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A few months ago, the brilliant blog about visual culture, Sociological Images, posted these two images from a mailer from a mayoral run-off race in Tampa.
Here one side of the mailer:
Here's the other side:
Who would say:
"Unmarried: Rose Ferlita has put her political ambition first and foremost, while her opponent is a dedicated family man with two children -- Ferlita is an unmarried woman with a suspect commitment to family values."
Of course, it is outrageous, but we who monitor and study singlism have seen that sort of noxiousness before. But there may be a new twist this time. As Gwen Sharp noted in her blog post, Ferlita (who lost) is a Republican. Maybe the mailer was a dirty trick by a Democrat, using the mailer to try to split the Republican vote and give the Democrat an easier victory. (Democrat Bob Buckhorn did win, and denounced the mailer. It is not always the candidate who is the originator and perpetrator of the sleazy tactics.)
If Gwen Sharp's guess is correct, then this particularly unsavory morsel of singlism was a Democrat's idea of what would resonate with voters from the religious right. In Sharp's words,
"I gotta say, I thought this was repugnant when I first saw it and assumed the group who put it out might actually believe this kind of crap. But to encourage people to vote based on sexist, homophobic values that you presumably don't even agree with, simply as a political ploy? That is some nasty, nasty business."
But wait, an update to the post posits still another wrinkle to this crumpled mess:
"It's possible that this is a fake mailer created to discredit the Democratic candidate by making it look a Democrat-affiliated group sent out something sexist."
So did a Democrat create the mailer based on their beliefs about what the most conservative Republicans believe about singles and their "suspect commitment to family values"? Or did a Republican create the insulting mailer to make the Democrats seem prejudiced and clueless?
The post at Sociological Images was titled "Politically expedient sexism." Of course, I think it is also politically expedient singlism. It is the sexism that gets called out and the singlism that slips by unnoticed. As my colleagues and I showed in our experiments on housing discrimination, singlism is often practiced without apology or awareness.
Page Gardner, Founder of Women's Voices, Women Vote and a contributor to the Singlism book, also blogged about the matter, and ended with this sage advice about single women in American society:
"Rather than demonizing these women, we should be working to understand their needs, come up with policies that address their concerns, and educating and engaging them in the political conversation. Using scare tactics and dog-whistle language is a silly diversion; it ignores the reality of the changing face of America and the future of our society and democracy."
[So why am I writing about a mid-March item in mid-July? I thought using as a hook (excuse, really) the recent failed Republican ploy in Wisconsin of running fake Democrats against real ones. But the truth is, I have a whole stack of great bloggable stuff that I never get to in time, and sometimes - late or not - I just don't want to let it go. This is one of those times.]
[Thanks to Molly for the tip about the Sociological Images post.]
