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The Terrible Power of Being a Political Woman on TV
What we miss out on when we demand fealty to a certain on-screen aesthetic
Being a woman in America can feel like riding a defective bicycle. You pedal and start to work up some speed, get up momentum until you’re sailing and the sweatiest effort is over — and then something in the mechanics catches, a spring or a wonk in the chain, and the thing stops and hurls you over the handlebars. After you’ve caught your breath, you grimly realize you have to start the work all over again.
Over the past four years, women have surged into Congress — only to get more scrutiny for their looks than when there were fewer women in office. #MeToo enabled women to speak up about harassment at work — but then, somehow, the take ends up being that it is women who are making men uncomfortable. You start to feel unsteady, as a woman in the world, unsure of which way the ground beneath you is sliding. You know that feeling when a car in the lane beside you at the intersection starts to pull forward, and for a second, you’re certain it is you who’s drifting backward, you who’s made some horrible mistake? It lasts: I drive paranoiacally and timidly afterward. That’s the feeling, now, some days, some nights, being an American woman. A sense of two things happening at once — breathtaking gains and unsettling counter-drifts.
I work in the political press, and the unsteadiness is here, too. When I started in 2005 as a reporter in Washington, D.C., there were far fewer female faces than male ones. By 2016, political “embeds” — print and TV reporters who follow presidential candidates on the campaign trail — were more likely to be women than men. Everywhere in news outlets’ chains of command, from the up-and-coming beat reporters to editors to business managers, there are women to emulate. In 2014, President Obama made history by calling only on women reporters at a White House press conference.
Television performance was increasingly spoken of as a science, with outside experts brought in so higher-ups at the networks wouldn’t have to take responsibility for their preferences.
