Also, a thread about this piece & some stuff that didn't wind up in it. First, when I was playing with the Breakfast Club menu of caricatures up top, I realized that several of the women could fit multiple roles, based on how they've been presented. thecut.com/2019/11/lesson…
ie: who's the lightweight? who's the meanie? There can be several answers, bc so many of them can be, and have been, labeled with more than one derogatory stereotype. Which is fascinating, since several of those stereotypes kind of contradict each other!
Then I played the game w/ the men, front-runners & sea of others: which of these stereotypes have been applied to them? A number of them have definitely been caricatured as lightweights. Bernie, as I say in the piece, regularly gets called out as yelling/angry. But...
Most of the guys simply HAVEN'T been framed as elite or mean or crazy or dishonest. Which is wild! All the women fit into several derogatory categories, but some of the men don't fit into any? Plus it doesn't track bc some of the men ARE elite, combative, eccentric, dissembling.
Also, I cut a more detailed element of my response to @SteveKornacki, bc it derailed my piece, but I'd like to note it here. His most persuasive analogy of a male candidate tagged as angry in a way that is comparable to how Warren, especially, has been described is Howard Dean.
It's a good comparison! But with a lot of stuff that we think of as sexist that indeed ALSO gets directed at men (for ex, critical analysis of clothing & hair), the ways in which it's framed negatively for men inherently involve feminizing those men. So, Obama wore mom jeans...
John Edwards was the Prell girl, Al Gore was "practically lactating," & Joe Biden & John Kerry get questioned about plastic surgery. The negative aesthetic framing is in the feminization itself. I think this is important when considering how Dean was treated.
Because yes, even before the Scream (which was mocked because it was high-pitched & his voice broke) he was written about as crazed with insurgent anger, a la Warren (& Bernie, tho it's used to marginalize Bernie, but make Warren scary). But Dean was also feminized!
There was a lot made of the fact that his wife refused to leave her medical practice to join him on the trail. He was teased for having referred to himself as a "metrosexual." David Brooks described him as "the only guy who goes to the Beverly Hills area for a gravitas implant"
So I think the point that men have been framed negatively for being angry (esp when their politics are understood as disruptive to power, as some progressive women are simply for competing) is very fair. But you can't wholly disentangle that treatment from gender, or gender bias.
(Also when sample size of serious male pres contenders is eleventy & sample size of serious female contenders is a dozen, you're gonna find a comparison in men for nearly everything bad said about women. The fact that they're said about EVERY prog woman who threatens is key.)
