LAWRENCE AUSTER writes on the vanity of female politicians:

If you have a society in which men are running things and enforcing male standards of conduct in the public sphere, you can have an occasional woman in high public office and it will not harm the society. But once the appointment of women to conspicuous political positions becomes routine and expected, and once female standards of public conduct become normalized, thus pushing aside male standards, then you have things like this.

I would add two points. One, a woman in power has more incentive to flaunt her physical assets precisely because they may be all she has left of her femininity. This is why we see more and more cleavage. The essence has vanished with the pursuit of power.

Second, a society’s understanding of authority also weakens when a significant number of women enter elective public office. Eileen Behr, pictured below, is running for sheriff in suburban Philadelphia. She seems like a perfectly nice, competent woman, but her face changes the very definition of the office. She looks too nice to write a parking ticket.

                                                       — Comments —

Lawrence Auster writes:

“One, a woman in power has more incentive to flaunt her physical assets precisely because they may be all she has left of her femininity.” 

That’s a very good insight. In passing, I wonder if a man could have had that insight.

Laura writes:

 There have been men who knew what it was for a woman to lose her femininity.
 
In “The Princess,” Alfred Tennyson describes the Princess Ida’s emotions after her feminist scheme of reform collapses:

But sadness on the soul of Ida fell,
And hatred of her weakness, blent with shame.
Old studies failed; seldom she spoke: but oft
Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours
On that disastrous leaguer, swarms of men
Darkening her female field: void was her use,
And she as one that climbs a peak to gaze
O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world: so fared she gazing there;
So blackened all her world in secret, blank
And waste it seemed and vain; till down she came,
And found fair peace once more among the sick.

                                                               (The Princess, PartVII)

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