Male Senator Has Never Seen Sexism in the Senate, So It Must Not Exist

By Erin Gloria Ryan  |  September 3, 2014 | 8:00pm

His name is Ron Johnson, he comes from Wisconsin, and he thinks that his Senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand should either expose the identities of the men who harassed her about her body or shut up about sexism. After all, Senator Ron Johnson (a man) has never seen sexism during his time in the Senate. Therefore, it’s questionable whether it even exists.

Senator Johnson, appearing on NewsmaxTV’s The Steve Malzberg Show today (clip spotted by BuzzFeed), was asked about claims Gillibrand makes in her new book, and he responded exactly the way you’d think a Tea Partier who once remarked that he hoped Senator Tammy Baldwin (who majored in math in college) could understand the math behind the federal budget might: Terribly!

“If you’re going to throw out accusations, my guess is you’d probably ought to name names,” Johnson, said of Gillibrand on The Steve Malzberg Show on NewsmaxTV Tuesday. “If you’re going throw out those kinds of accusations, you ought to give people a chance to explain themselves.”

Woof. Yeah, Kirsten. Think of the poor men who aren’t even being given a chance to defend themselves.

But there’s more. Johnson, regarding sexism as a general phenomenon in the US Senate (the same sexism that female journalists discussing Gillibrand’s book acknowledged as pretty damn commonplace), added,

“It’s actually a pretty collegial place. Pretty professional. I have never seen that type of behavior. That’s all I can say. That’s been my experience.”

Tip for TV journalists: if you want to know about whether or not a place is sexist, the best person to ask is a probably not one of the legislative branch’s most clueless men.

Image via Getty

 
Join the discussion...