Note to reader: This blog article is a bit outdated, in that I cite an event on the View from 3 weeks ago. (I wrote it, got busy with PhD applications, failed to send it off to an online magazine in a timely manner, and left it to collect dust.) But, since the critique I am making isn’t outdated, I decided to post this slightly-too-long-for-a-blog piece here anyways on my blog. 

As a left-leaning feminist, it’s not everyday that I make this kind of pronouncement: Elisabeth Hasselbeck, conservative pundit over at the View, gets it right here folks, and everyone else sitting on that couch got it wrong. Really wrong.

Here’s what went down: Bill Maher, host of Real Time, was a recent guest on the View, and Hasselbeck demanded “accountability” regarding a comment he had made February 4th about the detention of CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt. Maher had then joked on his HBS show: “New rule: now that Hosni Mubarak has released Lara Logan, he must put her intrepid hotness on a plane immediately. In exchange, we will send Elisabeth Hasselbeck.”

The joke about trading in women is offensive as-is, but to make matters worse for Maher’s comedy material, later on February 15th, CBS announced that Logan had suffered a horrific sexual assault while covering the protests in Egypt.

On the View, Hasselbeck read a description of Logan’s assault, and then asks Maher simply to own up that his humor about trading in women had crossed a line. While Maher had initially made the joke before Logan’s assault, Hasselbeck is still on to something. As a feminist scholar and teacher, I want to back her up here: laughing about women as hot, sexy objects to be traded by men is not un-related to cultural attitudes that keep sexual assaults at epidemic numbers.

Hasselbeck’s got a reasonable point to dialogue about with Maher, and she makes it articulately. Unfortunately, Maher proves too stubborn to do some needed self-reflection. Sadly, the other women on the couch don’t help matters, either. Hasselbeck is framed to look like a crazy, over-sensitive woman who just takes things too “personally.”

Ironically, Mahler begins the clip by trying to come across pro women. “You’ll like this,” he says, and proceeds to narrate his seemingly progressive views by commenting on the Sandusky sexual abuse case. He explains that any institution “goes to hell” with no women around, offering the “Middle East” as one of several examples.

All right, I see the point he is trying to make in order to get his pro women credits. But I need to counter with some feminist-informed political theory: assuming that the Middle East is one monolithic gender-oppressive place is actually a loaded topic, and tends to sneak in no small amount of Islamophobia, which ends up harming a lot of women.

After all, we Americans love talking about those “oppressed Middle Eastern women” because it’s so darn helpful when we want to fight our wars to “save” them. The Bush administration relied on the notion of the “oppressed” Muslim woman to justify its invasion of Afghanistan.

I am not arguing, of course, that the Taliban was not horribly oppressive, but there is evidence we were sold an imperialistic war based on faulty patriarchal grandiosity—dropping bombs isn’t actually the most well-thought out strategy for creating gender parity. (Instead of trying to be the world’s savior in gender equality, it might do us Americans more good to focus a bit more on why the United States is 69^th in the world— we’re neck in neck with Turkmenistan—in terms of representation of women in federal governing bodies.)

But, I digress.

Or do I? As someone who studies gender as my full-time job, I know that how we talk about gender is wrapped up in many other violent cultural phenomenon, and that’s why it matters that we all educate ourselves. When Maher talks about the “Middle East” with such sweeping generalizations, he is actually participating in a conversation about gender with much larger stakes than he realizes.

Mahler then makes a second significant gender blunder talking about Sandusky’s case, even while hoping to flaunt his pro-women stance: he suggests, seemingly insightfully, that women should have a role in institutions because of their “moderating influence.” Sounds good, right?

Not so much, actually. Unless we are in the 19^th century.

That women should have rights of citizenship because they are a “moderating influence” did prove to be a needed argument during the 70-plus years that women campaigned for the 19^th amendment, which finally passed in 1920. (More specifically, it’s white women who finally got the vote in 1920. Most women of color had to then wait decades longer until racist voting laws were removed, too. The implementation of democracy for all people has taken a while.)

It’s actually been an enormous leap-forward for gender parity debates in the last 40 years that we understand that women should have rights for the same terribly simple reason that men should have rights—because women are human beings. These philosophical distinctions end up mattering a great deal.

OK, Mahler tried his hand at progressive gender talk, but just hasn’t studied up on the issues. That’s OK— he gets a C+ at this point in the interview. I am grading him so generously because he makes the same mistakes that anyone might reasonably make who hasn’t given male privilege enough thought or taken a 101-gender theory class. As long as he decides to start showing up for class, I can cut him some slack. After all, we are all so entrenched in a sexist and racist culture that it takes all of us a while to start to understand how this stuff works in our unconscious.

But, the real problem, as the rest of the clip shows, is that he isn’t interested in even learning.  In fact, in the rest of the clip, his C+ falls to an F, as Mahler works pathetically hard to uphold his view that trading women as objects is still good, strong comedy material—even as Hasselbeck contextualizes the sexual assault of Logan.

It is important to see how careful Hasselbeck has to be when she makes her argument. She explains that the issue isn’t about her, but rather about women as a whole. And she explains that she has worked with the best in the entertainment business—she knows what good humor is, and that Maher’s joke was just a poor excuse for humor.

Notice what she isn’t saying: She isn’t arguing Mahler’s joke was inappropriate because it hurt her “feelings.” She is saying: you think you’re good at your job? You aren’t, not when you make objectifying women something to laugh at.

But, unfortunately, not only does Mahler dismiss her articulate, insightful argument, but also so do the other women on the couch, who want to make the issue about Hasselbeck’s “feelings getting hurt.”

So, to be clear: a woman calls out a man for joking about trading women as sexy objects—highlighting to him that one of those women ended up enduring brutal, sexually objectifying violence in real-life—and she gets framed as just another emotional women. That, folks, is the kind of quintessential sexism in the air we breathe that continually makes it hard for women’s experiences—and the violence done to them— to be taken as credible.

Before she even speaks about the issue, Hasselbeck is set-up by cultural stereotypes not to be heard.

She’s just not asking that much of Mahler other than basic human decency. She’s just saying—hey, there’s a line. Please own up to it.

And she right on. It would due us all good to consider if there is a correlation between our propensity to laugh at humor that makes women sexual objects, and the twisted attitudes in this country that lead to 1 in 5 women being sexually assaulted.

But Mahler isn’t interested in exploring that connection. He then has the nerve to go on Letterman that Tuesday night and joke that he was “abused” by Hasselbeck and “felt like a teenage boy at Penn State.” But, he’s happy to report that he and Hasselbeck are actually friends and their arguments just “make the sex hotter.”  (Notice, he objectifies her one more time.)

All Mahler had to say to Elizabeth Hasselbeck was—“wow, you are are right. That joke—particularly after CBS later came out with news of the terrible attack on Logan—is a bad joke. ”

But, he didn’t. And instead, what so many people chose to see on the View last Tuesday is another overly-emotional-sensitive stereotype with her “feelings hurt.”

Wonder why the U.S. has such problems with violence toward women? Because people still want to laugh about it, and articulate, on-point women are still being dismissed by sexist attitudes even as they try to talk about it.