No, It's Not Sexist to Describe Women Politicians' Clothes

[The Straight Story]

No, It's Not Sexist to Describe Women Politicians' Clothes
A new study disputes the claim that it harms female politicians when the media discuss their appearance.

I first found out I wasn't supposed to write about women politicians' clothes in 2006. Profiling the Democratic nominee for Nevada governor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, I had described her as habitually wearing a "shapeless skirt suit."

I wrote that because it was the sort of visual detail that helps readers engage with a piece's subject, and because it illuminated the persona of the candidate, a political science professor. But she took it as a slur. I soon heard that she'd taken to repeating the description at Democratic campaign meetings as evidence of the sexism and media bias her candidacy faced. "Molly Ball, in the Review-Journal, wrote that I wore shapeless skirts!" she would hiss, to sympathetic noises from the crowd. I have no doubt she was wearing a shapeless skirt suit when she said it. But the accuracy of the description wasn't the point; it was the way I'd supposedly tried to trivialize her by writing about the way she looked.

...

Two political scientists, Danny Hayes of George Washington University and Jennifer Lawless of American University, sought to test the premise in what they believed to be a more rigorous manner. They did their own poll, gauging respondents' reactions to positive, neutral, and negative descriptions of both a male and a female candidate. (They also gave their imaginary candidates identical biographies; the Name It Change It study's male and female subjects had different backgrounds, though voters viewed them about the same before the appearance test.) They found that there was no gender-based difference in how voters responded to the descriptions. Voters reacted negatively to a candidate described as "disheveled and sloppy" whether it was a man or a woman, and actually penalized men more for such judgments. "When Susan Williams and Michael Stevenson are described similarly -- whether in neutral, positive, negative, or no appearance terms -- their favorability ratings are indistinguishable from each other," the authors wrote.

Well, fine, you might think, but we all know only women are subjected to this kind of scrutiny; we don't live in a world where men and women are equally judged for their fashion choices. But in fact, there are plenty of examples of coverage of the appearance of men in politics. It's practically a requirement that any profile of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders describe his "unruly hair"; Mitt Romney, and John Edwards before him, frequently had his perfect coif cited as evidence of phoniness. When Paul Ryan was announced as Romney's running mate, his ill-fitting suits and chiseled abs were dual objects of fascination. And then there's Chris Christie's girth, "whose fluctuations garner almost as much attention as the Consumer Price Index," as Hayes and Lawless put it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/no-its-not-sexist-to-describe-women-politicians-clothes/277460/

[MotherPetrie]

1. This article trivializes appearance-based sexism

It really pissed me off.

[gollygee]

2. Whether it's sexist, and whether they're harmed, and whether

they're harmed in the ways they studied for, are three different issues.

[enough]

3. Golllygee, gollygee, you nailed it! (nt)