So, 6 heads of state walk into a summit...

What's wrong with this picture?



That's right: not only aren't half of the leaders women, none of the pictured leaders are women.

Oh, yes, and the failure to agree on a climate plan.

Though, black (male) head of state of a predominantly white country: check. We're still working on consistently representing the other (female) half of humanity, among other things.

Solidarity Gone Awry

File it under yet another "Unbearable Lightness of Being Center-Left." Or perhaps just "The Unbearable Lightness of Analysis at Slate."

Whatever the case, Emily Bazelon's recent article disappoints. Me, at least.

Charitably, I can see how hard it is to watch a woman flub on the national stage and worry that we've all been set back some (well, all us feminists, but more importantly I suppose, women and specifically women feminists especially -- Wom Fems?). It is, similarly, hard for me to watch black people make a fool of themselves (See: All Wayans family members post-1995ish -- and no, it doesn't matter to me that they're suppposedly funny or just pretending, minstreling is minstreling, aiight? Though yes, it would be worse if it were a national politician.*) So I guess, just in this instant thinking about that, I can sympathize with her position.

But the thing is, Slate is not (nominally) a confessional -- it's a news outlet for analysis and debate and reporting. And while reporting the embarrassment wim-fems and their supporters might feel about Palin, she does seem to fail to engage much beyond that. Just as I don't believe Hillary Clinton did all that much to advance feminism or women's issues -- just being a woman close to the presidency was an important symbol, but one without substance, she being hardly a Shirley Chisholm or Ruth Bader-Ginsberg or Joan Williams, i.e., feminists I respect for their actual ACTIVISM and not just womanness -- I don't know how much Palin is taking away from it. It is, after all, institutional sexism as much as anything else at this point maintaining male dominance, and institutionalized discrimination relies much less on the outward symbols and prejudices that make up much of the substance of historical discrimination (which in turn allowed present discrimination to occur more discretely, once the institutions to maintain it were set up on discriminatory foundations).

Perhaps I'm wrong -- perhaps I'm underestimating symbolism. I sometimes/often do. But it shouldn't require me to ask Bazelon to do her job -- which is not just to sound agonized, indecisive and inactive (which I SWEAR, must be the Slate house style these days, except when they're being decisively smarmy) but to ANALYZE things. Get to the MEAT of it. Bazelon's lack of engagement in the deeper structures of sexism is nigh-unforgivable -- similar to the media's coverage of Iraq. Because I ask you, what would be more valuable to the American people -- coverage of the play-by-plays of politics in the Iraq war, and the body count, or actual substantive coverage of the HISTORY of Iraq, a major undertaking in educating the public about the culture and people of Iraq, such that we could responsibly interpret what's going on there? Or, to the point, a responsible history and analysis of sexism and progress in the US and, hey I know, it's crazy to even ask for it -- other countries (many of whom have already had female heads of state and so maybe could shed some light on... oh, never mind).

I'm not saying such an undertaking was ever likely to be in the offing in the US MSM; I'm just saying, people like Bazelon are smart enough to know it should be, yet so rarely use their pulpits to even CALL for such an undertaking; and if they do call for it, they would certainly do it in the best spirit of the Slate political gabfest and call for someone ELSE to do it...

Uggghhh, I'm spent.

(*I'm not sure if I'd count, say, Alan Keyes. He's horrible, but he's obviously intelligent -- just IN-SANE. So I guess I don't have a ready straight parallel to Palin in mind... though is that because I can't think of any, because there are more black "embarassments" in entertainment than politics, and/or because there aren't ENOUGH blacks in US politics to have much of a diversity of them...? Oh, actually, there was William Jefferson...)

US' falls further behind in Gender Equality

Hello, faithful readers, and people who googled this page by mistake.

So, there are numerous ways one could imagine in which the US falls further behind in gender equality. In this case, it's in our running series, "Countries that already have had elected female heads of state." This includes places from Ireland to Liberia to Pakistan to the UK to Jamaica. It does not, sadly, include us, the US.

Today, India has joined the august body of people with female heads of state before the so-called leaders of the free world. (That's us again.)

That still doesn't mean I'm for Hillary Clinton. J-Friend APVS recently pointed out that, despite not having terribly strong identification with Hillary politically, she thought that having a woman as prez of the US (or a black man, an equality concern for a different day) behind the podium every day for 4 or 8 years, standing, sitting, signing there as the so-called leader of the blahdyblah blah would be an extremely potent visual. (I took some liberties with APVS's exact phrasing).

We here at the Continuum agree, but strongly disagreeing with Hillary on matters of policy (or, more precisely, not trusting her to do the few liberal things she's mentioned and trusting the loopholes she's left herself in the rest will get well-used) we're not ready to vote for her. On Iraq, we find her very disappointing, and on everything else, mediocre at best. We -- er, I, sorry for the affectation -- don't trust Obama, for his part, because his resolve hasn't been significantly tested, and I'm still very very disappointed/frightened by his noises during his Senate campaign about rethinking the wisdom of legalizing gay marriage and the possibility of attacking Iran. It's not just that he said these things that I disagree with, but that he said them in a race he almost couldn't possibly lose. NO ONE likes Alan Keyes. Illinois voters seemed more likely to ask Dick "Dick" Cheney out for a drink than Alan "I hate Carpetbaggers like Hillary Clinton" Keyes "Carpetbagger for Senate '04." The man was not popular, and not just because his voice sounds like Jon Stewart doing an impersonation of the doctor guy from the Simpsons after having had his nose broken. If you can't stand up for liberal positions when your insane-oh "my gay child is going to hell, ha ha" conservative opponent is so thoroughly disliked by everyone and has no chance of winning ("Hmm, we can choose a black man or a black man brought in by the Republicans for the sole reason that he's a black man to compete with the other black man"), then I have nooooo faith that you'll make the hard, correct progressive calls I'm looking for when your gonads are really on the line.

So. Yes. India: Woman President. First one. Beat us, by at least a year and a half if not more. (They did already have precisely one woman prime minister -- they're one of those countries with both a PM and a prez -- which is good and all, though Indira Gandhi was not, from all accounts, a nice person -- in the forced sterilization, authoritarian head of state meaning of the phrase "not a nice person".)

Pakistan beats us at the democracy game

What? No, not now, silly people. Before.

That is, they "beat" us in a very specific category of democracy, though particularly in this case, it was admittedly a somewhat symbolic blow for democracy. The specific, powerful but seemingly more symbolic than substantial event was the 1988 election of Benazir Bhutto.

This is not a recent event, true, but Ms. Bhutto has been on NPR frequently in recent days, speaking of Pakistani politics and Our Favorite US-Backed Military Dictator, Pervez Musharraf. (Ok, I'm lying, he's not our favorite dictator -- we have so many favorites, who can choose?)

The pertinence of this to the J Continuum is its commentary on our ongoing series, countries that already have had elected female heads of state. Sure, the usual suspects have already done it -- Ireland, the UK, Canada with their knees-bent-running-about-enlightenment, but so have, too, some less usual suspects -- for example, Jamaica, Liberia, and Chile. (I'm no doubt missing bunches, so feel free to enlighten me.) It also plays into the J Continuum's semi-ongoing series, Reasons Portraying Islam as a Backwards Religion and Culture is Annoying Bullshit (so called for the first time here). One entry linked to Muslims condemning the violence of their co-religionists*, as is so often asked of them, then ignored, though I think the responsibility of Muslims to deal with their most radical elements worldwide is often somewhat rather overplayed. (In large part because it seems far from clear that the shared belief in Islam is the most important factor in understanding Islamic extremists. Brief argument: Any variable where 99% of the sample -- all other of the billion or so Muslims in the world -- is an exception is a stupid explanatory variable. That is, since 99%+ Muslims are not violent radicals, Islam is a poor variable to explain extremism, which is what is done when people allege Islam is inherently backwards or violent. That's not to say it's irrelevant -- it's just waaaaay overplayed imho.)

BE THAT AS IT MAY (boy did I go on a rip there), here we have a Muslim country, Pakistan, that elected a female head of state, in 1988. There are some caveats -- it was parliamentary elections, so she wasn't elected directly (though it doesn't seem like the country came to a stop with protests against her or anything); her record as PM implies (at least from Wikipedia it does) that she didn't do much to advance women's causes, she may have run a corrupt government, and that she aided the rising Taliban in Afghanistan, despite the fact that they did believe she should, as a woman, most certainly NOT be head of state. So this is somewhat like what Brazilians seem to have found to be my astounding ambivalence about prominent African-American officials like Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell. Yay that there's enough equality achieved that they're there (in high appointed offices in those last cases), but it's not as if those three represented the political interests or ideas of the vast majority of other African-Americans. And in any event, for now, the US still has never had a female head of state, and that's just goddamned shameful.

Anyway, I digress, and we may have either our first black or first woman president along here shortly, which would be a breath of fresh air -- though I still have my doubts on Obama, and Hillary... yeah, my vote is not so much. A story for another day, though.




*Sadly, both the links in this post are broken... =[