- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Cue the post-mortems. The day after an election is always a smorgasbord of reasons why candidate so-and-so lost and candidate so-and-so won. This time around some are wondering what would have happened in the Massachusetts Senate race had Democratic loser Martha Coakley posed nude instead of Republican winner, Scott Brown. Yes, that’s right the conservative Brown posed nude except for a strategically placed wrist covering up his family-values parts in a 1982 Cosmopolitan magazine as a way to pay his law school tuition. At least he didn’t work for Hooters.
The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse wrote:
The morning after the election, a student of gender politics might ask: How different would the story have looked if the shoe — Lack of shoes? Lack of clothes? — actually had been on the female body?
You don’t have to be a gender studies geek to ask that question because everybody knows that Coakley would not have made it out of the Democratic primary much less gotten elected Massachusetts’ Attorney General. Everybody knows that being smart, serious, hot, and naked are mutually exclusive categories for women. Everybody knows that men get to retain all facets of their humanity even when they are Cosmo’s sexiest man centerfold.
Hesse also points out that it’s often assumed that women will vote for a sexy man, but the same can not be said for men, who are known to look past a woman’s exterior and elect her for her personality. Case in point, the brouhaha over Hillary Clinton’s non-existent cleavage in 2007:
No one argued then that men — aroused by some primordial mammary fixation — might feel compelled to vote for Clinton, though such an argument might have been based on research. In 2008, researchers at Northwestern University found that male voters were swayed by sexuality, predominantly declaring that the more “competent” female candidates were the more attractive ones.
True story: shortly after John McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his 2008 running mate, a male friend of mine explained why he thought Palin was so awesome by telling me that it was really hard for guys, not having a hot female politician. Kudos to Sarah Palin for getting horndog men all over the United States interested in politics.
Jeremy Mayer, writing in the NY Daily News, said that the Massachusetts race proves that sexism is going strong in American politics not because Coakley lost for being a woman, but because if Brown had been a woman with those pics, (s)he would not have won:
Surely it is not one of the great injustices in America today that women who pose nude are probably ineligible for higher office, while Brown’s nude modeling is just an unusual feature on his resume. But it is emblematic of the differing standards we have for women and men in public life
Mayer also suggests that the double standard might even lie between Democrats and Republicans because the sanctimonious Right was rather quiet about Brown’s photo spread.
Third, it helped Brown that he was a Republican who once modeled nude. I can just imagine what Rush Limbaugh or Fox News would have done with nude photos of a Democratic nominee of either gender.
But Coakley did not pose almost nude and Brown did and Coakley lost and Brown won. So Coakley was a shitty candidate, blah blah blah, and she let Brown surge ahead and define himself, blah blah blah; we can say au revoir to health care reform, blah blah blah; the independent voters are angry, blah blah blah; Democrats are screwed for 2010 blah blah blah. Blech.
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