Ep 387 – Judgment of Gender with Allison Butler

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese.

You know, we’ve done an incredible amount of work over the last several years detaching ourselves from identity politics, detaching ourselves from what we feel like is the neoliberal narrative that has splintered the working class and has created factions within the left to divide and conquer, to allow oligarchy to

do exactly what it has been doing.

But I want to tell you, there’s some stuff that we have to talk about as an intersectional movement, as leftist, as someone who sees men and women equal and wants to see us eradicate, you know, patriarchy and build a classless dictatorship of the proletariat, so to speak. You know, I felt like it was necessary to cover some issues of gender.

And we’re not going to go deeply into this in terms of, like, great theory and whatever. We’re going to use some pop culture. We’re going to use some figures that you would be shocked to hear us discussing on this program.

But it’s because they serve as great fodder and they are perfect examples of the type of distractions that are used in centering and framing conversations, in particular, as it directly focuses on women.

So the book we’re going to be discussing today is the Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture by my guest, Allison Butler. And let me just introduce Allison momentarily.

Allison is a senior lecturer, associate chair, and the director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She serves as vice president on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation.

She’s the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy, and she is the co-author of multiple practical resources for media literacy education. And again, she is indeed the author of the book the Judgment of Gender. With that, Allison, welcome to the show.

Allison Butler:
00:02:55

Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Big fan.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:59

Thank you. That means the world to me. And you know, we talked about this a little before we got into the live recording here.

I mean, some of the characters in this book that you cover, I want to center this. I want to make sure people understand. We’re going to talk about Hillary Clinton. We’re gonna talking about Kamala Harris.

We’re going to talk about people that you’re going to roll your eyes at and look one.

But they’re important to understand because it’s not so much that they were good, because, let’s be fair, “We came, we saw, he died ha ha ha…” is a famous Hillary quote. And if you think about her as just a person in office as opposed to a woman, you would understand how just disgusting that is.

But unfortunately, most of the critique on Hillary Clinton didn’t really stem on the kind of things that we just mentioned. They were on pantsuits, they were on her choice of hair bands.

They were on all kinds of superficial things that served to distract, maybe, from the more important things, like what she did in Libya with Qaddafi or other things like that. So this book that we’re going to be discussing today is an eye opener, I think, and it needs to be discussed.

So with that, Allison, can you tell us a little bit about your book and what caused you to write this book?

Allison Butler:
00:04:16

Sure. Happy to.

So the The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture, grew out of a book chapter that I was asked to write on a larger edited text about global crackdowns on censorship, global crackdowns on freedom, right? And I was asked to write a chapter about gender. And, oh, man, did I learn a lot from writing that chapter.

It was really, really just fascinating- deep dive into the way our society, our culture, treats and talks about women in pop culture. But a chapter is only so long. A book can only be so long.

An edited chapter has a lot of texts. So I left so much stuff on, as it were, the cutting room floor.

The largest footnote, I think, in the chapter was the number of women that I knew had been left out and the fact that there were probably so many more. So when the opportunity came to write an entire book about this and to be able to work with the Censored Press on it, I jumped as quickly as I could.

I really wanted to expand the story of how within the realm of patriarchy, women are centered and silenced.

And I wanted to use that contradiction and see how I could kind of tease out that contradiction of being both centered and silenced.

So in our current time frame, and certainly throughout history, women have taken up a fair amount of space, taken up a fair amount of space in society, taken up a fair amount of space in our pop culture. And yet how is that space constructed?

Who is telling those stories? What happens maybe when women are invited to tell their own stories, or what happens when their stories are told about them?

And for so many of us as media audiences, whether we want to be audiences to a particular person or a particular text or not, once it’s kind of in the public sphere, it’s kind of in our zeitgeist;

How do we then understand these human beings when we look at both, you know, famous women as well as private women who are thrust into fame by some sort of incident? And I’m happy to specify further on any of that, is we get a story told about them. That’s what we do as humans, right? We tell stories.

And when we tell a story, what’s that narrative? How is that story being told?

So that seeming contradiction of women being both centered and silenced is what role are women playing and how are their stories being told about them and potentially by them? And so I really wanted to.

I was just so excited to jump at the opportunity to both look at greater depth into those stories and also apply my background, my academic and intellectual background of critical media literacy to work on the analysis of how women are presented.

Steve Grumbine:
00:07:09

Fantastic.

Listen, you know, I hear what you’re saying, and I think it’s important to understand that we’re all, you know, if we’re not in the front row, we’re in the back row, as it were. I mean, if we’re not setting the agenda, we’re part of someone else’s agenda.

And, you know, as you’re talking about this, it sounds like I heard agenda in there, and I could be wrong. But, you know, you argue, like you just said, that women are simultaneously centered and silenced. Most people hear those concepts as opposites.

But what does the paradox mean?

Allison Butler:
00:07:40

Well, the paradox is, I think when we think about. So I think there’s a few different ways to think about this, right?

When we think about a lot of our current media, so much of our current media are visual. Here we are in a podcast, so we’re working on audio. But we do live in a largely visual media.

If we think about our social media, television, streaming films, etc, right? Even the opportunity, it’s… this is not novel anymore, of course, but when we think about the development of, like, music videos, right?

The opportunity to watch music, so we have, through our visual media, the opportunity to see or not see, right? To see or not see a lot of different representations.

And so we might be seeing more women in our legacy media, in our indie media, in our media of information and our media of entertainment. But how are those stories told, right? And then part of the work of critical media literacy, too, is the idea that the absence of data is data.

So when we’re looking at or listening to or reading stories, whose stories are being told, but also who’s being left out, right? What stories are aren’t we getting? What aren’t we invited to pay attention to? Sometimes to be looking for what’s not there.

It can be pretty tricky, right? There’s no doubt about it. But to look for what’s not there might reveal to us what the priorities of those who do greenlight our media, right?

One of the big things with critical media literacy, the reason why we use the word critical, is that we’re doing a direct interrogation of power. We’re looking at the behind the scenes, behind the curtain. So much of us spend so much time with our media content, and that’s to be expected, right?

That’s to be understood.

But we wouldn’t be able to spend any time with that content if it weren’t for the machines behind it, the humans and the corporations, and the increased concentration and conglomeration of those corporations that say yes or no, that greenlight projects or say no to projects.

And so part of what we’re also thinking about, when we’re thinking about what stories are being told and what stories are being centered is what stories aren’t being told, what stories are being being put onto the periphery, and how can we start to examine and look more closely at those? And to examine and look more closely at those is to look at power.

So just because we have somebody on screen doesn’t necessarily, and I’m using screen really broadly here, doesn’t necessarily mean that is a person with a great deal of power. So how do we understand how that body got to that screen, got to that text, got that story told?

And then our job is to kind of dig around behind the scenes, to look behind the curtain and see the power that made those decisions.

Steve Grumbine:
00:10:31

You know, I’m very fascinated with the role of institutions in general, and we bring this up as often as possible because we like to tie threads between all of our podcasts, even when they seem dissimilar, they’re not. They’re all part of a continuum. And one of the keys with the institutional power dynamics are where does that power come from?

And [Italian anti-fascist Antonio] Gramsci is quickly becoming one of my heroes in terms of, you know, centering where power comes from and what the narratives are and the distractions they create and why and what are the norms they’re trying to generate. And perhaps even what are some of the contradictions they’re trying to foster to keep us divided?

Because, you know, people divided are always going to fall. [Absolutely]

I mean, it’s impossible to attack the leviathan of oligarchy and capital and all the rest of it with a working class so steeply divided by identity-based features. And these are not accidental. I mean, there is a… I think that’s what the hard part for me was, is that I always just thought it was an accident.

I always just thought, you know, maybe it’s just they’re just older or whatever, maybe they just don’t know better. Maybe, you know, whatever. I’m older now and I’m looking at this and I’m saying to myself, “Wait a minute, hold on. There is a network of what, six?

I think it’s like six rich dudes that own all the media in the world pretty much. And they’re not operating on a playing field that’s goal is to inform.” I feel like it’s disinformation nation to use the Mickey Huff, we just interviewed him. I mean, this is to me a form of distraction.

And that was what, when me and you were talking offline, I think that’s what really jumped out to me because, you know, let me just say it like clearly, I cannot stand Hillary Clinton and I cannot stand Kamala Harris. And it’s not because of their gender and it’s certainly not because of the way they dress.

It’s purely because of who I feel they serve and what I feel like their message is when I look at capital and I look at Hillary Clinton’s approach to things.

But as much as I can’t stand them personally, it does make my skin crawl when I hear people focusing away from their very real policy deficit and their very real ideological garbage, I think that comes out oftentimes by focusing on the way they dress and the way they look and so forth.

Can you talk a little bit about this concept of distraction and maybe what the intent and purpose of it is?

Allison Butler:
00:13:15

Sure, sure. So, okay, so let’s, let’s see if I can bring in Gramsci, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, gender and institution.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:24

You see how I roll there? Check that out.

Allison Butler:
00:13:26

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down with Gramsci. I, you know, I read him voraciously in grad school, but man, that was a long time ago.

But so here’s the thing with anybody in the public sphere, but for the purposes of this book, I’m focusing on women, right? We’re talking about gender. And I’m focusing on women. And yet I do think that this extends.

But for now, we’ll kind of keep focused on sort of this one space.

When we look at somebody like Hillary Clinton or when we look at somebody like Kamala Harris, we are invited to see a certain slice of who they are, right? And I would go so far as to say I’m not gonna say how I feel about them as individuals. Cause actually don’t know them as individuals, right?

I feel like everything I’ve been invited to know about any figure in politics, any public figure, is what has most likely been tested to the Nth degree. Focus grouped, PR practiced, rehearsed over and over again.

I feel like I’m getting a public presentation, not who they are necessarily as a person that I might be able to sit down and, I don’t know, talk about a book with or, you know, talk about the weather even, right? I feel like I’m getting somebody who is, for the most part, showing up in a scripted way, right?

But here’s what’s part of the script that I think like a Kamala Harris and a Hillary Clinton, and we can go, you know, to the political right as well, like Nikki Haley, which I’ll circle back to in just a moment, is this idea of what these folks do or with the critiques and the commentary and the treatment that they get, has so much to do with their gender.

So as we were, like, talking offline before this, I said that, you know, I’m never going to be one to show up at a protest with a “If Kamala Harris were president, we’d all be having brunch right now” sign. Believe me, I have been to as many of the protests as I possibly have been able to attend since the start of this administration.

I live in a very small town in western Massachusetts.

I greatly appreciate when there are folks like at our one, you know, traffic roundabout, when there are people there, love honking my horn, going by that. Like, I’ll participate in any way, shape, or form, but I’m not going to carry that sign.

And part of the reason why I’m not going to carry that sign is my work in critical media literacy is we interrogate power, right? We interrogate who is in power.

Which means if Kamala Harris were in office, we’d absolutely be interrogating the decisions that she’s making, the choices that she would be making, the policies that she would be doing.

What we got instead was critiques of her voice, critiques of her clothing, critiques of the fact that she was too formal by always wearing a suit or she wasn’t, she wasn’t relaxed enough, she ironed her jeans. Like, these things have nothing to do with her policies or her proposed policies.

And they might distract us for a while from things thinking about those proposed policies. When we have Hillary Clinton, we have certainly a much longer timeline, right?

When she is the first lady of Arkansas, she is blamed for any one of Bill Clinton’s failed campaigns. And that blame was attached to the fact that she didn’t change her name.

Like when they were first married, she didn’t change her name from Rodham to Clinton. That was a mark against him. That was some sort of downfall, right? That she wore these headbands were just so not actually fashion forward.

When she becomes more in the public sphere in her own right, as a senator, as Secretary of State, as somebody running for the office of the presidency, she’s critiqued for like not looking good in a suit and she shouldn’t be wearing those kind of suits. To me, that has nothing to do with policy, but it serves as a way of distracting and to your other point, it serves as a way of dividing.

Here’s where I’m going to go out on a limb and defend Nikki Haley for a brief moment in time. And I really hope your audience and you know that I’m not defending her policies.

In fact, I think her policies or her proposed policies were abhorrent. I was not a fan in any way, shape or form of her treatment of women, particularly reproductive autonomy.

But in February of ’23, when she announced that she was going to run for president on CNN, Don Lemon says makes this kind of quippy little comment about how, “Oh, well, she’s past her prime,” which is a kind of a bad menopause joke. I don’t know if there are good menopause jokes, but certainly not from coming from Don Lemon, right?

And my reaction to that was this woman will never have my vote for policy reasons, but I would never vote against her because she’s going through or has been through menopause. That is a gender-based insult, right?

And so what I’m trying to do is to, to what you were saying a little bit ago in of like, this kind can serve to divide us is once we start getting those narratives, here’s a woman who’s past her prime, here’s a woman whose headband is problematic, here’s a woman who irons her jeans. We are then divided amongst ourselves and we are then separated or being encouraged to be separated.

I trust that your audience are all critical thinkers and they are going to know better than this. But we are encouraged to be separated from what might actually be happening.

If we’re focusing on a headband, if we’re focusing on a style of suit, if we’re focusing on the age of a woman, when we, like, we’re not focusing on policy, we’re not focusing on action, we’re not focusing on human, like, the way we treat human beings to be alive or not, right? And so let’s see if I can bring this back to Gramsci.

One thing, certainly with Gramsci, is the idea that, I mean, like, if those in power can convince those who they deem powerless or not worthy of power, that this is the way it should be and this is the treatment that is deserved and this is the, quote “normal or the common sense,” then you can maintain that authoritarian power, that dictatorial power for time immemorial, forever, right? The people have to take the moment, the time to ask the question.

They have to take some degree of discomfort and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t know, this is how it is. But this doesn’t necessarily mean this is how it ought to be.”

And for my purposes within this book, I was looking at that with gender, didn’t bring Gramsci in, right? This is a book more for a general audience, so I didn’t bring in Gramsci. But obviously it’s an incredibly valuable conversation to have, right?

Because what Gramsci teaches us is that we ourselves have to think about how what might make us uncomfortable as individuals could also be connected to our community or where we’re living or that differentiation of power. And how do we then start the process of pushing back?

And maybe for a tiny moment, maybe for a teeny introduction, we push back by going, “Wait a minute, why are they commenting on her age? Wait a minute, why are they commenting on her hair? Why are they commenting on her suits? Shouldn’t we be talking about something else?”

And if that’s just the opening, if that’s the little hook, the tiny crack letting in a little bit of light, then maybe that’s how we begin the conversation that invites us to start making much more substantive change.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:19

Very, very well stated. I appreciate that immensely.

I want to zero in on someone that has been part of my, you know, when I was much younger and I remember watching the hearings on television, the Clarence Thomas, you know, the trial, I call it a trial, but you know, when they were trying to nominate him, God, what a fiasco, right? But when they were going through this, this is I think maybe the most important one of the bunch.

I mean, I’m sure there’s a million, nobody’s, you know, not important in this, but in this case, I think this is one that everybody can kind of see clearly. You had Anita Hill, who really put her career and her life on the line to bring forward.

I mean, I don’t want to get graphic, but there was so many disgusting things that she was subjected to, and it distracted from the fact that Clarence Thomas was a horrible, horrible person and should never have have been a Supreme Court justice whatsoever. But during this time, I remember joltin’ Joe Biden grilling Anita Hill. Like, he. I was like, wait a minute, Reagan. I mean. I mean, Joe.

I mean, Joe Biden, you know, I mean, he. He. It was like. I fully expected “Welfare Queen” to come out of his mouth next, you know? You know what I mean? Like, it was just.

He was very, very much in line with what I would have seen as right wing. But really, it wasn’t just right wing. It was really patriarchy. I mean, it was. Well, I also believe, and this is just.

I believe that the handlers of these people told them who to do. They’re the tip of the iceberg we only see. There’s a whole bunch of people behind them formulating what they’re to do.

These are not autonomous individuals. They are carrying the water for someone. So this wasn’t isolated. He was brought in to do something, and what he did was, in my opinion, unforgivable.

And yet he was forgiven. Can you talk about the Anita Hill story?

Allison Butler:
00:23:29

Sure.

So Anita Hill is, at the time, she had worked for Clarence Thomas in two separate offices, and once he got nominated for the Supreme Court, as part of all the background checks that happen, she was asked to provide a kind of a factual reference of her time working for him. She was told that that would be confidential, and it turns out it wasn’t, right?

So she did talk about her sexual assault, her alleged claims of sexual assault, or I should say, maybe I should be more precise, her claims of alleged sexual assault. And again, she was told that this was going to be a private conversation. It wasn’t. It got leaked.

And instantaneously, she was accused of trying to bring down this towering figure in the legal circle, which was a great way of distracting from the fact that he was absolutely not a towering figure in legal circles. He was kind of a minimal player.

But if we kind of zoom out for a quick moment when we’re looking at the time that this is happening, the idea of nominating a conservative black man to the Supreme Court would have been an incredible feather in the cap of the Republican Party to show that they were forward thinking, right?

They weren’t as middle-aged, middle-class white men as everybody actually thought they were, which of course is, I mean, you look at the pictures and that’s exactly what it was, right?

But the instantaneous accusation of her, of trying to bring down this man, we immediately blame the woman who was answering questions that she was under the confidence of, that they were going to be kept confidential, right? And so that brings her to the Supreme Court nomination, then the structure of the nomination, right?

I don’t think that Biden’s vociferous part on that committee was a bug. I think that that was a feature, right? The nature of the hearings was set up, structured to support Clarence Thomas, right?

He was given plausible deniability. He didn’t have to comment on any of the things that she said. He got to speak first.

And at the end, so that she was kind of sandwiched in the middle of this. She was pretty much all by herself.

You know, again, the visuals are incredibly valuable, I think, to look at because you have a Senate committee hearing full of, of middle-aged, white men staring down at a single solitary black woman all by herself at a table. And to look at it any other way than predatory is to kind of miss the entire conversation, right? I mean, it was absolutely predatory.

But, the whole hearing was able to kind of slice and dice any sort of thing that we like. How can this black woman be talking against a black man? And so we were able to pit race against race, right?

How can this subordinate speak poorly of her superior? So we’re pitting, you know, hierarchies, hierarchical positions against each other.

And at the same time, there’s this conversation, which hasn’t ended. Like, this conversation absolutely hasn’t ended. Although I will say there are changes to it. At at the same time we have accusations against her.

Well, if it was so bad to work for him, how come you worked for him a second time? If it was so uncomfortable, how come you didn’t say anything earlier?

Even the senators in the hearing were saying, “What’s the big deal about talking about a woman’s breasts?” And it’s like, well, “I don’t know, do we really do that in the office? Like, is that a workplace conversation?” Right?

That’s not exactly something that most of us, I think, think bring up in our offices. And I think the answer to some of those questions were very much.

It took a little while to be able to answer those questions, accusing her, because we actually didn’t have a vocabulary for it. How come you worked for him again? Well, she’s a young woman. She’s fresh out of law school. These are some of her first jobs. She had bills to pay, right?

How many job offers did she have? Maybe she had to work for him again if there weren’t other options, right?

When you’re a young black woman in the 1980s with a law degree, there’s not exactly a lot of jobs.

And people are still very resistant to hiring women of color, to hiring people of color, and more specifically to hire women of color because there’s that perpetual threat that she’s going to get married and get pregnant and then leave, right? As if women hadn’t been working through having children since time began. But that’s, you know, a reason to not hire a woman, right?

So maybe she didn’t have too many options to the answer of the question, how come she didn’t say anything before? There wasn’t actually a really robust vocabulary. What was she to say and to whom? Right? We didn’t have sexual harassment in the workplace as a.

As a kind of dinner table conversation, right? We didn’t have that vocabulary yet.

There were probably generations of women who had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, but it wasn’t considered a legal term. It wasn’t considered something that you could fill out a form with HR to push back on.

There weren’t places to go to say, “Hey, this thing is happening.”

There was instead, like, whisper networks of women saying, watch out for that guy in particular, or don’t be alone in a room with him or try not to be his assistant or, you know, think about also blaming the victim, right? Think about the way that you dress or think about the way that you approach these conversations.

One thing that does happen with Anita Hill is that when we start to get that vocabulary, right? Post Anita Hill, the number of people calling sexual.

First of all, there was the creation of sexual assault hotlines, then the number of people calling them.

The idea that HR, human resources organizations, which admittedly are set up to protect the company, not to protect the individual, but nevertheless in their setup, started to include sexual harassment training, information on sexual assault. So now we did have a codified vocabulary. There were ways to push back. Admittedly, those ways are not 100% successful.

We have not eradicated workplace sexual harassment by any stretch of the imagination. But we certainly have shifted from, well, there’s no there there for any kind of protection to we have a vocabulary. We have places to go.

We have people that we can talk to. We have phone calls that we can make.

I don’t think any of those actually capital letters “SOLVE” the problem of sexual harassment, but they do give people an opportunity to have an outlet, to have a resource, to have a place to go.

And we saw that all largely stemming from not just Anita Hill, although we can certainly look at her, but from the generations of women that had to fight that fight, that had to push back and push back and push back.

So much so that when we see it with Christine Blasey Ford, who’s testifying at the Senate hearing of the nomination hearing of Brett Kavanaugh, and yeah, we get the exact same end result, right? It is absolutely disheartening. We have a highly incompetent man, one of many highly incompetent people on the Supreme Court.

We have definitely a puppet court. There’s no doubt about it.

But what we get a little bit differently with Christine Blasey Ford, same claims of alleged sexual assault, credible claims of sexual assault, evidence and support for sexual assault evidence that claims were actively ignored. What we get much more quickly with Christine Blasey Ford is there’s significantly less punishment of her.

There’s absolutely punishment of her, no doubt about it. But there’s significantly less punishment of her. And the story of defending her happens much more quickly, right?

For Anita Hill, it takes years before we start to revisit that story and say, “Hey, maybe we need to look at this a little bit differently.” For Christine Blasey Ford,  we are starting that conversation right away. And once again, now we do have some small mechanisms in place.

And once again, we see sexual assault hotline calls go up by hundreds of percentage points. We have more calls, we have more people pushing back at HR in their companies.

We have more people saying, “Hey, you cannot treat your women employees this way.” So the pushback, the revisits, the effort at saying this is wrong, that happens a little quicker.

And I’m somebody who, I refuse to be cynical because I feel that cynicism is the way that we stop a conversation, that once we get to cynicism, our conversation ends. I am definitely skeptical.

But what I also want to do is say when we have, as I was saying before, when we have those little moments, when we have those little cracks, let’s keep pushing at those, because that’s how we’re going to make change. Maybe it’s going to be in baby steps. I would personally love it to be overthrown. There’s no doubt about it.

But, if we’ve got the baby steps, then let’s start there. Let’s work with that and let’s work to make change.

Intermission:
00:32:51

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:15

So I’m going to bring up one more person that I think is equally as power… well. they’re all powerful stories. Let’s be fair. They’re all powerful stories, but the Monica Lewinsky story I think is particularly egregious.

I’ve got a lot to say on this one and I just want to get this part out. I used to go to church at McLean Bible in northern Virginia, and I was a Republican at the time, during the Clinton era.

And I was a young man raised in a Reagan household, which if you think about how funny this is, knowing who I am now, it did shape me. I know exactly what it’s like to be a Republican. I know exactly what it’s like to have been on that side of the game.

And I was sitting there in the church pew with my then wife and kids and I go to stand up for the song. I had to grab the book off the thing and I look behind me and there was Kenneth Starr sitting right behind me at the church.

And so I write on my church bulletin to my wife at the time, I was like, hey, look who’s behind us. Anyway, when I went to stand up to sing, I set the paper down on the pew and he read it and saw it and he laughed. He got a big chuckle out of it.

But you know, at that time I didn’t have a problem with Ken Starr. I didn’t know any better. I was like, oh, hey, great man. And so I went to a father-daughter dance and Kenneth Starr was there with his granddaughter.

So I talked to him a little bit, didn’t get a lot of information. He wasn’t probably going to give me the skinny. But nonetheless, I was there with Kenneth Starr right in the middle of all this.

And it was really, it stuck with me. I mean that your chance encounters with these big names and stuff, it’s really big.

But then flash forward as my life arc has changed and I’ve moved so far to the left that I’m no longer in the Overton window. And I look at this situation and I feel such incredible sadness for Monica Lewinsky. She was such a child, such a small, you know, she had no power.

She had people on all sides using her for a variety of reasons. With what we know today about the Monica Lewinsky story, can you kind of break that one down for us as well?

Allison Butler:
00:35:38

Sure. I mean, I think you hit on a really important point, which is that Monica Lewinsky had absolutely no power, right?

She was a 22 year-old intern at the White House who, you know, the proximity to power I’m sure was enticing. She was a woman who at that point maybe hadn’t made the wisest relationship choices. But, you know, who amongst us.

Were we all in our wisest relationship at 22? Were we all making the best choices in partners at that age?

You know, I’m not one to judge necessarily about that, but you’re young, you’re figuring things out. You make some poor choices. Only she made some poor choices with somebody whose absolute differential of power was almost immeasurable, right?

And so Monica Lewinsky is a young woman who is probably taken by the power of it. Sure. And Bill Clinton, I would argue in some ways was just kind of-

This is one of the things I say in the book, was that in many ways he was just kind of like a crappy boyfriend. Like, he would call her a lot and then he wouldn’t. He would say, “We can’t do this anymore.” But then they would.

He would say, “I’m never gonna, you know, like, I can’t leave my wife, but you’re the one that I really like.” Whatever. I mean, who knows? I certainly wasn’t there in all of it.

But when we think about how we kind of talked about the Monica Lewinsky Bill Clinton affair is one. We start with her, right? We name her first. Even though she was the private figure and he was the public figure, we kind of let him off the hook.

There’s no doubt about it. Two, we call it an affair.

And really, if you break it down, at least from what all credible sources have said is they had a lot of phone conversations. They met about 20 times over the course of a couple years. I don’t know if that’s.

I mean, yes, he cheated on his wife, but I think we often think of affair as something much more solid, right? Much more consistent. This was inconsistent at best.

Then we add in, certainly Kenneth Starr, who’s looking to destroy Bill Clinton… starting on a real estate deal gone bad and is trying to find any kind of leverage he can to bring down Bill Clinton. And goodness knows there was a lot of poor personal behavior.

But once again, that poor personal behavior doesn’t necessarily have to do with his politics or his policies or the choices he’s making, which absolutely are worthy of critique, right? Absolutely are worthy of critique.

But what Ken Starr was doing was trying to look for salacious personal ways to bring down Bill Clinton, which is maybe one of the reasons why none of it sort of landed in quite the way that he wanted it to, because for the most part, the American public was willing to give him a pass, which is also, if we look at that in context, kind of the way we as a nation thought about women, which is like, oh, yeah, there he goes again, right? It was this kind of like, oh, shucks quality of like, yeah, he’s got an eye for the ladies, right? Like, we sort of excused that behavior.

We kind of laughed it off in a way.

Maybe not as individuals, but sort of the national conversation was one that’s just sort of, kind of shrugged its shoulders and laughed off his inappropriate behavior, right? What to the public eye, was him cheating on Hillary Clinton, again, what do I know what the agreements in their marriage are?

But part of the reason why I included the story of Monica Lewinsky in the book and tried to focus on it from her position was that we also see the ways in which women harm other women, right?

When we look at everything that happened, it is the way that I describe it in the book and the way that I write through it is that it’s kind of a triangle of harm. Because you have Monica Lewinsky, who puts her trust in a woman named Linda Tripp who worked at the White House and then also at the Pentagon. Linda Tripp was a Republican. She absolutely hated the Clinton administration. She did not like the Clintons as people.

She was not terribly shy about that when she was working in the White House, which was one of the reasons why she got transferred to the Pentagon, because she was a little too vocal in her dislike of them. And Linda Tripp befriends Monica Lewinsky once again, an age, a pretty significant age difference and at least a longevity…

I don’t know about power differential so much, but certainly a longevity difference of Linda Tripp having worked in Washington for a number of years.

And what Linda Tripp starts to do is both encourage the affair a little bit, encourage their meeting, because she’s also gathering dirt and her argument in her own memoir, which was very obviously ghostwritten, like she was written with somebody, right? Very clearly written with another person who ended up finishing the book because Linda Tripp died before finishing the book.

So how much of it was this person’s, through this person’s lens, who knows, right? But it was very clearly shared authorship.

But Linda Tripp says in her memoir that she really started digging into what was happening with Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton in part because she wanted to bring down the Clintons, but she did so at the expense of this young woman, now 23-year old young woman, and she did something illegal, which is that she recorded their phone conversations. And in Maryland, where she lived, it’s two party consent.

And she never got Monica Lewinsky’s consent, but it gave all sorts of good information to Ken Starr. And then the third prong of this triangle is Maureen Dowd, right? Maureen Dowd is an opinion writer for the New York Times.

She, she started off as a political writer for the New York Times, but her writing was seen to be too casual to be the hard cutting politics that the New York Times fancied itself to be. So she was sort of moved to the op-ed pages. In part, she’s a really good writer. I mean, the woman can craft a sentence, right?

There’s no doubt about it. She was known for skewering men and she was known for skewering men largely based on appearance. So Maureen Dowd is quite good at gendered attacks.

She attacks women more than she attacks men. But she does attack men for their gender, not necessarily for their politics, right?

Her biggest, if you look at like her writings on John Kerry, it so much of them had to do with his hair. Once again, not politics, right? Not policy.

But Maureen Dowd’s first op-ed about Monica Lewinsky was, this young woman is going to be destroyed by the press. And then she went ahead and did that. She went ahead and destroyed her.

She wrote op-eds that were sort of done in the voice of Monica Lewinsky, or I guess more precisely in the writing. She sort of pretended to be writing journal, like, diary entries of Monica Lewinsky’s. She called her fat, she called her unpopular.

She said she wasn’t good enough to get the guy. What on earth are you doing? Right?

So, so women can also harm women, like within a patriarchal society, because patriarchy is the oxygen we all breathe. It’s the water that we all swim in, right? And so Maureen Dowd destroys Monica Lewinsky via the New York Times, a national newspaper.

There’s nobody that is unfamiliar with what the New York Times is. Maybe you’re not a reader of it, maybe you’re opposed to it, maybe you’re a fan, whatever.

But, we know, like collectively across the nation, we know, the New York Times, right? So she uses this huge platform to destroy this young woman, and in so doing, she wins the Pulitzer Prize for her fresh take. There is no fresh take.

This is destroying a human being, right?

So we see when we look at this intersection of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton from the lens of 2026, 2025, whatever it is, we can start to see the larger context of what it means, you know, from the small context to the large context, right?

What does it mean for two people to engage in a pretty poor choice in relationship, to expand out a little bit the ways in which one person in particular carries all the blame, carries the weight of all of that blame, how that person in particular is blamed on her physical body, on her choice making, on her intelligence or lack thereof.

The man with so much more power is given this kind of cultural pass. And we have multiple institutions to some extent supporting that harm and then being rewarded for that harm.

So I just think of this as evidence of how easy it was, and is, to harm women. What we do get from Monica Lewinsky is it takes a long time, similar to Anita Hill, right?

It takes a long time before we start to revisit Monica Lewinsky. But what we can see now is that people are starting to think differently about her. How did we treat her so horribly?

What names did we call her that are really largely unfair and have nothing to do with her actions?

How is it that she has struggled for decades now to get or keep a job, that if she ever chooses to maybe date, that is going to be kind of question number one or conversation number one about everybody knows her past, right? But I do think we’re starting to shift that a little bit. She has an excellent podcast where she talks about what it means to be a wronged woman.

And she brings on guests that have been wronged and whose stories have been told about or for them without their contribution, and invites us all to kind of rethink how those stories are told. And she has certainly been showing up in pop culture ways that invite us to think differently about women.

There’s a great work of fiction that’s out right now. It’s still in hardback. I devoured it. It’s called Dear Monica Lewinsky. It’s about a young woman who. She’s in her. It’s two time frames.

She’s in her 40s, remembering when she was in college and had an affair with one of her professors.

And in the world of fiction, Monica Lewinsky appears to her as a Saint and she prays to Monica Lewinsky for guidance of how to understand what happened to her when she was a college sophomore. And it’s really just such a wonderful, multi-layered way of looking at how we’ve treated women throughout time, right? When we look at.

She’s studying medieval art also.

So we’re looking at how the saints were treated, how the virgins were treated, how Monica Lewinsky invites her to sort of think differently about this. And I think this is a larger invitation to all of us of like, what do we do when we’re calling people names?

What are we doing when we’re supporting name calling?

And what are we doing when, you know, when we’re thinking about power differentials and power relationships and we are either actively participating or passively participating in harming that which doesn’t have power, that who doesn’t have power, and when so many of our insults are gender-based. So I’ll defend Monica Lewinsky till the end of time for that.

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:07

No, no. Very fair. I appreciate that insight because again, after learning more about it later, right?

I mean, the time, it was a punchline, the blue dress, I mean, on and on and on. It was just, just, you know, you could just… Raspberry beret moments all over the place. The jokes wrote themselves.

I mean, I was prime age for laughing at all of it, too.

I want to be honest here, but I want to stretch you a little bit here and take the praxis, what we are talking about in your book, and move it to something that’s in your backyard. Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots, who is an excellent coach by all, you know, intents and purposes.

I mean, the guy won coach of the year twice now. He also took a young New England Patriots team to the super bowl last year after they had been cellar-dwellers the year before.

And lo and behold, you have Diana Rossini of the New York Times, no less, The Athletic. And Diana Rossini has a reputation, so to speak, of getting stories any way she can get them.

Well, Diana Rossini goes ahead and resigns after it kind of becomes clear that her and Mike Vrabel had been having some sort of a tryst for a hot minute, for a while. She loses her career. She is a star reporter for one of the most important, you know, sports publications out there, The Athletic.

And she’s considered an NFL insider. And on and on and on. Her career is effectively over. Mike Vrabel, however, says, “Hey, gonna have to have some tough conversations with…”

They both kind of try to put the front out there. But at the end of the day, he’s back to coaching. He’s. Nothing happening to him really at all.

In fact, I think a lot of people are just looking at her like, like, how many stories did she get sleeping through the whatever? And, you know, and then all of a sudden it became, I mean, she did some of this to herself, I…

She’s not a victimless person. I mean, she’s not a innocent, if you will, of bad judgment. But what I think is interesting in this case is just the unequal treatment.

I know this is not necessarily in your book, but it’s here and now. What are your just… thoughts given the fact that you’re up there in, you know, Massachusetts?

Allison Butler:
00:49:34

Okay. Well, I suppose I should really start by saying I am not a New England Patriots fan.

So, yes, it is in my backyard, but I tend to not pay attention to. I am not a football fan. My husband is a huge football fan, but we grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, so.

Steve Grumbine:
00:49:51

Ah, you’re my Commander fan.

Allison Butler:
00:49:54

We are a Washington Football Team, Commander, red and gold, household.

Although I usually use Sunday afternoons or Thursday evenings to, you know, kind of do something else because I’m not a football fan. So I just want to put that out there that if I talk about football, I’m going to get a lot of football vocabulary incorrect.

But what I will say is that, yes, and you’re right, none of this is in the book. This kind of got published in this past spring. So it was well after the book had gone to press.

But I don’t think it is that that different of a story that we have been telling about. So I’m going to maybe kind of contradict myself from a little bit before when I said that, you know, things do seem to be happening.

Maybe we’re starting to see a little bit of change a little bit faster. Like Anita Hill takes decades before we start to look at her differently.

Christine Blasey Ford takes moments, days, weeks before we start to say, “Hey, wait a minute, we need to think about telling this story differently.” And now I’m going to kind of say something different. But I don’t necessarily think it’s actually contradictory.

The idea that we blame a woman for an extramarital affair and that her career or her public perception is ruined is not surprising, right? This is not at all surprising. It is an easy place to lay blame.

We as a society, as a population, are slightly less concerned about women’s careers than we are about men’s careers.

But we also have the tropes that we have lived with, you know, since time began, which is that women, you know, and we rely on these tropes no matter how unfair they are, right? Women are here as temptresses. Somehow this was probably her fault, right? We’re, we are, we very easily blame women.

And at the same time we have these tropes about men that like. Well, you know, I mean, men have needs, right? Men have physical needs and so they, they kind of can’t be blamed for that, right?

This is a way in which I would argue that patriarchy harms men as well, right? I think it harms women more. I think patriarchy is set up with the intentional harming of women, but it also harms men because.

And it harms our boys growing into men because there is a very narrow compartment that boys and men are allowed to fit into. They have to be kind of full of bravado. They have to be muscular, they have to be competitive, they have to be athletic in this case, right?

They have to have this certain kind of physical prowess in order to also fit into patriarchy.

And so when you have an NFL football coach of what has been a highly winning team, even though they, you know, had their years where they didn’t win so much, but even I know enough to know that they win a lot, right? I see it in my classroom all the time, right? Mostly by students who don’t show up after a good game. But, you know, that fits into a box.

So whether or not Mike Vrabel made poor choices, uninformed choices, really selfish choices, he as a person sort of fits into a box that we are going to say, “Yeah, well, you know, there’s no actual reason to fight. Was it consensual? Then there’s no reason to fire him.” Whereas the box that she fits in is like, “Oh, here we go again.

This like temptress who’s out to destroy a marriage” right? These are easy things for us to rely on. What we, I would say we need to do is to start thinking differently about, well, I guess everything.

But you know, for the purposes of this is, you know, why is it so easy to brush the woman aside and let the man just like let him be okay with all of that. We are okay with him and we are so quick and so easy to blame her, whoever the him and her is in these conversations.

We probably need to start, you know, by exploring that, by thinking about that and sort of what that means and how that operates in our culture. Who are we willing? Who are we able? Who are we eager to kind of kick to the curb? And who are we willing, able and eager to try and protect?

And that’s going to say, once we start to dig into those questions, that’s going to say a lot about who we are as a society, as well as sort of who we are as individuals. And as a society we are willing and able and eager these days to protect something like football, to protect something that is a national sport,

to protect something that maybe is one place where we do still have a little bit of a monoculture. Not really, of course, at all, but it is not uncommon.

The culture of Sunday football or Thursday Night Football or Monday Night Football is not something that anybody would be surprised to learn about, right? It is part of our ethos. So it takes some work to kind of undo all of these sedimentary layers.

But I can’t say is that I’m even remotely surprised by how this broke down.

Steve Grumbine:
00:55:04

Yeah, no. Thank you for giving. That’s unscripted, folks. That’s not straight from the book. That’s right off the top. And I blindsided her.

So thank you for taking that question.

Allison Butler:
00:55:12

It’s all good.

Steve Grumbine:
00:55:13

I have one final question that I’d like to. And then I’m going to ask you to take us out. But I have one final question regarding the book that I think will tie everything together.

At least I hope it will.

You know, when we’re judging women in public life, you know, how often are we actually responding to the actual person, the woman herself, versus a story that someone else has constructed for us? I mean, we’ve kind of touched on this, but I think that we can tie that up. We’re not really dealing with the person.

We’re dealing with a construct and that… can you take us through that?

Allison Butler:
00:55:48

Sure. I mean, I would argue that unless we know somebody personally, then we are dealing with a story.

And even when we do know somebody personally, that’s what we do as humans, right. Is we tell stories. We tell stories about who we are. We do that through the very words that we say. Absolutely.

But we certainly do it through, say, our clothing or if we have the privilege of doing so, we do so through our type of job or maybe our geography. We tell stories. We have stories told about us.

I think for the most part, when we’re talking about celebrities or when we’re talking about people who occupy space in the public sphere, we, the rest of us, have kind of a para-social relationship with them, right? We know them through their stories.

We know them through the media and the media construct, and that’s a real broad term and I’m using it real broadly right now, but I’m happy to break it apart. But we know our public figures through our mediated stories. Maybe we know them through press coverage in legacy press.

Maybe we know them through press coverage in something that is politically aligned to who we are or politically opposed to who we are, right? Fox News is telling a very different story about Kamala Harris than the New York Times is, right?

We have a very different story told about our current presidential administration through Fox News than through the New York Times. And those are just two examples of many, right? We have our stories told to us via our social media, right?

What are we learning about folks from the socials, as it were, the Instagrams, TikTok and Facebook? So we’re mostly getting stories.

And even there’s a little bit of a, kind of a, I guess it’s an anti-beauty trend now where it’s like, “Ugh, this is what I look like when I take my professional pictures, but this is really what I look like at home.” Those are still very carefully curated, right? It is a, it is an off day or a bad hair day that in and of itself is incredibly carefully curated.

And so we get this idea of like we are seeing somebody who might look less than polished, but that less-than-polished is, in and of itself, a polishing.

So I think for the most part, unless we know somebody personally, we are getting a mediated version, a constructed version, a carefully constructed version of who they are. And we have to, I would say that then we have to walk into our critique and our analysis with that as an understanding that this is a framing.

This is the way we have been invited in to understand this body. This is a story that has taken hold or that has been carefully crafted.

And we have to think that our first layer of analysis is to acknowledge and to know that that is a story. And then once we’re inside of that, we start to take apart that story.

Steve Grumbine:
00:58:43

Yeah, I know this is not related to what you said, but it sort of is.

Is there anything worse than the concocted story of the candidates in the Iowa caucus, when they suddenly roll their sleeves up, they have the blue shirt on unbuttoned and they’re eating the hot dog and they’re just, “Hey, I’m a regular person, just like you. Don’t pay attention to the $20 billion bank account. Don’t pay attention to the 12 mansions and the 200-foot yacht or whatever, 600 foot yacht.

I’m just like one of you.”

Allison Butler:
00:59:11

They’re in the real America, though. They’re in the real America. Having a hot dog. Absolutely. No, I know. I mean, that is absolutely such an eye-roll is the idea of.

I mean, I do love these conversations that are like, here we are at the state fair, or here we are in the real America. And it’s like, actually, I think if we were in the real America, maybe it wouldn’t be the colonizer that was in charge.

Maybe it would be the indigenous. I’ll go. Show me the real America, please.

You know, if the indigenous population that used to, you know, live where my house is knocked on my door and said, “We’re taking over, you’re going to pay your mortgage to us because this is our land.” I’d be like, “Great. Where do I write my check?” Like, I would love to see the real America. That ain’t what we’re seeing. And don’t get me wrong, I love a state fair, right?

I love watching the 4H animals. I love the janky roller coaster rides. You’re taking your life in your hands every single time.

But I think if we really going to dig deep, that’s not the real America.

Steve Grumbine:
01:00:14

Nailed it. All right, so with that, what didn’t we cover in this podcast that maybe we should have? Your final parting thoughts?

Allison Butler:
01:00:22

Well, speaking of the real America, I think one of the most important lessons for me when doing this book was learning so much more about the treatment of indigenous women and girls, particularly the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

And I think that that is something that we all need to be paying much more close attention to. When we harm women in our nation, probably around our globe, if I’m going to go that large, is the stories told about it so much are about isolated events. It’s this kind of like a woman was harmed. And that is the single narrative of the story.

But when we start to dig much more deeply, we are looking at chronic mistreatment. We are looking at state sanctioned violence.

And when we look at our indigenous populations across the United States, across North America, that’s where I focused on for the book. Certainly we need to be looking at it more largely is, we are treating human women and girls as disposable objects.

And I think that is incredibly dangerous.

So one intersection that I would want to make sure doesn’t get left out of this conversation, it doesn’t get left out of our thinking, is the ways in which we have have to start adding on to the kind of overarching sentence of yes, I focused on how women are harmed in society.

And we also need to be thinking of how women of color are harmed in our society and especially how our indigenous women are harmed, because that is absolutely something that is systemic, it is state-sanctioned, and it is largely ignored by our legacy press.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:01

Well said. Thank you so much for this. I did not know what I was in for.

I mean, obviously I was excited to do something a little different and I think this was fantastic. I really appreciate you taking my questions seriously, answering them and going in places that maybe you weren’t expecting.

I appreciate the flexibility very much.

Allison Butler:
01:02:23

Thank you so much.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:25

Absolutely. All right. Folks, my name’s Steve Grumbine. I am the host of this podcast, Macro N Cheese. We are a 501c3, not for profit institution.

We definitely need your donations. If you think the work that we’re doing is valuable, please consider becoming a monthly donor@patreon.com/RealProgressives.

You can also go to our website, it’s RealProgressives.org and you can go to our Substack and become a monthly donor there as well.

I just want to say this was a stretch for me.

My wife is probably going to chastise me and talk to me about this a little bit and remind me of all the ways that I fail in this space. But I don’t think it’s about individuals really.

I think it’s really about systems and patriarchy and really changing the way that society functions as a whole. I’m really focused on systems and this worked for me. It’s really important and it expanded my understanding.

So, on behalf of my guest, Allison Butler, I’d like to say thank you to all for listening and joining us. Don’t forget, this will be in our Tuesday night Macro N Chill session webinar. We break it up in 15 minute segments and we discuss each segment.

Should be a lot of fun to talk through. Allison, you’re of course welcome. So please consider coming. And with that, I am Steve Grumbine on behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese.

Real Progressives. And I am so tongue tied, I’m just going to shut up and say, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:04:04

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.