Thursday, cigarette #1
When I got off the floor of the Party of the Left's debate (Resolved: Men and Women Can Never Be Friends, a joint debate with the Conservative Party) the President of the Union told me I was what was wrong with America. This is almost certainly true, but not because I took some rhetorical shots at the crackpot notion that a woman can ever be "one of the guys."
To be fair, I went a little further than that (although not, by these lights, into Enemy of the State territory) by saying that in order to compete in a boy's club like the Party of the Right a woman has to scrape together as much power as she can, and, insofar as some of that power inevitably looks like "wiles," the When Harry Met Sally theorem holds true. (The reason why a woman can't compete with men in the same way that men compete with each other should be obvious — being a mannish woman makes you off-putting and unappealing, which means you lose power, in which case why did you bother in the first place.)
Turns out Madame President and I were both wrong. The Other Well-Dressed Conservative Grad Student Named Justin (not the one teaching the "What is Conservatism?" seminar but the other one) gave a rebuttal after which I had to be scraped off the floor with a spatula. According to him, it's fine to say that a female leader has to lead in a feminine way, but it's not a beautiful femininity, it's a sublime one, and being a thunderstorm rather than a rose doesn't compromise a girl in the way that trading on flirtation does.
Phew! One less thing to worry about.
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