Opinion

HILLARY & KATIE

Little more than a year ago, in what was widely heralded as a new postfeminist era, an epic series of triumphant milestones for American women seemed as inevitable as Sen. Hillary Clinton‘s claim to the Democratic presidential nomination. She would become the first female major-party standard-bearer, and Katie Couric, who had just won the plum job at CBS Evening News, would preside over the campaign coverage as the first solo female anchor in TV history.

Postfeminist my eyeball. With Sen. Barack Obama poised to seize the Democratic nomination and Couric’s ratings so low that her program is practically on life-support, all that’s left to settle are the departure dates for two of America’s most prominent women.

The mostly male punditocracy is deconstructing the twin debacles with unseemly glee, and both Couric and Clinton have been widely excoriated for the misjudgments that contributed to their front-page flame-outs. But there’s plenty of blame to go around, much of which belongs to the male advisors whose catastrophic advice helped steer both women to defeat. The results provide a painful measure of how far we haven’t come as a society ostensibly committed to equality. These days we believe in equal treatment for everyone, it seems, except women.

At CBS, Couric was the $60 million talent, but the suits who run the network were the geniuses who decided that one of the toughest interviewers in television should be reduced to a nauseating female caricature whose main contribution to her new role was girlish fatuousness, despite the excruciatingly obvious fact that the primary job requirement was gravitas.

When the ousted Dan Rather complained that his former broadcast had been “dumbed down and tarted up,” he wasn’t wrong, but nobody ever instructed him to insert cutesy comments about his kids between devastating news segments on the Iraq War, let alone to flash his shapely legs and a titillating glimpse of thigh for the cameras. America remains blessedly unfamiliar with the sight of Rather’s hairy pins – one shudders to think what they’d look like in Manolo Blahniks – but Couric’s denuded gams were accorded such prominence that the male honchos masterminding her show seemed to believe that sexy legs in stilettoes were all that viewers cared about.

Over in the political arena, where the salaries are lower but the stakes are considerably higher, it usually takes some truly deranged self-destructiveness for male politicians to focus the nation’s attention on their sex organs; recent examples include Sen. Larry Craig trying to socialize in a bathroom stall with his pants down, and Eliot Spitzer, New York’s newly deposed governor, on a magazine cover with a red circle around his groin and an arrow connecting it to the label: “Brain.”

But all it takes to rivet attention on the reproductive organs of female politicians is the biological accident of gender. During this campaign, Sen. Clinton had to endure such breathtakingly malevolent excrescences of misogynist popular culture as the South Park episode about terrorists secreting a bomb in her vagina and the marketing of an HRC nutcracker with a metal spike between its legs.

Lest anyone forget the proper role of women, there were helpful reminders from morons like the heckler shouting “Iron my shirts!” during a Clinton campaign appearance. No white males have yet been recorded yelling “Shine my shoes!” at an Obama event, but of course racism is offensive, whereas we’re supposed to laugh off even the most virulent sexism.

Such toxic assumptions reached some kind of historic apotheosis with Rush Limbaugh’s heated argument that Sen. Clinton shouldn’t be president because America couldn’t endure the awful sight of a woman aging in the White House. The radio ranter was apparently untroubled by the prospect of an already-wizened Sen. John McCain becoming the oldest president in US history, but god forbid the voters should be forced to watch a female executive whose primary qualifications no longer include the nubile appeal that facilitates ready sexual objectification. Limbaugh didn’t mention Margaret Thatcher, who managed to age in office without causing mass hysteria among the British populace – but the Brits are clearly made of sterner stuff than we squeamish Americans are.

Although it’s tempting to blame men for everything, women are often the most lethal enforcers when it comes to vicious double standards. Who can forget Nora Ephron annihilating Couric’s election-night performance in 2006 with the verdict that nothing mattered except her appearance?

“I don’t mean to be sexist about Katie Couric . . . But it’s impossible for me to make any sort of evaluation at all about her. Because I can’t believe how bad her makeup is. Tonight I can see she’s wearing too much eyeliner and too much rouge. It’s so distracting that it’s not even my fault that I see it,” whined Ephron, one of the most successful women of her generation, in The Huffington Post. Oh, really? Whose fault was it that Ephron chose makeup as the most important thing to write about?

In the annals of TV commentary, I guess I missed the reviews where critics complained that they couldn’t concentrate on what Mike Wallace said on “60 Minutes” because they were too distracted by his burnt-orange spray-on tan (even though the prevalence of such lurid cosmetic enhancement spawned a CBS office joke that every male geezer on the show wore more makeup than correspondent Christiane Amanpour did).

Although Wallace made his reputation with interviews whose aggressiveness approached that of a firing squad, Ephron also joined the chorus of outrage when Couric conducted a challenging interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards, which caused such a furor you’d think Couric had subjected them to waterboarding. Men practically have to commit homicide before they’re accused of being too aggressive, but with a woman, a couple of penetrating follow-up questions is enough to send everyone into a frenzy of indignation. Of course, Sen. Clinton didn’t escape the sisterhood unscathed; when she wore a top that revealed the shocking fact that she has – gasp! – breasts, Robin Givhan, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer, immediately appointed herself the neighborhood scold.

“To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation,” she lectured sternly, fanning herself like a Victorian dowager in dire need of smelling salts. Such an insult churned up “the same kind of discomfort” as a man exposing himself, Givhan added. “But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!”

With friends like these, famous women scarcely need enemies. But there are more than enough of both to get the job done. And so the glass ceiling cracks a couple more well-coiffed heads, as effortlessly as if they were eggs.

Feminism is about the political, social and economic equality of the sexes. If you believe that’s been accomplished, I want some of whatever high-powered mood elevator you’re on. It’s too early to know whether the failure of Clinton’s campaign and Couric’s anchordom will actually set back women’s progress, although my guess is that no major television network will rush to install a new female anchor any time soon.

For now, anyway, the women themselves will shoulder most of the responsibility for having bungled their grab at the brass ring. Yes, Clinton and Couric made mistakes, but America only forgives such human failings in male icons.

Women have to be perfect – and as long as we keep enforcing a standard like that, it’s going to be a long time before we truly reach the highest levels of success.

Leslie Bennetts is the author of “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?” (Voice, 2007).