The New York Times ran a piece on the Des Moines Register stating that the paper’s endorsement is seen as a great prize among candidates running for president. The article also pointed out that for the first time, the top three editorial spots at the Register are occupied by women and wondered if this wouldn’t give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage because as we all know, women mindlessly vote for their own kind regardless of qualifications and the issues.
What an infuriating piece of crap! Nothing raises my blood pressure more than sexist thinking like this. The fact that most men wouldn’t vote for a woman unless she was in a wet t-shirt contest rarely gets talked about, but when a woman actually runs for public office and manages to overcome the mean girl backlash and draws other female supporters, this is seen as some kind of herd mentality response. Men never seem to think that anything they think, do or say is influenced by their gender though there is a mount everest worth of reasons to believe that they are even more hormonally driven than their sisters, but anything under the sun a woman does is probably a result of PMS if she isn’t currently on the rag.
Although I don’t believe the Des Moines Register is a great newspaper (because it’s rather light on news beyond central Iowa and it allows the city’s elite to use it as though it were a high school publication), I am going to go out on a limb and guess that a person doesn’t get to be one of the top three there unless they have proven themselves in their field. Interestingly, though women are often accused of being tokens when they achieve positions like these, the truth is that women are usually held to much higher standards than the men who wind up in similar positions.
The Times should really be careful when it accuses others of bias. Aside from the ads, there isn’t a neutral thing printed in it ever, and I imagine that the East Coast ignorance about the Midwest played a role in the sexist conclusions that Mr. Zeleny, the piece’s author, came to write. Iowans are particularly plagued with Grant Wood images being superimposed over our lives and realities to the point where I don’t know if anyone out East even realizes that the majority of the state’s population lives in urban settings and that we have to organize field trips for our students to take them to farms so they know that milk comes from a cow and not from the AE plant on E. University. Shame on him still however, and shame on any who persist in the antiquated belief that when men vote for men it’s a result of thoughtful deliberation of the issues and facts whereas women only vote for the candidates based on their shared gender or because they have good personalities. Men are just as capable of casting their votes away as mindlessly as anyone and mindless voting is a result of just being stupid which is an equal gender opportunity judging from the NY Times piece.
