While skimming through the Washington Post on the web, my eyes were drawn to a photo on the main page: that of a smiling woman. The caption next to her name piqued my curiosity: “Mona Sutphen, perhaps the least well known of Obama’s advisers, takes a new approach to policy.” Now, what is so interesting about this, you may ask? Yes, I am a big admirer of President Obama and I follow American politics closely from France. And I was a big big fan of the TV show The West Wing – something that makes me naturally curious about the real people working in the West Wing. But what caught my attention today was something else entirely. Namely, the category under which the article was filed: STYLE.

Puzzled, I clicked on the article and went about reading the 3 page feature story on Ms. Sutphen, who I may add, is an extremely bright woman who has had a brilliant career so far. In my eyes, she is an authentic role model for women of all ages – as opposed to the cheap, plastic quality of the Paris Hiltons of this world. The article states,

Sutphen passed the foreign service exam right out of college, but ended up in Chicago working for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. After a few years, she decided that “if I’m going to be staying up until 3 a.m. it should be for world peace and not shampoo sales.”

She went on to work for the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, where she “managed the human rights portfolio for Burma, then on to an assignment helping implement the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. After a hiatus to study at the London School of Economics, she went to work for then-U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, whom she met during her work on Burma.”

And now, she finds herself working in the West Wing, as Deputy Chief of Staff, coordinating policy. A BIG deal. So, why is this matter of fact article, this profile, filed under “Style”? Had the Deputy Chief of Staff been a man, would the article have appeared in Style or Politics? I’m guessing the latter. This reminds me of an article that appeared last year in the International Herald Tribune, about Fadela Amara, France’s secretary of state for urban policy. The male journalist wrote,

Amara, a practicing Muslim who rarely bothers with makeup, never went to college and never married, retains the strong accent of an Arab immigrant and sometimes uses slang.

(Emphasis mine)

Can anybody tell me why on earth this article about Mona Sutphen is filed under “Style”? And why is it, that when a woman has a brilliant career in a field like politics, the public has to be constantly reminded about her gender and the stereotypes attached to it?

Links:

Washington Post – “Another World”

IHT – “A Daughter of France’s ‘Lost Territories’ Fights for Them”

Yesterday, the blog Jezebel discussed a recent segment that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America:

Good Morning America recreated the 1940s experiment in which 63% of African-American children given identical white and black dolls said they’d rather play with the white doll and 44% identified more with the white doll.

The original Jezebel post and the GMA video can be found here.

That made me remember a video that I had watched over a year ago, directed by a young African American girl, who ran the very same experiment and also filmed lots of interviews of fellow African American girls, discussing self image, body image, and discrimination. It was far, far more powerful and emotional than the GMA video. I highly recommmend watching it:

From Molly Haskell’s wonderful book “From Reverence to Rape. The Treatment of Women in the Movies” (1974):

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization.

[...]

In the movie business we have had an industry dedicated for the most part to reinforcing the lie. As the propaganda arm of the American Dream machine, Hollywood promoted a romantic fantasy of marital roles and conjugal euphoria and chronically ignored the facts and fears arising from an awareness of The End – the winding down of love, change, divorce, depression, mutation, death itself.

[...]

The anomaly that women are the majority of the human race, half of its brains, half of its procreative power, most of its nurturing power, and yet are its servants and romantic slaves was brought home with peculiar force in the Hollywood film. Through the myths of subjection and sacrifice that were its fictional currency and the machinations of its moguls in the front offices, the film industry maneuvered to keep women in their place; and yet these very myths and this machinery catapulted women into spheres of power beyond the wildest dreams of most of their sex.

“From Reverence to Rape” on Amazon.com

Molly Haskell’s official site.

via @amberlrhea