Thursday, November 01, 2007 - Posts
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In response to your perceptive comments, Emily: I agree that Hillary can seem to lack empathy, and that's what might make her seem a "pretender" to many Americans. But what the paper I cited starts to get at--and what I'm really wondering about--are the ways in which gender powerfully shape the way we "read" somebody, even when we think it doesn't. In other words, you and I might think we have a "pure" take on Hillary--that we'd feel the same way about her if she were a man. But as Lisa Belkin's column in The New York Times today on gender on workplace perceptions indicates, the exact same "tough" or angry behavior is frequently read as abrasive in women, but seen as authoritative in men.
Belkin quotes from a pretty interesting-sounding study by Victoria Brescoll at Yale in which a man and women are given an "angry" script and a "sad script" to use in a job interview: the angry man was seen as most hireable, then the sad woman, then the sad man, and, last, the angry woman. (Caveat: I haven't read the study myself, so don't know how well-executed it is.)
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In the NYT this morning, Gail Collins' column is all about Hillary's toughness. Collins reams Clinton for the substantive answers she gave during Tuesday's debates, but gives her style points for holding her own while "being yelled at by six men." "They began piling on from the first question. She took it all and came out the other end in one piece. She’s one tough woman. Kudos."
Meghan, you pointed out that Hillary gets called a pretender, and wondered if that's because she's striving to be a manly-girl. Collins' column is another phenomenon: Hillary gets points for being tough precisely because she's a woman. Those cross currents will probably be with us through the election; their relative strength could determine whether she wins. I wonder, though, if Hillary's reputation as a pretender has another origin. I believe her toughness. It's empathy that I have trouble feeling from her to the same degree.
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Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.
And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)
It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.
We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.
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