LOS ANGELES—Anyone who had the chance to watch the live feed of the Texas Senate during the marathon filibuster session by State Senator Wendy Davis in her ultimately doomed attempt to derail abortion legislation introduced by extremist Republican legislators has a good idea of the extent to which that legislative body remains a good old boys club, but according to Olivia Messer, the level of overt sexism that is a part of daily life for women in Texas politics is off the hook.
Messer has just published an expose of the goings on in the Texas legislature for the Observer following a 140-day stint during which she “wrote about the theatrics—and occasional clownery—of the Legislature’s 2013 regular session. I had no idea what I was getting into."
Her first-person account is rife with examples of outrageous behavior on the part of men who believe that even female legislators should know their place. “It didn’t take me long to realize that as a woman, and especially a young woman, Id be treated differently than my male colleagues,” she writes. “Within weeks, I’d already heard a few horrifying stories. Like the time a former Observer staffer, on her first day in the Capitol, was invited by a state senator back to his office for personal ‘tutoring.’ Or, last session, when Rep. Mike ‘Tuffy’ Hamilton interrupted Marisa Marquez during a House floor debate to ask if her breasts were real or fake.”
And of course porn is also an endemic part of the sexist landscape that defines the Texas Legislature. Messer writes of the sexist culture, “Even the most powerful women in the Legislature experience it, When I started interviewing women lawmakers, they all—Republican and Democrat, House and Senate, rural and urban—said that being a woman in the statehouse is more difficult than being a man. Some told of senators ogling women on the Senate floor or watching porn on iPads and on state-owned computers, of legislators hitting on female staffers or using them to help them meet women, and of hundreds of little comments in public and private that women had to brush off to go about their day. Some said they often felt marginalized and not listened to—that the sexism in the Legislature made their jobs harder and, at times, produced public policy hostile to women.”
It’s a rather eye opening, if unsurprising, account of a political institution that seems to have more in common with a high school male locker room than anything remotely connected with legitimate governing.
