WASHINGTON — In one of the stranger moments in a Nevada U.S. Senate debate this past week, Sharron Angle, the ever-grinning, grandmotherly GOP Senate candidate, fired off the retort of the night.
“Man up, Harry Reid,” the 61-year-old said, blasting the Senate majority leader on Social Security.
Angle’s zinger stood out for its unexpected near-hipness. But in the current climate of political discourse, the fact that it was loaded with sexual stereotypes seemed hardly to register as controversial.
The 2010 election cycle might be remembered for a jarring shift in the political dialogue between the sexes, a moment when polite sensitivities were shelved and bold gender-based power plays became the norm.
The trend is clearest among a new class of conservative women — the “mama grizzlies” who pride themselves on a strong and irreverent post-feminist posture and frank rhetoric. Their leader, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, set the tone when she told Fox News Channel in August that President Barack Obama didn’t have the “cojones” to get tough on illegal immigration.
About a month later, Delaware U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell told a radio interviewer that her primary opponent should “put his man pants on.” Angle’s “man up,” coming from another so-called grizzly, seemed another link in that chain.
“The references to manliness have gotten more explicit,” said Deborah Tannen, an author and linguist at Georgetown University who has studied communication between the sexes. At the same time, Palin “has built a sort of brand” on such brash statements, while the culture at large is welcoming less-formal conversation.
Male candidates also have used the phrase with increasing frequency — usually in an attempt to insinuate an opponent’s lack of political courage.
But experts in political discourse see another subtext, particularly when coming from a female candidate.
“Male candidates have traditionally been assumed by would-be voters to be tough and competent. Woman have traditionally been assumed to be caring and have to establish their competence,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. ” ‘Man up’ frames the attacker as tougher than the person attacked and suggests the male candidate is not taking responsibility or being accountable for his failures.”
George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, describes the Republican Party as emphasizing masculinity and strength in its world view and rhetoric, while Democrats underscore the more feminine quality of empathy. Conservative women, in order to trigger cues in some voters, must project strength.
