You have never pictured Stephen Harper in a speedo

How the media undermines female politicians

WILLIAM WOLFE-WYLIE CUP ATLANTIC BUREAU CHIEF

SACKVILLE, N.B. (CUP) — The day after Belinda Stronach crossed the floor of the House of Commons to become a Liberal MP, the front page of the Globe and Mail showed a heartbroken Peter MacKay in a Nova Scotia field. It was touching, yet entirely irrelevant. It was also an excellent indicator of how misogynistic some mainstream media coverage of politics has become.

Stronach crossed the floor, saving a government from imminent defeat, saving the people of Canada from a mid-summer election, and providing ample fuel for Tory accusations of Liberal corruption. But the story deemed the most relevant for the front page of our national newspaper was the image of her ex-boyfriend. Then, last weekend, I was looking at an article in the Australian and my jaw dropped. At the end of the fifth paragraph in a commentary about the new socialist candidate for the presidency of France, the author wrote: “But by May next year, France could have a woman, and an intelligent and beautiful woman who looks great in a bikini, in the Elysee Palace.”

What?

When Jacques Chirac was making his bid for the presidency, did the political commentary ever involve anything about his appearance in a Speedo? Is the swimsuit competition a relevant indicator of a person’s ability to run a country? But this is one of the sad facts of modern politics and of the ways that mainstream media are covering them: women are constantly being forced to battle their own sexuality in order to be taken seriously.

Women are consistently treated as subservient to men in both mainstream and independent media. They are painted as purely sexual beings, incompetent politicians, vain tagalongs, and openly mocked in ways that male politicians rarely experience.

An article from the Straits Times in Singapore ran under the headline “Alpha women are darn sexy,” and in People magazine, the headline “Eva Longoria: Too sexy for politics?” adorned the top of the page.

At the top of an article about Harper’s new environment minister Rona Ambrose, VUE Weekly, Edmonton’s independent weekly newspaper, printed the headline, “You’ve come a long way, gorgeous.” Then, Ralph Klein said about Stronach in a speech earlier this year, “I don’t think she ever had a Conservative bone in her body. Well, except for one.”

The idea of a woman leading a country is even treated as impossible in some publications. “Why a female president may no longer be a joke,” read the front page of the Herald in the U.K.. Then, in an article in the Scotsman, another commentary on France’s socialist presidential candidate leads with the headline “France falls for the politics of seduction.”

Climate Action Network made headlines last week while Rona Ambrose was in Nairobi for the climate change conference when they published an article about her which read, in part, “We were, however, impressed with the hair. Good hair, some might say even exceptional hair.” The article exploded into controversy and was covered by a number of national publications. This story was reported faster, and more widely, however, than the fact that while at that conference, Ambrose made considerable moves to distance herself from the anti-Kyoto standpoint of her government.

While Stronach saved a government, it was her brokenhearted boyfriend who made the news; while Ambrose was shifting away from the anti-Kyoto standpoint of her government at the Nairobi conference, that article was only published after the article about her hair. This trend in political journalism sends only one clear message: the work of men in politics is important, while the work of women is secondary to their appearance and demeanor.

The divide between men and women in politics is too large, by which I mean that there is, in fact, a divide. If we ignore the personal side of politicians and, perhaps, pay attention to their abilities as policy-makers, perhaps we’ll find a more informed readership and less time wasted on the trivialities of hair spray and swimwear.