Clinton's mode of trying to smile off serious charges, backed with carefully-worded responses that are technically true but completely misleading, turns out to look even worse on a man. The audience described him as “really punchable.” The kind of smarmy 'I think I'm smarter than you so I'm going to give you an answer you know is false but can't prove is false' mode is completely unacceptable from a man, so much so that it provokes the impulse to give him a sock in the chops for trying it.
I wonder if it isn't only our society's very strong mores forbidding violence against women that allows someone like Clinton -- or Pelosi, or DWS -- to get away with this mode. Maybe Obama could do it, protected by a similar set of mores among educated Americans against similar lashing out at African-Americans. The protections extended to them, out of a kind of respect for the vulnerability of their position, can turn out to enable bad behavior. Not voting for one of them, though, isn't violence against them -- and it isn't sexist or racist, not if you'd reject the same mode in a white man (and indeed, even more strongly reject it).
The female Trump stand in, meanwhile, was not rejected (as the organizers expected her to be) for being too 'pushy' or outspoken. Instead, people were suddenly able to see in her answers what they had been unable to see in the same answers given by Trump himself.
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics”...The second one is about a lesbian feminist who undertook the experiment without telling people she met she wasn't the man she was pretending to be. You've probably seen this one before, but it compares and contrasts nicely with the NYU experiment around Trump/Clinton.
I was surprised by how critical I was seeing [Clinton] on a man’s body, and also by the fact that I didn’t find Trump’s behavior on a woman to be off-putting. I remember turning to Maria at one point in the rehearsals and saying, "I kind of want to have a beer with her!"
The female Trump stand in, meanwhile, was not rejected (as the organizers expected her to be) for being too 'pushy' or outspoken.
ReplyDeleteThis reminded me of the so-called 'Ban Bossy' campaign that attempted to lay the ground work for Hillary's run, and points out that female leaders are not resisted in general, as the claim went, but that the specific style of 'eat your broccoli' hectoring usually described as 'bossy' is what people object to. A woman presenting positive actionable objectives will be evaluated in a more neutral manner.
A couple of experiments that both involve switching the sex of a person to see how it impacts how people receive them.
ReplyDeleteThese are experiments that are impossible to run: they're gender appropriation.
Hey, wait....
Eric Hines
In one of the Brene Brown clips I watched yesterday, she said she was signing books one day when a man came up to her in line and asked what her research told her about some aspect of vulnerability in men. She answered that she studied only women and so didn't know. He upbraided her mildly for her self-imposed ignorance, saying, "Let me tell you about the value of vulnerability in my life as a man. My wife and daughters would rather see me die on that white horse than to watch me fail."
ReplyDeleteFailure is really one of the things you have to be vulnerable to, as a man. I would say that I have failed at most of the things I've ever tried to do, because I try to do hard things. Sometimes they're just hard for me, and sometimes they're hard simpliciter, but those are the things worth doing. That means they're the things worth trying. But since they're hard things, it won't always work.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, after a while you build up a certain number of successes. And, together, they make up a life worth having lived.
Maybe it wasn't really the gender switch that changed things for these viewers, but that the words were detached from the objects of their preconceptions. This allows them to listen to the words more objectively and to assess them more accurately. That the actors are not familiar to them would also enhance that.
ReplyDeleteBut to them, it has to be about gender somehow, just not the way they thought.
I disliked watching both Trump and Hillary in the debates—their manner was offputting to me—so it's interesting to me that I have the majority reaction to this clip: I liked the female "Trump", disliked the male "Clinton". It has me wondering whether it might just be that the actress playing Trump is more winsome in some way.
ReplyDeleteI also noticed both actors are considerably younger than Clinton and Trump. I wonder how this would play out if both were older (or made up to look older), more the age of the actual candidates. Are we more annoyed by certain mannerisms coming from old people? Or maybe less threatened when someone visibly old says something than when a younger person does?
When an authoritative woman is offputting, I often ask myself whether I'm unconsciously expecting more softness. When an authoritative man seems brusque, I wonder whether I'm playing a "bully" tape in my head and being overprotective of his female opponent. It was interesting to switch the genders here. The man seemed prissy, thin-skinned, and self-involved. What self-respecting man would say, "I wrote a book about it, you can go buy it and read it"? When this woman interrupted him, even to lecture him loudly, it was the relief of hearing some plain language to cut off the flow of orthodox, safe, boring nonsense. My reaction was, "Thank goodness this woman knows how to stand up to an opponent and make her point instead of cringeing and complaining later to sympathetic critics that he didn't let her voice be heard." Also, "Thank goodness she knows how to defend a plain position instead of asking tentative questions and soliciting consensus." The Trump actor was focused on action and results for the benefit of the country, while the Clinton actor was focused on whether it was fair to hold him accountable for his performance.
ReplyDeleteI always thought part of my bad reaction to Clinton could be blamed on her nasal hectoring tone, but my reaction was the same despite this actor's pleasant voice. With Trump, some of my reaction always is to that loud New York honking, so I wonder if it made a big difference that his stand-in spoke in more standard English. (Or did she? Now I can't recall without replaying it.) It's true that I often enjoy a NY accent--or maybe I'm really thinking of New Jersey, as in Tony Soprano, a sound I love. I also love listening to Richard Feynman or Groucho Marx (Lower East Side/Long Island). Maybe I just like the Yid thing? Trump's accent says "uncultured, unread" to me in the same way that George W. Bush or Rick Perry's accents say those things, I imagine, to Yankees.
Texan99, have you seen the "sophisticated Trump" videos? (Trump dubbed with same words, but with a British accent.) Curious how you might react to the mannerisms and words but without the New Yawk accent.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, that one just says "snooty Nigel Farage" to me ("even snootier"). Maybe it's his facial expressions, that hair? I'm on board with the message, clearly. I may never learn to like his delivery.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we could give him Scott Walker's voice. That would be some serious cognitive dissonance: boring Mr. Rogers with all that unfiltered heart-on-the-sleeve stuff. (I was a dyed-in-the-wool Walker fan.)
I have trouble identifying Trump with a New York accent, because my take on a New York accent is the Groucho accent. A NY friend of mine from my freshman year in college had a Groucho-type accent. The college had a lot of New Yorkers, most of whom didn't have a Groucho-type accent. It seemed to me that those New Yorkers who didn't have the Groucho-type accent just spoke like I did. I am a New England native, but not from Eastern Massachusetts. Call it a Northeast accent? There was definitely a generational aspect about the NY accent, because my roommate from the Upper West Side of Manhattan spoke like I did- as far as I could tell- but his father definitely had the Groucho-type accent.
ReplyDeleteHumans are even more like livestock than I had imagined, and that is pretty far. The livestock have the excuse of their limitations for being unable to comprehend what their senses provide, what do so called humans have to justify their inabilities...
ReplyDeleteThese are descendants of the citizens that Andrew Jackson wanted to have a vote in the say of policies. That eugenic experiment worked out about as well as Slavery 2.0 or Aristocracy.