Inconsequential

People who follow politics and political coverage often criticize the media for not explicating policy proposals and instead focusing on polls and swing states. Such critics see the media as too focused on distractions. Now, following Tuesday's Presidential debate, an online public hears Romney's "binders full of women" comment and amplifies it, silencing other discussions for a day or so.

Maybe the "binders full of women" is sort of amusing, and within that amusement is the sense that some things are odd about Romney. Some things are, but nothing evidenced in his comment is revelatory unless you've never thought about who Mitt Romney is beyond his brand, "successful businessman".

The larger discourse on women voters and women's issues seems far more revealing about what we're like, and how we perceive ourselves and those around us. Women are sort of treated as a political g-spot in need of some serious finessing. This gender-oriented political discourse seems to say that a candidate needs to understand and address things women "care about" without appearing to stereotype women or lock them in the home. This CNN article on Romney's women-talk during the debate cites a political science professor voicing such a concern:

"His discussion of work-life balance appeared condescending to some because of the reference to women cooking dinner."

So the candidate must embrace gender difference but frame his embrace in terms of equality. Maybe most or all political discourse aimed at a specific segment of the voting public includes some version of outlining that segment, then erasing those lines, of conjuring their image, then making them disappear, but women are a good, current example of this, I think. The finessing and specific, pointed targeting of women leaves an impression that women are both foreign and essential to political discourse. A political writer in The New Yorker touched on all this when addressing political ads aimed at "women voters":

... that ad, like every ad targeted to women voters for the last half century, including those made by both campaigns this election season, assumes that women are wholly different species of citizen than men. The political imagination of American women, at least according to American political advertisers, begins with our cervixes and ends at the kitchen door.

Notes:

• The "binders full of women" meme nearly obscured the best bit of political gamesmanship by anybody of either party in years: Obama's "Proceed, Governor".

• Embracing gender difference while seeking equality is sort of similar to how feminist theory works in academia, I'd say, from my very limited experience with it.