11:12 am
Hotness, Sexism, and Politics
I learn via Ezra Klein, who got it from Dana Goldstein, that there’s a new study arguing that Sarah Palin’s (alleged) hotness hurt the Republican ticket:
A new study found that after male college students were asked to write about Sarah Palin’s physical attributes, they judged her as less professionally competent than those asked to simply write about Palin as a “person.” If the subjects were swing voters or Republicans, thinking about Palin’s appearance actually seemed to decrease their likelihood of voting for the GOP ticket.
Here’s what Ezra has to say about it:
[I]t’s hard to know how seriously to take this study because Palin was so relentlessly sexualized amidst the campaign. The McCain team sold her as “a gun-toting Alaskan frontier sex symbol” and the conservative movement picked up the message. . . . That’s not to say I think Palin got a bum rap on policy matters. Those were some sorry interviews. But it makes sense that a study examining reactions to appearance would return particularly strong results for a national figures whose appearance was such an aggressive part of her persona.
What I find interesting here is not the fact that liberals and conservatives alike objectified Palin, but the impact of that objectification on her candidacy. After all, almost every hetero woman (and gay man) I know thought Barack Obama was incredibly hot. But as Megan over at Jezebel notes, that helped Obama, not hurt him.
So what we’re really talking about here is not the relationship between politicians and sex appeal, but rather between sex appeal and gender. Male politicians (Kennedy, Obama, Edwards, even Clinton and Romney) gain traction from looking good, while female politicians (Palin is the most obvious choice, but I’m sure there are others) lose support.
That’s not because they’re hot. It’s because men tend to associate hotness with a lack of intelligence or competence while women do the opposite.
To be clear, I think Sarah Palin damaged the GOP because she was a bumbling incurious naif unprepared for the national stage. But it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that Palin’s gaffes hurt her not only because they exposed her lack of preparation for the job, but also because they reinforced the existing cultural meme that beautiful women are vapid.