Just a Pretty Face?

Samantha Bee in Sunday's New York Times discusses a recent study by the UCLA Psychology Department that found that ""the women of the Grand Old Party have more feminine faces than those of their female Democratic colleagues . . .in the 111th Congress."

She notes the study was "based on objective measures of feminine facial structure"; undergraduates were asked to the political affiliation of each face and "guessed correctly with surprising accuracy." Bottom line: the more conservative the woman, the more feminine she looked.Or as Bee says, "actual professional scientists . . . have just basically given us the green light to go ahead and judge a book by its cover." At least for women; the students had less success at judging the party affiliations of men.

Money quote: the study "suggests that a key factor in the electability and, dare I say, presence of a female politician on a national stage can be dependent on something as random as the placement of her eyebrows? Are there really subtle ways in which people would consider a woman suitable for office that are rooted in their visceral reaction to the width and prominence of her cheekbones? Well, probably."

The article is humorous, as befits a writer for the Daily Show, and she makes a couple of references to "mannish" men. Familiar talk, of course, to the class; this has been a topic since day one; as we recently heard, "conventional beauty equals competence." How does this tie in with policy positions, I wonder: do conservative women favor more feminine policy topics, while liberal women favor "mannish" topics? And how do you tell the difference?

For example, Slate reports "women tend to report lower levels of support for defense spending and use of military force." This seems to me that GOP women then should be in line with this position, and Democratic women should be for big defense budgets and more military engagements. For example, out of 11 women on the House Armed Services Committee, two are Republican. However, those two women voted with their male colleagues (and several other Democratic women) to give the Pentagon more money than it requested for FY 2013. Of the five "no" votes, three were cast by Democratic women.

Simplistic? Perhaps. But it seems that more research is needed into the connection between feminine appearance and feminine behavior by women politicians.