Everywhere, female professionals, leaders, and those at the top of their fields are described as “cold” and uncharismatic, degraded with slurs for the same neutral behavior men exhibit. Treading a careful line between our words and actions not carrying weight for being a woman, and being a ‘female dog’ for practicing a cultivated sternness as protection against the former. “Smile,” they command of us – as men do extraneously and continuously while walking down the street. It’s a tumultuous internal battle sparked the moment we’re removed from class for showing the tips of our shoulders which persisted on into the male-dominated top of ladders in adulthood. As a result, many of us build a shield – one created not to protect us from heinous transgressions, but to mediate people’s views and actions around us.
Trailblazing women quickly learn to shape the perception of their gender stereotypes by adapting a contrived, professional personality only to be met with grave, insubstantial backlash. Such was the case with Hillary Clinton. Irrespective of one’s politics, this Yale-law educated public figure redesigned the role of the First Lady, became a U.S. Senator, then Secretary of State, shattering the glass-ceiling in many ways for women. Despite all her incredible intelligence, hard-work, and experience, she faced an insurmountable onslaught of backlash from a 30-year-spanning anti-Clinton machine.
“Women are seen through a different lens,” shared Hillary in an eye-opening Humans of New York interview where she spoke about this gender dichotomy and the other side of her public perception.The former Secretary of State faced an unprecedented amount of vitriol for what other standard corporatist, centre-left politicians such as Biden and Obama never did; that men don’t face. I’m no fan of Hillary’s policies, but these weren’t substantive critiques, rather slanderous lies- about her health, emails, and even a child-trafficking Pizza chain resulting in a shooting from a deranged right-winger. They were about her pantsuits, about taking the same money from Wall-Street flooding almost every Senator and Representative on Capitol Hill detractors voted for. These were among the demonizing narratives which molded an intelligent, hard-working, qualified woman, and grandmother, into the contrived, greedy caricature to funnel one’s magnified, selective outrage onto.
Being an educated, hardworking, experienced leader makes you a “nasty woman.” Being too passionate makes you shrill, humor makes you immature. So you internalize everything under the pressure of your perception and curate a serious personality only to be called cold and robotic for being knowledgeable. Secretary Clinton said on this:
““I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences. But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural. It’s not something they just dial in. They work and they practice what they’re going to say.”
Women are criticized for behavior men are lauded and respected for, and Hillary offered a perspective into that in a hyper-scrutinized world:
“I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message, and screaming about how we need to win the election. And people will love it. And I want to do the same thing. Because I care about this stuff. But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation. I love to wave my arms, but apparently, that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’”
The shield is built from every insult and patronizing experience telling us to turn back. In that same interview, Hillary recounted the day she took her LSAT at Harvard and being one of few women. Men began to antagonize her saying, “You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.” Going on to say:
“But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena..I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
She described what many of us go through, this need to protect ourselves by seeming emotionless, by being serious and focused on our work because “emotional women” are “not fit” for leadership roles. Thus, our delivery is limited, passion curtailed only to be deemed robotic. Hillary was crucified for tearing up in a 2008 interview, attacked for not smiling at a national security forum in September 2016. She “didn’t have the stamina” for office, despite having traveled to and negotiated with 112 countries, and spending 11 hours testifying to a Congressional witch-hunt committee.
If we want our merits to recognized, to be treated on substance – on par with men we adjust our form. If we don’t, we’re at risk of not being taken seriously in a world where beauty and brains are mutually exclusive, and the acromion of our shoulder “distracts” boys from learning. Actress Natalie Portman recently shared this facet of the female paradox recalling her experience with “sexual terrorism” as a 13-year-old after the release of the film The Professional. Portman described her excitement about the movie, only to encounter sexually explicit messages about her.
”I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” she recalled. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”
That’s when the shield went up for her. She changed the way she publicly expressed herself to limit objectification:
“”I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe,” she said. “And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was. And I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”
It’s a story that struck me because I too policed harmless aspects about myself and built a serious self-defense mechanism to prevent not being intellectually heard. I quickly learned as an 8th grader to never wear tank tops in 98-degree weather after being catcalled several instances in public by grown men. To this day, I’m lightly-mocked for dressing conservatively – something I do as a safeguard against not being heard.
After developing this highly-mediated professional persona to curtail men’s actions, what are we left with? We’re left with imposing, strange men demanding for us to “smile” subserviently and extraneously to accommodate their egos. Women are not allowed to have a neutral resting expression – it means they’re angry and must parade around grinning from ear to ear day-long. Teachers tell us that we’re “so serious” during class and they can’t tell if we’re “enjoying” the lesson. People think you’re “stuck up” before they meet you. We’re left with “quiet” Lady Doritos.
We create an overtly conservative persona to limit crude male behavior and leering eyes that would reduce our seriousness; to prevent our hard-work from not being credited. To validate our belonging to a male space. We tone-police our message to not be deemed “shrill.” We limit our delivery and curtail our passion because women are already “too emotional” for leadership positions. Because if our merits are to be recognized, our voices to be heard, if we are to be treated on substance; we must fix our form which is inherently ‘wrong.’ But we are not the problem, nor should we inhibit our personal expression and qualities that are okay for the opposite gender. The dynamic must flip in our culture.
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