How to counter penis politics
I’ve worked for and with powerful men in and around politics my whole life. From Mississippi, where I grew up, to Washington and New York, I’ve been a woman in a field where power and ambition drive both sexes, but take on a particular dynamic for women working for men.
The recent spate of stories about Gov. Cuomo’s penchant for bullying isn’t about behavior that’s unusual in politics. It’s the norm. Andrew, with whom I had a decades-long professional relationship, isn’t the only practitioner of what I call “penis politics.” He just happens to be the master of the art, a subject I am writing a book about.
In Washington, he’d given me a job in 1995 and then worked to undermine me in it. Day to day, he made me feel as if I were no good at my job and thus totally dependent on him to keep it. In Cuomo’s world — and he would never admit this even to himself — working for him is like a 1950 s version of marriage. He always, always, always comes first. Everyone and everything else — your actual spouse, your children, your own career goals — is secondary. Your focus 24 hours a day is on him.
If you need more time with your own family, he will treat you like you are cheating on him. If you have your eye on another, better job, he’ll try to make that job disappear. Escaping Cuomo is tough because he has to exercise total control.
He told me I had only worked for a “Black man from a small town in Mississippi” and, therefore, wasn’t qualified to lead the public affairs office for him. The Black man from a small town was Mike Espy, who became the first Black congressman from Mississippi since Reconstruction, and who later came as close as any Black or white Democratic candidate has to win a statewide election in what is arguably the most racist state in the nation.
But that was immaterial to Cuomo, who needed complete control.
Mayor de Blasio, for whom I also worked and knew for 25 years, both at HUD and as New York City mayor, practices a different brand of penis politics. His charming, easygoing personality he had when we worked together in the federal government gave way to a hectoring, inflexible approach that bordered on sanctimony when I was his press secretary at City Hall.
His signature move as mayor was to dig in on an untenable position against the advice of staff, raising the cost of an inevitable defeat. Discussions with staff were marked by condescension, leaving the female staffers feeling especially marginalized. It made for an uncomfortable work environment.
Although the mayor preached a philosophy of egalitarianism, the workplace was pretty much like any other male-dominated environment I’ve been in: Women were interrupted more often and listened to less, whether they were a commissioner or a scheduler. By the end of his first term, the mayor had lost twice as many senior officials who were women than men.
While they had different styles, both Cuomo and de Blasio had one thing in common. Like many powerful men in politics, they create a public image as champions of women’s rights and equality. Behind closed doors, they use gender domination as one means to assert their power over women.
My experience with penis politics wasn’t only in the political arena. I saw it on the basketball court in my Mississippi high school, when I got benched for running better plays than the ones my coach, a man, wanted. I’d seen it as a young journalist, when my male editor refused to run a controversial story that I had well-sourced after the Jackson, Miss., mayor called to complain. I’d seen it in working in Congress, where men tended to get the chief of staff title and women often played receptionist, taking the incoming phone calls placed by angry constituents.
Silence and penis politics often go hand in hand. In 1998 at HUD, I spoke up about a clumsy pick-up attempt Bill Clinton made on me when I was a 26-year-old campaign operative and he was governor of Arkansas. It cost me a Senate-confirmed appointment when Cuomo quietly had the White House pull my nomination. It was penis politics again in 2015, when Cuomo and his “sources” threw bombs at me (and for a while, I threw them back) and then again when de Blasio made it impossible for me to do my job by invalidating what I said to the press on his behalf.
The men who often rule the roost in politics routinely go out of their way to assert their dominance over other men. Over women, doing so is second nature.