Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post is embarrassed by the reaction of much of the fairer sex to the Obama campaign:
Here’s Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: “He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female’s cry of ‘I love you, Obama!’ with a reassuring ‘I love you back.’ “
Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren’t screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: “Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful.” Huh?
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought that fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
“What is it about us women?” Allen asks. “Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?” Why, indeed? (For even more fun, check the comments to her article from all the indignant feminists.)
I think, in this presidential year, our view of the candidates has less to do with sentimental goo and more to do with the cult of personality. Read the rest of this entry »
