Andrew Bolt: Looks like sexist attitudes work both ways
AN interview with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been labelled sexist, but are attitudes to attractive male leaders any different, asks Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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LADIES, take your claws out of Charles Wooley. He may have slobbered over Jacinda Ardern but he’s no more a sexist than you. Poor Wooley has been denounced from Wellington to London for truthfully observing on Sunday’s 60 Minutes that he’d never met a prime minister “so young” and “so attractive” as Ardern.
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Oh, my God! How dare Wooley notice exactly one of the secrets to her success?
You see, Ardern’s looks aren’t irrelevant to her astonishing victory in New Zealand’s elections last year. Only 37 and radiating health and freshness, she seemed to symbolise the new start a significant number of voters seemed to want. And as many studies confirm, good-looking people are more likely to attract success, which is why few world leaders are ugly. (Read Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by economist Professor Daniel Hamermesh.)
But we can’t admit to human nature, can we? So Wooley’s sniffy critics belted him for reacting to Ardern exactly as many voters did — and as humans seem hardwired to.
“Relentlessly creepy,” declared NZ Herald columnist Steve Braunias.
“Chilling,” agreed Sommer Tothill, a “writer, TV maker and YouTuber” on the ABC. “How are women ever to smash the glass ceiling when the male gaze simply glazes over us?”
And in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jane Gilmore went the full virtue signaller. Wooley’s salivating was “sphincter-loosening”, she raged. Not just “creepy” but “sexist idiocy”.
And Gilmore, choking over the word “attractive”, resorted to the familiar hypocrisy of the modern social justice warrior.
“Ardern must have been delighted to be given the ultimate Old White Man accolade,” she said, objecting to Wooley commenting on Ardern’s appearance by sneering at Wooley’s own. But Gilmore is a bigger hypocrite than that.
This is the same woman who celebrated the election of Justin Trudeau, Canada’s telegenic Prime Minister, by writing: “Speaking of trousers, Canada has just elected a new PM, Justin Trudeau. You’ve probably heard about him, but just in case you haven’t, this is him.”
She then posted two dreamy photos of Trudeau, adding: “There’s more (you’re welcome).”
Hmm. And that’s a warning. Don’t take seriously the only-women-bleed argument of the feminists now whacking Wooley.
Take Tothill, whose attack on the 70-year-old Wooley became a diatribe against all “older men in positions of power”. These men’s “stranglehold on culture is still so tight that even a prime minister can’t be assessed with the same cold professional clarity we would extend to a man in her position”, she insisted.
Seriously? Unfortunately for Tothill’s argument, an army of female commentators have extended no such “cold professional clarity” to Trudeau or French President Emmanuel Macron. Many have, instead, panted more frantically over them than Wooley did over Ardern. Even in The Guardian, the bible of social justice warriors, columnists write of their hots for Trudeau.
“Quite handsome” and a “pin-up”, sighed Hadley Freeman last year.
“Handsome,” agreed Anne Donohue. In fact, “there aren’t many world leaders I could bear to look at without a shirt and I suppose the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is near the top of the list”, drooled fellow columnist Joan Smith, the unimpeachably correct author of Misogynies, a “collection of stinging essays” exploring “women-hating”.
Meanwhile, Mamamia, billed as “Australia’s largest independent women’s website”, recorded a podcast in which host Monique Bowley informed her eager panellists: “We need to talk about Justin Trudeau’s butt … You could see his very nice bottom.”
This was steamy enough, but when France elected Macron last year the lust became unbridled. Newspapers and magazines around the world — from Britain’s Sun to Elle — argued over which male leader was now “sexiest”. Danielle Le Messurier in the Daily Telegraph went through the nominees: Macron was “handsome”, but Trudeau “irresistible” in his “booty-hugging pants”. Still, she couldn’t count out Barack Obama, with his “athletic build”. How many more examples do you need?
Wooley is not sexist but all too human. Like many of both sexes, he was impressed by the good looks of a political leader and was simply rash enough to say so. The ideologues flogging him as a sexist are the real sexists, most working on the false paradigm of our victim industry — that men act badly and women well. That men care for looks but women don’t. That’s a paradigm that would make the cosmetics industry the world’s greatest mystery.
And it’s one that’s magically turned nice Charles Wooley into a world-renowned “creep”.
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