agree on the general direction that we want to take America in, so lets cut the crap with this claims of how mysogyny hurt Hillary, lets cut the crap once and for all and admit, Hillary ran a worse campaign, she raised less in funds, she lost the young, black and educated votes that are a large part of the Democratic party.
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ewm2442 on getting back to the article
isn't the daily show supposed to be a parody of mainstream news? they're outright about their bias so i don't really think that counts.
They're still mainstream! And apparently more popular than the "real" news, which is an encouraging sign.
also, i did make the connection in an earlier post about how these stereotypes originating with right wing truth-makers have the same effect on everyone.
Oh goodness, I must have missed that. You have the same crazy ideas then!
The fact that this particular article was about Senator Clinton has guided my overall comments. ... the washington post article was a good read.
It wasn't bad, but I'm still struck by how ahistorical it is. The long history of what Clinton has had to endure makes, in my opinion, a more persuasive argument in favor of the idea that misogyny is a powerful force in American life. So I wonder about the reasoning behind only focusing on the things that happened since her primary campaign started to have trouble.
I'm not saying that the writer was trying to take a stab at Obama or something. I don't see any real evidence of that — most political commentators appear to possess the cultural memories of jellyfish and one oughtn't to ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by jellyfish-brains, as the old saying goes.