Artist and activist Tina Duryea joins us today to discuss Democratic politics and how "preachy females" will continue to play a key role in the party whether fossils like James Carville like it or not.
Duryea is creator of the Sheroes Series of Portraits and Products celebrating women. You can check out her work here.
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Transcribed excerpts from our conversation:
SER: I read something you’d posted on social media after Democratic adviser James Carville had basically said the most ridiculously misogynistic statement imaginable regarding “preachy women.”
TINA DURYEA: Preachy females!
SER: Yes! It was very Tim Curry from Rocky Horror, you know, FEMALES. I sort of reflexively humanized you. But yes, “preachy females.” And it to me spoke to what I’ve observed as a growing tension within the Democratic Party. And I think you touched on it so well. And something you'd posted on social media, if I could read that real quickly.
“Unfortunately, James Carville is not alone. There are too many Democratic men and some women who want women to stay in their place, which to them means in the background, doing all the unpaid volunteer work, making sandwiches and coffee.
They don’t want to give women a seat at the table. He is not alone.”
Can you follow up more on that if you don’t mind?
TINA: Of course. And and I thank you so much for having me on. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this further in depth.
First, I want to just start everything off by saying like I’m voting Democrat, I will always vote Democrat as long as things remain the way that they are and I support the Democratic Party. That being said there are some tensions as you mentioned within the Democratic Party, such as you know what James Carville talked about when he said “preachy females” and I think what I see happening with people like James Carville — and there are many of them in the Democratic Party — is like Democrats are the party that's going to vote the right way on women and they'll give women a few token seats at the table but a lot of men, white men, straight white men, do not want to give up enough seats at the table to make the Democratic Party actually 100 percent look like what we are.
We are a big tent party, we are LGBTQ, we are black indigenous people of color, we are women and for the history of the party, for the history of the human race, it has been controlled by straight white men and Democratic men are willing to give a small portion of seats to those people who do not look like them but they get very uncomfortable when we get past a certain number of people who look like them.
I’d wanted to pull up the actual study that shows that if you have a room full of men and women and the women talk something like 30 pecent of the time and then you survey the group of people they will say that women are dominating the conversation and I think that what we see with James Carville is the same thing.
He thinks that us “preachy females” are dominating the Democratic Party whereas we're just actually finally getting a small say in the party.
SER: You were talking about representation and I think representation can be perhaps misleading. I've been in a situation as a person of color working at publications and so forth where they say, “Oh, we need to have black writers!” or and so forth and you get there and then it's like “Oh, you have a different opinion?” What I wanted was to continue to express the same opinion, to prioritize the same sort of things, but have it look better because there’s now [minorities] working there, but it's still the same agenda, the same perspectives as when it was all white men. But Tina and Stephen are working there to sort of give an illusion of diversity but when we have different perspectives, that's when the Carvilles of the world sort of freak out and and object to how things are going.
TINA: So [Carville seems to think] the entirety of wokeness is the fault of women. Thank you! Wow, um women actually did something good uh and I actually think that that is perhaps he’s right. I mean, feminism for at least the past — I don’t know I’m not a historian so I don’t know when intersectional feminism actually started to be a thing but for the entirety of my recent political kind of feminist career intersectionality has been an important part of being a feminist, and you cannot be a feminist and be anti-LGBTQ. You cannot be a feminist and not believe that black lives matter. So in James Carville’s world that would probably mean “woke” and so yeah maybe because women have gained a small but significant voice within the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party perhaps has become more “woke” and concerned about these issues because the whole entire conversation around feminism says we must make sure that if we are going to fight for the rights of women, we also fight for the rights of everybody. And you know maybe he’s right. Maybe feminists have made the entire Democratic Party more “woke” and as I said before, “Thank you!”
James Carville, Beware! We’re Talking With ‘Preachy Female’ Tina Duryea About Democratic Politics!