Brown’s recent Senate win in Massachusetts took folks by surprise for good reason. To begin with, he’s the first non-Kennedy to fill that seat in some time. Another shocker: He’s a Republican. And finally: Back in the day, Brown stripped down for Cosmo.
Yesterday, George Mason University public policy prof Jeremy Mayer made a case at NY Daily News that a woman with a similar history could never have won that senate seat. In fact, Mayer suggests she probably wouldn’t have gotten very far in politics at all if she had posed for something like, say, Playboy.
… sexism is also there when a male politician does things a woman would never get away with, or lives down things that a woman would never be able to get past.
Surely it is not one of the great injustices in America today that women who pose nude are probably ineligible for higher office, while Brown’s nude modeling is just an unusual feature on his resume. But it is emblematic of the differing standards we have for women and men in public life.
I think Mayer makes some fantastic points – I hope you will read his article to engage with all of them. And, in general, I agree with him and admire him for speaking out. However, I think the images may have hurt Brown more if his Democratic contender, Martha Coakley, hadn’t been such a weak, campaign-hating candidate.
Also, I don’t think a Playboy shoot for a woman would be parallel to Brown’s Cosmo shoot. Maybe Details!
Last, and it may not be today, but I think we’re nearing on a day when the right candidate could overcome a little flesh in her past. It’ll probably have to be a Republican – just look at all the support Carrie Prejean’s gotten from the right! Or Angelina Jolie.
I think that a few years ago a man couldn’t have overcome skin in his youth either, but people care less about a lot of that these days. I think it would be best not to go ‘oh no, women can’t get away with this, why should a man’, and stick with reminding people that it’s not so bad the next time it does come up for a woman.
Note that I think people should carefully consider anything they let exist at all, since these days it will inevitably come back to publicly haunt you later in life. But I think that by the time the 15-year-olds today are 30, there will be so few people without nude photos or worse floating around that it will no longer been seen as stigmatic.
I don’t think it’s sexist at all. When women pose nude they show their privates, this man’s are covered so it’s rather innocent looking. It isn’t a sexual picture, it’s more like a goof.
He’s laying naked. On what appears to be a bed. That’s not sexual?
It’s sexual, it’s just low-key sexual. Not comparable to the nothing-bared spread of a playboy shoot, but surely comparable to the softer men’s magazines that have similar partially-clad women in moderately sexual poses rather than the explicit.
And just because a woman shows some skin in a photo shoot doesn’t mean she’s always going to let you stare up her vag. Christ.
In case you forgot Genius, Sarah Palin posed in a swimsuit in her younger days and it didn’t hurt her any. If anything, it helped her public appeal. If she posed topless or showed her vag it would have been different, it would have made her look cheap and slutty. Scott Brown isn’t showing anything. Do you see a penis? I don’t.
Attitudes on that type of thing are becoming more liberal,mores change in time,as they should. The reason she lost is the people of Massachusetts weren’t comfortable with the national health care proposals.