No girls allowed
by digby
I just don’t even know what to say to this:
Kay Hagan just wanted to swim. It was late 2008, and the Democrat was newly arrived on Capitol Hill as North Carolina’s junior senator-elect. But Hagan was told that the Senate pool was males-only. Why? Because some of the male senators liked to swim naked.
It took an intervention by Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Rules Committee, to put a stop to the practice, but even then “it was a fight,” remembers pollster Celinda Lake, who heard about the incident when the pool revolt was the talk among Washington women.
[…]
In the entire history of the United States Senate, a mere 44 women have served. Ever. Those few who have were elected to a club they were never meant to join, and their history in the chamber is marked by sexism both spectacular and small. For decades in the 20th century after women first joined, many male senators were hardly more than corrupt frat boys with floor privileges, reeking of alcohol and making little secret of their sexual dalliances with constituents, employees and any other hapless subordinate female they could grab. But perhaps more striking is what I found after interviewing dozens of women senators, former senators and their aides over the past several months: Even today, the women of the Senate are confronted with a kind of floating, often subtle, but corrosive sexism, a sense of not belonging that is both pervasive and so counter to the narrative of real, if stubbornly slow, progress that many are reluctant to acknowledge this persistent secret.
That article in Politico is a must-read for anyone who thinks that all of us beyotches are just whining all the time. Note the date that this swimming pool incident happened. It wasn’t 1938. It wasn’t 1968. It was 2008.
Those elite Senators are fairly typical of men at the top of the heap. They can’t imagine having to give up even the slightest privilege — like not being required to wear a bathing suit in a communal pool. Indeed, the more likely explanation is that they just didn’t want to share the pool with a woman at all and used that as an excuse. In either case, they behaved like pigs when confronted with losing even the slightest bit of their superior privilege over women.
Once again I’m compelled to point out just how infuriating it is to hear such men complain about women or minorities wanting “too much.” It’s one thing for average guys to be unaware of the sort of authority they have (and women don’t have) in normal human interactions. Often women aren’t exactly sure exactly what that is either even though they feel it. But when elite males with these attitudes pat themselves on the back for being the avatars of freedom, equality and democracy in action it just galls.
We are half the population and yet only 44 women have ever served in the US Senate over the course of more than two centuries. No woman has ever been nominated by one of the major political parties to be president. What do you suppose girls think when they hear that?
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