Dr. Brooke Magnanti: Obama 'like a girl'

After a US columnist attacks President Barack Obama for behaving 'like a girl', Dr Brooke Magnanti hits back, explaining why none of the American leader's failings have anything to do with sexist caricatures. 

By Dr Brooke Magnanti, formerly known as Belle de Jour

11:21AM BST 22 Aug 2013

US Daily Caller columnist Mark Judge took to t'Internet this week to ridicule Barack Obama for being the 'first female President'.

In a top-level demonstration of above-the-line trolling,You know, like being female is a bad thing.

Citing a lack of "rage and the desire to kill" in Obama's eyes (let's just stop and dryly chuckle a while, everyone who's been paying attention to the drone debate), Judge's piece starts at bad and goes rapidly to worse. 

Come on. The measure of a man is how little he controls his rage? That's an insult to civilisation on so many levels it's hard to know even where to begin.

I'm willing to bet, in fact, that the reason we don't see that loss of control in Obama's eyes - or anywhere else for that matter - is because he is black, and to be successful has probably spent a lot of time combating anything that might cause the "angry black man" stereotype so rife in American culture to rear its head.

The piece goes on to list seven virtues that are supposedly markers of masculinity: courage, discipline, self-reliance, honour, industry, resolution, and manliness. Ignoring the stupidly recursive last one - manliness is how you prove you're manly? Back to logic 101, sir - these traits are presented as if they are the exclusive preserve of men.

When a set of qualities that any adult might strive to have is labelled as exclusively 'manly', then Houston, we have a problem. If you can't easily recognise the courageous, disciplined, self-reliant, honourable, industrious and resolute women of the world, what world are you living in? One that blithely writes off fully half of the world's population, it would seem, and lumps a politician in with it simply to score high-fives and chest bumps from the dude-bros.

I for one don't believe that men are any less caring than women are, or women less self-reliant than men. The circumstances of our lives have a lot to do with how particular attributes present themselves, but the fact that cartoon approximations of masculinity and femininity run rife is no excuse to ignore these traits in anyone.

Obama is measured by Judge (and fails to live up to) Theodore Roosevelt. Right… like Mitt Romney would have fared any better? T.R. was one of the all-time greats, that's why he's on Mount Rushmore. The lack of any more contemporary presidents up there sure ain't for lack of mountainside real estate in North Dakota.

There are a lot of reasonable and substantial critiques of Obama's presidency to be made, everything from drones to the NSA. He's taken hits for gender gaps in his cabinet, and for a pay gap that grows ever wider in the US, in spite of the administration's noises about closing it by reintroducing the ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’.

None of those criticisms, not one, has anything to do with a failure to live up to sexist caricatures. And indeed such nonsense 'criteria' bode ill for the future of the first woman US president, whoever and whenever she may be. If we can't get overseeing personality traits as inherent in a person's sex, we automatically cut off half the talent pool from ever making waves.

Still, well done to Judge for trolling the entire world with this one. It's such a passive-aggressive little piece of bile, one might even go so far as to stoop to gendered critiques and accuse him of being the most female columnist on the Daily Caller.