Everyone's a Little Bit Sexist

Is the media sexist? That's the question a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters, are asking right about now, according to The New York Times.

I would ask a different one: What is the acceptable level of sexism in the media? Because no matter how we try to police it, the level is never going to be zero, nor -- depending on how you define "sexism" -- should it be. And, no matter how successful we are at eradicating it, some political correctness crusaders will always continue to spot sexism festering where it isn't.

The question of sexism in the press has much in common with the question of liberal bias. In both cases, the people asking it speak as though there's an entity called "the media" that behaves as a single organism. Of course, "the media" actually consists of individual reporters, editors, commentators, etc., each of whom has his (or her!) own collection of sympathies and biases, and most of whom strive in varying degrees to exclude those sympathies and biases from their work.

Are some of these individuals outright chauvinists? Naturally. I think Chris Matthews amply demonstrated over the past year that he's incapable of treating a woman as anything other than a woman (especially if she's "a knockout").

But there's a second, much larger group that's also getting tarred with the sexism brush: those who aren't chauvinists, by any reasonable interpretation of the word, but who sometimes discuss a woman in terms different from those they might use to describe a man. Take "shrill," a word whose frequent application to Hillary Clinton has been cited as proof that a woman can't speak her mind without getting labeled a harpy. In its rundown of sexist quotations, the Times quotes consultant John Neffinger as saying that Clinton sometimes sounds "a little bit shrill."

Now, I've met John Neffinger on a number of occasions. He struck me as the very opposite of a chauvinist. I'd be inclined, hearing those words coming out of his mouth, to think he was using "shrill" in its dictionary sense of "having or emitting a sharp or high-pitched tone"; insofar as he'd be more likely to apply it to a female candidate, it's only because women -- sorry! -- tend to have higher-pitched voices. A man can be just as strident as a woman without being as shrill.

Is this sexism? Is it unacceptable to use one set of descriptors and metaphors for men and a slightly different set of descriptors and metaphors for women? Maybe so, but it's the kind of sexism that we'll never eliminate altogether. Our language, and our brains, are wired for gender difference.

But they're also wired to perceive bias where none exists. Remember when Anna Quindlen insisted, preposterously, that it's only the women in politics who are labeled "calculating"? Former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman made a similarly unsupported claim in the Times last weekend when she said Clinton was "labeled weak" after she misted up on the campaign trail in New Hampshire (versus Mitt Romney, who was supposedly "described as compassionate"). Was she really? I've trawled Nexis in vain for an example of a mainstream journalist who said the show of emotion made her look weak; the overwhelming consensus, in fact, was that the episode had helped humanize a figure who had up until then seemed too forbiddingly composed. Could it be Whitman herself who thought Clinton seemed weak? Could it be that even women -- even feminists -- aren't 100 percent immune to the sexism bug?