Jerry Brown aide caught on tape calling Meg Whitman a “whore”

The LA Times reported last night that they had obtained audio of Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor in California, talking with one of his aides about the Republican opponent Meg Whitman. In the exchange, the aide suggests calling Whitman a “whore” for having made a pension deal during her campaign and Brown appears to approve the label. From the LA Times:

“Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be – that they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em, will cut them a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.

At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: “What about saying she’s a whore?”

“Well, I’m going to use that,” Brown responds. “It proves you’ve cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.”

According to Talking Points Memo, the Whitman campaign “jumped on the issue in an attempt to drum up sympathy from female voters,” calling the use of the word “an insult to both Meg Whitman and to the women of California.”

(In case you’re wondering how the audio was recorded in the first place, apparently Brown thought he had hung up the phone properly after leaving a voicemail… but he had not. So next time you see that in a movie and think, “yeah, right,” remember this moment.)

This is what it looks like when gender is a part of our national political conversation. When candidates and their aides use highly gendered derogatory terms to refer to the opponent, and when that opponent responds by appealing to women’s personal-is-political feminism, we are having a national discussion about gender.

Granted, in this case, it seems largely accidental in one camp and strategic in the other. Brown’s aide sure as hell didn’t mean to start the conversation, because he sure as hell didn’t mean to get caught on tape calling Meg Whitman a whore. As for the Whitman campaign, they’re right to say that calling Whitman a whore is an insult to her and to women everywhere – but they’re also hoping that telling people so will win more votes for Whitman.

As a result, we are having a national conversation about gender. But it doesn’t feel like a particularly productive one – it’s more a case of one camp screwing up by revealing underlying sexism and the other capitalizing on that mistake to score a few points. We’ve seen this happen with race a million times. It’s not an honest discussion of structural and cultural sexism in America and how it affects people of all genders.

I want to make it clear that I think what Jerry Brown’s aide said was unacceptable, as was Brown’s seemingly tacit endorsement of the word. It’s not acceptable, obviously, to call anyone a whore. But I’m trying hard to remember what Jay Smooth taught us: condemn the action, not the person, or the campaign. Demanding accountability for that action is what will move our conversation about gender forward. Calling Brown and his aide sexist pigs gets us nowhere. By the same token, while I think it’s important to call out sexism when we see it, it’s not acceptable for the Whitman campaign to try to use this as a political opportunity.

Incidents like this one remind us where America’s is at when it comes to sexism. They remind us of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve got to go. I’m not, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, going around being grateful that male politicians can no longer get away with calling their female opponents whores. While it’s sort of the bare minimum you can expect from a civilized society, I’m glad that people have jumped on this and realize that what was said on that videotape was unacceptable. What happened in California overnight reflects the fact that it’s no longer acceptable to speak in a way in public (or in private if there’s a chance that your boss didn’t hang up the phone properly), that sounds sexist.

And I’m glad that now, as a result of this incident, we seem to be heading toward a national conversation about gender now. But I want it to be a real discussion. I want a substantive conversation about gender, one that isn’t about trying to score points in the run up to a tight election. Somehow, though, that seems like wishful thinking.