What if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump swapped genders?

[True Dough]

An interesting experiment at New York University. Their conclusion is that Drumpf's bombastic, bullying tactics could work for a female candidate as well.

NYU poli sci/econ professor Maria Guadalupe and educational theater prof Joe Salvatore collaborated to stage a recreation of the Trump/Clinton debates with the gender roles reversed, starring actors who played Brenda King, "a female version of Trump" and Jonathan Gordon, "a male version of Hillary Clinton."

There were some elements of the debate that couldn't be readily genderswapped (Clinton's "when I was First Lady" lines didn't translate well as "when I was First Man," for example), but a very wide and representative slice could be.

The resulting performance is...uncomfortable. When the female "Trump" uses his mannerisms and quotes his lines, what sounded incoherent and bombastic sounds oddly forceful and compelling; while the male "Clinton"'s adoption of the Clinton tactic of smiling calmly in the face of provocation seems weak and insincere.

The people who put together the project thought that they'd be revealing that women couldn't get away with Trumpian bombast -- instead, they seem to suggest that the tactics would work especially well for a woman.

http://boingboing.net/2017/03/08/hummable-lyrics.html?fk_bb

[unblock]

1. i think the key for donnie's tactics is it only works when you commit to it 100%

i think much of his "outrageous crap that would sink any normal candidate" would indeed backfire if he or anyone else were to do it only occassionally but usually be normal.

if someone shows they're capable of being reasonable or of reflecting on their own behavior or feeling embarrassment or shame, then it doesn't work. because then, normal is still normal; and the weird, outrageous behavior is abnormal.

but if donnie or someone else commits to it 100%, then the rest of us have to adjust our filters or question our own norms. then it can be very effective.


maybe gender matters less than we might think because donnie is abnormal by any standard. he's not merely outrageously male (although some of his comments certainly are); he's simply outrageous.

[tblue37]

2. I posted about this a few weeks ago, but it dropped like a stone. nt