The Girl Elephant in the Room

I spent the last few weeks devoting all my free time (all 32 seconds per week) to the Martha Coakley campaign to represent Massachusetts in the US Senate. I missed both my chance to volunteer during the primaries, and celebrate her win, when I had an emergency appendectomy the early morning hours of December 8th. But that didn't stop me from voting. My father brought me an absentee ballot to my hospital bed and I proudly filled it out, hours after surgery.

So I jumped into phone banks leading up to the general election and drove people to the polls on election day who had no means to get there. I talked her up to anyone who would listen. I was committed to getting her elected.

It is old news that she lost. That she went down in flames. All the talk is about how poorly her campaign was managed. Few people are willing to acknowledge that something much more insidious was involved.

Misogyny.

During the first hours of the polls being open, I stood with a large Coakley sign outside an elementary school. As young children walked on the sidewalk past me a man who looked to be in his 50's rolled down his car window. There was a sidewalk and an entire lane between us requiring he had to yell to be heard.

Very clearly he shouted "She's a fucking beast".

During the days leading up to the election I would call voters, asking them to vote for Martha Coakley and half the time they would say to me that they hated her negative ads. When asked about Scott Brown's ads they insisted he was never negative. And yet, several years ago during the Presidential campaign when Senator John Kerry ignored the Swift Boat negative ads, he was considered weak. So according to those callers a woman couldn't fight back.

Later, after the polls closed, I was at a town gathering unrelated to the Senate race. I was surrounded by Democrats, Republicans and unenrolled voters. I started talking to a man I know. He isn't someone I know well but we've interacted over the years. We got to talking about the Senate election and he made it clear he voted for Scott Brown in part for his position on abortion.

After a discussion of Brown's failed amendment to create a massive loophole in a bill to protect rape victims, the man suddenly said,"If my daughter was raped, she wouldn't get an abortion. Two wrongs don't make a right."

I thought I had been kicked in the gut. I started to cry, describing the hell of pregnancy - even when that pregnancy is a product of love - and asked him how he, sans overies or a uterus, could even think that he should have a say.

I returned home late election night, reeling from my bookend experiences. A man who felt no inhibition to yell such profanities in public and a man who would look a woman in the eye and say that a woman should be expected to carry a pregnancy from a rape. I cried until 2:30 in the morning. I awoke at 4:30 in the morning only to start crying again.

I would talk to liberal men about the sexism and be brushed off. "It was all about her bad campaign. It had nothing to do with gender" declared one young [male] colleague.

Yet every woman I spoke to agreed. Agreed that there was vitriol directed at a female candidate that would never happen to a man.

So why is it o.k. to diminish the impact of gender on this race? Why is it o.k. to yell obscenities about a woman candidate? Would the driver that morning have felt it was alright to yell a racial epitaph if the candidate was black? Why is it o.k. to be matter-of-fact about options for a female rape victim? Would the man at the party have said the same about denying treatment to the victim of any other form of assault?

I have no answers. I'm still too raw from Tuesday's results. Both inside and outside the polls.