So goes the double bind
Rebecca Solnit is seeing a lot of unconscious bias going on:
I’ve just spent a month watching white male people in particular arguing about who has charisma or relatability or electability. They speak as if these were objective qualities, and as if their own particular take on them was truth or fact rather than taste, and as if what white men like is what everyone likes or white men are who matters, which is maybe a hangover from the long ugly era when only white men voted. It’s a form of self-confidence that verges on lunacy, because one of the definitions of that condition is the inability to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective realities.
She points out that a lot of male pundits “whose misogyny helped shape the race” in 2016 were later accused of sexual harassment.
Meanwhile, the New York Times in all its august unbearability just published this prize sentence in a piece about Joe Biden’s failure to offer Anita Hill an apology she found adequate: “Many former Judiciary Committee aides and other people who participated did not want to talk on the record because they feared that scrutiny of Mr. Biden’s past conduct would undermine the campaign of the candidate some think could be best positioned to defeat President Trump, whose treatment of women is a huge issue for Democrats.” That translates as, let’s run a guy whose treatment of women is an issue, and let’s ignore that treatment because even so we think that he’s best positioned to defeat the guy whose treatment of women is an issue, and also fuck treatment of women, especially this black woman, as an issue, really.
The trouble is, you see, that women lack charisma. Sad but true. Men have explained that to Solnit.
A friend of mine posted some praise of Elizabeth Warren, and a man jumped in to say, “It’s a moot point because she’s not going to get into office. With any luck Bernie Sanders is going to do that.” I’ve heard a lot of white men explain that Warren can’t win because she’s wonky, and then when I mention that our last two Democratic presidents were famously wonky, I get to hear why they had charisma and Warren doesn’t.
It’s almost as if, to a lot of men, unless a female person is 19 or under and smokin’ hot, she’s repellent. Too wonky, not charismatic enough, too smart, not relatable enough…just wrong, somehow. Them’s the rules.
What makes a candidate electable is in part how much positive coverage they get, and how much positive coverage they get is tied to how the media powers decide who is electable, and so goes the double bind.
The media powers aren’t always the right people to be deciding who is electable. (That’s deliberate understatement, of an extreme kind.)
when I mention that our last two Democratic presidents were famously wonky
Bill Clinton was wonky?
Colin, Bill Clinton was famous for being a policy wonk. He was like wonk of the year, or something. People sort of forget that because he was so aw shucks and because of his sexual adventures, but, yeah, Clinton was wonky.
I’ve already seen one (male, white) Facebook friend post that he finds Warren off-putting because she sounds like “a scold.”
A commenter suggested this might be unconscious bias. Of course friend vigorously denied it. And yet–it was right there in his choice of words. “Scold.”
*sob*
Is this facebook friend aware that by definition he cannot be aware of an unconscious bias? I have seen many ‘sceptics’ vehemently deny the possibility that they have an unconscious bias; they seem to think that if they had such, they’d be aware of it. White and male as a rule, but I’m sure that’s just pure coincidence.
Well he didn’t say he was aware of it, he said [he was aware that] he didn’t have it.
:D
I met Hillary Clinton once. She’s INCREDIBLY charismatic. For the ten seconds that it took her to shake my hand and thank me for some volunteering that I did, I felt like I was the only person on earth.
So, James Garnett, I guess that was one time she wasn’t being shrill? Oh, wait, I don’t think that’s possible. She’s always shrill, right?
I have some problems with Hillary’s policies and some of the things she does, but I think she’s an amazing woman. She has taken so much hate blasted at her for nearly 30 years, and she still manages to get up in the morning, knowing there will likely be more hate in her email, her Twitter feed, anywhere she happens to look, and she goes about her day as though, well, as though she’s just going about an ordinary day. And for her, I guess she is. And she still put her hat in the ring to run for president, and managed to put on a smile many times when I imagine she didn’t want to smile.
I would be sitting in a strait jacket somewhere rocking and moaning, unable to leave my house or to function.
iknklast, I snorted out loud at that first part of your comment :)
There are things I didn’t like about Hillary Clinton as a candidate, to be sure. But I voted for her. And yeah, nobody can accuse her of being uncharismatic, or not having a spine. And I REALLY enjoyed meeting her. I’d vote for her again, over Biden, in a heartbeat.
I responded recently to a Democratic FB poll: who did I favor in this early stage of the race? Not saying who I would pick, but I noticed — glaringly — that Elizabeth Warren’s name wasn’t even on the list. It’s f*ing infuriating.
We have a real problem with images of female authority (something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve become a female in authority)–many/most men have only a few images/references for female authority–nurse, teacher, mom, nagging (ex) wife–and respond accordingly, often embarrassingly when in a work environment. I wonder if there’s a way that we can identify, acknowledge, and respond to this often unconscious behaviour? Can we try to channel Daenerys Targaryen or Sansa Stark? Or Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I? (I think I used to be more Joan of Arc, leading the troops, but am more Sansa in black these days.)
Yes, I sense that, too.
And when I wrote a play with an intelligent, independent female in authority, even the female actor (a strong, intelligent, independent female with authority) felt the need to turn her into an airheaded ditz by playing it as a farce. Another play I wrote for the same group about women they immediately dubbed a farce; I removed it from their control without delay.
People are uncomfortable with female authority figures, even if their mom was not a tyrant or a “nag”. We’re raised on a constant stream of images, and the images of authoritative females are usually incompetent ditzes or ‘ball-busters’. There were some promising possibilities in the 1970s and 1980s, but we seem to be going backwards.
It’s really easy to fall into the ‘ditzy’ model of female authority, because it’s non-threatening and puts your staff at ease. I don’t know if you’ve read, or remember, Deborah Tannen’s example (from I think Talking Nine to Five) of a manager at a radio studio who, realising that the new hire on the sound board was nervous and anxious, spent the few minutes before going on-air with him asking him very basic questions about his job, so that he could show his expertise by answering them, distracting him enough and boosting his confidence enough so that he could perform well. The manager obviously knew the answers to these questions, but anyone watching that interaction would have seen a clearly incompetent airhead asking a competent man questions she should have known the answers to. I’ve been known to do this…it’s taken me a while to realise that while it might be effective management it’s not good ‘optics’ for me. But now I’m working in a role and a business environment where I feel perfectly comfortable saying ‘explain this to me starting from the bottom’ without feeling like my authority will be questioned as a result.
What first made me realise that our problem is an absence of useful patterns/archetypes was watching my male peers in age and experience fall easily into the roles they’ve grown into–‘strong leader’, ‘innovative thinker’, ‘absent-minded professor’, ‘techie wiz/subject matter expert’, etc….and realising that a) I couldn’t portray/adopt any of these convincingly and b) I didn’t have any other options.
That’s really interesting.
But the thing I find really shocking about the situation is seeing grown men, adult professional men, respond to me (and other women in authority) by role-playing some kind of scene, or family trauma–I’ve seen ‘I won’t and you can’t make me’, ‘you’re not the boss of me’, ‘aw, do I hafta?’, ‘yes dear’, and various other totally inappropriate responses to what should have been a basic ‘please do this’ interaction.
I don’t want to get jumped on, but just meekly, the Evil White Men seem to be commenting on polling results, which steadily put Biden at the top. I realize that some may believe that Evil White Men, by their opining, *cause* the polling results to come out that way, but that’s not some sort of proven fact, it’s an assertion.
Oss Ickle,
Yes, and it’s not just white men who are supporting Biden in the polls — he’s attracting strong support from African-Americans and doing fine among women. That doesn’t negate the point. Political opinions aren’t formed in a vacuum. Media influence affects everyone, not just white men (evil or otherwise).
There’s also some second-order effects going on here: what *I* think makes someone electable depends just as much on who I think *you* are willing to vote for as who *I’m* willing to vote for. So it’s entirely plausible for women to be resigned to supporting Biden because they’ve just heard their husbands, brothers, and other men in their lives mutter about all the supposed defects in the women candidates. WaPo political reporter Dave Weigel (hardly a rabid feminist) noted on his Twitter feed recently that he has had numerous conversations with middle-aged female Democratic voters who don’t think a woman can get elected president right now, or at least that it’s just too big a risk to run with everything that’s currently at stake.
Confession. I, a middle-aged female Democratic voter, have had the same thoughts myself. I cringe at them. I hate them. I bash and batter at them, but I realize they are formulated not by my own preferences, but by those of the men around me, most of whom are extolling the Bernie virtues…and several who are saying that at least Biden is a moderate. So…yeah.
Of course, I am also saddened and horrified by how many women seem to honestly believe women haven’t got what it takes to be commander-in-chief of the world’s largest army – and most of those are Democratic women, because I spend much less time with the Republican women of my acquaintance, finding their pieties often difficult to stomach.
iknklast,
It’s a cruel sort of logic. I’m reminded of Keynes’s comment about the stock market being like betting on a beauty pageant — the strategy is not to choose who you think is the most beautiful, but who the judges will think is.
If it’s any consolation, recent polls have Warren closing in on Bernie. The hard-core Bernie Bros will never desert him (by definition), but if the trend keeps up, then his electability argument starts to crumble.
A curious thing, “electability”. I’m not crazy about Biden, but I nonetheless feel pressure to vote against him in the primary, because he would have difficulty in the general election. Not because Republicans would vote against, but because Democrats would. There are factions that do not trust the Democratic Party apparatus to decide on a nominee, and they hate Biden so much that they plan to sit out the presidential election (or vote 3rd party or write-in) if Biden is the nominee.
I don’t know what to think of this.
Sackbut,
I think the Democratic Party is sort of screwed either way in terms of spoiler third party candidacies or “stay home” movements.
I think you’re correct that, if Biden (or someone else running as a moderate/centrist) is the nominee, then certain elements of the left will vow to support the Green Party, or stay home.
But we’re also seeing evidence that, if the nominee is Sanders or someone else deemed “too far left” for their tastes, there will be a Howard Schultz-type candidate.
I just don’t think you can worry too much about people like that this far in advance. When push comes to shove, hopefully most of the voters will decide to opt for getting rid of Trump versus their preening self-regard. (Or find a way to have both: it’s a secret ballot — you can always vote for the Unsatisfactory Dem Nominee but brag to all your friends that you really voted for Awesome Fringe Spoiler Candidate!)
From an outsiders perspective, over the last 40 years I’ve been giving attention to politics, the US (and Western generally) political milieu has moved so far to the right that I don’t regard Biden, Obama, or either of the Clinton’s as centrist, let alone left wing. The US really has no idea what left wing politics actually look like and therefore by definition what the ‘middle’ is.
Her recent column on “electability” is yet another reason why Alexandra Petri at WaPo is a national treasure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/25/you-have-think-about-electability/
Rob, that has been my observation as well. Most of our so-called middle-of-the-road candidates are somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon, though they do at least give lip service to minorities and women, as well as a few social justice issues. They just don’t do much about them. Talk is cheap.
It’s like we built a road where the only left lane is a bike lane, too small for most people to use. Or perceived as weird and extremist.
@15 I was waiting for Ophelia to respond, but she hasn’t chosen to so I will. What’s up with the passive aggressive ‘oh mean women pleeeze don’t hurt meeeee’ tone? What advantage did you feel that commenting with Weird Capitalisations etc. had over just stating your opinion in normal adult language? This relates a bit to my first comment on this post, as it seems to be an example of how difficult it is for a woman speaking authoritatively to have a conversation with a man without it swerving into some kind of family psychodrama.
I think I was drawing breath (so to speak) to respond to Oss @ 15 but then I scrolled down and saw that Screechy had so I didn’t. I don’t want to suffocate anyone!