Letterman and my blood pressure

[sev]

Last night, after watching the debate, the small crowd of people gathered at my house also watched the two David Letterman tirades regarding McCain cancelling his appearance on the Late Show.

I was expecting better.  I'd heard they were hysterically funny, but I was not amused.

What's on those clips?  The short answer: Letterman's sense of self-importance is bruised and he retaliates by linking up McCain with stereotypically feminine pursuits ("facial" "cooking veal piccata" "manicure").

Because, y'know, it's 2008 and "You _____ like a girl" is still a funny thing to say when you're trying to insult somebody.

Sheesh.

Comments

[supdegrave.livejournal.com]

I think you're letting your self-righteousness get in the way here a bit by saying that he was linking McCain to "stereotypically feminine pursuits". I took the 'facial' comment to be referring to the fact that he was getting primped by his $5000- makeup artist prior to the Katie Couric interview he attended *instead of* Letterman. Also, I think you're taking the comment about 'cooking veal picatta' out of context -- that was a dig on the celebrity show circuit (and possibly its competitiveness?), as it was something like "After Katie, he went on Rachael Ray's show and ..."

This from someone who hasn't personally cooked veal picatta, but thinks that calling cooking a 'stereotypically feminine pursuit' is perhaps a little outdated. But then, perhaps that's because I know so many excellent male cooks.

[sev]

Perhaps if he'd made those three comments over the course of a year, I'd think we could make excuses for why each individual comment might not be an attempt to feminize-as-insult.

But in context, with all those comments together, no, I don't think that those excuses work. This isn't my self-righteousness; this is our cultural bullshit that thinks that femininity is an insult.

We may be able to name any number of excellent male cooks, but Letterman and/or his writers still think that cooking is a girly pastime that needs to be butched up (by blood, or by turning it into a chug-fest, to name two of the more-popular examples from his show). Context is important, here.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I didn't see it, but I think it could be less based in a general feeling that girlish pursuits are insulting and more specifically in McCain's image as a Manly Man.

Heck, with her hunting, even Palin is being presented as more of a Manly Man than Obama (while simultaneously totally feminine). There are a lot of sexist assumptions in such an approach--including that intellectual=female and action=male, and regarding what people want in a president--but it's not just the idea that femininity is an insult to anyone.

[sev]

I absolutely agree this is about the US presidential image. And also that it's way more complicated than just the femininity-as-insult thing. And there's also, as was pointed out to me today by spoglia, an undercurrent of masculine=important and feminine=frivolous going on in Letterman's schtick on those two nights.

The veneration of masculinity and the concomitant denigration of femininity contribute to that image, and as such, gets used as a weapon during the presidential race. Every four years we get to watch a carefully orchestrated pageant of masculinity, in which a very common topic of discussion is about whether or not a candidate is manly enough to be president. So, we get to hear about Obama's intellectualism (good catch -- I'd missed that!) and McCain gets accused of being girlish. (And Bush, in 2003, was accused of padding the crotch of his flight suit, intimating that his masculinity was fake and/or insufficient. I suspect that exposing the gender-pageant as a constructed image may have been the bigger sin, there.)