What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (59 page)

So that’s the kind of change, toward a much more humane politics—tactics and strategies that are less ejaculatory politics, as I call it, less confrontative, less militaristic—the kind of thing I refer to in the diplomacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the human touch. How do we get rice in a bowl to this person now, as opposed to macropolitics, which only sees the big picture? I’m for seeing both, and both is not just one. So there’s a very real difference.

Now, why that difference is, people can disagree about until the sun goes down. I think it’s a combination. I don’t think it’s either/or. I don’t think it’s bifurcated. I think it’s a both-and. I think it’s a combination of biology and socialization. Socialization, we know, raises women to take care of and be caregivers and, if anything, be afraid of power. They’re afraid of power the way it’s been defined by men: power
over
. When you reposition it as power
to
, they’re not afraid of power anymore. And, biologically, the more that we now begin to get emerging evidence of value-free tests and value-free science, we learn things like the fight-or-flight defense that we thought was characteristic of all humans in a crisis situation (adrenaline fuels fight or flight), well, everybody experiences it to some degree, but, interestingly enough, where it is most pronounced is in men. What women have in crisis situations, at the same time as the release of adrenaline, is a release of oxytocin, which is the caregiving, bonding, empathetic chemical, which does not release at the same time in men. This
was a University of California study that first evinced it and named it the “tend and befriend” reaction. So in men you get fight or flight. In women you get tend and befriend. That’s a
huge
, humungous difference. And these are science based; these are not crazy feminist fantasies.

So I think there is both a biological reason and, certainly, a socialized reason why women govern differently from men. You can look at history as well. You look at Elizabeth Tudor of England, the longest period of peace and prosperity and the Golden Age of literature and music that the country had. I’m not saying that there haven’t been monarchs and women in power, like Lucrezia Borgia, who had not been batty, but by and large, on the average, it’s a different and better tone of power and the exercise of power. So that’s why we say that a woman president would make a difference, depending, obviously, on the woman president. Libby Dole ran for president, and I had nightmares that she might move further along in the race. As it turned out, even she, with all the conservative credentials and backing in the world, couldn’t raise the money, a woman. So it depends on the woman, obviously, and that’s one reason why Clinton would be so amazing, because she already has a standing, unabashed commitment to the betterment of women, the empowering of women.

MS
: I think there’s a growing awareness in the world, and even men are starting to realize, just in general, that this would be to the benefit of all of humanity. It’s just a balance; it’s not about being antimale.

RM
: It never was antimale; I mean, that was a myth. But it was antimale having his foot on my neck. It’s a little ridiculous when you’ve got a truck on your neck and you say, “Please, somebody, get the truck off my neck,” and people ran around and said, “Oh, she’s antitruck.”

MS
: [
laughs]
That’s a very good analogy.

RM
: So it never was to begin with. And I think that you’re right. I think there is a change. Once the young women students began marching in New Delhi after the hideous rape-murder, they were then joined by male students, and then they were joined by people who weren’t students, and then it spread to other cities and became a national demonstration. So that’s a good sign. Men have never demonstrated for any women’s rights in India or in most other places. Now, that said—and it is true men’s consciousness is changing; God knows we’ve put blood, sweat, and tears for forty-five years into getting it to change [
laughs]
. It’s like, “Come on, Herman,” and Herman is changing—I do not want us to relax our vigilance, because that change, as all change does, starts superficially.

It’s about self-interest. For example, most of the men who were marching in India were marching because it was a demonstration against police corruption and ineptitude. And they had their own reasons for being angry at the police, as many or more motivations for marching as [they had for] caring about what had happened to that woman and what happens to Indian women all the time in terms of assault and harassment, et cetera. So some men who were in fact harassers were marching, but that didn’t mean that they got it, if you know what I mean. And I think you see that a lot. I don’t want us to, in our eagerness for men to finally put an oar in and row their share, become openly grateful, which is a woman’s tendency. There’s no reason to be grateful to people who are doing what they should have already been doing all along. As a white person who’s privileged in a white, racist society, I don’t expect African American friends or acquaintances or strangers to be grateful that I’m trying to fight racism. That’s what I should have been doing all along. Hello! It’s that kind of thing where a man picks up a plate and actually washes and dries it and everybody falls over sideways and says, “Look, look, oh my God, he’s a new man!” This is the twenty-first century. So he’s got a long way to go. I think, in other words, measured celebration is in order, and continued
vigilance. This is a case where—and I rarely do quote Ronald Reagan, you can imagine—this is “trust, but verify.”

MS
: I remember talking with Eve Ensler about two years ago. I was feeling very hopeful about the rising rights of women and the feminine in the world, and she was saying yes, but with that comes a backlash. And as we’re seeing a rising in violence and even some of the very retroactive things that went on during the election around reproductive rights and such misinformed statements around rape, it’s just interesting to see if there’s a correlation. It seems like these things are happening simultaneously in some ways.

RM
: They are. Well, first of all, everything is sped up because information travels so much faster. This is hardly the first backlash, you know. We’ve had backlash on an average of every two years since the late 1960s. Backlash comes with the territory. It’s expectable at this particular point. Look, it’s the same thing with “terrorism.” This is not a clash between civilizations. This is a clash between modernists and traditionalists. And the modern—which has good things like penicillin and literacy and mass communications and education—also, as it moves through the world, brings with it, or masks itself sometimes in, corporate control, in lack of respect for local people, in hegemony, in neocolonialism. The traditional, on the other hand . . . the good news that it brings is a sense of self, a sense of
historic
self, a sense of community, but the bad news is that it can also mask itself in ignorance and fundamentalism and sort of “we’ve always done it this way, so we have to continue doing it this way” authoritarian hierarchy. So there are pros and cons on both sides. But women, and the perception of women, are absolutely crucial to both sides, because how women are dealt with in a modern context, or in a traditional context, matters. In a modern context, it’s pornography, stripping
off her
clothes.
In a traditional one, there’s the burka and the abaya, making her into a moving bolt of cloth. In neither of those extremes is she, in all senses of the word, clothing herself and appearing as herself. So these things really matter, and they take a long time to sort themselves out, because we’re not just talking about gaining power; we’re talking about redefining it.

MS
: I know change can be slow. I remember after this election, talking about my daughters again, there was a lot of excitement over the fact that it was history-making, those twenty female senators. And I remember my daughter Jazmin being like, “Twenty?” It’s progress, and yet we have to remind ourselves it’s still not parity. There have been so many strides for women in a lot of other areas—why do you think it’s been so slow in the political sphere, and what changes need to happen? We definitely have made the case that there
should
be more women, and yet how do we get there?

RM
: Well, I don’t think it’s slower in the political sphere. It’s my understanding that the 17 percent in leadership is kind of representative across the board. It’s on corporate boards, it’s in positions of CEOs and presidents of corporations, it’s in media. It wavers a bit up and down, but that’s basically where we’ve hit. It’s interesting to me that it’s the same level in so many different fields. In politics, it’s about power, and nowadays it’s about money. I’ve just been talking with friends in the film business . . . and they were saying that what it comes down to is always women directors. Women made strides in other areas, but not women directors of feature films. Women make strides in documentaries, but feature films, no. Why? Because they’re big budgets. The investors don’t trust a woman, and the director’s chair—there are more women producers, there are women film editors—but the director’s chair, what does it project? Authority. Command and control, again. And they don’t want to entrust [a movie
budget of however many million dollars] to a girl! The same thing is true in politics. Politics, unfortunately, more and more is about money and the raising of money.

Women have more trouble raising money, so that’s one place where we’ve got to do a whole lot of work and where women have got to put their checkbook where their mouth is. And women of earned or inherited wealth, who are coming more on board, and more in the way that the suffrage movement had, of finding their own feminism and then being able to turn their activism into funding support, it makes a huge difference.

We’ve also got to encourage women to run at the local levels and then be there for them. Eleanor Smeal always used to say, “What drives me crazy is that women will say, ‘Oh, I don’t think I’m qualified,’ and I would say, ‘Compared to what? Look at the men who are already in there. My God, a pink baboon would be qualified to run against them.’” And she’s absolutely right! Some of the men who are currently serving in Congress, or even the Senate, make your hair curl. And my hair is quite straight! So . . . we’ve bought the line that somehow we’re not qualified, as put up against some abstract standard, that the men don’t qualify by either, but they’re men, so it’s okay. It’s like the old days when they would say, “We can’t give you a job because a man should have that job; he’s the breadwinner,” and the woman would say, “Well, so am I!” and they’d say, “No, you’re not.”

So it’s hitting in on a number of fronts. It’s getting more women in the pipeline, in every area, toward power. That’s in the pipeline toward power in the corporate world and changing the ethics there. It’s toward getting women more power in politics, in the entertainment industry, you name it. [The pipeline is important] because we haven’t been able to get in the pipeline, so consequently, when they look around and say their classic “We can’t find any qualified women,” we know the women are out there, but they’re not in the pipeline. So the pipeline is important and getting
women to run is important, and then funding is really absolutely crucial. And being there for the women politicians, if they act in a principled manner. Being there for them in a way that is really loud and clear. Not forgetting once they win. For example, in that new crew of just-elected neophytes, there is the first open atheist, there is the first open lesbian, there is the first open Hindu—there are some amazing women there who are being very open about connecting the personal being political. So we need to be there for them as they take those stands into the policy realm. We need to get on their mailing lists. We need to tweet and email and call and fax and use whatever means of communication—carrier pigeon, if necessary—when they have bills up that we approve of. We need to become less apathetic and more involved in legislation, or else we’ll have legislation that will kill us.

MS
: We’re talking about the fact that a lot of women don’t think to run, or don’t see themselves as leaders, and I keep thinking that the role of the media is not only for women to see themselves as leaders, but for men to see women as leaders. You are the founder of the Women’s Media Center; what’s the connection, do you think, the role that media plays?

RM
: It’s huge. It’s huge. Women’s Media Center did a study, a project we call Name It, Change It. And we’ve gotten media apologies out of various commentators and anchors—Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz—for making fun of or dismissing or dissing women candidates. At one point, Chris Matthews said about Hillary when she ran for the Senate, “Let’s face it: the only reason she’s running is that her husband fooled around.” He wound up apologizing. So it’s a rapid-response system that we have built to point out just when this is happening, so that the sponsors are alerted, pressure is put [on them], and most of the hosts now are smart enough to immediately apologize and then gradually, in fact, to begin to change their
sense and to be more careful and to be more considerate, and then they come on board as converts.

But the study that the Women’s Media Center did was really startling, not to feminists but to many other people. We’ve been saying all along, “Look, this is not just a matter of name calling. This affects the [political] race,” and people have said, “No. Nonsense. Can’t you take a joke?” Well, we now have empirical proof that it affects the race, the outcomes of the race, on two fronts. One, if a sexist smear is made about a woman—well, she’s just a cow or a dog, or whatever, or she should be in the kitchen, blah, blah—that affects her money-raising abilities as a candidate. And it affects people—literally, there are people who will not vote for her because of that. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you’re honest, the way that we are with the rapid-response system Name It, Change It, and if we publicize the fact that this is sexist, this is unfair, this is untrue, et cetera, et cetera, whether or not the host apologizes, and even more so if the host does, people change. The people who were going to not vote for her then, because of the smear, turn around and come back on board.