Gender Reversal Teaches Uncomfortable Lessons - Marginal REVOLUTION
Excellent.
[The professors] 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.
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how
Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in
front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the
person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message
became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that
was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s
technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that
Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and
everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to
it….Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was
“really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were
just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what
they thought they would feel or experience.