Guys, quit it with the ‘women are too weak for office’ message ok
YOU might think that the race for the US presidency was a battle of physical constitutions. In fact, why not just skip the election, and instead put Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton through a rigorous set of medical tests? After all, since Clinton’s brief disappearance from the campaign trail after her collapse following a 9/11 ceremony, the real presidential question, at least in the minds of Republican supporters, has been who is the fittest – with their florid, overweight candidate being the obvious winner. Clinton’s illness, revealed last Sunday to be highly-treatable bacterial pneumonia, triggered many to write her off as being just not fit or strong enough for the Tough Mudder that is presidential office.
The intense scrutiny of candidates’ health is not really about whether the next president is likely to find themselves incapacitated or even killed off by the stresses of the job. The focus on the physical is there, I would suggest, because this battle has become one of man versus woman, and when we talk about women we almost always end up talking about bodies. It has, therefore, been to the advantage of the Trump campaign to make a great deal out of Clinton’s biology, to make out she is a ticking time bomb – which is, of course, what all women are, and how our bodies have long been viewed. Women’s bodies are dangerous things, regarded as problematic and, even when no longer fertile, possibly harbouring secrets. Even when they are not dangerous, they are simply weak or fragile.
The reaction speaks of quite how uncomfortable much of the United States population feels about embracing a first female president. Relatively speaking, Hillary Clinton’s bout of pneumonia, assuming that’s all it was, is not that big a deal. It’s something that millions of people contract each year. And, considering what previous male presidents and candidates have been through health-wise, her infection seems a minor affliction. Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, had a heart attack and a stroke during his presidency. Franklin D Roosevelt suffered from anorexia, and had been paralysed from the waist down by polio. Ronald Reagan had, among other ailments, urinary tract infections, prostate stones, temporomandibular joint disease, arthritis, prostate and skin cancers, and later Alzheimer’s disease, though few seemed to make such a big deal of it.
It is perhaps not surprising that there has been speculation around this issue. The health of a candidate is a valid concern. But the intensity of focus on Clinton’s health has been almost unprec- edented, verging on a fixation. What has been most troubling has been not the reaction to the illness itself, but the backdrop of months of Trump support-
ers’ speculation about her health, of questioning whether she is “too old”, an issue that seems to rarely crop up with their man Trump, or too “frail”. Then there are the conspiracy theories over whether she has anything from Parkinson’s disease through to dementia.
Trump has stirred that mix. He has fuelled it, stating that Clinton lacked “the physical and mental stamina” to tackle Isis and tweeting about her “coughing attack”. Following Clinton’s collapse at a rally, he questioned if she “would be able to stand up here for an hour”.
As former New York Times editor Jill Abramson put it: “Donald Trump has been hammering away and saying ‘she’s hiding a more serious health problem’ so it feeds that conspiracy theory … I think there’s an element of sexism in how this is being over-covered at this point.”
The idea of a woman as weak is, added Abramson, “a sexist stereotype” – and that stereotype has been reinforced by the endless replaying of video footage showing Clinton being helped into a van.
Of course, politics is often dirty, and activists will use whatever they have on another person to undermine them. Concerns over health are an easy, underhand line of political attack. But you only have to read the online outpourings of the alt-right about #Hillaryshealth, their desire to portray her as physically vulnerable, despite her apparent strength, to see this has reached fever pitch. Those commentators speculate, for instance, that she has secret seizures, or that she carries a defibrillator with her at all times. Some have even surmised that photographs of Clinton published following the collapsing episode are actually pictures of a body double whose fingers aren’t the same length as Clinton’s or whose nose points in a different direction.
It is natural to have a little scepticism about what politicians tell us about their health. JF Kennedy kept his Addison’s disease concealed from the public. Woodrow Wilson kept secret the strokes that left him blind in his left eye and paralysed his left side. So it’s hard to take Clinton or any politician’s declared fitness as fact. And even if we could, how could we be sure that a few months down the line they might not be hit by a stroke, pulmonary embolism, or some other health problem of the kind that afflict people out of the blue?
The truth is that almost every human body, male or female, is like a ticking time bomb, in which who knows what might manifest at whatever time. That’s how we humans are. Yet, men’s bodies are rarely portrayed that way. Instead, we get Donald Trump, posturing as virile and invulnerable, brandishing a letter from his doctor saying he would “be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”. We get a chilling lack of recognition of vulnerability and mortality in men, and an obsessing over these qualities in women.
Put simply, we get a big, unhealthy cultural lie – and all because too many people still find it unacceptable that a woman could lead in the land of the free.
The focus on the physical is there, I would suggest, because this battle has become one of man versus woman, and when we talk about women we almost always end up talking about bodies