"The early 1980s marked both the period of my adolescent hunger for an urbane, grown-up life in New York and the dawn of VHS, enabling the obsessive consumption of movies, which in my case meant the obsessive consumption of movies by Woody Allen.
In them, I found a vision of the future I wanted, a series of aspirations — to have opinions, to write, to go to book parties but also to make fun of people who approached those things too seriously. The hope was to inhabit the world the way Woody Allen did, as both conspirator and judge.... For all of its visual beauty and brilliant writing, the movie is a shell game in the end. Look over there, the director is telling us — it’s pretension and quaaludes and bad sitcoms that are really the problem. Feminists themselves were in on the game. One scene is set at fund-raiser for the Equal Rights Amendment in which the politician and women’s rights leader, Bella Abzug, makes a cameo.
Reduced to its elements, 'Manhattan' is a movie about a guy who beds a sweet 17-year-old girl, breaks her heart when he leaves her for someone else and only comes crawling back when he gets dumped. It is not simply that so many of us were so besotted with the film for so long; it’s that we were perfectly content to look and see virtue."
Yes, Woody Allen did create the image of a sophisticated world that a very young woman — like Bellafante, who was 14 when "Manhattan" came out — might want to grow up and inhabit. Movies have always provided dream material for the young. The Woody Allen dream that charmed Bellafante was one where smart people cared about writing, said clever things to each other, and thought they were superior to the people who made up the bulk of America. You know, the deplorables.
The problem Bellafante sees now is that Woody Allen was sexually attracted to young women, like the 17-year-old in the movie. Bellafante says "17-year-old girl," but 17 is and was the age of consent in New York. I guess if only the characters in the movie were more plausibly proximate in age, it would have been just fine to shape your life around high-level literary taste and look down at everyone who's not up there with you.
Neither of the young Smithsonian object handlers knew of the formidable New York feminist and three-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Brookins said she had heard of Abzug, who died 21 years ago, for the “first time in the poster.”...
The Bella Abzug poster, in orange, black and white, shows her in one of her trademark hats, along with the slogan “This Woman’s Place is in the House . . . the House of Representatives!” (The Smithsonian also has one of her hats.)
You'll have to imagine the orange lettering:
Pictures really do help us to remember. Pictures of posters, posters that helped us to have an idea of the candidate at the time. The hat helped too. It's another visual (and the Smithsonian is preserving one of her hats). This woman really did imprint herself on the public by wearing a hat. She was the one with the hat.
These days, Trump is the one with a hat, and he imprinted himself on us by making his head distinctive not with a hat but with a very odd hairstyle.
Anyway, these kids today. They don't know much about history. But maybe if you give them some pictures, some glimmer will arise. And what do you really know about history? What's there in your odd head? Isn't it — to be fair — just some posters? Stuff like...
It is precisely Sanders’s au-naturel-ness that endears him to his young fans: his unkempt hair, his ill-fitting suits, his unpolished Brooklyn accent, his propensity to yell and wave his hands maniacally. Sanders, it appears, woke up like this.
These qualities are what make him seem “authentic,” “sincere” even — especially when contrasted with Clinton’s hyper-scriptedness. Sanders, unlike Clinton, doesn’t give a damn if he’s camera-ready.
This is, of course, a form of authenticity that is off-limits to any female politician, not just one with Clinton’s baggage. Female politicians — at least if they want to be taken seriously on a national stage — cannot be unkempt and unfiltered, hair mussed and voice raised. They have to be carefully coifed and scripted at all times, because they have to hew as closely as possible to the bounds of propriety available to both their sex and their occupation. They can’t be too quiet or too loud, too emotional or too cold, too meek or too aggressive, and so on.
But they also can’t appear to be trying too hard, either. At least if they want the kind of enthusiastic millennial support that Sanders enjoys.
I have 10 problems with this:
1. Bernie's hair is actually not unkempt. It's neatly trimmed. It may look misshapen in the balding areas, but it's thick around the bottom and looks very carefully cut. It's also very clean and combed in place. He doesn't rub it with his hands or muss it up. He's not Doc from "Back to the Future." He's not Einstein.
2. Bernie doesn't wave his hands maniacally. He makes rather large hand gestures, but they are slow and deliberately coordinated with his speech, as if he's placing the words in the air in front of him. That's why it worked so well in "Bad Lip Reading" when they had Bernie reciting a poem.
3. Bernie is able to put himself out there in a form that seems to be something close to what he really is — a politician of many decades, repeating his old lines like "The American economy is rigged." It's an old habit, and it's not that hard. I don't think he's even been trying to win, so it's a pretty simple task. It's straightforward expression, and people do indeed respond to that, especially while it remains in the expressive category and they're not (yet) squarely facing up to the reality of this man as President.
4. So compare him to a woman who's in the same position, someone entering the race to say the things that are not being said and not carrying the burden of all the expectations — that she's supposed to win and that everyone else has gotten out of her way and that now she'd better be able to make good on what she led them all to think she could do. I could imagine such a woman. Elizabeth Warren could have played that role, and I think people would have loved it. Why didn't she jump in? Maybe because she would have wanted to win, and that's a much more complex task.
5. Bernie's clothes are indeed very ordinary. Just a generic man's suit. An everyman's uniform. Could a woman come up with something equivalent? Hillary hasn't tried to do that, so show me a woman who says that's what I'm going to do and see what they say. Only then would you get a fair reading of whether there's a double standard. Have a woman candidate wear a plain white blouse under a dark gray blazer and a dark gray straight mid-knee-length skirt — wear the same thing every day — and see if there is criticism or celebration. My bet is that people would love it.
6. As for the woman's hair, maybe it can't be dirty or badly cut, but it doesn't need to be an ultra-controlled helmet. I think people would be quite happy to see the hair fall naturally and move like real hair, and a well-cut feminine hairstyle is supposed to be mussable. Talk to a good hair dresser. I'll bet he or she would be horrified to be asked to fix a woman's hair like Hillary's and would much rather cut something short and choppy that you're supposed to muss to get the right look. Think: Helen Mirren. Don't tell me that won't work. Hillary's helmet hair does not prove that Hillary's helmet hair is required because she's a woman. Sometimes it's hard to be a woman... the old Tammy Wynette song begins. But it's not that hard.
7. Do men have more freedom in the tone of their voice? Maybe. I'm inclined to think that volume and stress in a woman's voice is offputting to many people. There's a trigger point where they'll use words like "strident," "nagging," and "sounds like my ex-wife." But I'm not willing to believe people would reject a woman who came out and talked something like Bernie Sanders. Listen to Bella Abzug (from 1977):
I think we'd love to embrace a presidential candidate who looked and talked like that. (By the way, the hat is another answer to what to do about your hair.)
8. I don't believe that a female candidate has "to hew as closely as possible to the bounds of propriety available to both their sex and their occupation." How do we know? Where is the woman in the race who is challenging this idea and getting rejected because of it? Looking excessively bound to "propriety" isn't much of a recommendation, but in fact, all the candidates are expected to behave. Trump transgresses. We'll see how that works out for him in the end. It is hard to imagine a female Trump. I'll grant you that. Perhaps liberals would celebrate such a woman (assuming her politics were liberal).
9. "They can’t be too quiet or too loud, too emotional or too cold, too meek or too aggressive, and so on." Maybe so, but what's the midrange that's permissible? How narrow is it? I think a lot depends on the individual, and if you are trying too hard to calibrate it, you're going to seem phony and unnatural. That "can't be too" list doesn't include "they can't be too phony or too natural." Be natural! Let us see who you really are. If we don't like you, we don't like you. When we see fake, we're on guard that you are putting something over on us. We're right to be sensitive to that.
10. "But they also can’t appear to be trying too hard...." That sounds like it means poor Hillary has to try hard not to look as though she's trying too hard. That's a hell of a lot of trying. An alternative is to let your natural self shine through. If you've got one.
"Running for president is like sex... No one ever did it once and forgot about it," says James Carville, talking to Maureen Dowd, who inserts a few paragraphs — for decency's sake? — before getting to this additional Carville quote:
What's with all this love and sex analogizing? I hear in it echoes of Barack Obama's crushing "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Going back into my own old "likeable enough" posts, I find this 2010 link to Instapundit:
ELIZABETH WURTZEL: “I suppose I should confess: I like Sarah Palin. I like her because she is such a problem for all these political men, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their polls, and their Walter Dean Burnham theories of transformative elections, and their economy this and their values that–and here comes Palin, and logic just doesn’t apply. . . . The Democrats are total morons for not finding their own hot mama before the Republicans did so first, or maybe I should have left off the qualifiers and called it straight: the Democrats are just plain morons, at least where women are concerned.”
... But the very essence of old-line Democratic feminism is to reject feminine appeal. It’s Bella Abzug and Hillary Clinton as role models.
Politics is like sex, and people want to fall in love, but it gets complicated when it's women in politics. Think about sex/don't think about sex. A paradox. A quandary.
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