A Woman Is Running for President

But the Coverage Is Mostly Male [Independent]

In the US, as in many countries with universal suffrage, women outnumber men as registered voters, and older women vote in larger numbers than any other group. Perhaps in an election where women voters believe that a woman has a chance of victory, the voting gender gap will widen.

New Hampshire apocrypha suggests an unsuspected element of female solidarity.

Tales are told of women who went to vote, or changed their vote, at the last moment to counter the slights and bias they perceived to be directed at Mrs Clinton – the same slights, they felt, they had experienced themselves.

And the bias they say they felt, where did it come from? Not from the pollsters, but from the media.

Watch US network television, scan the by-lines in the mainstream US newspapers, and count the women.

They are "allowed" to report, especially if they look good, and one woman is accommodated on most talk shows. This is, after all, the 21st century.

But political punditry remains a man's game – an establishment man's game, what is more. And when the front-runners are identified, it is the (usually male) "stars", who follow the bandwagon.

This year's Democratic primaries are male-female contests, in which the coverage is disproportionately filtered through the lens of male experience and expectations.

In this, you might observe, the scene is not a whole lot different from here. Who are the political editors and observers who set the tone for mainstream politics?

Half a century of feminism has left the two elite circuits for political journalism, Washington and London, with men easily outnumbering women. As Washington correspondent during the 2000 election, I was one of only a few "girls" on the campaign bus.

In Britain, the number of women covering mainstream politics seems actually to have declined compared with 15 years ago.

Perhaps this does not matter. Perhaps a good pundit is a good pundit, as observant and perspicacious as the next.

My sense, though, is that it does matter; and that as long as the imbalance obtains, the pack mentality and the presumption of a shared male experience will persist. If this is so, then the good news from New Hampshire is that the women used the ballot box to fight back.

Male Pundits Locked into Female Stereotypes [LA Times]

The media, punditry and pollsters have been viewing this historic female candidacy, and the candidate herself, through the Madonna-Medea prism they've applied since at least the Victorian era to women who venture into American public life.

In so doing, they have ignored a whole other model of womanhood that is central to female experience. If they are determined to think of Hillary Clinton in stereotypical female terms, at least they should get the stereotype right.

That ignorance was on prominent display after New Hampshire, as analysts groped to explain the primary results and came up with explanations that were as offensive as they were phantasmagorial.

Some pundits acknowledged that there might be a gender dynamic at work but allowed for only one possibility: Female voters were easily manipulated saps who'd let a few girl tears muddle their political sense.

Pundits debated whether Clinton's tears were "real" or "manufactured" -- that is, whether she was some weak sob sister who couldn't hack the rough-and-tumble of a man's world, or just a power-grabbing witch who would do anything to hang on to her broomstick.

A few, such as San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci, offered more cogent appraisals. She pointed out that female voters didn't seem to be responding to Clinton's tears so much as to their outrage at men's reactions to those tears (in particular, men in the media).

Clinton has not based her campaign, or much of her appeal, on her femininity or her womanhood. However, the public (and especially the media) persist in viewing her through that lens.

The problem is that it is a distorted lens. It only sees half of female experience. Clinton, and virtually all of the female politicians who have come before her, wind up being assessed according to a long-standing division, then condemned either way:

Too tenderhearted or coddling (the criticism implicit in "Hillarycare" or "nanny state," as well as in the initial reaction to her tearing up in New Hampshire) or too unemotional and controlling (implicit in "Hillary's not personal enough"). In either case, the candidate is being judged not just as a woman but as a mom.

American society characterizes women as caregivers based on their young years as mothers. And when the American media demand emotion and warmth from Clinton, they are voicing the demand of a child to its mother (a demand not made equally to its father).

In their appraisals of Hillary Clinton, the pollsters and pundits who have not gotten beyond that mommy/ball-buster teeter-totter narrative of American womanhood also have not begun to diagnose gender dynamics beyond the perspective of the little boy and his mom.

A lot of female voters, however, may be factoring in a whole other kind of female archetype, whose wet eyes do not signal weakness and whose flashes of anger do not signal coldness, only pragmatic perseverance.

If pundits ever tried to understand what some female voters know about the complexity of women's lives, they might begin to comprehend the appeal of a female candidate whose ethic of caring and whose posture of femininity derive from responsibilities beyond the maternal.

And then they might begin to understand the affection of women in New Hampshire who put her over the top.

tags: media  male  domination  female  stereotype  hillary clinton  president  2008  

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