The Obama gender

Well, let's start with this.  Women need to behave "like men" (but not too much so) to "get ahead." Men need to be gentler and more flexible (but not too much so).  Our first woman president needs to be very careful. 

We still -- let's face it -- put more store in men's abilities in the "real world" to "get things done right" than women.  We're just getting more polite to women about their obvious deficiencies.

Kathleen Parker (conservative, yes, but one of our best columnists) observes that Barack Obama is, in many respects our first woman president.

What??!!  Are those damn conservatives slamming his integrity in a new way? 

See what I mean?  It seems kind of like an insult to call Obama a cross-president. Women and men share many of the same knee-jerk prejudices in this area whether we like to admit it or not.  Parker gets it. 

I'm not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.

It isn't that he isn't "cowboy" enough, as others have suggested. Aren't we done with that? It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense. That is, we perceive and appraise him according to cultural expectations, and he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom. 

We've come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda. 

We just can't get used to president who's more evolved than any of his predecessors.  Were we ready for that?  Obviously not.  He's not just more evolved that his predecessors, he's more evolved than most Americans. Many of us lizard brains are rooted in the 1950's and can't seem to get beyond the old mom-and-pop fantasies.

So what do we do, rise to the occasion and try to learn from one of the most promising we've ever elected?  Probably not.  He bridges white and brown, feminine and masculine.  He shows us a world that's more complicated and challenging than we can handle beyond the campaign season.

We feel threatened.  It's easier to give in to our weakness and fear, so we'll do everything we can to bring him down.

Comments

[Jymn]

I get the point, but it's peculiar how female journos love to write about Obama's manhood. It's almost like code. You know the old saying that if you first deny you are something ("I'm no prude, but...) you are that very thing. Kathleen Parker does this very thing right at the beginning. While Parker is no far-right conservative, she is a conservative and calling Obama 'female' falls right into the hands of the wingnuts. It's almost as if Parker is vying for the wingnut meme starter of all time. Conservative women crave strong-appearing men. It drives them nuts Obama doesn't care about projecting the macho image the GOP works so hard at doing. My eyes read over Parker's piece but my mind stuck on the words 'female president'. I reckon the wingnuts will soon be trumpeting that term from the rooftops.

[PW]

Parker is a genuine conservative. The nuts to her right are more correctly called "radicals' and -- like radicals anywhere -- they'll use any excuse to go brainless and start yelling. So I don't blame Parker for what the nuts might make of her column. I just don't know how we let them get away with calling themselves conservatives.

Whatever else, Parker's views of the American social character are solid. It troubles me, whether the radicals misuse it or not, that most Americans including females say "female" in a slightly apologetic tone of voice as though America sees itself as composed of Real People plus Others like non-whites and females. It's more noticeable if you've lived in a place where women have equal power in the prevailing sociopolitical system. It's appalling America still hasn't caught up.

P.S. I'm very impressed with your blog. Nice going!

[Anne]

Up to this point, I have respected Kathleen Parker although she is a conservative and I am a liberal. But her asinine psychobabble about the president's "gender" has lost her my respect. As far as I'm concerned, thinking and researching before speaking are not "feminine" or "masculine" traits, but are a hallmark of mature adulthood.

With her antiquated gender stereotypes, she managed to insult both men and women. We have had a previous leader who liked to play the swaggering cowboy, and the results have been disastrous. But of course, she isn't alone, because she speaks for a number of people who are unable to get past the stereotypes. As a country, we have come a long way from where we were in gender equality, but we still have a long way to go.