It’s kind of amazing that Bill Clinton called Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live to thank her for this performance.
Let’s review. Tina Fey said that Bill and Hillary Clinton have exactly the same amount of sex with each other as George and Jeb Bush do. Then she said Hillary Clinton was a bitch. Then she compared Hillary Clinton to an ‘old clam’ nun that sleeps on a cot and beats her students. And Bill Clinton called her to thank her for her comedy routine.
Look…I have a sense of humor and I get the point Tina Fey was trying to make. I just can’t imagine having someone say those things about my wife on national television and feeling compelled to call up the person and thank them.
Just saying…this is not your ordinary couple.
I also take offense to the line ‘bitch is the new black’. I know it ostensibly refers to black as a wardrobe choice, but in the context of a campaign between a woman and a black man, it appears to suggest something else. And whatever its comedic value in that routine, I really hope Clinton supporters stop using it as a rallying cry, as if women are now as suppressed as black people have traditionally been in our society.
There is no bad publicity.
It’s all showbiz.
and
It’s all showbiz.
Bet on it.
AG
and have to deal with being called a bitch as often as one gets called that in this culture to get this skit. An ordinary couple, what is one of those and do you presume to be a member of one of those just because you don’t understand what this skit is about and you wouldn’t have thanked Tina Fey for doing this skit?
I fear in this instance reports of your sense of humor’s existence are greatly exaggerated. Fey did the impossible here: managed to make Hillary seem as cool as Obama. Identifying as a Bitch has been standard among out there neo-feminists for quite a while. She didn’t compare Hillary to the nun, she was talking about bitches who get things done. And she made the first effective counterattack I’ve ever seen to the meme about having a new co-presidency if Hillary’s elected. I can see why Bill would be pleased. BTW, reading racial overtones into the “bitch is the new black” line is way, way, reaching — look who’s injecting race into stuff now.
But thanks for the clip. First time I’ve really laughed at anything on SNL in years.
It’s all too humorous and subtle for words. Bill Clinton obviously understands something about women which I don’t. Good that the whole train wreck goes on while we’re treated to such gems of US ‘culture’.
Nah, you can’t be serious about “bitch is the new black” being even a teeny bit racist. It means you can ‘wear’ it everywhere and it’s appropriate and it looks good and a lot of different accessories go with it. It’s a staple.
I watched the show live last week, and it came off like a very pro-Hillary rallying cry. It won’t appeal to men, but it will to the women she needs to turn out in Texas and Ohio.
Look what Fey did: There probably is a stigma of sorts for women who want to vote for HIllary because she is a woman. But she equated this with following Oprah and voting for Obama. So you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, so just vote your instinct (Hillary). She put them on level ground.
At 2:08, she made the strongest case yet for a co-Presidency. It’s a good thing to have two smart people in the White House, she says. (Bill must have really liked this) The campaign can’t make this argument, but if a supporter on national TV does…
Then Fey calls Hillary a bitch. And then she defuses it completely. She takes the word and renders it meaningless. She says she’s a bitch, Amy Poehler’s bitch. The message being: All women with power our bitches–Let’s embrace our bitchdom. Again they take an eternal negative for the Hillary campaign and turn it into a positive and in an area where the campaign itself can’t make that argument.
The old clam I wouldnt even have noticed if you brought it up. Given how positive the context was, it doesn’t stand out.
Finally, she says bitch is the new black. You have to be very tone deaf to not get this double meaning. They could have chosen a lot of phrases which didn’t refer to the single most identifiable characteristic of her sole opponent. Therefore, I think BooMan is right when he says that it implies, most importantly to white women, that gender trumps race.
So, this segment was of enormous value to the Hillary campaign. Bill should buy lunch for them for the rest of the SNL season.
That’s about how I see it. Yet, I still can’t imagine thanking someone for saying such things about my wife.
Yeah… but could you imagine being Bill Clinton, and your wife being Hillary?
Bitch is entirely a co-opted feminist term in many young female circles – in college 5 years ago, the only people I heard using it were women and gay men. Bitch, please.
This is Bill we’re talking about here. A) He’s trying to get her the presidency so he can make up for cheating on her. B) He’s cheated on her repeatedly.
With Bill, it’s all about Bill. He heard “two smart people in the White House” and ignored the rest. The Clinton campaign is desperate for good coverage and they are making the most out of what they can get.
I have to go with Second Nature on this. I have heard “black is the new black”, “gay is the new black”, and it obviously refers to the new cool way to present yourself to the world.
If you aren’t a female, you probably don’t really feel in your soul all the woman bashing that is being directed at Hillary, she is shreiky, she is emasculating, blah blah blah. Every time I hear those nasty attacks it goes right to my gut and makes me sick. The republicans have done a really good job of instilling revulsion in their threatened base just at the sight of her picture.
So even though I support Obama, I don’t think treating Hillary in this way is fair to her or to women in this country, and I am glad that Tina Fey made such a good case, in a humorous way, for taking back the power.
sorry, but whatever Tina Fey meant by it, it is now being used as a rallying cry by Clinton supporters, and I doesn’t mean it is suddenly cool to be a bitch. It means more than that.
Sorry, Booman, we’ll have to disagree. It does mean it is suddenly cool to be a bitch. It means the same thing whether you have a black opponent or don’t. It is about embracing the bitch and not apologizing for being yourself even if being yourself makes others (bitch haters) uncomfortable.
sounds too much like ‘bitch is the new nigger’ to me.
okay… so how does that make you feel?
it makes me feel like Clinton supporters are adopting the strategy of ‘owning’ a perjorative about women in the same way that black youth ‘own’ the term nigger, as an effort to take the steam out of it. And they are straightfowardly suggesting that this trumps Obama’s blackness. It’s cool to elect a bitch…even cooler than electing a black guy.
As a joke, it’s okay. As a rallying cry it’s offensive.
See, Booman, you are the one reading into it that anyone is saying it trumps Obama’s blackness. They are not “straightforwardly suggesting” any such thing. It has nothing to do with Obama at all. You are saying they are “adopting a strategy of owning the word” -maybe there’s no strategy there. Maybe it just spontaneously feels good to be able to say screw you for trying to make me feel less than.
Honestly, so far in the media it has been okay to call Hillary a bitch, just ask McCain.
They can’t just come out about Obama and say, Alert, Alert, Black Guy Threat Level Code has been raised to Orange: Elevated. So they have to attack him using lies about being a scary muslim. These lies are easy to dispute, and Obama has been doing a good job.
How can Hillary dispute the media bias that is saying it is inherently scary to think about a bitch being in power? She can’t, really. But other women can, and there is only a certain tone they can use to not sound like they are whining.
You’re only focusing on one of the meanings here when there are two.
I understand the embrace of “bitch”. That’s half of the statement.
The other half is the “new black” part. Let’s talk about that part.
A fashion reference? Sure. Is it also consipicuous because she is running against a black man, and when the tone of the skit was feminist (nothing wrong with that by itself) and when there have been feminists which have argued that gender is a greater barrier than race–even during this very campaign?
Given the context, there is a second and somewhat pernicious meaning. You may not have picked up on that, but many have.
you can get your t-shirt here.
I agree. It’s been the worst part of this campaign.
I thought it was effective when Tina said “bitch is the new black”. Over at dKos I even posted that maybe Hillary would put out bumper stickers.
Women need to take control of the term because it’s still used too much by men who insist that we are all equal. But they still use that anti-woman code word that is the little wink-wink between themselves.
OK. So I’m not a woman and I don’t have a sense of humor. Lord Jesus–if I didn’t already realize I’m black before I’m a woman, then I certainly have been whacked with the clue stick now.
I didn’t find “bitch is the new black” as anything other than “I’m so oppressed–must be since we’ll consider the Black guy over Hillary.” I felt the same way I did after I read Steinam’s garbage. I didn’t find it funny; I found it offensive.
But I’ve stipulated I don’t have a sense of humor.
Look, someone PLEASE tell me how someone who is First Lady, moves Nita Lowey out of the way to be Senator in a state she didn’t live in, and runs for president as the de facto incumbent with the sense of entitlement she thinks that entails, is somehow flippin’ OPPRESSED??? How is the DLC champion and standard bearer–with policies that positively SCREW women who go to work every day–suddenly the feminist standard bearer?
I really don’t like the “who’s more oppressed” game but you know, my “sisters” shouldn’t piss on my back and tell me it’s rain.
That just means I’m even doubly oppressed. Or like most feminism does this exclude black women too?
Exactly. I have no love for the way Hillary has run her campaign and will not vote for her but she’s pretty much getting doubly crucified by the media for being a Clinton and being a woman and it’s all pretty sickening.
“as if women are now as suppressed as black people have traditionally been in our society.”
What.
Are.
You.
talking.
About?
The rest of the column was OK, but I’m not buying that last line.
so the fact that Sam Alito is on the Supreme Court is now the equivalent of 400 years of slavery/Jim Crow?
That’s fascinating.
Why go there?
I dislike Hillary Clinton, but feel exhilarated that a woman might be president in my lifetime. On this site, when I see words like “hysterical” used to describe her, I wince, but haven’t said anything so far.
Oppression isn’t mutually exclusive. White women do face certain barriers, and depending on who and where they are, those barriers vary. Trying to say that those, on average or in the specific case of Hillary & Barack, are bigger or smaller barriers than those black men face seems pretty useless… Since our goal (I think) is the empowerment and freedom to pursue happiness, for all people.
Arguably, women have held a status as low as slaves for a lot longer than Africans were taken as slaves. I don’t think there’s any question that white women are better off than black people generally today, but how long has that been the case now? Thirty, maybe forty years? Try telling that to my mother, who left college with three degrees in the late sixties and ended up working secretarial jobs. Try telling that to women who live in states where marital rape is still legal, or in the majority of the states, where it’s illegal but never prosecuted. Go into a battered women’s shelter and try telling anyone there that they’re doing better than the black guy working as a school janitor. Tell it to the fourteen-year-old impregnated by her own father who can’t get an abortion — and who, at least in California, will be encouraged by the state to “reconcile” with her father if it ever gets as far as a court of law.
If you’re a white, middle to upper-middle class woman from a decent liberal family in a major urban center, yeah, sure, things are pretty good for you. Even then, you are making less than all your male peers.
I’m not sure 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow really matter that much in the context of who is being oppressed now and to what degree. Black folks are oppressed today in any number of ways, but slavery isn’t one of them. If you want to drag slavery into it, the bulk of people who are slaves right now are women in sweatshops and in forced prostitution in brothels.
I’m not sure how any of this matters with respect to the well-to-do folks running for the Democratic nomination, but the notion that things are all that good for women in today’s America won’t survive serious consideration. Nor will the curious, implicit argument that we have to somehow triage oppression through some kind of historical oppression points. How about we stop getting distracted by that sort of pointless bean counting and just tackle the problem of building an egalitarian society — something liberals have been promising for a good four centuries now without managing to produce one.
Just putting this out there, to augment eodell’s point: most women I know have been raped. Many of them are white, and most are well-educated and reasonably affluent.
That’s apples to the oranges of being mistreated in smaller but still horrible ways every day, but I’m just saying. Let’s not forget that.
I can only speak personally from a white womans perspective. We continue to walk through minefields of sexism every single day in small and large ways.
A good example might be the time I went to a family reunion-not mine-my sisters husbands family. There were probably about a hundred people roaming around chatting. One of the younger men who everyone considers the ‘salt of the earth’ bellowed out to his wife, ‘Get me a beer, Bitch’..everyone laughed and thought oh that guy, isn’t he funny. I’d bet that if he’d hollered out ‘Get me a beer, Nigger’ no one would have laughed.
This incident happened several years ago and it’s one I just can’t get out of my head, even though he apparently apologized to his wife. He’s also homophobic and uses gay slurs constantly so I can imagine how his kids are going to be when they grow up. And everyone continues to believe he’s just the bestest guy with a heart as big as the outdoors..whatever.
A funny bitch comment I just read over at a WaPo blog:
Since it’s now so fashionable to be a bitch and all… thought some here might enjoy it as I did.
Coming to think about it, am I supposed to accept that Tina Fey just decided to make these provocative remarks and that Bill Clinton just happened to see her on television or was told about what she was saying and then suddenly, on the spur of the moment, spontaneously, decided to call her to chuckle and chortle about ‘bitch’? And as far as having ‘two smart people in the White House’ is concerned, Michele and Barack Obama are every bit as smart as the Clintons. In fact, why are we supposed to accept that the Clintons are as exceptional as they’re cracked up to be? They’re not. Right, they’re far from stupid.
Wow. I’ve found my quote of the week:
Lighten up, dude. It’s just a comedy show.
You’re sounding like a purity troll.