Will the first female president shift pop culture?
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that not only will the sun come up tomorrow morning, but Summer will follow Spring and those rock-hard Tootsie Rolls your kids bring home on Halloween will yank their fillings out.
Oh, and one more thing: after last Monday’s presidential debate, the U.S. will soon have its first female president.
I have nothing against Donald Trump — a great entertainer, master showman and “Mad Men” era blowhard who travelled through a time portal from the ’50s to find his calls for elitist white privilege met with a resounding roar of approval from disaffected dinosaurs (and abject horror from everyone else).
When this election has run its course and The Donald returns to his role as Boardroom Despot on “Celebrity Apprentice,” I will eagerly await the fawning accolades showered upon him by B-list sycophants like La Toya Jackson, Marilu Henner and a raft of unintelligible sports heroes from yesteryear.
We love you, Donald, even though your presidential run had less to do with visionary politics than Ralph Kramden clenching his fist and bellowing “to the moon, Alice!” on “The Honeymooners.”
“One of these days . . . one of these days . . . POW! Right in the kisser!”
As for the rest of America, it will heave a sigh of relief and move on to the vexing conundrum: What effect will the first female president have on American pop culture?
I remember back in 2008, when Barack Obama became the first African American commander-in-chief, how pundits waxed philosophically about a “postracial” era where all men (and women) were brothers and true equality would reign supreme.
Yikes, what happened? In the wake of Ferguson, Trayvon Martin and #OscarsSoWhite, I think we can agree that fantasy didn’t play out exactly the way we hoped.
“I think a couple of things coincided with Obama’s tenure,” notes Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto Film Festival, pointing out how tempestuous eruptions can spark positive change.
“Previously shuttered conflicts about racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities exploded out into the open; and the 24-7 confessional culture of social media became our dominant expression.
“I suspect the Oscar nominees are going to look a lot different this year.”
So what happens when Clinton takes the wheel and a generation of girls grow up thinking it’s normal for a woman to occupy the nation’s top office.
How will Hollywood’s autocratic male powerbrokers, who have been casting women as window dressing for decades, react?
Will studio-manufactured pop stars like Katy Perry and Britney Spears feel less compelled to take their clothes off to sell product?
Or will we witness the biggest backlash against women since Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” and kickstarted second-wave feminism in 1963?
“I’m leery of thinking a female president is going to change things radically in American culture,” notes Chris Klassen, a religion and culture prof at Wilfrid Laurier University who thinks progress will be incremental.
Like the other academics I interviewed, she greets Clinton’s rise with something between cautious optimism and benign indifference.
“Particularly since Clinton is not an overly charismatic figure,” she points out.
“She’s not sexy or young or engaged with youth. Someone like Beyoncé is going to have a bigger influence on how girls understand feminism than Hillary Clinton.”
Her ascension to the throne will be symbolic, they agree.
But game-changing? This is a candidate disparagingly dismissed by younger women as “a corporate feminist” who lives in a privileged white bubble, determined to empower “women who are already powerful.”
“It’s complicated,’’ says Klassen. “What will Hillary Clinton do? Who will she be as president? Because once they get in they become a new person.”
In some respects, it doesn’t matter what Clinton does. The fact she exists is both proof of positive change and a catalyst for more of the same.
Seriously, have you taken a look at TV, film and pop music lately?
TV dramas like “Pitch,” about the first female major league baseball player, the TV empire of Shonda Rhimes (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal”) and the Netflix hit “Grace and Frankie” represent a new era in small screen gender parity.
There’s Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win Best Director at the Oscars (“The Hurt Locker”), and director Ava DuVernay, whose Oscar-snubbed “Selma” helped kick-start the #OscarsSoWhite movement.
There’s Adele, Lorde and Meghan Trainer, non-traditional pop stars who counter the industry’s stripper paradigm without batting an eye.
And did you catch this season’s instalment of “House Of Cards,” where the vengeful First Lady — tired of being treated as an appendage — launches a political career of her own against the
president’s outraged decree?
If that’s not pop culture transcendence, what is?
On the other hand, most female TV detectives are portrayed by svelte 20-something knockouts, 14 of 15 movie directors are male, and for every Adele, there’s six Katy Perrys espousing equality while shooting whipped cream out of their halter tops.
“I was a teenager when we had ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ and people thought ‘Now women are gonna get powerful!’” notes Klassen. “And there hasn’t been a lot of change.
“Supertight clothes and acting like men — that’s still going on.
“What I wonder, though, is if we will see a shift to representing older women in a more positive and more frequent role.”
Like the African-American narratives finally gaining traction, turning the TV and film landscape from monochromatic to colourfully diverse, this too, I suspect, will be inevitable.
“Having Hillary Clinton in the White House sends a message to all girls about leadership, about changing roles, about fighting for what you believe in, and not giving up, regardless of whether she ‘does’ anything or not,” notes Wilfrid Laurier musicology prof Kirsten Yri.
“All of these are important to any woman in the music business and will be positively and continuously reinforced.
“But that’s not the only barrier to success. Some industries have particular expectations that need to shift (the music business’ desire for scantily clad women, for instance).
“Women will still have to have skills, ability, dedication and drive for that confidence to have an impact.”
In the end, it’s fair to say gender issues will evolve under the nation’s first female president, despite an impending feminist backlash that may rival eruptions on Mount Vesuvius. But don’t sweat it. Given the cool efficiency with which she dispatched the frothing Trump Id monster, Clinton will deflate its bellicose pretensions without breaking a sweat.
Welcome to the future. Leave your harrumphing sense of entitlement at the door.