My Book Review of Susan Bordo’s Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman
I cannot recommend this book enough and I have additional thoughts to add of my own.
After I had finished the section referencing one of George Orwell’s books, I felt like I just got done being in a class with her as my professor and gained a whole new outlook on how we use and surrender to words and how it relates to our political discourse.
There are also so many memorable and quotable pages in this book.
One example is her chapter on Thurgood Marshall. What struck me is not only her observation that he was ahead of his time and did much to change our understanding of the 14th amendment, but that “in the 60’s, younger activists dismissed him as not being radical enough…”. The historical perspective parallels to how many younger people today speak as if the Democratic Party isn’t “radical enough” and points to a long time problem in our political discourse as it relates to the issues we care about and our progress working through them.
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My take on this sends me back to my younger days, my brain learning of injustices and how the world isn’t the kind place I was raised to believe it to be. Anger is definitely a valid emotion, but younger people are not known for their patience through their new emotions. And so I feel when younger people say we’re not “radical enough”, they mean the arc of justice isn’t moving fast enough for them. They want the world to be the kind place they thought it was, or if they’re a marginalized group already knowing it wasn’t kind, to move faster toward that goal. The problem is, there are millions of their peers still being groomed to continually uphold the very injustices we want to dismantle and those peers are also being groomed to continue to hold positions of power. What I have learned as I have aged is our Democratic leaders have learned to strategically fight for the things we care about, while being able to compromise in a way that at least gets us stepping in the right direction. Pragmatism isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. The arc of justice will move faster as we fill our leadership positions with the marginalized.
I also enjoyed her counterpoint against Kristen Gillibrand’s “no tolerance” policy. She says: “those who argue…for a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in which there should be ‘no distinctions’ between various forms of sexual misconduct, put us in danger of forgetting a key lesson that feminism taught throughout the sixties and seventies: the true abuser is not really after women’s bodies, but uses women’s bodies to show he is master.” This is an important point. The #MeToo movement was started by a black woman, Tarana Burke. And since then, it has been clearly co-opted and it’s true meaning lost by white feminists.
In the haze and confusion of some screaming “believe all women!” and hitting us over the head with a club, the intent behind sexual harassment and assault gets lost. It has always been about POWER. Abortion, sexual assault, dismissing women when we’re done speaking if we’re even allowed to speak at all — all of it is about power. Remember when Hillary Clinton was heckled while running for the Senate by a man who said “who is going to iron my shirt?” It’s about us staying in our place. When we start to correctly view men like Joe Biden and Al Franken through this key part of the lens, we realize there are men who aren’t trying to abuse their power. That with men like them, we should be able to communicate our discomfort and allow them to correct themselves and apologize and do better. Both of these men have committed to doing just that. That is a stark difference from the blatant sexual predator behavior of the Donald Trumps and the Harvey Weinsteins. Susan does a great job in her book articulating these distinctions and reminding us of what second wave feminism taught us about what we’re fighting for. I think Susan’s perspective also provides insight into the simplistic rhetoric of the left while the sins of sexism by the right are ignored.
In the age of “OK, Boomer” Susan does a brilliant job of pulling us back into the lessons she has learned throughout her life and how the struggles we have now fighting oppression and fighting for equality are not very different from the fights for those same struggles during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s-70’s. Her knowledge and wisdom are key to building on accomplishments we’ve already made. Her observations and analyses are vital to identifying just exactly where we are still lacking in that fight.
I absolutely adore her for devoting an entire section to James Comey. I felt alone in my hatred and confusion of the man, who seemed on the surface like a good political neutral servant to his government, but then made some public decisions that absolutely tilted the 2016 election towards Trump. I love that she read his book so that I don’t have too. He does everything to absolve himself of the accountability and responsibility of his actions and now wants to act like he’s anti-Trump. He could have used his position of privilege and power to make sure the FBI acted with true integrity and did not allow a man who had been clearly helped by a foreign country to win. But he has done the exact opposite and I will never forgive him for it. It’s soul-feeding to read Susan’s take on James Comey.
I was also struck by Susan’s MSNBC interview and especially the part where Hillary Clinton herself is blamed for “allowing the media to shape the narrative.” Susan is righteously incredulous. In fact, I had a Twitter argument with a Canadian who insisted Democrats needed to make sure certain things were always in the news cycle. Here we have Republicans calling CNN the “Clinton News Network” and now we have the media failing to hold itself accountable, blaming Hillary Clinton for allowing them to have their own narratives. It’s astounding that part of the narrative is that Clinton does everything she can to blame everyone else for why she lost while we’re reminded nearly daily by the media that she’s actually being blamed for things of which she has zero control over whatsoever.
Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman has had such a profound effect on me, I went and purchased her other book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. And I agree with Susan that we must absolutely look to the past and learn from it if we’re going to know how we need to move forward into the future.
This book is a must read for deconstructing our political discourse as Democrats and really digging into the media complicity of 2016 — which continues to this day. I feel this book is a requirement to help our minds shape our collective political strategy for the rest of 2020.
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