How far have we come? Well, now we get paragraph after paragraph of perfunctory caveats and qualifiers before columnist and new CNN host Kathleen Parker calls our president a pussy.
“No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie president,” Parker writes. Oh no? “But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.”
Paging Maureen Dowd! You have some competition in the department of being a woman who lobbies “femininity” insults at male leaders and pretends that this is some sort of fresh analysis. Good thing you both got Pulitzers for your bravery. Otherwise we might have to stage a catfight.
Let’s review the logic here:
1) Toni Morrison, a real black person, once said that Bill Clinton was the first black president. Thus, Parker, a real woman (she is rather fond of this phrase herself), can’t be sexist when she calls Obama a ladyman.
2) She’s not being a misogynist! Because take a look at these boxes she’s checked. “It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense. That is, we perceive and appraise him according to cultural expectations….Cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.” In other words, Kathleen Parker read that stuff that whoever wrote about the social construction of gender but . . . whatever.
3) “Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.” See what she did there? Ladies have trouble shutting up — Parker herself needs several hundred to make a point that amounts to very little — and Obama may as well trot out in petticoats for all the conquering masculinity he’s offering.
4) But bless Obama’s heart! Parker doesn’t mean it as an insult or anything. “I say this in the nicest possible way. I don’t think that doing things a woman’s way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.” It’s not her fault that everyone else thinks being “female” is a deficiency. Except the part when she frames this alleged femaleness as an urgent problem, blamed for everything from using the passive voice in his speeches to fucking up on the oil spill to losing the confidence of the American people.
5) Parker, who briefly earned points with liberals for calling bullshit on Sarah Palin during the election, throws the deficient ladies a bone: “And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.” Let’s get things straight here: real women act like ladies, real men conquer like Genghis Khan and don’t let anyone catch them pussyfooting around. Somehow a “real woman” can be president anyway, but only if it gives Kathleen Parker a chance to dust off some more discredited platitudes.
It’s not really clear if Parker’s issue is with Obama’s communication style or his supposedly ladylike actions, though I suspect that in her desperate desire to make everything about the thwarting of masculinity, as well as her Beltway blinders, she has heedlessly conflated the two. But really, why bother to change up her routine? It’s already served her so well.
Obama, Our First Female President [WP]
Earlier: Would Someone Send This Woman To Thailand Already?