Because it's apparently not enough that Nancy Pelosi's clothes have gotten as much attention as if she had taken to the fashion week runway, the New York Times has now dedicated a 33-paragraph article to fashion among women in Congress. The article makes gestures at examining the phenomenon of unequal attention to women's clothes:
Just raising the issue of a powerful woman’s wardrobe choices strikes some people as sexist, an undermining of her talents and qualifications. And last week, when a reporter approached several of the female members of the House and Senate, or their staff, to talk fashion, some did not want to engage. Others cringed, at least initially.
In the end, though, girls will be girls.
But when the conversation veered into the nitty-gritty — what do you wear, where do you buy it, what image do you want to project — the women in politics happily chatted away.
And chat away the article does: Pelosi's Armani and "chunky, but tasteful" jewelry, Dianne Feinstein's Ferragamo shoes, Debbie Wasserman Schultz's straightened hair and eBay deals. But to what effect?
Women in politics are the first to say that they give serious thought to their appearance because, like it or not, voters at home, powerbrokers on the Hill and the news media are all mindful of the slightest faux pas. It is wrong to look too risqué, they say. But isn’t it retrograde to equate looking good with being empty-headed?
...snip...
The men have it much easier because unlike women, they seldom are punished for fashion mistakes.
Don't get me wrong, fashion is a real issue, and the article's defensiveness about the fact that women do have to think about this issue while men do not represents real progress from the days when coverage of the clothing of the most powerful women would have been presented without even this much apology. Yet that defensiveness seems like a calculated and thin cover for a more traditional interest in the age-old question of how women find a balance between dowdiness that would get them attacked and excessive stylishness that would get them attacked, without any actual analysis of how and why the need for this balance persists. The fact that men don't face this kind of criticism is mentioned and moved past in a sentence. It's like the gestures toward analyzing these difficulties were made only to cover for the article's real interest in who still wears boxy St. John knits and who is more stylish.
Besides - 33 paragraphs? The House's completion of the first 100 hours agenda got 22. The Senate's passage of ethics reform got 20.
At least we can't complain that only women politicians are getting the human-interest treatment from the Times, though. No, the frathouse-style living arrangement of Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and Representatives George Miller and Bill Delahunt also gets the treatment (28 paragraphs).
Women rarely set foot in the place, excluding the Haitian cleaning lady who comes every week and who everyone promises is a legal immigrant. The common bathroom upstairs is stocked with supersize bottles of Listerine, CVS cocoa butter, Suave shampoo (with dandruff control) and a hair dryer.
Little thought is given to entertainment besides the big-screen television that Mr. Durbin recently purchased against the wishes of Mr. Schumer and Mr. Delahunt, who liked the old one. The refrigerator is mostly empty save for apples, grapes and about two dozen bottles of beer.
...snip...
Once, Mr. Miller’s son shot a deer and presented the house with an abundant supply of venison. It remained in the freezer for 12 years, at which point it was deemed to have reached its term limit and was discarded.
Taken alone, it's a hilarious story, and reading it you can't help but feel that the stories that don't make it into the New York Times are probably even funnier. But side by side with the story about the clothing of their female colleagues, it takes on an incredibly stereotypical boys will be boys, girls will be girls feeling. The girls talk about their deals on Valentino while the boys joke about killing rats and sit around watching television in their boxer shorts. (And then, at the school dance, they stand in opposite corners of the room whispering about each other while the cool boys sneak over and spike the punch.)
It's preferable to the stories about Mark Foley's emails and how Duke Cunningham spent his bribe money that are what have passed for human interest stories under the Republicans, and entertaining enough, but is this really the best they could do?