We, as Americans,
have certain things we like to believe about ourselves… about how we have
continually improved ourselves and shed the negative aspects of our past, like
racism & misogyny, when we all we have really done it to paper over the
holes in the walls without repairing the holes the invading elephants made.
And the elephants
remain in the middle of the room, too. We tiptoe around them because we don’t
want to upset them and have them make new holes or tear off the pretty wallpaper….
Because then we might actually have to do the harder work of fixing the holes.
So, let’s
recognize some of our collective elephants…. And I’m not talking about the GOP,
well not exactly…
The other day, I
was listening to a podcast and the announcer and his guest were discussing the
differences about Biden & Hillary Clinton and why older voters like Joe
better. Mind you, both commenters were men so they missed an elephant that any
woman will see and many men will simply deny the existence of.
Mind you, Hillary
Clinton wasn’t my #1 choice in 2016 for president, she had a great deal of
baggage, especially thanks to the Right. They hated her as First Lady, they
hated her as a Senator, they hated her as Secretary of State, no matter what
she did, she couldn’t do anything right. She also had a lot of referred ick
from being married to Bill Clinton. But no matter the baggage, she was
certainly the most qualified of the candidates. She wasn’t considered
“likeable” and people couldn’t “connect” with her, she was considered cold,
aloof, & distant or aggressive & power-hungry. All of this may have
been true, but given the generation that Hillary came up in, to advance, women
had to develop a certain tough demeanor…
but they did so at their peril. Women still walk a tightrope between
their feminine sides and tougher sides, and meeting the competing expectations
is pretty much impossible. All women want is to be recognized as full human
beings first. The biggest issue that nobody want to talk about with the Hillary
problem is that she is a woman.
Controlling women
is possibly the oldest elephant the human race has tried to paper over. And US
likes to think that women getting the vote in 1920 fixed that… but the truth is
that by 1970, women still couldn’t have a credit card or own property without a
co-signer, or could get fired for being pregnant. These were finally fixed over
the course of the 1970s, but that was OVER 50 years after the 19th amendment.
Married women weren’t allowed birth control until 1965 and it took until 1972
for all women to be allowed access to contraception. Congress didn’t even
remove references to contraception from federal anti-obscenity laws until 1970.
And the there is the eternal fight over Roe v Wade. I’m not going to litigate
it here, because it’s just a piece of the women’s rights battle.
So how did I get
here after talking about Hillary Clinton, credit cards, and then reproductive
rights? Because it’s all the same thing. Women are not seen as full human
beings. The fight for reproductive rights is about the control of women, hence
the fight against birth control and abortion. Women are considered at a
fundamental level to not be capable of making decisions about their lives or
their own bodies, like children, we can’t be responsible and need to be
controlled. Additionally, our value is measured by our reproductive ability:
women get married and the first thing they are asked about is when they will
have a baby, women who have had several children or who decide they don’t want
children are often **not allowed** to have their tubes tied or other
sterilization procedures. My own daughter had a doctor who “allowed” her to
have her tubes tied based on his on calculation of her age + the number of
children she had had…. It wasn’t because she wanted to stop having children,
but because of some rubric he had made up. A friend of mine knew she didn’t
want kids and was married, and her spouse was 100% with her… but the surgeon
had to sit down with *both of them*.
Beyond all of
this is the way that women are treated in the business and professional fields,
often talked down, accused of being aggressive for wanting to advance (or
accused of sleeping her way to the top). Per Leftronic.com (https://tinyurl.com/y3ho3a96), 29% of senior management is female, 33
Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs, 31% of senior roles are held by
women in the U.S., 12.5% of American women are employed as Chief Financial
Officers in Fortune 500 Companies, and female CEOs are more likely to be fired
than male CEOs. These type of statistics are often blamed on having children,
not being engaged enough, no giving enough, etc. rather than looking at the
structures that either block or support women in the workplace. Women have
different needs that are often not incorporated into corporate culture, what
they are really saying is that they don’t want to change.
All of the things
that I have mentioned here are all examples of how women are controlled, and
the major mechanism is via her sexuality. If she dares to step outside the
appointed box, she is called demeaning names or accused of demeaning acts, all
to shame her and silence her. So we continue to talk about pay gaps, abortion,
birth control, but never get to the discussing the elephant of misogyny.
An amazing woman
I follow is Dr. Bandy X. Lee, MD, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale
School of Medicine. Her specialty is
violence prevention, and she edited and contributed to the book, The Dangerous
Case of Donald Trump (https://tinyurl.com/y4xud4e7). She and her colleagues have predicted much of
what we have seen Trump do and the pathologies he has exhibited as his
presidency as gone on. She was accused
by right wing website of “not being licensed” (https://tinyurl.com/y4pdhwfu)
and of violating the Goldwater Rule by the APA. She has accused the APA of
having her blacklisted, as evidenced by her inability to get booked on most
mainstream media outlets including Rachel Maddow. She has been outspoken in her
discussion of Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism and how as the walls close
in, he will become worse as he tries to save what shreds of his psyche remain (https://tinyurl.com/yxadptyq). She and her colleagues have warned, quite
rightly, in my opinion, that Trumps mental health would keep spiraling out of
control, possibly eventually taking the country, and perhaps the world, along
with him. His uncontrolled & worsening mental state infects those around
him, and the country as a whole. He will do anything for his psychic survival…
all while having access to the largest military & nuclear arsenal in the
world. He also makes clear how he does not care about others, and is incapable
of doing so. She posits frequently on her Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1) that until we, as a nation, address Trump’s
mental health, analyzing his actions and treating him appropriately from the
mental health standpoint, we will get nowhere.
However, Dr. Lee
is also Asian and has faced both racist and misogynistic attacks for her
speaking out from her expertise.
Here we have to
tiptoe around 2 additional elephants, racism and Trump’s mental health. Trump’s
mental health has been nibbled at around the edges by the mainstream media, but
has rarely confronted the issue head-on, perhaps under pressure from the APA
and other groups, but she remains another female, and Asian, voice that is
being actively silenced by the powers that be.
The last amazing
women I am going to bring up, are Sarah Kendzior (https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior)
and Andrea Chalupa (https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa). I have mentioned them
in previous podcasts, they have called nearly every step of the US descent into
autocracy under Trump. Their podcast, Gaslit Nation (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/), is a study of where we are as a country
every week. They too have not been widely listened to, or taken seriously,
until now… all while being faced with threats to their families and persons, up
to and including death. And lately I have seen more experts on rising
autocracies on the news as the mainstream media seems to finally be cottoning
onto the concept that our country might actually be in danger. However, more
often than not, those voices are male and not female. But these brave, bold
women have been trying to tell us what has been coming for the last 5 years.
So we have some
huge elephants sitting in our national living room… and they can’t be ignored
anymore. Like so many problems, we have to recognize them for what they are and
listen to the people affected by them to begin unravelling the toxic effects
they have on us all.
The first and
most urgent has to be Trump’s pathological narcissism. This is the most looming
danger we face, partly because over 1/3 of the country is it on and taking the
rest of us down with them, the problem is that they cannot see where this is
heading and they really think this is what they want, please listen to my first
podcast “Watch What You Wish For” (https://anchor.fm/jennifer-schmidt2/episodes/1-Watch-What-You-Wish-For-ejs10l)
. We are on the USS Trumptanic and we are all locked in steerage. If we don’t
deal with this, any semblance of the America we know and love will be gone. The
road ahead isn’t easy going to be easy, no matter who wins the election in a
month. However, understanding that we are dealing with a very ill individual
from a mental health framework will make taking the next steps as a country
easier, because we will have a grounded understanding of what is happening vis
a vis the president.
The misogyny and
racism elephants must also be dealt with squarely and forthrightly. The place to
start is by listening to women and communities of color about what THEIR needs
are. Don’t assume anything. Don’t treat any gender or community as monolithic.
White men are treated as individuals, that is all women and people of color are
asking. Nobody has to give up anything, this is not a zero-sum game.
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