• Not Just a Pretty Face

  Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:06 PM | By Hanna Rosin
  
  
  sponsorship
  
  I agree with you, Meghan, that woman have never settled on a comfortable uniform for power. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities. But they are not all bad. Think about it this way. We don't talk about every powerful female politicians' clothing. Nobody analyzes what Barbara Boxer wears to a hearing, or Olympia Snowe, even though they are both perfectly attractive. I think the place we are at now is that, for women, people say attractive when they mean charismatic. In Jane Mayer's piece, you can see the men around Palin struggling to come up with the right words to describe this awestruck feeling they have. They settle on demeaning ones—"pretty," "knockout"—but what they are describing is some kind of force she has that they can't quite put into words. This same phenomenon happened to Segolene Royal, the French Socialist candidate. People talked about her bikinis, and her flirty little skirts, but they were really talking about something else.  
  Filed under: $150, 000 clothing bill, Sarah Palin, wardrobe
  0 Comments

  Add Yours

  Or join the discussion
  on the Fray