What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (25 page)

        
—S
ANDRA
D
AY
O’C
ONNOR

I think the world is really hungering for women of power
.

        
—A
LICE
W
ALKER

DON MCPHERSON

“Sometimes when I talk to people and they want to debate the severity of sexism in our culture, I remind them that I, as a black man, at one point in this country, was livestock. And I got the right to vote before [women] did. That should tell you the severity of sexism in our democracy.”

F
OR MORE THAN
twenty-five years, Don McPherson has used the power and appeal of sport to address complex social justice issues. He has created innovative programs, supported community service providers, and has provided educational seminars and lectures throughout North America. Don has twice testified before the United States Congress and has worked closely with the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense on issues of sexual violence in education and the military, respectively. He has provided commentary on numerous news programs and was featured in
O, The Oprah Magazine
and appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. McPherson has served as a board member, consultant, and advisor for several national organizations including the Ms. Foundation for Women and the National Football Foundation. Recently, McPherson joined the board of directors of the U.S. National Committee for UN Women. As an athlete, McPherson was a unanimous All-America quarterback at Syracuse University. As captain of the undefeated 1987 Syracuse football team, McPherson set twenty-two school records, led the nation in passing, and won more than eighteen national “player of the year” awards. His
professional football career included playing for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and Houston Oilers, then going up north to join the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Ottawa Rough-Riders. He was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. In 2009, McPherson was enshrined into the College Football Hall of Fame. McPherson has worked as a college football analyst for ESPN, BET, and NBC and is currently the studio analyst for Sportsnet New York’s coverage of Big East Football.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we have not yet had a woman president?

DON MCPHERSON
: Wow. It’s funny . . . you’re asking this question, and there are about five or six different ways in my head that I can already think of answering it. We live in this incredibly sexist and misogynistic society—that’s an easy statement to make—but it’s more. I think when you really start to drill down into American culture, we’re the greatest hypocrites going. We say things like “equality,” and yet we laugh in the face of that at times. We still have unequal pay for equal work. We still have these glaring things in our culture that we have yet to address. We have not ratified certain agreements, even the rights of a child. We are so hypocritical: we live these very Judeo-Christian values on the one hand, but on the second hand, the capitalism that drives our culture is so loaded with gender inequities and use of sexual behavior and sexual innuendo in this supposed Christian culture. It’s subtly powerful. Even if you look at our current political structure, there are so many whys. Why haven’t we had a Jewish president? The hypocrisy of our culture sometimes . . . we talk about being fair and just, but we are sexist and homophobic. So that’s sort of my first gut reaction.

MS
: In connection to that, that’s why I always think it’s not just about electing a woman president, but the fact that we’ve elected Barack Obama twice, just in terms of changing the paradigms by having greater diversity up at the top is still a very positive sign.

DM
: It is, but sometimes when I talk to people and they want to debate the severity of sexism in our culture, I remind them that I, as a black man, at one point in this country, was livestock. And I got the right to vote before [women] did. That should tell you the severity of sexism in our democracy. And so Barack Obama is part of the boy’s club. Even though he’s a black man, even though he’s a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. He’s not a black man named George Jefferson, as was famously George Jefferson [
laughs]
. But this guy—Barack Hussein Obama—and he made it to the presidency before [a woman did].

MS
: Do you think that we’re ready yet, to elect a woman president? Do you think men especially are ready?

DM
: I think that person has to be so special and so unique. I think that Hillary is probably the only woman right now that we know of. And I say that only because of the way the political process works, that there’s all the internal vetting of the party that she would have to go through in our dysfunctional two-party system, and no one’s going to challenge her. So I do think the country is ready for Hillary, but there’s a reason why I think that men are ready for her: She’s put up with more crap than any woman has ever had to in public office. And everything that she put up with, publicly and privately, I think she has had to go through that to earn the respect of especially men. She couldn’t just come up and be a brilliant woman who has great political instinct and is well studied on foreign relationships. She had to go through everything she went through. She had to go through the
moment when . . . she cried, in New Hampshire, it was all these charges of her gender that somehow mattered. So even that—Obama never had to deal with anything like that. He didn’t have to deal with anything that was specific to his race. In fact, everyone walked on eggshells around his race, whereas any moment where Hillary showed her gender, she was attacked. And what I love about her is that I think she honored both the men and women who love her and respect her and support her, because she did it with such grace and power. She never gave into the hate and the sexism.

MS
: When I had interviewed Gloria Steinem, she said in the 2008 election she didn’t think we were ready for a woman president, but she thinks we are now. She said that part of the issue was that men, especially, are not used to seeing women as authority figures and leaders. She gave me this quote, and I was just interested in your reaction: “We were raised by women and so we associate women with childhood. Men, especially, may feel regressed when they see a powerful woman. The last time they saw one they were eight. So one of the most helpful things we can do in the long term, is to make sure that kids have loving, nurturing, male figures, as well as female figures, and authoritative and expert female figures, as well as male figures.” I’m just curious if you think, in terms of talking about some of these gender roles, if that is part of the issue? That men have issues with seeing powerful women?

DM
: Yes. To your point about what happens with our boys . . . I always say that boys who are raised by women, as you mentioned, there comes a point when they are told, explicitly, that what your mother does is beneath you. And what she does is less than what your father does, or has less value, and you’re not to do those things. And we laugh about it. We joke about this. Boys don’t do laundry, they don’t cook. You hear a guy say he cooks, you’re like, “What? You cook?” “Yes, I prepare food for the family
to eat.” And yet that’s beneath boys, and it’s all the behaviors and all the things they see their mothers doing. My daughters put on my shoes and clog around the house, but if I had a son, would he put on his mother’s shoes and clog around the house? Our homophobia tells that boy, “No, that’s wrong.” And we learn this as boys. We learn this at a very, very early age. For a lot of boys, it’s troubling. It’s like, What do you mean? This is the woman who bathed me, who fed me, who does all these things—still does all these things—and I’m being told that who she is, is less than. And that is a very real expression; I hear it almost daily. I have two children who are seven and nine years old, so I hear it in their peers of families on a regular basis. And so boys are learning that women are less than. And as they grow, that just gets reinforced in so many ways. It’s the mom is a cook, but Dad is a chef. Your elementary school teacher is a woman. Your middle school teacher is a woman. Your high school teacher is a man. Your college professor is a man. So it’s all these different things—as we get older, the more serious roles are men.

MS
: So how can we fix this or change this?

DM
: I actually think that as dramatic as that just sounded, I think it is one of the areas where we are far in advance of what we think. What I mean by that is, as I said, I have two daughters. And my two daughters know they can be just about anything. And they’ve asked that question about a woman president. And because of the media the way that it is now, I do think that this is a very interesting time where a lot of challenges to convention are happening at a very, very rapid pace because of technology and media. I was just having this conversation yesterday with the Breakthrough office about why this time is so interesting. It’s that the conversation right now at the Supreme Court level with Prop 8 and DOMA is one where we’re seeing how twenty years ago the Supreme
Court moved at a snail’s pace, Congress moves at a car’s pace, and society moves at a jet’s—and that was twenty years ago. Today, it’s Congress and the Supreme Court are still the same, but society is at light speed. It used to be that people left small towns and little places to come to New York or San Francisco to be gay or to look at the world in a more loving social justice lens that was more accepting of all, and now you don’t need that. People are connecting without having to move to those locations, so we’re seeing this collective consciousness that is being supported by media. . . . And generationally, because of that being more connected, more aware, more conscious, I think that those things are moving us toward a woman president, toward a lot of things. I think there are a lot of things that are happening rapidly, that are challenging the convention of all white men.

MS
: One of the things that I’ve heard you say, which I think is always so important to keep in mind, is that we sometimes mistakenly think of gender stereotypes as fixed attributes, like men have an innate propensity toward violence and women more toward peace, when the truth is a lot of that has been cultural conditioning. Isn’t it really that men and boys have been directed dysfunctionally that way, not that they’re naturally that way? I have heard you talk about, as a man, trying to embrace your wholeness. I like that you call those qualities of being loving and nurturing and peaceful part of your humanness, rather than feminine. Those are qualities that exist in men and boys, as well, but they’ve been conditioned to turn those off by society. The fact that women aren’t represented in positions of power and authority may also have to do with these “feminine” and “human” traits associated with women that have been suppressed in the world.

DM
: That’s patriarchy. Because what it’s doing is taking those qualities that we see as weak or that we associate with weakness. I’m just thinking
of myself in some ways, but I think of men in general, when we
feel
, we feel weak and we feel vulnerable. And it is a horrible feeling, but what’s amazing about that horrible feeling is that’s where we grow. And men are typically violent toward that growth and toward that feeling.

MS
: In my interview with Patrick Stewart recently, I thought one of the most powerful things he talked about was how he came to understand why his father was violent toward his mother. He learned after his father’s death that his father had actually been suffering from post-traumatic stress after returning from the military following World War II, which was never properly diagnosed or treated. While that doesn’t excuse his father’s actions, it may help explain his coping problems and propensity toward violence. It’s the idea that men, too, need help, that men have been taught to suppress their emotions, not to reach out for help and may only know how to deal with conflict through violence. So men need this help dealing with constrictive gender roles and stereotypes, too.

DM
: You’re exactly right. The other day I was in Dallas for a rally, and a guy named Dale Hansen—he’s been on the air doing sports in Dallas for so long, I know who he is and I don’t even live in Dallas. He’s a big man and he spoke at a rally the other day, and he talked about his father who was the biggest, strongest man he’s ever known. He talked about his father winning the Strong Man Competition in the carnival that used to come through his town when he was a boy, and his father was this big, burly man. And he watched his father punch his mother in the face and break her nose. At this rally, he told that story, and he cried telling the story. After the rally, I was talking to a woman who runs a domestic violence shelter in Dallas, so we started talking about young boys and at what age boys begin to learn to suppress their feelings, and it’s so much a part of them—it’s half of who they are. And she says, “What happens to those
boys? What happens to guys?” I said, “Well, we become Dale Hansen.” We become this sixty-year-old man, this seventy-year-old man, who still recalls with vivid recollection that moment when the biggest man he knew, in his words, became so small in a child’s eyes. But you suppress that and you keep pushing it back. It doesn’t go away and you are that man, as Dale Hansen is—this big man who is this high-profile sports announcer in Dallas, who’s living with this and has lived with this. And so, yes, for Dale Hansen that moment was cathartic for him to be able to stand up in front of other men and tell that story.