I have been called many things in twenty-eight years: Mexican, Korean, gook, chink, wetback, son of a mud-shark whore, Jap, mutt, china-man, stupid dumb ugly mean little man who don’t know nothing bout nothing (Shasprine Gaines had quite a tongue), fag, homo, chicken-fucker (I’m not sure where that guy was going, why), and most often asshole, by my friends, as a term of endearment.  Sticks and stones, and the experience of being ethnically ambiguous in America.  But until yesterday, I’d never once been called a sexist or a misogynist. 

            The reason, likely, is that I’m the sort of man who’s not uncomfortable calling himself a feminist.  I don’t talk hard about women, even around the boys after a couple beers and the break up fresh and raw.  I’ve never called a woman a bitch to her face, unless it was meant in jest and would be understood, and I’ve certainly never trotted out that word that starts with a c that is perhaps the only word in the English language that makes me so uncomfortable I cannot say it.  Several of my best friends are women, and um, I treat my mother well.  And, oh yeah, there’s the fact that I’m the sort of intellectual who teaches units on gender, who assigns freshman Gloria Steinem and Deborah Tannen and trots out figures about wage inequality and glass ceilings in American business and who lectures about the contradictory ideal of the American woman as created by the media and society.  As my friend Keetje said, “If you’re being called out as a sexist, America’s in pretty good shape.”

            But the world isn’t in good shape—and I’m not, simply not, misogynist.  And so I suppose I want to respond, not in a defensive way, but in a sort of manifesto, a statement of principle: I have the right to be accurate, and speak clearly, with the hope of being understood.  In this e-space, a spade will always be a spade.

            The charge of sexism was trotted out by fellow blogger Madame Bitch with regard to my essay about Mr. Obama and the McCain ad that featured Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.  In that essay, I first asserted that the two women were vacuous and vapid, and so there was no reasonable intellectual comparison with Mr. Obama.  Then I asserted that they had been chosen for this comparison because of the way they’re associated with sex and scandal.  Madame Bitch asserted that I was being sexist by ‘piling’ it on them, that they ‘cultivate stupid for money’, and bore no responsibility for their actions.  Instead, I should recognize that the ‘producers and back-end profiteers,’ the men, forced on Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton their persona and engineered their public conduct for their own profit.  When I responded that there was extensive documentation of their daftness and superficiality, Madame said that I was saying ‘well, they asked for it,’ which was “like saying that anchorwomen and or CEOs who go out of their way to be fashionable invite criticism of their looks and clothes.”

    Working from the bottom up, the analogy isn’t analogous—an anchorwoman or CEO is in their position largely, one would hope, on the basis of their intellectual (or professional) merit. Criticizing them due to their dress, then, is sexist, and they likely do face sexism.  Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton do not rely on their brains.  Ms. Hilton is heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, and rose to greater prominence by way of a reality television show that documented her glitzy, superficial, hard-partying lifestyle.  Ms. Spears is a young pop star who became famous at sixteen for music and music videos about how sexy and amenable she was to being 'hit one more time.’  The two of them famously allowed the paparazzi to take pictures of them sans undergarments.  Ms. Spears has a ninth grade education; Ms. Hilton dropped out of high school but earned her GED.  Ms. Hilton is the person responsible for the word ‘hot’ coming to apply not just to physical appearance, but to anything—in other words, all that matters is those superficial aspects of anything that make it desirable.  She once asked what a soup kitchen was, and inquired of Wal-mart, “Do they make walls there?”  When her breast size increased a couple cups overnight, Ms. Spears famously insisted: “I did not have implants, I had a growth spurt.”  Ms. Hilton, when introduced to author Joan Collins, said, “If I could read a book, I'd definitely read one of yours.”    

            I’m all for a woman’s right to dress as she would and be free of the judgment or comments of men. I’m not all for women prominent in the public eye acting, talking, and comporting themselves foolishly and licentiously, glorifying only the superficial and sexual.  To suggest that these uber-rich starlets have no choice, that they are the victims of a vast patriarchal conspiracy, insults the vast majority of women who demonstrate intelligence and don’t rely on sex appeal alone—and must battle the sexism perpetuated by the stereotypes Paris and Britney conform to.  I’m not saying sexism isn’t rampant or that patriarchy doesn’t persist.  Ms. Clinton’s candidacy showed us just how much, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, we still accept sexism as a matter of biology, though we reject such nonsense in examining race.  We have a long, long way to go—and I fully admit that as a man, I simply don’t know how hard it is to be a woman.  I understand, too, Madame’s resistance to the gleeful name-calling, the legions of men eager to claim power over a woman by speaking of her body, calling her a stupid bitch or whore or that c word that I can’t say.  But to suggest that no woman can be called vapid or unintelligent because that’s a part of the lexicon of sexism is, well, stupid.  If we cannot make distinctions based on evidence, we cannot say anything meaningful at all.

            When Madame B was first calling me a sexist, I spluttered a bit, got defensive.  What I should have done was explain what her reasoning reminded me of: that of a rather slow fraternity brother I taught last year.  We were in my unit on gender, studying Miss America as a case study, a cultural artifact that helps create the ‘ideal’ of the American woman.  He’d been disaffected the entire class, unhappy to be forced to think critically and speak clearly, but this day he was with it, tipped back the brim of his cap and tried to follow.  I showed video of the pageant, opened discussion of an article we’d read by former Miss America Kate Shindle.  He raised his hand, waved it in the air, and spoke with passion: “It’s just—it’s not fair.  These beautiful women, and people say they can’t be smart!”

            I died a little inside, and here’s why: yes, beautiful women can be smart, and there’s an impulse by men to call any attractive woman stupid, and so claim a kind of power.  But what’s wrong with the Miss America pageant is that it suggests that before a woman can take the stage, before we listen to what she has to say, she must first look good in a bathing suit, and strut herself before the appraising eyes of the world.  Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are bathing suit strutters who make no gesture at being articulate or even promoting a cause, as the contestants of Miss America at least do.  They revel in, promote, and profit from a performance of the feminine that suggests that all there is to a woman is how ‘hot’ she is.  There’s no need to be able to, like, read a book, or know stuff.  As Paris Hilton once said, “I don’t really think, I just walk.”  There may be a sort of native intelligence to such calculated and exposed a walking—both Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton seem to understand that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.  That does not make them the sort of role models that young women should imitate.  If it’s misogynist to assert that there’s more to a woman than her sex appeal, I am guilty as charged—and I want to part of a feminism that would condemn me for saying so.