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.
