King For America

A political science professor and a theater professor wondered how people would have responded to the candidates if they flipped the genders:

Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression—his tendency to interrupt and attack—would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.

But the lessons about gender that emerged in rehearsal turned out to be much less tidy. What was Jonathan Gordon smiling about all the time? And didn’t he seem a little stiff, tethered to rehearsed statements at the podium, while Brenda King, plainspoken and confident, freely roamed the stage? Which one would audiences find more likeable? {…}

“I’ve never had an audience be so articulate about something so immediately after the performance,” Salvatore says of the cathartic discussions. “For me, watching people watch it was so informative. People across the board were surprised that their expectations about what they were going to experience were upended.”

Many were shocked to find that they couldn’t seem to find in Jonathan Gordon what they had admired in Hillary Clinton—or that Brenda King’s clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they’d remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out. For those Clinton voters trying to make sense of the loss, it was by turns bewildering and instructive, raising as many questions about gender performance and effects of sexism as it answered.

And this was just the first phase of the project: Her Opponent’s creators envision adapting the recording as a classroom teaching tool to explore the complex ways our personal biases influence how we receive messages. The gender-swapping technique, Salvatore suggests, could also be used to explore the communication styles of different political figures in other charged confrontations.

These results don’t necessarily dismiss the importance of gender, nor do they prove that the gender dynamics actually favored Hillary Clinton. It could just be that the actor for Brenda King (the female Donald) was better than the actor for Gordon. Jonathan Gordon (the male HRC character) may have suffered precisely because he was living up to the same female expectations that Hillary Clinton was expected to. It could also be an indicator of something that we, as a society, know or at least suspect: women have a little more versatility when it comes on to taking on stereotypically male traits than men do taking on stereotypically female ones.

Even bearing all of that in mind, just the snippet of video in the article is really quite illuminating. It really was a very good exchange for King, and I didn’t remember in that way for Trump. Leaving the gender thing aside, it allowed me to watch Donald Trump without all of the preconceived baggage I have with regard to Donald Trump.

Obviously, I do not care for Trump. Not the man, not the candidate, and not even in an anti-anti sort of way. It’s not just his platform or the racist/sexist comments or the fact he is a wealthy New Yorker. It is all of those things, and more. It is reasons that are rational and reasons that – if I’m being honest with myself – are not. There have always been things for me to like about Trump, but I’ve never been able to actually like them. It’s not that I’ve been completely unable to understand how anyone could support him. But rather that my understanding is rooted in third-person hypotheticals (“If I were this type of person” or “If I believed these things”) and more heady than visceral.

The first glimpse I got into the instinctual was when I read his nomination acceptance speech. I thought it was good. It wasn’t going to move the needle for me, of course, but I found a way to sort of understand it outside the third person. Specifically, I could look back at my 17 year old self and say “Yeah, this would have appealed to him.” And since him is me, I felt it a little more personally. For a brief moment, I got it.

Then I saw the speech and I hated it. I thought that his delivery was bad. I imagined the speech still working, but only if someone like Tom Cotton (or, ahem, Joni Ernst) gave it. I filed it away in the file box where I was putting a lot of my papers: Trumpism can win, but Trump can’t.

Reading about this, and watching the video, reminded me of that because it was another opportunity for me to imagine Trump as not Trump. It allows me to put all of my baggage aside and assess him independent of my many, many impressions of the man. And with that out, I can again find why things that rubbed me the wrong the way didn’t rub others the wrong way enough to change the election. Not enough to make him popular (he wasn’t), but enough to make him palatable to people who didn’t like either candidate.

I didn’t come away from the video really liking King or wanting to support her. Same platform I disagree with, speech pattern I am not enamored with, and mannerisms that I don’t care for. But coming from someone else I find myself more easily able to, if not put them aside completely, not be tripped up by them. To more easily be able to take what she’s saying on its own merits rather than as Something Donald Trump (or Brenda King) Is Saying. That was more interesting to me than the merits of the gender reversal overall, except that the gender reversal may have been necessary to (a) allow someone to replicate him as much as possible but (b) without any real confusion – conscious or otherwise – that I am watching someone else.

In addition to Trump specifically, it might provide some insights on the international success of conservative, right-leaning, and right-wing female politicians.