Dueling charges of misogyny from the left and the
right have become a depressingly regular media circus—one that,
regardless of the real issues, is mostly about moral posturing and
political point-scoring. Worse, both sides are feeding a toxic
obsession with women-as-victims and promoting a sexism of special
treatment rather than equality.

Conservatives
accuse liberals of ignoring and condoning sexist slurs against
right-wing women. Liberals accuse
conservatives of ignoring and condoning sexism except when it’s
directed at conservative women and can be used as a weapon against
the left.

One can argue ad nauseam about which side is more misogynist and
more hypocritical. There is no question that crude and sex-themed
attacks on “enemy” women have come from both camps—be it vulgar
language directed at Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, or, most
recently, the Hustler magazine
photomontage of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp performing a
sexual act and the recent Twitter comment by blogger Dan Riehl

inviting liberal pundit Joan Walsh to perform a similar act on
him. I would say that, generally, the left has more consistently
(if often grudgingly) condemned such behavior in its ranks while
the right has been more likely to circle the wagons.

But here’s a question: Does any of this warrant the cries of
outrage about misogyny?

Yes, that Hustler montage was vile. But it’s not as if publisher
Larry Flynt has ever held back on sliming male social
conservatives. He was behind the famous parody ad that had Moral
Majority leader Jerry Falwell confessing to a drunken tryst with
his mother in an outhouse (prompting a Supreme Court ruling that
protected such satire no matter how distressing to its targets).
Just last September, Flynt
ran ads soliciting reports of illicit sex with Texas Gov. Rick
Perry, then a leading Republican presidential contender. 

Riehl, too, is an equal-opportunity offender: He has posted
plenty of
crude insults and taunts toward male journalists, including
insinuations of pedophilia  and public lewdness—drawing only a
fraction of the criticism his comment about Walsh set off. Perhaps
we should be less concerned with offenses against womanhood and
more with the general levels of hostility and vulgarity in our
discourse.

The silliest tempest in the war-against-women teacup has been
the
brouhaha over the video of labor activists in South Carolina
bashing a piñata with the face of union-unfriendly Gov. Nikki
Haley. Tacky and nasty, yes. Sexist, as claimed by some
conservatives including Glenn Beck and Slate.com blogger Rachael
Larimore? Hardly, especially considering the basher was also a
woman. Barack Obama piñatas are sold on Amazon.com (there’s a
YouTube
video  of one being whacked by children), and
George W. Bush piñatas have been around as well. 

It is worth nothing that three years ago, some feminists made an

equally silly fuss over a conservative Oklahoma newspaper’s
cartoon of then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a human
piñata, claiming that it was telling women to “know your place, or
we’ll take a stick to you and teach you a lesson.” Once,
conservatives used to mock this politically correct victim
mentality. Now, they’re aping it.

What about sex-specific or sexual insults? Feminists have a
point when they say that such attacks on women are uniquely
damaging because historically, women have been so often demeaned
and disempowered by being reduced to their sexual functions. Today,
too, women in public life can face unmistakably misogynist
rhetoric, whether it’s Salon.com publishing a Palin-bashing
screed filled with degrading sexual imagery or Rush Limbaugh
repeatedly
portraying Clinton as an emasculating female; whether it’s
conservatives suggesting that feminists are not “real women”
 or liberals suggesting the same  about women who don’t
toe the feminist party line.

But not every crude and hateful slam at a woman is misogynist;
sometimes, it’s just crude and hateful. An anatomical epithet
toward a woman is not automatically worse than the male equivalent.
Calling a female politician a bitch is not automatically worse than
calling a male politician a scumbag, an overwhelmingly
male-directed slur. Rocker and right-wing activist Ted Nugent’s
invitation to Hillary Clinton to “ride one of these into the
sunset” while brandishing two rifles
at a concert in 2007 was no more disgusting than his
simultaneous invitation to Barack Obama to “suck on this” (and
there’s no reason to think that Nugent would have been kinder to a
top Democratic presidential contender who was male and
white). 

Nor are male politicians immune to sexual denigration. After
Rick Santorum angered gay activists with negative comments about
homosexuality, he was
targeted for an Internet campaign promoting the use of his last
name as an obscene sex-related term.
Print ads seeking dirt on Rick Perry were run not only by Flynt
but by Ron Paul supporter Robert Morrow. (Imagine the shrieks if a
respectable newspaper had run an ad asking, “Have you ever had sex
with Sarah Palin?”)

In the 21st century, women may not have yet reached parity in
public life. But they are clearly no longer outsiders. If their
gender can still be an obstacle, it can also be an asset: a source
of extra star power as well as extra voter sympathy. They have come
far enough to not be treated as especially vulnerable, an
expectation that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In 2008, when Clinton’s campaign complained about sexism in
media coverage, a
conservative woman responded, “When I hear a statement like
that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine
about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on
her, I think, ‘Man, that doesn’t do us any good, women in politics,
or women in general, trying to progress this country.'” Sarah Palin
may never have spoken wiser words.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is a columnist at
RealClearPolitics, where this article
originally appeared.