New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action.

But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as being prepared to nuke Iran if necessary. There is no blueprint, after all, for how a woman should pursue the US presidency. Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher: all managed to suspend their sexuality while exercising political power, as does Angela Merkel, but in their cases nothing like the might of the American presidency was at stake.

In countless ways, every day, Clinton has to navigate her way through potentially cataclys mic storms stemming from these dilemmas that male candidates simply never have to confront. Her husband, for example, is prone to “tearing up” when confronted by human suffering - but woe betide her if she does the same, thus showing what, in a woman, would be widely derided as weakness. The contrast is a paradox: Bill possesses the kind of enormously folksy media charm that his wife lacks, but she has much the more disciplined and focused intellect.

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At meetings, she feels obliged to crack jokes about trying to lose weight. Her main Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, provides photo opportunities of himself indulging in the “quintessentially American” recreation of shooting hoops on a basketball court; for her, there is no sporting equivalent open to a woman that would not carry the risk of being perceived as butch.

This is a revealing statement in a number of ways. It contains within it one of the central dilemmas of social science. The dilemma is this: if we are in thrall of our cognition (slaves to image, willing sheep falling into frame) how can we display any autonomy of it at all, such as this meta-statement. The traditional answer that this is only possible for the educated and determined has been proved to be at least partially incorrect but the susceptibility of humans to conceptual manipulation is an intuitively appealing solution. Because, obviously, in order for our cognition to be as powerful as it is at processing the complex imagery of our social environment, it must be very difficult for an individual to stop its flow of entailments and see the world from a cognitively autonomous perspective. Yet, at least partially, people do this all the time. How come that Andrew Stephen, the author of this piece, is able to recognize the pitfalls of social imagery of appropriate public behavior for women and the rest of the world isn’t? However, on the other hand, this autonomy is not something that can be readily observed over large population, although any one individual seems capable of it to a certain degree. I invite anyone reading this (women included) to imagine Hilary Clinton in an overtly feminine role or playing basketball. No matter what prejudices one holds propositionally, the imagistic ones require a certain amount of retuning. Of course, part of the problem is the image of Hillary Clinton herself (a change in a friend’s haircut takes a while to get used to as well) which is more prominently available to us and the public negotiation that necessarily accompanies it. Witness the following from the Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory - washingtonpost.com There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

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With Clinton, there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. You were intruding — being a voyeur. Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed.

To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation. It requires that a woman be utterly at ease in her skin, coolly confident about her appearance, unflinching about her sense of style. Any hint of ambivalence makes everyone uncomfortable. And in matters of style, Clinton is as noncommittal as ever.

While it can be argued that other prominent candidates’ wardrobes receive similar scrutiny (as well as other opportunistic or parasitic blends such as Obama’s name’s similarity to Osama), it makes the navigation of this conceptual field no less confusing.

Women Supportive but Skeptical of Clinton, Poll Says - New York Times Mrs. Clinton’s choices as a woman and a political figure have been intensely scrutinized during her 15 years on the national stage, and as she runs for president, the debate about her remains polarizing, politically and culturally.

The complex combination of negotiation and the unconscious constraints on blending that arise 'naturally' is something that will be a very difficult nut to crack for any social theory that wants to remain cognitively realistic and vice versa.

(A perhaps dim) Awareness of this is adumbrated in this conclusion to a Politico’s piece finding parallels between Clinton’s image with that of fictional female presidents and Katie Couric’s persona as a news anchor.

TV provides poor signal for Hillary - David Paul Kuhn - Politico.com UCLA’s Suber predicts that Clinton’s success or failure, like that of Couric and Davis, will ultimately hinge less on gender identity than other factors, tangible and more ephemeral, that influence whether voters believe Clinton fits the part. “It’s not that different from the discussion producers have when they are talking about casting actors,â€? Suber says. “Who is believable in a role? ‘Well, what have they done?’ is always the first question. Everybody typecasts.â€?