What's an iron, anyway?

I've been unable to find the original source of this essay. I've seen it forwarded in email and referred to in various posts.

Goodbye To All That (#2) by Robin Morgan

I don't know if it is genuine - it is too new to appear on Snopes. Let's just assume it was actually written by this person and that all statements in it are factual.

The gist of it is that female candidates face tougher rhetoric than black male candidates. One statement that made me think for a few days (and it works as a hypothetical situation too, even if the story is untrue) is that a person at a Hillary Clinton event yelled "Iron my shirt!" and it was generally considered amusing. The essay proposes that if someone yelled "Shine my shoes!" at a Barack Obama event, there would be nothing but outrage.

I thought about why this was true. I can't be objective about this because I am a white chick, and I am constantly deprecating myself and my gender for ironic comedic effect. Such as by calling myself a "chick". I think having a sense of humor about being thought of as weak adds to my strength. So if I were on stage running for president and someone told me to iron their shirt, my response would probably be to laugh, especially since I can count on one hand the number of times I have used an iron in my life.

As a white person, I *would* be more outraged to hear someone yell "Shine my shoes" to a black person. I can't speak from the perspective of how it would feel to hear "Shine my shoes!" if I were a black person. Perhaps having the perspective of one but not the other is affecting my point of view on this discussion.

In the US at least, I think it is fair to say that women have had it easier than blacks historically. White women, though thought of as property by many men, have never been bought and sold to work in the fields and make plantation owners rich. White women have been able to share water fountains and lunch counters with men. White women have never had to be escorted by the national guard just to get to school.

I know women in the past have had it harder than we have it today. But being trapped doing the cooking, cleaning, and child raising in my opinion pales in comparison to what black people have had to go through. So that's why I tend to be more outraged with racial slurs than anti-female rhetoric.