"Is sexual desire a human right?"

"And are women entitled to a little pink pill to help them feel it?"

Those questions are being raised in a campaign that is pressing the Food and Drug Administration to approve a pill aimed at restoring lost libido in women. The campaign, backed by the drug�s developer and some women�s groups, accuses the F.D.A. of gender bias for approving Viagra and 25 other drugs to help men have sex, but none for women....

The drug, flibanserin, has been rejected twice by the F.D.A. on the grounds that its very modest effectiveness was outweighed by side effects like sleepiness, dizziness and nausea....

I don't see how women are "entitled" to a drug in the general area of Viagra as some kind of gender equity proposition. The standard for approval of all drugs should be the same � some balance of effectiveness and unwanted effects. And obviously, there's a big difference between wanting to have sex and the capacity to physically carry out the act. Why is not wanting to have sex even regarded as a dysfunction? I want to want what I don't want. What the hell kind of problem is that? Or is it that my partner wants me to want what I don't want and I want to satisfy him? Drugging women so we'll be able to do what men want? How did that get turned into a women's rights issue? I guess you could say that it's for women to decide � don't take away our choice! � whether we want to want what he wants when we don't want it.

�Our usual patient is someone who is fearful of losing the relationship they have been in for years,� said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego and a consultant to many drug companies. �It�s tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.�

One of his patients, Jodi Cole, 33, of Porter, Okla., said her lack of desire �tends to cloud my thoughts of everything related to my husband.� She said that �replacing the dread I have for intimacy with desire would be life-changing.�

Meanwhile, on college campuses, Cole's frame of mind � needing to have sex out of fear of losing the man � would be enough to brand her husband as a rapist if he proceeded to have sex with her knowing that's how she felt. And yet we're asked to think a drug that causes sleepiness, dizziness and nausea should be approved � in the name of women's rights � so she can blot out her lack of true consent.

This flibanserin is like those rape drugs frat boys are said to put in the unguarded drink. Oh, but if the woman chooses to take the drug? Well, isn't that like choosing to get drunk at the party? The man isn't supposed to exploit the opportunity of a drunken and seemingly willing sexual partner. Why is it okay to have sex with a woman who's taken the flibanserin?

I thought the Chicago Sun-Times was engaging in subtle humor on its front page here...

... making it look like Lena Dunham was biting the headline, but � click through � she's holding an "I'm with Hillary" bumper in her teeth. And here's Lena's message of support for Hillary:

Hey, just a head�s up: accusing women of supporting Hillary just because she�s female is misogynistic BS � women are smart enough to make decisions based on a number of factors: policy, track record, campaign strategy. Yes I think it�s time for a female president but I�m not part of a witch�s cabal that senses ovaries and suddenly MUST VOTE. Plus if I was gonna vote for someone just because she was female it would be this chick...

(Photo of Lil' Kim.)

... written in on all my ballots always. So go ahead, argue your political POV but don�t insult a woman�s intelligence by acting as though she votes exclusively along vaginal party lines. As Kim would say �I�m valedictorian y�all in the audience/And I�ve got nine hundred and ninety-nine votes, You got nine hundred and ninety-nine notes/You know bitch I�m worldwide.� New Hillary campaign slogan? TGIF!

"If Carly Fiorina gains any traction from her barbed attacks on Hillary Clinton, the rightwing cartoons will practically draw themselves..."

"... Carly and Hillary in a teeth-baring cat fight, Carly�s claws like a tiger�s, HRC�s eyes as red as a Demon Sheep�s, and Benghazi burning in the background. As one man tweeted, 'Let the Cat Fight begin!! Fiorina will tear Hillary to shreds.'"

One man, eh?

The quote is from The Nation, and all I can say to you right-wingers is: Don't give the lefties what they want. You do see what they want, don't you? I'm not going to womansplain it to you. If you don't see what you shouldn't do, I'm not going to help.

Cruelly neutrally yours,

Your humble blogger, Althouse

"Democrats hope for Hillary Clinton coattails."

Really?

Her campaign is still in its infancy. The presidential election is nearly 18 months away. But Democrats are already banking on a �Hillary effect,� an anticipated wave that will lift the party�s fortunes up and down the ticket.

They're banking on it? Where does this come from? Is it pure lying? Is it propaganda?
Click for more �

"Fiorina, 65, is a sturdily built man, with graying hair combed back on a block-like head and a somewhat taciturn manner."

How to talk about the political spouse who's a man.

As the husband of Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive now running for president, Fiorina plays an important role for the campaign. Political spouses typically find themselves referred to as a candidate�s �secret weapon,� trusted with �humanizing� their otherwise remote/robotic/pompous partners. Is it sexist to reduce women to little more than props for their politically ambitious husbands? Is it silly to call someone who has a public role on a campaign a �secret�? Can the new crop of political husbands escape the burdens of playing campaign humanizer? Yes, yes and no.

Viral video takes down that Kennesaw State University academic adviser.

"Sitting here until someone is available is harassing them," said Abby Dawson, caught on video by the student, Kevin Bruce, because, as he put it: "Abby Dawson has an attitude, that�s why I knew exactly when to record her."

Rude advisors at Kennesaw . Smh pic.twitter.com/ugcX4gnIsp

� KB (@IamKB_) May 14, 2015

The video gets out, not the larger context. What is the larger context? Dawson can't get her side of the story out, and Bruce controls the narrative. Bruce knows that he is recording, and during the sequence that's recorded he's speaking in a calm, circumspect manner that makes Dawson look way out of line.

Bruce has explained that he was told his adviser would be available in an hour, and he decided to wait instead of leaving and coming back in an hour. How did that earlier interaction play out? Why did Dawson interpret the lingering in the office as harassment? Was her reaction part of some absurd ever-enlarging concept of "harassment" within the gender politics of modern American education? Is Dawson an abusive outlier? Or would this all be nothing if we could see the whole interaction on video?

"I am not surprised Fox has censored Picasso�s breasts. It is absurd and creepy to blur out the bosoms of his Women of Algiers..."

"... in a report on the painting that set a new world record this week. But it is not completely impossible to understand, because if you were a puritan or a fundamentalist or just hated women�s bodies, Picasso�s breasts are the kind of breasts you might find shocking.... Picasso�s breasts are just black circles with big dots for nipples. It is a measure of his genius that he can convey all the roundness, fullness and touchability of a breast using this graffiti-like shorthand. There are four pairs of breasts in Women of Algiers (Version O) by my count � painted in various stages of cartoonish crudity... It is a cliche to see Picasso as a misogynist whose lust for women was aggressive and patriarchal... Who hates women � Picasso who painted all those breasts, or the TV station that smeared them out?"

That's from The Guardian, scoring political points off cartoonish breasts in a painting that you'd think conservatives would want to show because it was just so darned expensive this last time it was sold and even though it knows very well that it was just some local station that was afraid someone would complain. Objections could have come from lefties as well as righties. The Guardian admits, as it must, that Picasso was a big old aggressive misogynist.

Anyway, maybe it works over in England to say "Picasso's breasts," when you only want us to think of the women's breasts that he painted, but the American mind � mine, anyway � goes straight to moobs. And Picasso is a man who often posed for pictures shirtless. I went looking for a good picture to illustrate this and I found a whole page titled "A lot of pictures of Pablo Picasso without his shirt on." I picked this one:



It's been a good year for Picasso and a good year generally for shirtless men. Mitt Romney appeared shirtless the other day (in some boxing match, but who cares?, the big deal was that he was shirtless). And images of Martin O'Malley without a shirt are continually popping up as if to say look what I can do that Hillary can't.

"The pseudo feminists, the pseudo Marxists, the pseudo power-and gender-freaks... I call them all, in capital letters, the School of Resentment."

"I always get nasty reviewers. I couldn�t care less," said Harold Bloom, asked by Time Magazine whether he "anticipate[s] flak" because his "new book, The Daemon Knows, features 12 American writers touched by genius � only one of whom is a woman."

I don�t even bother anymore. I�m always being denounced.

I assumed I knew who the one woman is, and I was right. Here's the book, in case you want to check the list (encourage old man Bloom by buying it).

"The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she's got a voice that she wants to get out there."

Sexist? Megan McArdle says it's risky to say "sexist" if it's not really bad, obvious sexism:

The great difficulty of sexism in this moment is that we're fighting subtle bias and knotty structural issues, not fellows who stride up to the podium to jauntily announce that women just don't have the brains for politics, the dear little things.

But there's a reason that I rarely dissect a statement in search of such subtle bias. It's because sexism is so serious we need to be careful when and where we level accusations.... To claim "sexism" too often just robs the word of its power.

So if we want to keep the norm that sexism is very bad, we need to think twice about when we pull out those accusations. Before you shoot, remember that you're not a movie hero with an unlimited supply of ammunition. You're the guy with a single six shooter crouching behind the bar. You have to make every shot count. Aim carefully. When in doubt, hold your fire.

First, that's a terrible analogy! Calling something "sexist" isn't anything like shooting one of your 6 bullets at a guy. Words actually are unlimited, and the guy who is hit by your words has unlimited words too, and the interchange of words can go on forever. The problem is the dilution of the meaning of words and the erosion of credibility.

I was going to say it's the problem of "crying wolf." But "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is also a bad analogy. It's about a specific alarm that demands immediate action and a boy who outright lied when there was no cause for alarm at all (and as a consequence was not believed when the cause for that specific alarm was true). But sexism is not like a wolf. There's no continuum of wolfism. There is only a wolf or no wolf. Sexism is a continuum, and some people � perhaps including McArdle � might like to say that it would be best only to use the important word "sexism" to refer to the obvious things about which there will be consensus, like that jaunty announcement that women just don't have the brains for politics.

But McArdle knows that's not the sexism problem anymore: "we're fighting subtle bias and knotty structural issues." If that's what we need and want to talk about, why shouldn't we use the word "sexism" for that? Why set it aside so it will be useful for a purpose we don't have anymore? The only reason I see is that it's harder to convince people that you're right about subtle sexism (and, indeed, you could be wrong). But that's saying we shouldn't talk about non-obvious sexism. And if the subtle sexists of this world could be assured that subtle sexism won't be talked about anymore, they'd know how to ply their sexism. Subtly!

So the question is: Where on the continuum from no sexism to outright sexism do you want to draw the line? Really, the continuum needs 2 lines: 1. The point at which you believe there is sexism, and 2. The point at which you will make your belief known. I think McArdle's guy-with-a-6-shooter bad analogy is an argument for a wide gap between Line #1 and Line #2.

As for Barack's statement about "Elizabeth" and her "voice," that crosses the line where I believe there is sexism. Should I have refrained from saying that? Should I have refrained from saying that so my... voice... will come across as decently powerful when I encounter something more worthy of the accusation? Like in case that jaunty strider-up-to-the-podium blurts out something really crude? I say no, because the jaunty podium strider is a dumb jerk who won't get anywhere in America these days, and Barack Obama is the President of the United States and an educated, up-to-date, eloquent speaker. It's important to keep track of what he's saying, what's between the lines, and all the subtleties of his rhetoric!

The "Women on 20s" campaign reveals the results of its poll in a very slick "Dear Mr. President" video.

"It doesn't take an 'Act of Congress' - it just requires the Secretary of the Treasury to make the change...."

Obama seems to be getting kicked around a lot these days, so maybe he's looking for something inspiring to do, but I don't think he will. I told you why last month:

If one President fiddles with the [$20]... the next thing you know, Reagan will have the $10. And then where will Obama go, years from now, when his face becomes legally billable?

If Obama sees the long game, and what he wants is to end up as one of the faces of U.S. currency, he should not put the woman on the 20, because if he does that, Reagan will follow on the 10, and then � even though the process of politicizing the bills will continue � he'll be stuck with the 50.... I think he'll see the best strategy is do nothing and leave the field clear for some future administration to honor him. He'll have the 20.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said...

Stop pandering to us! It's so insulting. It makes me sick.

You don't say, "A woman needs to be on one of these," and then go picking out a woman. You wait until there's a woman who makes you say, "She needs to be on one of these!" and you put her on one. When she's dead.

Unless you can think of a woman who doesn't make it look like the women got a pity prize in the bill lineup, do not add a woman!

Oh, brother.

"Men but not women get to preside at Mass. Men but never women wear the cassock of a cardinal, the vestments of a pope. Male clergy are typically called 'father,' which connotes authority. Women in religious orders are usually called 'sister,' which doesn�t."

Says Frank Bruni in the middle of a rant titled "Catholicism Undervalues Women."

Whatever else he may want to say about Catholics and women, there's no lack of parallelism in that father/sister terminology. Men in religious orders are called "brother," and female leaders of orders are called "mother."

1. "Clinton: 'Deep-seated' beliefs block abortion access," 2. "Hillary On Abortion: 'Deep-Seated Cultural Codes, Religious Beliefs And Structural Biases Have To Be Changed.'"

2 headlines for the same news event in 2 different places. #1 is The Hill. #2 is The Daily Caller.

Here's the raw material. Judge for yourself:



Hillary did say "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone � and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States."

Now, it does sound off to say "religious beliefs... have to be changed." You'd think the speech-writers would have tweaked that into something less easily extracted and denounced. And yet... perhaps it's a trap. Come on, you Hillary haters. Flay her for saying "religious beliefs... have to be changed." Commit. Then she can come back and destroy you. She can tell you about the war against Islamic extremists who have religious beliefs that have to be changed. They're cutting people's heads off for not converting. They are raping and enslaving women. They are throwing gay people off tall buildings. Gotcha!

Of course, there are religious beliefs that need to be changed! That's not even controversial. The question is how to change them � when to use military force, when to use the force of legal sanctions, and when to use speech to persuade people to believe ideas because they are better.

The equality of women � feminism is the radical notion that women are people � is a strong, persuasive idea that is at odds with what many believe as a matter of religion. Hillary Clinton is on solid ground when she says religious beliefs have to be changed, and I assume she means that they can be changed through persuasive speech and appeals to reason and moral sensibility.

If you think she's vulnerable to attack, go ahead and attack. I'll spectate from this overlook.

"I think she�s a Democrat just like they all are. She seems like every other Democrat."

"I would not like to see her win. She�s the same old shit. I�d like to see me win," said Roseanne Barr, who ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2012. Roseanne isn't impressed with the idea of Hillary Clinton as a woman President:

"No, not at all. I think that a party that was woman-friendly would be revolutionary, and that party could be headed by a male or female. It�s what the party itself stands for that matters. She is standing as a Democrat so she�s a Democrat, and I don�t see much difference between them and the Republicans. They both get paid by the same guys. They do the same thing, they want the same stuff, more business.... I would rather see the first intelligent, honest American president. I don�t care what�s in their shorts. I don�t care what it looks like down there at all."

I'm blogging this because Roseanne is saying something that isn't heard too much anymore: Democrats and Republicans aren't different enough to get excited about. I remember back in 2000, when Ralph Nader was a strong third-party candidate and lefties scoffed at the option of voting for the Democrat, as if Al Gore were significantly different from George W. Bush. It was a popular joke to say "Gush and Bore."

Something changed in our political culture. Those who, in the past, would have been straightforward lefties with an aversion to mainstream Democrats have bonded with Democrats and get passionate in support of them, as if the difference between Democrats and Republicans is profoundly important. To me, it's quite weird. I mean, I don't look to Roseanne Barr for lucid analysis, but her serio-comic riff reminded me of how much the Democratic Party jams the left-wing brain waves of America.

"In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life."

"In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South � from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. � hundreds of thousands more are missing. They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million... For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity."

From a NYT piece called "1.5 Million Missing Black Men."

Maureen Dowd says Hillary Clinton "can�t figure out how to campaign as a woman."

That's a statement that is sexist IF the assumed proposition is true: that Hillary Clinton is trying to "campaign as a woman."

So, does Dowd establish the necessary proposition? Dowd points to Hillary's 2008 campaign and asserts that "Hillary scrubbed out the femininity, vulnerability and heart" because: 1. Mark Penn (her chief strategist) had written that voters look to the President as "the 'father' of the country," not a "first mama," and 2. Bill Clinton�s post-9/11 advice to all Democrats was that it works better to be "strong and wrong than... weak and right." Consequently, Hillary was too pro-war on Iraq, or, as Dowd puts it: Hillary "act[ed] like a masculine woman defending the Iraq invasion" and lost out to the "feminized man" who denounced it.

Yes, that's right: Dowd calls Obama a feminized man and equates resistance to war to femininity. So far, Dowd is looking utterly and confidently sexist.

After losing Iowa and watching New Hampshire slip away to the tyro, Barack Obama, Hillary cracked. She misted up, talking to a group of voters in New Hampshire when a woman asked her how she kept going, while staying �upbeat and so wonderful.�

... [I]t was a triumph because she seemed real. As The Washington Post�s Dan Balz wrote in his campaign book, it �let a glimmer of her humanity peek through.�

Hillary always overcorrects. Now she has zagged too far in the opposite direction, presenting herself as a sweet, docile granny in a Scooby van....

[I]sn�t there a more authentic way for Hillary to campaign as a woman � something between an overdose of testosterone and an overdose of estrogen, something between Macho Man and Humble Granny?...

Hillary is a woman, so why talk about what it means to campaign "as a woman"? Hillary is a specific person. We all know her very well. If she's dialing weakness and strength up and down for political reasons and we can see it, she seems dishonest and devious. Dowd's word "authentic" hits that problem. To equate weakness and strength to femininity and masculinity is sexist stereotyping.

Dowd doesn't take responsibility for her sexism. In fact, she ends the column by projecting that sexism onto Republicans. Hillary's "Republican rivals...  are coming after her with every condescending, misogynist, distorted thing they�ve got." I predict that the GOP candidates will go out of their way to seem gender-neutral and to avoid giving Hillary and her supporters material they can use to do more War-on-Women politics. It's Dowd who's plying misogyny right now, using stereotypes like "granny" and the masculinized woman.

Hillary's real problem is inauthenticity. Dowd's saw that and admitted it as she rambled along the gender track, where she needed to be to get where she wanted to go: Those Republicans are terrible.

"These guys are ready to do whatever they can" to get Hillary!

Email, yesterday, from the Democratic Party. Guys are ganging up on Hillary. They'll do whatever they can, those meanies. I'm filing this under "gender politics," but it's rather weak gender politics, deniable gender politics.

It's not like it says "These guys are ready to do whatever they can to make sure that a woman isn't the 45th President"... but "These guys are ready to do whatever they can" is... well... for the sensitive... trigger-warning-worthy....



That reminds me... I just read the Playboy interview with Bill Maher, wherein he was asked "Who�s your money on for the White House race?" And he said:

I�d say Scott Walker will be the nominee for the Republicans. Jeb Bush is building momentum, but he�s attached at the hip to Common Core, which the Tea Party despises. True, he�s not the doofus his brother was, but in today�s Republican Party, that�s actually a huge minus. Then there�s Chris Christie. His numbers with Republican primary voters are horrible, close to Sarah Palin level, though if you like small government, he�s the guy for you, because soon half his administration will be in jail. But Walker? He�s a folk hero with the people from the Tea lagoon and with the establishment wing. His father was an evangelical preacher�a huge plus with the snake handlers and flat-Earthers who make up the base. And he won three times, including a recall, in a blue state, and he faced down public unions. The one problem is he didn�t graduate from college�oh wait, that�s a plus too, because book learnin� is, you know, suspicious.

Kelley Paul is here to soften Rand Paul for you, and she's got a book of essays about women and the bonds they forge called "True and Constant Friends."

That phrase, "women and the bonds they forge," comes from the New York Times, which has a article about Kelley Paul titled "Kelley Paul Has a Task: To Make Her Husband More Approachable."

�Rand�s personality is kind of �Cut to the point,� � she said... �I think in some ways people respond better to that, but we�ll see. We�ll see what the country wants.�...

�He�s the last person in the world who would ever be dismissive of someone [e.g., Savannah Guthrie] because they�re a woman. I mean the last person,� Mrs. Paul went on, pointing out that his partner in his ophthalmology practice in Kentucky was a woman. �Someone could make the argument that perhaps he should be more poised, he needs to be smoother with this. And that�s legitimate,� she added.

5 quick reactions:

1. Is she making him more approachable, or is she trying to make us want to be tough and appreciate the value of a "cut to the point" style? I would prefer the latter!

2. "Cut to the point" is a good metaphor when talking about a surgeon. Isn't it weird that there are two surgeons running for the GOP nomination? Is the surgeon mentality what we want in a President?

3. Did Kelley Paul really write that book? I see it comes out today. The full title is "True and Constant Friends: Love and Inspiration from Our Grandmothers, Mothers, and Friends." I can't bring myself to add that to my Kindle. From the description at that Amazon link: "Kelley explores the universal themes of hardship, determination, commitment, family, independence, optimism, friendship and love � and illuminates the power of the female bond that enriches all our lives." That exploration of everything takes up all of 144 pages, including the photography, which seems to be of gentle, happy women in sunlight and earthtones:



4. In the NYT's expression "women and the bonds they forge," I detect a deliberate insinuation that the traditional, relationship-oriented female life is, metaphorically, slavery. The oldest meaning of "bond" is "Anything with which one's body or limbs are bound in restraint of personal liberty; a shackle, chain, fetter, manacle," and the word "forge" calls attention to the fabrication of iron devices.

5. The campaign's second video, which features Kelley, really is excellent, but in saying that I'm aware that my standards for video are quite different from the way I think about books. With video, I'm more likely to observe from a distance as if I were someone else watching this and being affected (even though I personally resist the sentimentality and cheeseball expressiveness):

The Rand Paul has a problem with women meme.

I've watched the clip of Paul with Savannah Guthrie on "The Today Show," and it shouldn't be that big of a deal, but it is, and now any time Paul talks over a female, we'll hear about it and this meme will grow. Rand Paul has his response: He's "pretty equal opportunity." He's "been universally short tempered and testy" � toward males and females � and he needs "to get better at holding my tongue and holding my temper."

That's a good answer. Equality is a great concept, and women mostly want equality, and, I think, most men want equality for women. But in real life, rudeness toward women is perceived differently. For one thing, it was traditional for more respect to be shown to women, so we � some of us � notice its absence. And the reaction well, but I'm an asshole to everybody doesn't satisfy those who want a culture of civility.

But even for those of us who don't want special sensitivity to women and who think it will hurt women's opportunities � in journalism, in politics, and elsewhere � we observe how well women are treated with an understanding of what has gone on in the past when women were subordinated and diminished and dissuaded from entering the fray. (I had a high school English teacher who asserted with confidence that women could never work as broadcast journalists because our voices were unsuitable to the medium.) With that background understanding, what is objectively equal treatment may feel unequal.

Of course, it's also true that Rand Paul has his opponents who will use whatever works, and I fully expect them to accuse him of sexism whenever they can now. Once it's a meme, that's how it goes. If he remains "short tempered and testy," whatever hits women will be highlighted as Rand Paul's problem with women. If he manages to take the edge off, because he's trying "to get better," what niceness is aimed at women will be characterized as patronizing and even exclusionary. His opponents will want to box him in. Whatever he does will be wrong.

"It is a form of soft discrimination that I fear might be all too familiar to all too many women..."

"... and often I find it hard to explain to my male friends and colleagues. Occasionally, I even find myself struggling to convince them that it is discrimination, and that it has consequences."

"You are on notice that we will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism."

Said email received by NYT reporter Amy Chozick from a group called "Hillary Clinton Super Volunteers," reported at Reason, which says that the problem is that "many if not most" of the words the group says it's looking out for "have been used to describe non-Clinton candidates � some of them men � as well."

Well, of course! How else could it be code? You've got to have your deniability. You can't get off the hook that easily.

You know, I too am watching, reading, listening for the sexism in seemingly sex-neutral language, and I have been doing that for a lot longer than the 11 years of this blog. For example, women are called "strident." It's like calling black people "shiftless" or "uppity." Well, white people can be "shiftless" and "uppity" too. Yeah, but we at least know that saying "shiftless" or "uppity" about a black person is coded racism. It might get more sophisticated and questionable beyond that. Is it coded racism to call a black person "articulate" or "eloquent"? You might want to argue about that, but straight out denial is lame and shallow.

Similarly, in talking about women, there is language that those who care about the equality of women should notice. And the Hillary Clinton Super Volunteers have listed some words:

2/2 Sexist words, they say, include "polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident..."
� Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015

Now, obviously, these are people pushing Hillary's candidacy, and they're trying to intimidate and manipulate the media. The media can't let this cow them. Mustn't criticize Hillary. We might get called sexist for any criticism we make. That would be incredibly lame, and in fact, I think that if a female President can command that kind of privilege over speech, we'd better not have a female President. I don't want a politician that we're not free to kick around. That's dangerous!

But that's no reason to abandon the project watching for coded sexism in language. That's the reason to look not only for sexism � and racism � but for political interest. We shouldn't take statements at face value. That would be naive. There's a lot going on in language, and we ought to take a closer look at everything... including what Hillary and her people say about other women... words like "narcissistic" and "loony toon."