As promised in the previous post, here are the reasons why I think the firestorm over Romney's "binders full of women" remark is an example of people having way too much fun calling "misogyny!" as an excuse to pursue a group hatefest rather than of actual misogyny:
(disclaimer: I got an absentee ballot and have already voted for Obama. I dislike Mitt Romney, just not for this specific reason.)
1. It was offensive for Romney to use the phrase "binders full of women".
I can't Google "binders full of women" or even "binders full of people" directly because it's all references to Romney.
But "folders full of people" gets 9 Google hits of people using it in totally reasonable contexts, like "I had a few file folders full of people who signed up to help this year". One Outlook user says "Up until now i have grouped them in folders of up to 100 people and now have 22 folders full of people."
"Lists full of people" gives 9040 results, including wait lists full of people, email lists full of people, and targeted leads lists full of people.
"Files full of people" gives 5510 results, including "files full of people who are glad they bought travel insurance", "files full of people whose save lists were corrupted", and "files full of people affected by the problem".
Even more specific forms get results, for example a police station that has "files full of suspects", and four different marketing groups that have "files full of customers" plus three that have "folders full" of them.
Ignoring the "full", "folders of customers" has 3560 results; "folders of men" has 220, "folders of people" has a whopping 13300 (and yes, I checked the first few pages, most of them are folders containing people, not folders belonging to people.)
But of course as soon as Mitt Romney says it, it's because he thinks women are inhuman objects who are worthy of being stored in binders. Or something. I want to be charitable, but the only person who explained their objection to the phrase used the phrasing in the last sentence. So I don't know.
If you're on the phone with a sales representative, and she offers you a catalog of her store's products, and you say "You ignorant piece of crap! It's not a catalog of the store's products! It's a catalog containing information about the store's products! You're such a worthless idiot!" then congratulations, you can self-consistently get upset with Romney for using the same synecdoche. If you would be utterly appalled by the thought of acting that way to the sales representative, but you posted something snarky on your Facebook about how Romney was a misogynist, you have deeper problems.
2. It wasn't the binder comment itself, it was the subsequent "tokenism" in specifically seeking out binders of women.
Assume you have some job openings, and the overwhelming majority of applicants are male.
You have two choices. You can either hire a proportionate amount of both male and female applicants, in which case the overwhelming majority of hires will be male. Or you can make a point of hiring a disproportionate number of female applicants so as to be 50% female (or as close to that goal as possible).
So far no one has said they doubt Romney's claims that most of the qualified applicants for his positions were male, and certainly enough thousands of other people have complained about the same problem that it is hard to dismiss it as a misogynist fabrication. And in fact, if feminism is correct about educational bias, commercial bias, and the glass ceiling, it's totally expected that a disproportionate number of people who reach such a high level that they are good candidates for state cabinet posts will be male.
So Romney's three choices are to settle for a hugely-disproportionately-male cabinet, to disproportionately go out in search of female applicants and be "tokenist", or to research a way to suspend the Law of the Excluded Middle.
There are arguments for both of the first two options, but it seems much less misogynist and more in keeping with a genuine desire to work for equity of women in the workplace to go the "tokenist" route of actively trying to recruit them.
Or to put it a different way, if he'd said "I'm not going to be tokenist; my application pool is mostly male, so I'm hiring mostly men and having a practically-all-men state government", does anyone believe feminists would hate him less?
If someone only has two choices, and you're going to hate them no matter which of the two they take, you're not changing anyone's behavior. You just like hating people.
3. It wasn't the binders or the tokenism comment, it was the flexibility comment. Romney was misogynist to suggest women wanted more flexible working hours.
Women are more interested in work flexibility than men. The only study I could find on the issue asked people of both sexes to rate the importance of flexible working hours and found a statistically significant difference in favor of women considering it more important.
Research in the UK shows that 52% of women have jobs that allow flexible working hours as opposed to 25% of men, and that the discrepancy is even greater among parents of young children (61% of such women vs. 19% of such men.) Harvard Business School suggests working hour flexibility as a key to maintaining female workers.
When feminists themselves are pushing flexible working hours for women, other feminists applaud it as a properly feminist cause. Women Like Us is a "social business" that tries to help women get careers and is strongly committed to flexible working hours as a pro-women measure.
Womankind.org.uk says that "Flexible working is a feminist issue because it should be on offer – and encouraged - for dads and mums alike if we are to rebalance parenting responsibilities. But lets face it’s also a feminist issue because whilst women still tend to do the majority of household tasks and childcare, it is women’s paid economic opportunities that are limited without such flexible arrangements." Womenandwork.org says that "the way the US has structured work hurts the people who need flexibility — inordinately women"
In fact, screw it...just Google "women flexible working hours feminism". It will be page after page of feminist websites talking about how women want more flexible working hours and how important flexibility is in getting women in the workplace and how it's a very important feminist issue.
So basically, feminists themselves generally believe flexible working hours are disproportionately important to women, and business schools and feminist organizations both agree that increasing the availability of flexible working hours is an important way to get more women in the workplace.
And Obama himself alluded to this in his response to Romney, when he said his administration would raise the number of women in the workplace by helping them with childcare. If you're going to claim Romney is saying women need to go home early to make dinner because that's all they're good for, at least stay consistent and attack Obama for saying women need to take care of children because that's all they're good for.
But no. The feminists are fine, Obama's fine, but when Romney says the exact same thing, he's a misogynist!
There is a completely separate and more interesting debate about whether it's bad that women want more flexible working hours; for example, do they only need more time because society forces them to bear a disproportionate amount of the effort of taking care of children? This may be the case, but it's not Mitt Romney's fault and he did not endorse it. He just said that given that women currently want more flexible working hours, he could increase the number of women in the workplace by giving them what they want. Attacking Romney for this is shooting the messenger.
4. It wasn't the binders, it wasn't the tokenism, it wasn't the flexible working hours, it was that he gave a bizarre, rambling, and inept response to the question.
There is a long tradition of candidates giving answers to completely different questions than the ones that were asked during town hall debates. Romney didn't seem any worse than anyone else.
The question was about pay equity for women. Romney first talked about his efforts trying to get women into high-paying positions in Massachussetts. Then he talked about how he wanted to get flexible working hours that would increase the number of women in the work force. Overall I give him a C+ for staying on topic, which isn't bad for this sort of thing.
Then Obama was asked to answer Romney, and he started talking about how he would give away free contraception. This relates to the question only in that pay equity for women and contraception for women both relate to women, who are 50% of the human race. Talking about the same half of the human race as the questioner did is still not bad for a town hall debate, so I give Obama a C-.
The fact that some people are capable of seeing misogyny in anything including tea leaves, weather patterns, and A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, does not mean Romney is a terrible person for saying something that some very motivated reasoners misinterpreted as misogynous, any more than the fact that Al Gore once said something which very silly people interpreted as a claim to have invented the Internet means Al Gore is a terrible person who should never be president.
This is the pattern I condemned as "I can hate anyone for any reason, and I am always right and it is always their fault. Either it is their fault directly, because my reasons are correct. Or it is their fault that I misinterpreted them as deserving hatred. In any case, I will hate whoever I want and I can never be wrong to do so."
5. It wasn't the binders, the tokenism, the flexible working hours, or his response. But men really do oppress women in many ways, and if a silly comment from Romney raises awareness of it, then that can't help but be a good thing.
"Okay, so when I beat up my Muslim neighbor while screaming ethnic slurs at him, I admit that he may not, upon closer investigation, actually have been a terrorist himself. But there are definitely actual terrorists, and the ensuing media circus helped raise awareness of the problem of terrorism, so in the end it all kind of worked out. Pity about the ruptured spleen, though."
6. It wasn't the binders, the tokenism, the flexible working hours, his reponse, or the awareness. It was that it turned out he exaggerated his own role. He didn't ask for the binders full of women himself. Women's groups created the binders and then suggested to Romney that he use them, and he merely took the suggestion.
Oh, so he exaggerated his role in the story. And that's why you called him a misogynist. Oh, okay. That makes total sense.
While I am clearly avoiding the meat of the matter and picking on the details, "this relates to the question only in that pay equity for women and contraception for women both relate to women, who are 50% of the human race" feels a bit disingenuous. Better reproductive rights and easy access to contraception is related to closing the pay gap in quite a similar way to how better flexible working is related to closing the pay gap. Unplanned pregnancies affect the mother's career options disproportionately more than the father's, typically.
Defend binders all you want: Mitt still didn't answer the question worth a shit, is a habitual liar, a plutocrat, hates half of America, and is a hollier-than-thou smug Cayman-loving Jesus-jumper-wearing insincere ignorant arrogant shit-stain on the body politic.
"Tokenism" has two meanings. The first is "You want to look like equality matters to you, so you hire some random women and proceed to either ignore them or only ask them about women's issues, where you expect them to agree with all women". The second is "You look for women who are genuinely qualified, for example by asking a specialized group for a long list of competent women, and combine that with your applicant pool, and also I dislike you and wish to call you a mean name".
There's also "It wasn't any of this, what he said is perfectly fine. But he ended up reducing the total fraction of female staff. Therefore, he doesn't actually care about women, he's just using them to look good. This makes him a misogynist". (In the sense that people who're neutral on feminism are misogynists, anyway.) But people don't seem to be claiming that.
Somewhat off topic, but could anyone recommend any politics forum wherein more than a single person regularly spends time logically analyzing issues without regard to whose "team" is helped by the analysis? I skim enough conservative writers that I do usually see things like irrational attacks against Republicans dissected, likewise for liberals and Democrats, but now you have me daring to imagine that there might be places where people talk about politics without writing stupidly biased things to begin with.
I've seen attempts but they didn't last. Even an iconoclast is going to identify the "right" position on various issues and side with the politician who's closest to the correct stance on the most important issue. Which will be seen by someone with a different opinion as pure partisan positioning . . . and we're off to the flame wars.
Gresham's Law of Debating: Bad political arguments drive out good political arguments.
I think the thing is that: Romney has been historically, uh, not the biggest fighter for women's rights, and in a bid to reach out to the right wing extremists of the Republican party, has said and done some shit that is pretty backwards and (OH NOES!!!) misogynist. It's not the binders comment in and of itself that's what's getting people upset, it's the mindset behind it. Arguably not even just Romney's mindset, but the blanket mindset of the entire Republican party in recent memory, what trying to de-fund planned parenthood, holding panels on women's health with a negligible amount of women, comments about "legitimate rape," etc. The binders comment just lends itself to the kind of bizarre imagery that is perfect meme fodder.
But presumably you understand all that, which makes your analysis of the comment come across as rather disingenuous.
Yeah, the point of "binders full of women" isn't that he's suddenly outed himself as misogynist. Quite honestly, we already knew beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy's policies would be misogynist and bad for women. But, here, we have a catchy, obviously dodgy gaffe that can be used as a pointer towards the facts that's pithy enough to get media attention. So, sure, let's make use of that.
Something about the way you have phrased the last two posts has crystallized for me exactly what bothers me so much in the way you deal with these gender issues.
You have described this as a group hatefest, with everyone gathering around Romney in a circle and laughing at him, and that is not how I see it at all. To me, this is more equivalent to something out of West Side Story, where the Sharks and the Jets have gathered on the street. The leader of the Jets has just said something, and all the Sharks start mocking him, calling him names, riling up their side. The Jets are all on their side, waiting to do the same thing, and it's all leading up to a big fight.
There are any number of unhealthy things about this dynamic, and I do think the Culture War is bad for this country, but you never address those issues. Instead, every time, you end up trying to defend one of the Jets from the Sharks. All of your benefit of the doubt, your sympathy, goes in one direction. You consistently see all the support the Sharks have, and figure you don't have to help them, but miss all the support for the Jets.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but I think it does express the aggravating dynamic I have noticed again and again when you deal with gender issues. Maybe it's because you spend a lot of time around liberals, and on liberal sites? Maybe it's because you've personally experienced antagonism from one side and not the other, or the complaints of one side resonate with you more from personal experience? I'm not sure, but it's very frustrating watching this from the outside.
As an added note, I completely agree with you about how stupid the whole 'binders full of women' blow-up has been. It may have been awkwardly phrased, and his other behavior may have undercut it, but it was nevertheless a good, admirable action on his part, and punishing him for it is not just wrong, but actively counter-productive.
It just annoys the ever-living daylights out of me that you decided to make it yet another case of 'what's wrong with modern feminism,' and a misguided case at that.
It feels like you are not considering any context here. Perhaps you are not acquainted with that context.
The line about binders was itself a silly, funny gaffe. On its own there is nothing but a chuckle at awkwardness.
However.
The implication of his story (that he had deliberately sought out more women for his cabinet) is at odds with the story told by others there at the time (that he had been given this list, and then only used it halfheartedly, putting women in charge of departments he then reduced or eliminated). The comment is thus legitimate shorthand for Romney's tendency toward being awkwardly disingenuous. This is a lesser point but not one I see you addressing.
However, more significantly, Romney is the standardbearer of the Republican Party. "Women in binders" is not the first time Romney, or the party he represents, has made a statement on the civil, social, economic, or physical rights of women. The positions of his party on the rights of women are, in fact, odious. "Women in binders" provides a new and legitimate shorthand expression for the unacceptability of the positions he shares or, at a minimum, refuses to disavow.
These interpretations - these justifications for the viral nature of the comment - would seem to be inconveniently counter to the thrust of your article, whose thesis seems to be that there is no such justification. And it would seem that the principle of charity requires that you consider interpretations that happen to be inconvenient for the preset thesis you wish to present.
And in turn the principle of charity means that I should not make that assumption, but instead assume that you have not been provided these interpretations, rather than assuming that you are deliberately skewing the arguments in order to deceptively strengthen your point.
I can't help but think that this was the wrong quote to use to emphasize the Republican Party's existing problems with women's rights. It's too easy to counter with the fact that he actually was trying to hire more women (pushed to it by politics or not, undermined by future actions or not, those are the sort of qualifications easily pushed aside in political debate).
I think there was a real missed opportunity in that you have the Republican nominee up there actually affirming that affirmative action is a good thing to do, something his party is entirely against. Even politically, I think you could make plenty of hay with this angle of attack.
"Women in binders" is not the first time Romney, or the party he represents, has made a statement on the civil, social, economic, or physical rights of women. The positions of his party on the rights of women are, in fact, odious. "Women in binders" provides a new and legitimate shorthand expression for the unacceptability of the positions he shares or, at a minimum, refuses to disavow.
Isn't this kind of like my point 5? Doesn't it also mean that if we dislike a group of people, then anything those people do, even if innocuous, actually becomes a justification to dislike them further?
(I also think calling it a "gaffe" is kinda similar to my point 4)
1. There is no application process for cabinet positions. You know someone who knows someone, or you're so amazing they approach you.
2. So his team (who he appointed and thus reflect his values, albeit imperfectly) didn't see any women worth approaching and don't overlap with the circles of women who would be interested.
3. This is especially glaring given the phrase "binders full" implies there were a lot of appropriate candidates.
4. Which is why it bugged me so much that his tone implied that having so many women available was a testament to how awesome he was, not how terrible his team was for not finding them on their own.
5. The repeated use of "qualified" bugged me. It sounded like he was finding women who were good enough for the sole purpose of hiring women, not that any of the women were the best for the job (where best might include "brings a unique perspective on account of gender", but doesn't mean "we needed a woman so they'll stop yelling at us").
6. Moving himself from acted-upon to actor wasn't an exaggeration, it was a lie. Politicians lie all the time, but I criticize them for it too.
"Misogynist" still strikes me as too strong, but "buys into a prevalent, rarely examined mind set in which women are subtly pushed away from power through a combination of the human tendency to like people like themselves, social pressure that imposes unequal family obligations, and slight devaluation of their accomplishments, cumulatively leading to a serious gender gap in positions of power" is already too long for twitter
"I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men. And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?"
I have anecdotally heard from other people that this phenomenon where sometimes it's almost entirely men applying for these sorts of positions is a real problem. Although I guess Romney could be lying about this too, in this case I have no particular evidence that he is. If his story is true, that seems to negate criticisms 1-3.
I guess one of the reasons I am slightly sympathetic to Romney regarding point 2 is that I imagine what would happen if I were elected governor some day. I think I have enough very smart female friends and connections and networking-y people to appoint a pretty gender-balanced cabinet if I wanted to.
On the other hand, if I get a pile full of white people resumes, and someone tells me I need five Hispanic people, I will be totally lost - I can think of one, but for the other four I'd have to send for the binders full of Hispanics. This isn't because I've spent my life deliberately avoiding politically savvy Hispanic people or anything, it's just because factors that are not directly my fault have sorted society in a way that I would have to go specifically looking for Hispanic businessman friends and I have not done this. If we call Romney misogynist (or your longer version) for not having made enough female connections, it seems about equally fair to call me racist for not having yet befriended enough Hispanics. But I think most white people would be in that latter group. And although (arguably) we should be told to take more initiative about it, I don't think it means we deserve to be the subject of snarky Internet memes mocking our failure.
Granted, there are three times as many women as there are Hispanics, so I would say Romney is three times worse than I am, but then Romney's also a whole lot richer than I am so the filtering mechanisms at his level might be a whole lot more intense than at mine.
Also, I kind of notice that everyone who is angry about Romney with this has a different reason, yet everyone agrees in being angry. I find this suspicious.
It has been already noted that the anecdote he told was--with regards to his role in it--falsified. A group of women brought him these binders of resumes (which is, as you know, an entirely different image than a binder with a whole person stuffed inside) and made him sign a campaign pledge to diversify his cabinet. (source)
Romney did indeed fill a lot of these open seats with women, and good for him. But David Bernstein, who originally broke above story (see same source above), checked with the non-profit Massachusetts Government Appointments Project and found that the governor shunted these "highly qualified" women off to seats he didn’t think were essential. In addition, while the number of women appointed did rise from 30 percent to 42 percent during Romney’s governance between 2002 and 2004, just two years later, women "made up just 25 of Romney’s 64 new appointments, lower than he was elected."
Jobs are all about who you know, and Romney—and his original political team!—knew little to no women, even though they spent decades managing a major business in the private sector. He had to be forced to use a "binder full", and then he lied about it on a national stage.
Scott, I’m sure you know all of this already. Combined with other things standard to the Republican Party, like cutting funding to Planned Parenthood, I think my—and many other peoples’—reaction to his weighted soundbyte is more than a bit justified.
