Posts tagged Sexism

We have existing laws — Title VII, um, Lilly Ledbetter, all those existing protections in place — that, I believe, enforce and provide that people doing equal jobs are, certainly in this country, should receive equal pay. So, uh, that bill, in my view, didn’t add — in fact I think it created a lot of additional burdens that would have been hard, um, to make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs… . The reason that I voted against that specific bill is that, I looked at it, and there were already existing laws that need to be enforced and can be enforced and I didn’t feel like adding that layer was going to help us better get at the equal pay issue.

Morning Joe” is the world’s most self-satisfied television program. It is a place where Harold Ford Jr. is treated as a person whose insights and opinions are worthy of being taken seriously. It’s a show with so little respect for its viewers that Mark Halperin is asked on to explain politics every day.

“Morning Joe” is very sure that it is fun and outrageous, instead of depressing. They joke, or “joke,” about how they are all drinking alcohol at work, on TV! They banter! Sometimes someone swears!

Scarborough’s wacky morning show cocktail party — are they or aren’t they spiking their coffee, is a question they are all really hoping anyone is asking — isn’t just an endless parade of conventional wisdom-spouting morons feebly discussing the day’s political news. It’s also cable TV’s most reliably sexist program, with Scarborough finding it endlessly amusing to interrupt and belittle his supposed co-host, Mika Brzezinski. As most successful sexists do, Scarborough dismisses criticisms of his constant unambiguously sexist remarks by saying that they’re just a joke that you’re too p.c. to get, like in this “hilarious” promo, in which Brzezinski is very professional, and Joe and the other guy do cool, edgy guy stuff like get drunk and do drugs and stuff. (Joe Scarborough is such a cool guy, guys. He enjoys drinking alcohol! He even played in a band once.)

The joke is less funny when you learn that Brzezinski was making 14 times less than Scarborough, until she learned of the disparity and nearly left the channel over it. Now she makes half what he makes. (Which is maybe a reflection of the fact that she seems to get roughly half as much time to talk as Scarborough does on your average edition of “Morning Joe.”)

But fratty misogyny is only one of “Morning Joe’s” recurring gags. There’s also Joe’s titanic self-regard, best exemplified by his apparent belief that he and Michael Bloomberg would have made a successful presidential ticket. Scarborough, a moderate conservative television personality, still believes himself to be a Real Man Of The People sort of guy. But the ideology of “Morning Joe” is the ideology of the elite center, a group of people who hold opinions that are deeply unpopular on both ends of the political spectrum and who have convinced themselves that they represent a secret majority of Americans. (Or at least “Real” or “Regular” Americans.) Hence, Harold Ford. These are people who believe not only that cutting the most popular government program in the nation is a “moderate” and sensible idea, but that there is a popular “mandate” for said cut, because millions of voters selected one candidate who promised not to cut Medicare benefits over another candidate who supported cutting Medicare but also scored political points by accusing his opponent of already having cut Medicare benefits.

It’s like the judge telling the woman who got raped, ‘You asked for it because of the way you dressed.’ OK? That’s the same thing. ‘Well America, you should be the ones to apologize, you should have known this would happen, you should have done — what I don’t know — but it’s your fault that it happened.’ You know, for a member of our State Department to put out a statement like that, it had to be cleared by somebody. They don’t just do that in the spur of the moment.

Delightful as Dratch is in interviews and in her book, there is something uncomfortable about this framing. If we accept the premise, that Dratch hasn’t cracked Hollywood because she isn’t good-looking enough, then there would seem to be a feminist obligation to support her, to buy all her DVDs, go to her movies on opening night, protest the studio heads who reject her. Indeed, on Jezebel last week, Dodai Stewart was outraged on Dratch’s behalf: In a post titled “Hollywood Thinks Rachel Dratch Is a Troll (But if She Were a Dude, She’d Have Her Own Show),” Stewart demanded, “where is Rachel Dratch’s Garry Shandling/Larry David-esque TV show?