It occurs to me that Americans have an obsession with a hyper-masculine, macho, very physical image of leadership.
It occurs to me that Americans have an obsession with a hyper-masculine, macho, very physical image of leadership. I mean, I'm sure lots of places do, but it occurs to me that one of the difficulties in running for office as a woman is that we are super attached to binary gender norms informed by our own cultural mythos.
Which means that things like intellect, thoughtfulness, deliberativeness, sympathy, empathy, etc. are all minimally regarded as essential to the task. It's like we're back many centuries, voting for the strongest, scariest warlord whose job is to stomp on people and let the politicians, diplomats, and scholars work all that out later. Forgetting, of course, that even warlords can be killed or get sick and die.
Which means that things like intellect, thoughtfulness, deliberativeness, sympathy, empathy, etc. are all minimally regarded as essential to the task. It's like we're back many centuries, voting for the strongest, scariest warlord whose job is to stomp on people and let the politicians, diplomats, and scholars work all that out later. Forgetting, of course, that even warlords can be killed or get sick and die.
It'd be nice to think we've advanced beyond mere instinct to something requiring a little bit of higher brain functions. Besides, we're pretty selective about which more basic instincts we consider acceptable. I mean, presumably having sex with anything that moves is a basic instinct but we get all judgy about that behavior.
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