Trivalisation

TODAY
Hillary has work cut out for her
Clinton faces an uphill battle for more respect in a male-centric political arena
05:55 AM Aug 14, 2009
by Judith Warner

THIS was supposed to be the trip that would show how Mrs Hillary Clinton would make good on her pledge to make women's issues "central" to United States foreign policy, not "adjunct or auxiliary".

There could have been no more dramatic setting: Overruling security fears, she travelled to eastern Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped over the past decade.
She met with one woman who was gang-raped while eight months pregnant, and she heard of another who had been sexually assaulted with a rifle.

She spoke of "evil in its basest form". She promised US$17 million ($25 million) to fight sexual violence.

And back home, all anyone could talk about was Bill. Had he upstaged her with his trip to North Korea? Had he dogged her all the way to Kinshasa, where a university student, wondering about "Mr Clinton's" views, set her off, and set the world cluck-clucking, once again?

As she circles the globe in coming years, making the case for women's empowerment, Mrs Clinton really has her work cut out for her. And it is not just because the situation of women around the world is so dire - maternal mortality, sex trafficking, domestic abuse, malnourishment, lack of education and medical care.

And it isn't just that her historic mandate to equally empower women is so vague and seemingly overwhelming.

It is also because the tide of trivialisation that washes over all things "Hillary" is powerful. That tide threatens to drown out anything of substance Mrs Clinton might attempt for a population whose problems have long been obscured in the androcentric world of diplomacy. And that is a huge pity.

This could be a moment for America to redeem itself as far as the world's women are concerned.

Our recent track record is pretty dim. We pulled our financing from the United Nations Population Fund and imposed a global gag rule barring women's health organisations that talked about abortion from receiving US funds.

We never ratified the basic Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Our lack of paid maternity leave made us something of a world joke.

But now things just might change. In the Senate, Ms Barbara Boxer is leading a subcommittee charged with global women's issues; a Bill to combat child marriage is moving through Congress.
And yet, a peculiarly gendered form of trivialising scorn still tags our Secretary of State. Just two weeks ago, the Washington Post had to remove from its website an ostensibly humorous video sketch that juxtaposed a picture of Mrs Clinton's face with a bottle of derogatorily named beer.
This sort of thing bodes badly for the country's ability to treat her with appropriate respect.

"We have our own work to do at home," Ms Melanne Verveer, the State Department's new ambassador at large for global women's issues told me. "We trivialise the importance too often of these issues: the 'women's issue' … What we have to do is realise these are the issues; if we want societies to prosper and if we want our own security, we have to raise the status of women."

Women's issues are being framed by this administration in terms of realpolitik: US security depends on women's empowerment. Global economic growth depends on women's participation.
Women's empowerment won't be delivered at the end of a gun or through economic sanctions. This is messy stuff; some of our most sensitive allies have horrific records on women's rights.
Programmes that show success tend to be slow-moving and incremental. Can all this complexity attract, much less sustain, the attention of the public? Maybe, if we stop viewing everything Mrs Clinton does as entertainment.
THE NEW YORK TIMES