Framing the Cunt: the use of sexist stereotypes in the 2008 election – Part 1
January 26, 2009
by Sheryl Lee
|I don’t usually talk about this, but when I was fifteen years old I read a book called The Social Animal by Elliot Aaronson, which explained how to manipulate and control people. You can get people to do things they might not otherwise do, without them knowing you’re doing it? Amazing! So I did what any curious teenager might: I tried experimenting on my friends.
The results were disturbing. Pretty soon, my friends were doing what I wanted, when I wanted. I wasn’t prepared for this. I hadn’t really considered that my little experiments would work, and now all of a sudden, the people I cared about seemed less like autonomous human beings and more like puppets or pawns that could be moved around a game board at someone’s whim. At my whim. Too late, I realized I had acquired one of those bits of knowledge I might have been be better off without.
As for the experimenting, I didn’t keep it up for long, and I didn’t go to university and study Social Psychology and become a spin doctor, either, in case you’re wondering, but that unexpected success ensured that I would never lose interest in the topic: I have been studying and thinking about the ways people are manipulated for 29 years.
Let’s try it: suppose I wanted to evoke an unconscious association in you. How would I go about doing that?
If I say “white rabbit” — what’s the first thing you that think of?
If next I say “caterpillar,” does that reinforce your first association, or are you wondering if I’m making a zoological inventory of my backyard?
a) White rabbit
b) Caterpillar
….did you get it?
Isn’t it amazing that I can mention those two common critters and you recall a specific story from your childhood? Of course, there’s probably no unpleasant association attached to your memory of Alice in Wonderland, but if there were, I could use it to evoke an aversive reaction in you: Rabbits are tricksters! Don’t trust them!
Try these:
a) 2 months salary
b) “……forever”
a) Plastic surgery
b) Pet chimpanzee
a) Hamburger
b) “Where’s the….?”
Now consider this:
Aug 29: McCain announces Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the days following, we learn:
– she was nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda” in high school
– she used to help out with her husband’s commercial fishing operation—she was a fishwife, selling the day’s catch.
Sept 3: Gov. Palin’s speech at the Republican Convention
– she makes her famous joke about how the difference between an hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick. The crowd loves it. The joke is repeated over and over in the press the next day.
– after her speech, Heart’s hit song, “Barracuda,” plays over the stadium’s sound system.
Sept 9: At a rally six days later, Obama says the following:
“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink…”
From the laughter and applause that immediately followed Obama’s comments, we can safely conclude that the audience made the association with Palin. But did Obama intend for them to make it?
These associations are involuntary. They’re unconscious. It’s not something we’re on the lookout for. But political messages are crafted with utmost care. They are designed to get people to do what you want, which is vote for you instead of your opponent. That is the end game, the desired outcome, the successful result of the influence your message exerts on your audience.
Given the mere eleven days between Gov. Palin’s arrival on the national scene and the comments by Obama, the lipstick and fish juxtaposition is simply too convenient—too elegant, one might say—to dismiss as a coincidence. Like the rabbit and caterpillar I used above, Obama’s references were intended to evoke a specific association for the listener—Governor Sarah Palin: a pig in lipstick, a smelly fish.
It was quite brilliant—exactly the sort of thing I’d be aiming for if I were writing those speeches and my code of ethics was sufficiently flexible to allow me to choose ends over means, and the result was exactly what I might have hoped for: In the days following the speech, by bringing up the offense over and over again, the uproar only served to reinforce the association that Obama had evoked, and then he went on TV to say how silly it was that the media had grabbed on to this ridiculous story when so many more important issues are looming.
It was perfect—a work of art—and the idea that a skilled orator like Obama didn’t know what he was doing when he spoke those words is absurd.
Of course he knew.
Just like he knew what unconscious association he was evoking when he said, “I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically, when she’s feeling down, goes on the attack to boost her appeal.”
Hillary Clinton: hormonal harridan.
Perhaps Obama didn’t like doing it. Maybe he was advised to use these tactics, told, “This is what you have to do to win.” Maybe he didn’t write this stuff himself. Maybe Favreau wrote it, and maybe writing things that were deliberately intended to demean Senator Clinton shaped Favreau’s attitude toward her to such a degree that just days after Obama appointed her as Secretary of State, Favreau would take a cardboard cutout of the senator back to his place as a party prop and interact with it in ways that were intended to humiliate her.
In The Social Animal, Aaronson writes about the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students were randomly divided into prisoners and guards, and brought to live in a mock “prison” set up inside the school. The resulting interaction led to such psychological cruelty on the part of the “guards” toward the “prisoners” that the experiment was terminated after just six days.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations.
The same behavior has been observed in military personnel toward their prisoners: in order to be effective soldiers, they are trained to dehumanize the enemy, but it’s difficult to shift this attitude when the enemy is at their mercy.
Or when the enemy becomes an ally. When Clinton joined Obama’s cabinet, were some of his staff still thinking like soldiers?
One can make an argument for moral relativism: “It’s what you have to do to win”, or ”you gotta beat them at their own game”, but the fact that Favreau likely penned those words about Hillary Clinton before he performed his demeaning pantomime with the Clinton cut-out seems to indicate that they are not “just words.” Words influence how we think and what we do, and that’s the whole point of evoking unconscious bias: to influence people to act in a particular, predetermined way.
So you carefully choose your words in order to give people hope, to make them dream; you want to inspire them, to motivate them to do what you want, because it seems like the thing that is in their best interests. Or you want to activate their shame, to call up their fear and their disgust so they will respond with aversion to the thing you don’t want them to do. If you want them to reject your opponent and vote for you, you evoke the most unpleasant stereotypes available about your opponent. If these are effective, many of the voters who have identified with your opponent will turn away and reject that person out of fear of being associated with him or her.
This works especially well with women, because we’re afraid—deeply, morbidly afraid—to be called pigs or cunts or harridans. We’re mortified that anyone might think we smell like fish. We will draw back from these images as if from an open flame.
Dr. Violet Socks makes it plain:
Where Hillary was a ball-busting bitch, Palin is an airhead fuck bunny. Where Hillary was every(male)body’s know-it-all nagging first wife, Palin is a beauty queen bimbo. Hillary was a vicious lying cunt, but Palin is a stupid cunt. The result is the same: a laughingstock, an anything-but-inspiring figure of ridicule, the kind of woman people would be ashamed to support. The kind of woman that women would be ashamed to support. Yes, of course we’d like a woman vice-president, but not this one because she’s a stupid cunt.
But it’s just politics. It’s how you win elections. And yet Favreau’s mock assault of the cutout of Clinton demonstrates in the clearest, most indisputable terms that the framing works—even for the person who’s doing the framing. Amazing! Just like when I read that book and tried it out on my friends.
How did Favreau decide to mess around with the cut out of Clinton? What mental processes led up to it? What made it seem like a good idea? The incident occurred quite some time after the primaries were over. It wasn’t an immediate effect –- a blowing off of steam after a tough battle. The constant devaluation of Clinton during the primaries was an indirect exercise of power, of dominance. As observed in Stanford’s student “guards” and their “prisoners,” dominance encourages devaluation of the people over whom one exercises power, allowing you to dehumanize them to the point where you can do things to them that you would not do to a person you saw as an equal, possessed of dignity and deserving of respect. The fact that that Favreau could act out in such a manner after several months had passed is evidence that his attitude toward Clinton persisted.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains it this way:
A frame is a conceptual structure used in thinking….Every word evokes a frame….Words defined within a frame evoke the frame….Negating a frame evokes the frame….Evoking a frame reinforces that frame….Every frame is realized in the brain by neural circuitry….Every time a neural circuit is activated, it is strengthened [emphasis mine].
“Framing,” he says, “is an art, though cognitive linguistics can help a lot. It needs to be done systematically.” Lakoff has advice for those running for election:
Negative campaigns should be done in the context of positive campaigns. To avoid negating the opposition’s frame and thus activating it, do the following: start with your ideal case of the issue given. Pick frames in which your ideal case is positively valued. The contrast will attribute the negatively valued opposite quality to the opposition as a nightmare case.
Now let’s apply Lakoff’s ideas to the sequence of events in late August and early September: Palin is framed (and frames herself) as a barracuda, a former fishwife, and a pitbull in lipstick. Obama reframes her as pig in lipstick and a smelly fish. When his opponents try to negate the frame, they’re caught—repeating the offensive phrases over and over, they end up reinforcing the frame, while Obama makes a clever follow-up speech about how the media is being fed catnip by his opponents and cluttering up the news feeds with trivia when there are much more important issues that we all ought to be focusing on. That he invoked the “swiftboating” reference shows true audacity, as he was the one doing the swiftboating, and doing it with considerable skill.
Part 2 will look at the collateral effects of this type of framing on the general population of women.
Brilliant Sheryl. Can’t wait for part 2. You are absolutely right.
Thanks Sheryl.
Now let’s use this information for OUR good!!!
You have totally expressed my sentiments. Thank you very much.
This is what some people call running a “modern campaign”. No thank you.
Sheryl, great post. I agree with mamabroad, this stuff is too easily written off as necessary.
This is a compelling piece. And a great title. I posted it on my Facebook, LOL!
Wow! That is a fabulous article.
LOL, but in every group there are defective units. See, you say white rabbit, I think magician. You say caterpillar, I think tractor. You put the two together and I kid you not, I’m left trying to puzzle out what the heck magicians and tractors have in common. I’m hopeless, I know.
But there are more out there just like me. We see a politician using these techniques and it just doesn’t translate properly. We’re left wondering “why is this man standing before me like a bunny with a pancake on his head and everyone is chanting?”
LOL, yttik! I knew I was supposed to conjure up Alice in Wonderland. But I actually thought of Jefferson Airplane.
Excellent article and I can’t wait to see the follow up.
However, I sincerely believe that people had to want to buy the hate Obama was selling. There’s just no way any thinking person could actually believe that Sarah Palin was/is a bimbo. Obama relied on a culturally acceptable sexist subtext that was already in place.
Racism is not culturally acceptable and could not be used against Obama. Instead, he was able to use accusations of racism against his opponents, while at the same time embracing misogyny and conducting an overtly sexist campaign.
I just want to say thank you. This brilliant article perfectly frames what happened, and is aptly named. This will be easier for me to explain going forward, and offers the opportunity to rebut the “just words” pushback and belittling technique. I only wish I’d read this in September!
I absolutely agree that the Obama campaign used this strategy during the campaign. He also picked up the thread of the conservative anti-Clinton narrative and amplified the misogynist aspects. Obama’s campaign damaged women in that it profited from negative stereotypes about powerful, ambitious women while exploiting the misogynist elements of our society. Because that has now been done by the “left,” many women who are aware of the enormous negative ramifications of such damaging stereotypes are without a political home.
HELLO?! Do you think the Clinton and Palin campaigns didn’t do the EXACT SAME THING against Obama, except MORE OVERTLY? Aren’t there any black women or men objecting to this article or are there none perusing this website?
The “damage” the Obama campaign made to women was in defeating Hillary and the McCain ticket. Most of their damage was self-inflicted.
You write, “How did Favreau decide to mess around with the cut out of Clinton? What mental processes led up to it? What made it seem like a good idea?”
Here’s what I wondered: Who thought it was appropriate to photograph? And then to circulate the picture?
People do stupid crap all the time; but these are smart folks who are perfectly aware of how the media (and the public) works, as you so clearly explain! This was no accident.
Digger, my guess is that they wanted to diminish Hillary, to put her in her place, consciously or unconsciously. She couldn’t stand on the same level as Obama, couldn’t have the same prestige as Obama, after all she did win more votes than him, and she really is more of a genuine leader than him. The alpha dog asserted his dominance for the world to see.
One more thing…the one who does the disrespecting and gets away with it is the one who has more power, or dominance.
Anne-Marie, I agree with you. I was just pointing out that, far from “boys will be boys” or “it was just a prank” or “it was just a joke” (and of course, as women, we “have no sense of humour”), these folks were well aware of what they were doing. The pictures didn’t “accidentally” get taken, or released to the media.
[...] want you to think about that while you’re reading this brilliant post by Sheryl Robinson: Framing the Cunt: the use of sexist stereotypes in the 2008 election – Part 1. And when you get to the point where you start saying to yourself, “oh, it wasn’t [...]
Thank you for this superb post, Sheryl. You are absolutely right. Somebody’s going to do a graduate thesis on this.
(Full disclosure: I, too, thought of the Jefferson Airplane.)
It’s called brilliant advertising.
I don’t know which is worse: something offensive done consciously, or something offensive done unconsciously. They both have strong drawbacks.
For me, at this point, I have no need to try to delve into Obama’s psyche or the myriad campaign decisions that were made and the (misguided) rationales behind them. I just have to take it as it comes. Deconstructing it matters little.
If he insults women, it needs to be addressed. If his policies are against us, they need to be addressed.
Sheryl says that in Part 2 she’ll broaden out to look at how this works on women as a group, but there’s also another larger issue here, one that haunts me: our political discourse is increasingly in the hands of propagandists. In fact I’m not sure we should even call it “discourse,” since it’s more like the effect of TV commercials on a somnolent nation of watchers.
We all saw the trainwreck of 2000, when a class of gibbering scribes ridiculed Al Gore relentlessly, so that by the time the election rolled around everyone “knew” that he’d claimed he invented the internet (he didn’t), along with a whole bunch of other nonsense. I’d hoped that the growth of the blogosphere would serve as a counter-measure, but no luck. In 2008 it was mostly just an echo chamber.
We are screwed.
Violet,
I agree about the state of political discourse. There should be an active, public conversation about these issues in the press, but there isn’t; it’s the peculiar case of the rooster that didn’t crow. Kudos to Sheryl for describing the elephant on the table.
So the Democrats have finally caught on (google up the sadly defunct Rockridge Institute for more general discussions about Republicans and framing, if you want). Now that they’ve discovered the utility of these powerful tools, how quick do you think they’ll be to abandon them?
Fallout, and the attendant sequelae, might seem an acceptable trade-off for those who happen to be living upwind.
[...] on Mr. Favreau’s work product from Sheryl Robinson at The New Agenda: Given the mere eleven days between Gov. Palin’s arrival on the national scene and the comments [...]
Exceptional, Sheryl. Truly exceptional. Looking forward to Part 2.
And I have to admit, I thought of Jefferson Airplane (re: white rabbit), too. Of course, the song’s lyrics included rabbits, caterpillars, and…Alice.
Music aka sound with lyrics acts as a powerful sensory, emotional anchor for associating certain things with other things from memory or to imprint new associations into memory — both of which remind me of Obama’s swipe at Hillary during his Iowa victory when the campaign played Jay-Z’s “99 Problems (But A Bitch Ain’t One).”
When Mark Penn & Bill Clinton advised Hillary to attack Obama’s foreign upbringing and similarly likely weaknesses, she took the high road and declined, as did McCain. O’s camp showed no such confidence to conduct itself in an ethical fashion, thus we have our president. Both Clinton and McCain have stepped up to support the new administration.
I absolutely loved this article. I have sent a link to everybody I know.
Dr. K
I don’t think it is a matter of the Democrats finally catching on. Both parties have been doing this kind of framing probably since their founding. I think WE are the ones who are finally catching on to all of them.
Dr. K, brilliantly put together the framing Obama used to manipulate our thinking that any person could understand.
Thia, GA –
I agree with you for the most part, politicians know the power of words and their associations, and have been doing this for a very long time. But, 2008 was special because Obama had the utter complicity of the MSM. What I saw repeatedly was a media that repeated the frames, but NEVER once questioned whether Obama was in fact doing it intentionally nor the negative effects if it was done unintentionally. There was no iota of questioning, rather mere repeating of the standard Obama meme.
I was completely stunned that NO ONE called Obama out on this remark:
“I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically, when she’s feeling down, goes on the attack to boost her appeal.”
Not NOW, nor any other feminist organization, journalist, or newspaper.
Thia – I tend to agree with your perspective. Perhaps this year was just the “perfect storm” (to use an overused analogy). Plus, with a woman running for President and one for Vice President, perhaps issues once more hidden became more glaring. Plus, whereas in years past, not so long ago, we did not have the Internet which, as I believe Violet stated, has become an echo chamber for the bs out there in the media. Truth and facts and opinions and emotions and theories have blurred to become a single entity that the public absorbs as truth. (Which is one of a couple of reasons why I want to know if the photo of Paterson on the post about his selection of Gillibrand is for real of computer manipulated i.e. the inscription on his t-shirt, because if TNA manipulated it, it should be noted as such.)
This is a really, really great post. Thank you!
And, I now know why Obama’s mind control didn’t work on me. My mind obviously doesn’t associate the way many peoples’ minds do!
Thank you. This puts it all out there. I await part 2. Yet it was hard if not impossible to use the same tactics against Obama, because that would be labeled as racist….and you can bet the MSM would have picked that up!!
By the way–”white rabbit” made me think of Chinese candy, and “caterpillar” brought back a memory of drinking a glass of water, forgetting that the kids had earlier kept a caterpillar in the glass, one I kept on the sink. I spit out caterpillar hairs for days. Some things are better forgotten.
While obviously sexist (and racist) stereotypes were definitely at play during the election, I think we have to be careful about how we interpret the meaning behind words. For example, I remember when Hillary was talking about her supporters, and she said, “working Americans, hardworking Americans, white Americans are supporting me.” A lot of people thought she was tapping into images of lazy minorities living off the state to increase white voter support for her in the next couple primaries. Based on her words, I can see that. But I personally think she was just making a point about her support base and out of tiredness or in a moment of inattention (which is completely understandable, given the stress she was under), she phrased it in an unfortunate way. I think the same thing happened to Obama, Palin, and McCain.
I do think that Obama’s lipstick thing was intentional. But unless insulting your opponent is sexist in and of itself, I don’t see how turning a phrase that Palin herself used back on her way sexist. She and McCain (and Hillary, for that matter) insulted Obama in similar ways, but that wasn’t racist. Maybe they were all being a bit childish at times, but that is a different story.
That should be *was sexist* not *way sexist.”
Thank you for this. I have so many thoughts but no words to express my anger and dismay at the sexism in his speeches, and the lack of voices in the media and so-called feminist organizations speaking out about it.
And mom, sorry about the caterpillar in the glass….
Madeline -
“I think we have to be careful about how we interpret the meaning behind words.”
I agree. And, it does work both ways. And, “lipstick on a pig” is actually an expression that politicians have used for a long time to describe proposed legislation that they feel is being dressed up, but which is essentially the same at its core. (I learned that after this whole incident unfolded with Obama.) How intentional or coincidental Obama’s comment was, I, nor no one, can say. None of us can crawl inside the heart and mind of another to say: “This is what you intended.” At best, it’s guess work, deduction, etc. The fact that Palin had used the lipstick image and then Obama made the comment correlated in time. That, coupled with other aspects of him and his candidacy that made many of us leary about him, certainly made me cringe when he said it. But, getting back to your original comment – I think you’re right on.
And, in my opinion, there’s little need to interpret, assume presume and analyze since there’s plenty of straight forward stuff to go on (Favreau, number of cabinet appointments, the nature of the stimulus package and how it will leave millions of women in the dust come to mind.)
Great article! The brilliance of using this is that you can deny using it all day long.
Unless we get over the ‘moral’ problem of throwing it right back at them, we will be buried in it. I guess we could use positive framing for ourselves and the framing we use on Obama could focus on his not knowing what the h*** he’s doing, which is truthful, after all.
Looking forward to part 2!
Wonderful post Sheryl!
UPDATE on Favreau’s mental processes:
Favreau is dating a former underwear model who has been hired as an aide to a White House Deputy Chief of Staff. . . Here’s the article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....ident.html
Some of the comments in response to the article are interesting (the article is from a British newspaper).
And several people note that the phrase “Yes we can” was swiped from Bob the Builder . . .
Scratchbacker
HELLO! as gxm at 1:17 wrote..
“Racism is not culturally acceptable and could not be used against Obama. Instead, he was able to use accusations of racism against his opponents, while at the same time embracing misogyny and conducting an overtly sexist campaign.”
It may be hard to believe, after all the years of well-documented acceptable racism that the picture has changed, however much that undermines the previous narrative. Believe it.
You say that the Clinton campaign used the same kind of tactics but obviously you didn’t hear that Obama won the Marketer of the Year from the Association of Advertisers. ( Like, guess who did NOT win.)
The Obama campaign was recognized for their effectiveness in these tactics.
No, it’s not Just Words. It’s damn effective marketing.
No, it’s not just disaffected voters making this observation. It’s congratulations! from the shapers of consumer preferences – which is sorta effective in a capitalist consumerist society.
You just have to deal with that.
The narrative of the most successful marketer outweighs other narratives that have any contrasting, or questioning narrative. It does follow from there that observations of “sexism” were dismisssed as “racism”.
( Hmm… I just wonder how many Obama-narrative supporters remember their outrage at that senator who called Obama ” articulate and clean and well-spoken” as if these were anomalous attributes in an African-American. And that this particular senator was none other than Joe Biden?”
Oh, fer crissakes, get over it, or something.
Oops.
No, Obama rightfully won the Marketer of the Year award. This doesn’t erase the well-documented sexism of his campaign.
99 Problems and A Bitch Ain’t One. And “Bros before Ho’s” and on fairly mainstream SNL “Bitch May be the New Black, but Black is the New President, Bitch!”
Ooh, them awful Clintons – that was part of that awesome Marketer of the Year campaign.
Thia, GA:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/m.....koff.shtml
Scratchbacker: I’m a black woman and was appalled by the sexism in Obama’s campaign. Stil am. You say that the Clinton campaign did the exact same thing to Obama – I assume you mean used racism against him. Yet, even though you say she did it “more overtly,” you fail to mention one specific example. I know why you don’t, because you can’t. Neither she nor McCain ever once stooped to the level that Obama did over and over again.
The supposed “racial slip” of Hillary’s that is mentioned a few comments below Scratch’s brings up the “hard working Americans, white Americans” comment and is, once again, used entirely inaccurately. In the original quote by Hillary – which she needlessly, I think, apologized for (try catching Obama apologizing for anything) – she was QUOTING an AP article that discussed the demographic problems Obama had attracting both working class groups of all colors and whites across the spectrum of income. Which is why her quote about the AP article specifically separates the modifiers hard working and whites. If anything, her slip in the quote makes it seem that she thinks white Americans are something other than hardworking. It’s hardly people of color who should have been angered by that – but of course the Obama campaign made it all about race, ergo about him.
It simply is objectively not the case that there was any equivalency between Hillary and Barack when it came to racism and sexism in the campaign. Believe me – I’ve experienced both from whites of both genders and men of all colors and I can tell when a black man is trying to put a woman of any color in her place.
terrific article – thank you!
Please don’t forget that Michele Obama in introducing Hillary at the international women’s courage awards recently herself diminished and attempted to humiliate Hillary when she introduced her…
“Secretary Clinton….gee…how I *love* saying *Secretary* Clinton…”
How dumb and embarrasing–for this clueless woman now inhabiting the premiere address in the land…shame on her. Her cousin Valerie Jarrett in Chicago indoctrinated and mentored her in psychological, not just monetary tenement development warfare…
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