In the words of the inimitable Sojourner Truth....Ain't I a Woman?? Read the complete article at the Washington Post...
What tripe!!!! I'm gonna have to totally disagree with Kathleen Parker here. Her op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker about Obama being the first female President is bunk. Parker’s thesis is based on the following attributes she ascribes to feminine communication: Is she on the same planet that we are on? Obama is horrible at forming coalitions. Mr. “I won” has polarized both Republicans and Democrats like no President before him, so I’d hardly call him a paragon of coalition building. And don’t get me started on “forming circles and talking it out.” Obama is not interested in talking anything out — time and again we have seen his modus operandi is classic narcissism — “my way or the highway.” Perhaps most offensive in this article though is that Parker then goes on to channel all the most horrible way by which one can characterize “feminine communication.” She defacto implies “Women are chatterboxes. Women lack the ability of immediate, commanding action, thus they lack leadership skills,” as these are qualities she observes in Obama. And while I don’t disagree with Parker that “chatterbox” and “lack of leadership skills” are qualities Obama possesses in spades….where I do disagree with her is calling this “feminine communication.” Such things are not “female communication”, Ms. Parker, they’re just simply “failures to communicate”, and such failures are indeed gender neutral. The fact that she would even reduce such failings as simply aspects of “the gender which is not one” (to borrow from Irigaray) is IMO, quite patriarchal on her part. But if I may add one aspect of “female communication” that she did not elaborate on much (and one that I think is quite telling)….it’s that women are generally considered to communicate in a very empathetic manner. In that respect then, Obama is hardly “female”….because let’s face it, hardly anyone feels these days that Obama truly empathizes with them.
At the risk of derailing the thread, I just gotta say that if Hillary Clinton were The South, you'd totally be Muad Dib, Eminence.
As fun as Obama-bashing is, I never have bought into the gender-stereotyping bit that women lead in certain types of ways. More nurturing, more caring, less aggressive... I've been in the workforce a while now and had both sexes as bosses. It just ain't so. Leaders of either sex tend to have certain characteristics. It's interesting that Obama has made it to his position with what have traditionally been "feminine" strengths, but I certainly won't take labeling him "female" seriously any more than I did labeling Clinton "black". It smacks of political opportunism on the one hand and outright comedy on the other.
I had just such a discussion several years ago in college. I said that while it's common to think of women as docile, sweet, everything nice...tell me. Is there any creature more "fierce or dangerous" than a Mother Bear whose cubs are under threat?
Any creature with a successful history of being able to defend itself or promote its own interests using aggressive tactics will respond in like fashion in the future. Mother bears do have that reputation but mother butterflies? It's not the sex of the creature but a learned response that we're talking about here. Is one sex better than learning from experience than the other? I don't think so there, either.
