GOP: Gender Orientation in the Primaries

The corporate-sponsored game of political campaigning for mainstream party candidates has always been a rough-and-tumble process. Ad hominem one-liners and manipulated information are coupled with black-and-white imagery to paint an opponent unfavorably while conveniently eclipsing any real critique or understanding of their policies and experiences.

When Colorado Republicans select a candidate for their party’s senatorial ticket on the August 10th primaries, however, the question isn’t your usual “how ugly is the campaigning,” but rather, “how man enough is Ken Buck?”

According to his conservative competitor Jane Norton, the most questionable characteristic worth our scrutiny has nothing to do with politics, leadership or policy: Masculinity is the trait in doubt.

 

Norton’s now locally infamous campaign admonishes Ken Buck for allowing a “shady” interest group to do his bidding against Norton in campaign advertisements. “You’d think Ken Buck would be man enough to do it himself,” she scoffs.

The claim is a disturbing reinforcement of the cultural notion that men and women must behave in certain ways, and that men more specifically require an ambiguous level of “enough” manly behavior to qualify as “real” or “authentic.”

Not only does this gender association in political campaigns strengthen the division between "acceptable" politics for male or female candidates; it also distracts us from what’s really going on, anyhow.

Like racial bias and culture wars, normalizing particular attributes as “manly” ones aids the effort to blind politically disengaged U.S. citizens from the transparent connection between people like Buck and Norton, whose commitments to capitalist orthodoxy and limited social safety nets more accurately describe their political efforts and how they will be translated in Washington – certainly more than “man enough” endeavors. Let’s be honest, there are important issues in the upcoming election – issues that take precedence over this kind of childish quarreling. 

We should, in fact, condemn Norton’s accurate statement that she reduced spending while working for the Health Department – including cuts to Planned Parenthood, effectively curbing the necessary funds for free or inexpensive breast cancer examinations.

Additionally, Coloradoans should ask all politicians in Washington why hardly anybody is advocating for cuts to military spending – the massively over-funded recipient of our government’s discretionary income that comes with a $693 billion dollar price tag to fund and exacerbate three unjustified, inhumane wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Unfortunately, instead of examining these very real, very important issues, Coloradoans are afforded nothing but petty bullying in the name of “being a man.”

It is this need to polarize and define behaviors and objectives by gender, and then unabashedly hold individuals accountable if their own conduct does not match predetermined molds of gender, that upsets me the most.  

Norton does not criticize Buck for certain policies because they are products of corporate control, explicit inattention to social impact, or other reasons to render a decision bad.

Buck has failed in Norton’s eyes because he wasn’t “man enough.”

As a result, the Norton-Buck debate conveys the message that our gender can be inadequate. Men might not meet the standards of masculinity and when that inability shifts to the political realm, we are subjected to yet another form of cultural coercion – one that entices us to judge men on a spectrum of masculinity, rewarding those who make it to the top.

Never mind that this entire debacle on who fulfilled what gender fate disillusions us from the impending conflicts and current devastations in our disastrous economic and political systems. Or that it doesn’t even include women in the equation and consequently assumes male power is the only potent and useful kind in the world of Congressional character.

Please, bring democracy back to the forefront of political debate and inform your fellow citizens that in order to find candidates representative of our ideas, values, ideologies, opinions and political sentiments, we should be focusing our energy on something else – something that isn’t indicative of Ken Buck’s “manhood,” as if the elusive concept is something we can calculate or discredit after watching a few minutes of mudslinging.