Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker must hate that she doesn’t have a penis. What else could I infer from her vapid column in today’s Washington Post, “Obama: Our first female president”. The premise of the piece is interesting, take Toni Morrison’s famous analogy that Bill Clinton was our first black president, and turn it on its head by saying Obama is our first female president.
Parker writes:
Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.
Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.
I’m still not sure of the Alda-Khan simile, but let’s let that pass. Parker looks at Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s essay, “Hating Hillary” which Parker writes that the study “details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, ‘like a man.’ ” I haven’t read Kohrs Campbell’s work, and cannot comment on whether Parker gets that right or not.
Parker then throws it out there that basically, we could never have a woman in the Oval Office.
I’m not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.
Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.
And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.
So feminine styles do not connote leadership? WTF. Parker had so much possiblility with her premise as Obama being our first female president, but she botched it. Her political glasses got in the way of driving to the crux of the matter and maybe enlightening the reader.