As the gender roles turn; how did it happen?
Hillary Clinton, the first woman to run for the presidency who threw
away her skirts and high heels and donned her pant suits in the
quest for
the presidential nomination is a tough talking, beer drinking, gun
toting tomboy candidate.
Barack Obama,
the change candidate, is a change, indeed. He’s brought to politics a
new kind of change: a sex change. He’d rather talk his way out of a
fight than put up his fists, rather engage in girlie talk than in fierce
negotiations.
Hillary wants
to get down and dirty, air the laundry so to speak. Obama doesn’t like
to get his hands dirty. So much for the estrogen and testosterone wars;
she’s got the balls, he’s got the eggs, but it is, as Obama has said,
silly season, and it is the first presidential contest of the new
millennium.
“Why can't a
woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
eternally noble, historically fair. Who, when you win, will always give
your back a pat. Why can't a woman be like that?” Professor Henry
Higgin’s decried in the Lerner and Lowe musical, My Fair Lady,
the lyrics so brilliantly delivered by the manly Rex Harrison portraying
the ultimate male chauvinist.
He finally
got his way.
Of course,
saying Obama exhibits traits reminiscent of the feminine is not a gender
slur on the female model anymore than Clinton’s modeling of the
masculine is. Certainly there is nothing wrong with either motif. What
has changed is we’ve tended to limit the role models of the sexes, and
that is the barrier that has been broken here.
A woman can
run for president, but she better be tough. A black man can run for
president, but he better not exhibit racial stereotypes. Tired of the
tough-talking, swaggering Texas cowboy, George W. Bush, Senator Barack
Obama’s girlie man attributes would seem appealing to many. On the other
hand, Obama’s feminine mystique might look sissified to others.
Clinton has
been described as the ultimate castrator by some, a heroine by others.
She is a woman going where no man has gone before. But no victim, she;
Hillary is willing to stand up to any man, play on his turf, even if he
won’t. Relentlessly, as men have done in the past, she is happy to fight
to the dying day in order to achieve her goal.
Obama, on the
other hand, is like many women in relationships. He appears ready to
retreat in the face of conflict, even relent to smooth over differences.
At times he becomes more like a cat, he hisses when his dander is up
(notice the cat metaphor, more the feminine than the masculine).
Hillary
reacts like the male gender stereotype when under attack. She boasts,
she embellishes, she huffs up – a bear.
It is not
misogynistic to point out the role exchange these two candidates have
made in this contentious fight for the Democratic Party’s nomination.
What we see here is a microcosm of what is happening across America, a
gender role switch.
Calling Obama
a sissy when he found himself on the defensive and tried to whine his
way out of his pathetic performance in the Philadelphia debates was not
a claim that Obama was acting shameful because he was acting like a
woman and women are bad for acting like women. It was that he was acting
in a way that is more familiar to a woman’s behavior than a man’s
archetype, and many prefer the sexes to behave according to their gender
stereotypes.
One positive
thing that may come out of this contentious contest is that if Barack
Obama were to become the next president of the United States, he could
become that unifier he likes to see himself as. We said it was time for
a woman president, and we said it was time for a black president. In Obama we’d get two for the price of one and even a bonus, he’s half
white.
Professor
Higgins, be careful for what you wish.