By Patricia L. Sharpe
A few days ago I was in Silver City, New Mexico, where a friend was searching for affordable housing. Silver City’s heyday was the late 1800s, when the city was home to mining money. The ore-meisters built cupola-topped red brick mansions on the main drag, but mining, in it’s usual cyclical way, crashed. Then a flood came and washed away much of the center of the city. A surviving old house is now the wildly quaint city museum.
The next memorable era in Silver City was the hippie phase, which the museum does not recognize. Sixties-recalling murals, second hand shops and cafés dominate the historic city center today.
Now a third phase is underway. Real estate values are so depressed and/or reasonable that Silver City is becoming a retirement destination. So my friend decided to check it out.
That she did, for a day and a half, after which, last Wednesday morning, it was time to leave. Since our quaint B&B served the world’s most horrible breakfast, with swill as coffee, we stopped at a place called Java the Hut (Har! Har!) to fill our thermoses.
Java the Hut is also the place to go for a morning gab session. Three guys of the retiree variety were lounging on comfy couches taking about the primary in Pennsylvania. I hadn’t heard the late results, so I asked if any of them knew what the final vote was. The spread, one said, was nearly ten percent, with Clinton leading, which led one of his buddies to observe, “Twenty-five percent of Obama’s supporters would throw their weight to Clinton. Only 19 percent of her supporters would do the same. It’s racism,” he concluded.
I couldn’t resist. “If one is racism, the other is sexism. Why aren’t you denouncing that?”
The three of them laughed (Har! Har!). “A woman in the White House! Can’t risk it. Once a month, you know, women lose it.”
The curse of the curse! A monthly warpath! Was I really hearing this?
I muttered something about the 24/7 effects of testosterone on the current White House resident and his closest advisers, but I was so dumbfounded that didn’t think of the other perfect comeback. By the time any woman is ready to run for the presidency, menstruation is likely to be history.
But maybe my lapse was just as well. Sexist popular culture has nothing good to say for the business of being female during menopause either.
In short, if you’re a woman, young, middle-aged or old, you can’t win. And that’s what these guys were hoping, until Clinton grabbed the lead in Pennsylvania.
But sexist? Not them!
So if anyone’s still wondering why a lot of white men of the normally (covertly) racist variety are going to vote for Barak Obama, this little anecdote may shed a little light on the phenomenon.