Barecca on the Anthony Weiner fiasco and gender.
"Really, take a moment: Imagine if a middle-aged female politician decided she should send to random strangers a photograph of her vagina the way Congressman Weiner sent to women a photograph of his penis.
She would not be asked to resign. She would not be the subject of witty, albeit salacious, banter on television and radio programs. She would not be subject to serious questions concerning her judgement, her ability to govern, and the state of her marriage.
She would be institutionalized. She would be grabbed in the street, put into a straightjacket, and carted off to an asylum.
She would be medicated instantly and heavily."
And....
"But a New York politician takes a bunch of photographs of his body and mails them to powerless young women—not to Pelosi, or Clinton, or Sotomayor, mind you, which would have been GREAT because their responses would have gone down in history—and he yet still wants to be taken seriously as a leader in our government?
Sure, everybody has done something in our personal lives of which we are not proud. And sure, most everybody is willing to forgive politicians some kind of weirdness in their own personal lives because otherwise NOBODY would run for office.
But Weiner was driven, not by lust—which we can sort of find forgivable—or even by some other kind of desperate passion—but by vanity. It was plain old lousy, dumb, nerdy, unmerited, creepy vanity that made him take pictures of what he thought was his handsome virile self and send those pictures to women he didn’t know personally in order to feed his sense of unparallelled perfection.
That’s not somebody we need on our side. He’s on nobody’s side but his own."
