Gender Wars Gone Wild

Sarah Palin's arrival has sent the sexism debate into a cuckooland where Pat Buchanan is defending her womanhood and Gloria Steinem is attacking her credentials.

According to Steinem, "Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with [Hillary] Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for--and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, 'Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs.'"

The courtly Buchanan, on the other hand, defended Palin in an on-camera attack on Chris Matthews. "What's your problem with strong women, buddy?" Buchanan asked. "The MS in MSNBC should not stand for misogyny."

In the real world, the Obama people are mobilizing to deal with it all by ignoring Palin's gender, raising questions about her inexperience and possibly stepping up Hillary Clinton's role in the campaign.

“Anyone who was inclined to support Hillary Clinton," says one of her former staff, "typically did so because of her focus on middle-class, bread-and-butter issues. Her message for Barack Obama on those issues could certainly help the Democratic ticket at the ballot box.”

Meanwhile, the new topsy-turvy gender politics will be making some strange bedfellows indeed.

Fifty-Fifty About 50

As Madonna turns 50 today, pop culture discovers a whole new decade to babble and bloviate about, following its #1 Seeker as she leaves what Gloria Steinem once called "a much-loved and familiar country."

Time is catching up with the Baby Boomers, the first of whom are eligible for early Social Security this year, and true to their natures, they will make aging a subject of endless self-examination and a project for self-improvement--skydiving, running in marathons and try to prove that "50 is the new 30."

My friends, as John McCain might say from the vantage of 70 and I would echo from beyond 80, the fact is that 50 is 50. Deal with it. It's neither a cause for celebration or despair, just another milestone in life's march through endless possibilities and problems. Savor all you can of the good and, in facing the losses, suck it up

If the tabloids are to be believed, in addition to her Kabbalah studies, Madonna has been busy breaking up not only her own marriage but that of baseball's $20-million-a-year man, Alex Rodriguez, who was eight years old when her first album came out. (Coincidentally or not, he's been slumping at the ball park ever since.)

If one can offer a bit of advice along with birthday greetings, best of luck with trying to have it all for as long as you can, but there's also something to be said for acting your age.

Clay Felker

The man was a sponge. Creating and editing New York Magazine, he soaked up the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s and gave it back to readers as a heady brew of New Journalism and cultural chic. Clay Felker, who died today at 82, was one of a kind.

Between jobs as a magazine editor, I wrote for him and witnessed the workings of his restless mind and insatiable curiosity. Visits to his office were a montage of people popping up at an open door with gossip, news and rumors and his prowls through the corridors, asking everyone who passed, "What's new? What's new?"

Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than covering news over which they have no control, they fill their pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw the attention of those who find the results to their taste. Felker's contemporary, Harold Hayes of Esquire, called it delivering an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.

Between them, they gave birth to the New Journalism, which mirrored a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. In New York, Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 ("When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?")

Almost single-handedly, Felker made journalism a subject of popular interest. Wolfe satirized the New Yorker, and everybody reported on the New York Times. Even I got into the act with a piece titled "The New York Times Discovers Sex" while writing about literary auctions ("What Am I Bid for Lyndon Johnson?"). Ralph Ginzburg going to jail for what he published ("The Punishment for Bad Taste Is Three Years") and the melodrama surrounding the death of the Saturday Review.

Writers became celebrities, and Felker nurtured their fame but stayed out of the spotlight himself. After he lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, he moved to California and tried to duplicate his success there, but LA was too shallow for his kind of in-depth reporting and he turned to teaching journalism.

I would see him for lunch out there every so often, and he was still asking, "What's new? What's new?"

Speaking About Sexism

Gloria Steinem thinks Barack Obama should make the same kind of speech about gender that he did about race and, according to the New York Times, he is considering it.

Not a great idea. That speech was prompted by the Jeremiah Wright uproar and would otherwise not have been made. To suggest that Obama should be as embarrassed about defeating Hillary Clinton as he was by his former pastor's rhetoric is a faulty equivalence.

He was forced to distance himself from Wright because of their past association, but there is a kind of "When did you stop beating your wife?" logic in asking Obama to prove he is not sexist when no fair-minded observer has accused him of such speech or behavior during the long primary contest with Clinton.

Obama can best make peace with Clinton supporters who feel cheated by appealing to them as citizens and Democrats rather than scorned women. Just as he does not "owe" them the choice of Hillary as a running mate, neither does he owe them an apology for being African-American and male.

Anything else would be the worst kind of condescension and sexism.

The Obama Mystique

Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California, whose husband is backing McCain, comes out for Obama.

Alma Rangel, the First Lady of Harlem, whose husband, Congressman Charlie Rangel is backing Hillary Clinton, comes out for Obama.

Susan Eisenhower, whose grandfather was a Republican legend, comes out for Obama.

Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, the Senator from Missouri, the Governor of Kansas... The list of prominent women who are choosing Obama over the potential first woman president keeps growing.

Last month, one of the icons of the Movement, Gloria Steinem, argued for the election of Hillary Clinton in a New York Times OpEd piece, asserting "the sex barrier (is) not taken as seriously as the racial one."

But her counterpart who started it all with "The Feminine Mystique," might not agree. If she were still alive, Betty Friedan would be out there for Obama.

In 1968, Friedan and I were working together for Eugene McCarthy to stop the war in Vietnam. She would not be likely to back Hillary Clinton, who voted to start the one in Iraq, over Barack Obama, who spoke out against starting it.

There are times when bloodshed trumps both gender and race.

Sexy Feminists

Now comes a scientific study to prove that feminists are hot.

“Contrary to popular opinion,” Science Daily reports, “feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships.” The study also refutes stereotypes that “stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing.”

As someone who worked at the dawn of the women’s movement with hundreds of feminists, I’m puzzled by the need half a century later to argue (the study is more polemic than science) that women who have strong feelings about their rights in society are not sexually impaired.

Betty Friedan, who started it all with “The Feminine Mystique,” once showed up to protest the lunchtime exclusion of women by the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room in New York with special makeup to hide the black eye and bruises her husband had given her. But she got out of that bad marriage and, although far from a beauty, had satisfying long-term relationships with men for the rest of her long life.

The other icon of the movement, Gloria Steinem, who came to her calling after going undercover to write an article, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” later made into a TV movie, was once described by Time as “one of the best dates to take to a New York party these days--or, failing such luck, one of the most arresting names to drop.”

Both worked with me at different times as contributing editors, and there was nothing “unattractive and sexually unappealing” about them and the multitudes who followed their lead.

“It is generally perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict,” the report on the new study says.

Perhaps by men who feel threatened and some brainwashed women, but these are people with problems of their own. The scientists should spend some time studying them.