The “Post-Sexist” White House

Feminism, Obama style.

There is quite an amazing story in the NY Times today about the sexist culture that surrounds the sexist president in the White House.  Except the real story, according to the Times,  is that they aren’t really sexist at all.  See, the problem isn’t that a certain kind of boy’s club atmosphere exists, it is that women are just too fucking stupid to get that these men are past sexism and that women shouldn’t get their panties in a twist when men act like men.  Just ask the women of the Obama administration, like Anita Dunn:

Ms. Dunn, who had to take a typing test three decades ago to work for a campaign, rejects the notion of a boys’ club. She calls the Obama administration “refreshingly un-self-conscious” about matters of equality, maybe to a point where they neglected the “optics” of the all-male basketball game.Ms. Dunn said that she recently hosted a baby shower for an administration official and that no men from the office were invited. She is comfortable with that — just as she is fine with never playing basketball with the president.

“That is just part of the culture here that I am excluded from,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

Because I got mine, bitches, and the rest of you can suck it. Maybe if you started acting like women, you’d get a little further ahead too.

But really, the point is that the boys have access to Obama and the women don’t.  What she says MIGHT make sense if Obama showed up to the baby shower, but I’m betting he didn’t.  Maybe Michelle sent a card.

I mean Jesus Christ, the women that they point to in order to prove the administration is giving a voice to women are the very ones who are enabling the boy on top status quo.  For fuck’s sake, they even bake cookies.

Women in important White House jobs tend to be less visible than their colleagues, even as the administration is trying to elevate their profiles. (In the same week as the basketball game, Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, hosted a group of women reporters for an off-the-record meeting with Ms. Jarrett over chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies.)

Well isn’t that lovely?  I hope someone brought the tupperware samples.  Kill two birds with one stone, ya know?

It may be easy for some of the high profile women to tolerate the antics of their male colleagues, but for the women working lower level staff positions, it must just be more of the same bullshit they’ve had to deal with their entire professional lives.  And some of them can’t hide their frustration even though they might want to.  Instead they just cloak themselves in anonymity.

“There is a sense that Obama has a certain jocular familiarity with the men that he doesn’t have with the women,” said Tracy Sefl, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign who speaks regularly to some female aides in the administration.

In interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised officials there described the culture with more of a collective eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort. One junior aide, who like the other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about appearing publicly critical, said that the “sports-fan thing at the White House” could become “annoying” and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating. And while this is not uncommon in any workplace, sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss.

No shit it can afford a point of entree with the boss.   But like I said, this is the same sort of crap women have to deal with all the time.  I would expect more from someone endorsed by NOW and declared the poster child for feminism by Ms. Magazine.  Instead it appears that the White House is a classic boys club workplace where women are excluded from the inner workings of the power structure and women in high positions go out of their way to excuse their bad behavior.  And they do it at the expense of the women who work for them.  But you can’t really blame those women in power for their behavior, they just know how the game is played.  They know the first rule of the boy’s club:  bros before hos.  It is the golden rule, and even the women on top know not to push back against it.  Just ask Hillary.

Maybe it is the fact that Obama and Co. are so blatantly sexist that this type of absurd denial  has to even be printed.  When we complained about Obama’s sexist antics in the election we were called racist liars.  But since women as a group are responsible for his election, they still have to tamp those fires now and then.  Now they’re basically just saying that if some women view the culture as dominated by testosterone, they just don’t get the “post misogyny” president. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t invited a single woman to play golf, or basketball.  Or that he didn’t want to get a “girlie dog”.   Obama, they argue, is so, so, sooooo not sexist that he doesn’t realize it when his actions are sexist and exclusionary.  He exists in a post-sexist world where everyone is so equal that for him sexism doesn’t even exist anymore.  If only women were enlightened enough to join him there!