The Thrilla in Manila Folders: Binders Full of Women
The Thrilla in Manila was the third and final famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier for the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World, fought at the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines on October 1, 1975. The contest got its name from the frequent Ali rhymed boast that it would be a “Killa and a Thrilla and a Chilla, when I get that gorilla in Manila”. –Wikipedia
Sure, it wasn’t exactly the same as one black man calling another a”gorilla”–unthinkable today, unless it were a white Tea Party supporter carrying a sign or circulating images of the the Obama family online. It wasn’t even, as the Washington Post declared of the Vice Presidential debate, Ryan v. Biden, the Catholic ‘Thrilla in Manila.’
It wasn’t exactly that these debates have been from the beginning ubiquitously described in the terminology of boxing. Just today, for instance, the headline on NYTimes.com declares “For the President, Punch After Punch.”
The language of violence has been central to this campaign, long before the debates, most notably in the GOP “war on women” and the popular culture sadomasochistic tripe of “50 Shades of Grey.”
I mention those two examples not unintentionally. Some polls have measured that because of the beating Obama took in the first debate from an apparently unfactchecked Red Bull fueled Romney, his double digit lead among women voters has all but vanished. With Women Key to Win, Obama Sought to Sour Them on Foe, proclaims another headline on NYTimes.com.
It may turn out that Mr. Romney did that job for himself in the debate last night which will be long remembered for the Mitt Romney unfortunate turn of phrase–perhaps only rivaled as Olympian by Michael Phelps’ specialty–”binders full of women,” which instantly appeared on Twitter with a hashtag and has devoured the majority of television coverage on the morning shows as I write.
The slap of the tongue came in response to a question about equal pay for women.
Having been on record as opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, Romney sought to impress the female questioner with his quest to find and add qualified women to his staff when he was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002.
2002.
Apparently even in the long distant past of a decade ago, neither Mr Romney nor any of his advisers knew of any living breathing, working, accomplished women.
At all?
Neither did his wife Ann or any of his buddies at Bain Capital.
None at all?
As curiously as “Mars Needs Women,” Boston, the locale of that shithole outpost called Harvard University and Boston College, was in sudden need of them too.
Oh where to look? Who to ask?
He inquired with local women’s groups, he said, as to where to find such Martian creatures with terrestrial vaginas, creatures apparently not affiliated with women’s groups that were filled with the full time homemaker wives of vulture capitalists or riders of dressage horses.
Martians the likes of Peggy at the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce four decades earlier? Or liquor swilling college sluts who were looking for Mr. Goodbar 30 years earlier?
Shall I go on?
No.
But the Romney team apparently did, spurred perhaps by the need to tap the secretarial pool for a Secretary of State for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and at least settled on Kerry Murphy Healey as his Lieutenant Governor.
The rest of the women were apparently picked from “binders of women” passed along by these womens groups, making it sound much like the process of picking out a criminal, a sperm donor or a mail order bride.
Without having to elaborate, Mr Romney managed, with a very telling turn of a phrase to turn the feminist evolution –as late as 2002– into a seedy, icky and onerous sex trafficking job of insourcing, when what he was well versed instead was outsourcing.
Outsourcing to China makes for a legitimate political bone to pick with Mr Romney. Boasting of pioneering insourcing feminism in 2002 just makes him a bonehead in 2002, let alone 2012.
So if you still long to be tied up and spanked by your partner, at least consider yourself slapped in the face by your presidential nominee and all the other binders of women in the mainstream (nee extremist) GOP.
Yes, the boys who boast without any sense of irony about finding you in binders in the dustbins of recent history, as if they were the Rover and you were Mars.
I for one am betting you’re smart enough– even if at long last by last night at least –to finally unmask the 800 pound gorilla in the room for debate.
Tom Kolovos is Editor in Chief of aControlledSubstance Top image via PBSNewshour.com.
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