Some professors reenacted parts of the 2016 Presidential Debates, except with gender swapped actors. They thought if a woman acted like Trump she would seem ridiculous, and if a man acted like Hillary he would seem strong. Watch the excerpt below before reading anything else and gauge your reaction:
Debating gender: what if Donald Trump was a woman?
Read the article here:
What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
The professors and the liberal audiences who watched it had their expectations proven wrong.
So supposedly some liberals have the scales fall from their eyes when viewing this. I had similar opinions for the gender swap as in real life: male Hillary is fake, condescending, and talks like a lawyer trying to hide something, and female Trump is like male Trump, she’s more relatable because she talks like a real person, but she’s obnoxious. Real Trump comes off as slimier than this female Trump, maybe due to the closer camera during the debate, maybe due to the so-called “women are wonderful” effect, or maybe because there’s more to judging a person than their body language and speaking style, i.e. as far as I know this woman isn’t a creeper who stiffs contractors.
On conservative and lefty sites the reaction about what this says about liberals is about what one would expect.
I’d like to see the full show instead of the small rehearsal excerpt.
Trump is often portrayed as the height of masculine braggadocio, but the interesting thing is Trump talks like a woman, which may have helped people trust him:
I don’t have a thesis statement or debate point (other than gender politics being complicated, I guess), but I thought it was interesting and wanted to share and see what you folks thought.
There was a liberal contingent during the election who thought Hillary should go full “ice queen bitch mode,” which supposedly matches her private demeanor where she’s more sarcastic and has a dark sense of humor. I don’t know if that would have helped or hurt, but I’d be curious to see what that would look like (maybe similar to the “we came, we saw, he died” clip).