Manu Joseph: A right that women don’t have is the right to mediocrity

There is an implication in this view that one has to be exceptional to become America’s leader or reach the top of other fields. Yet, they would struggle to list what is exceptional about Trump. A way of the world is that it punishes the ordinariness of women and is more understanding of the mediocrity of successful men.

A right that women do not have is the right to mediocrity. I call it a right because it is what most people are, by definition, and people have the right to be themselves.

There was a Trump before Trump, and her name was Sarah Palin, a former governor of Alaska who was a vice-presidential nominee when John McCain ran for president. She once said that she could see Russia from her house in Alaska. She said things an average person would.

While Trump was rewarded for that quality of discourse, she did not survive the torrent of ridicule.

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The word ‘mediocrity’ has come to mean something demeaning, but it is intended to describe something between excellence and terrible—the common output of an average person. Ideally, a characteristic of most people, their ordinariness, should not be held against them.

And it is often not held against male leaders. If anything, their ordinariness makes them endearing to others. But when female leaders slip up, or are just dour or mediocre in other ways, they face much more severe scrutiny.

When feminists speak of what the world does not grant or allow women, they often speak of how exceptional women are not given opportunities. In my view, this is not true. It is hard for the world to suppress exceptional women because it is in the self-interest of society to let them thrive.

In any case, exceptional people are rare, and they constitute a tiny proportion of women, too. The real bias against women is in how the world perceives the ordinariness of ordinary women as opposed to the ordinariness of ordinary men. All around us are ordinary men in leadership positions getting away with being ordinary.

The movement to set things right for women had no choice but to glorify success and brilliance. As a result, it is easier today for a man to be unambitious, to choose an ordinary, quiet and healthy life, while it is complex for a woman to overtly say that she wants to achieve nothing.

Even Barbie had to become more than an alluring girlfriend and get dressed in career uniforms and other ambiguous clothes of success. Mediocrity is not only about the capacity of one’s mind; it is also about the ordinariness of aspiration.

Most people do not aspire to anything extraordinary, and it is easier for men to be that way or even say that they want to be that way. In the film Barbie, a character tells the CEO of Barbie’s maker Mattel that it should create an ordinary Barbie who just wants to be a mom.

But the film is nervous to state what it seems keen to say: that women have a right to be ordinary.

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There is a stigma attached to mediocrity and even to wishing for an ordinary life. The very bias against women is routed through allegations of their ordinariness; so their champions feel they should never speak of that.

As a result, no one speaks of the actual place where the bias is cruel, where a woman has no defence because what she is accused of may be true, even if it is an unfair charge because a man in her position would get away with it.

When I say that exceptional people are rare, I mean that exceptional people are rare among the successful. Being exceptional is not the prerequisite for success that the world pretends it is.

The educational system, self-help books and motivational talks all suggest that people must prepare to be exceptional to succeed. But people succeed because of ordinary reasons like social networks and dumb luck and because they are so ordinary that they are likeable, fun and belong to a tribe.

While there are advantages to being ordinary, there are drawbacks too. Ordinary people are sometimes caught out of depth. That happens all the time to men in power, but they survive unscathed compared to women in the same position.

At first glance, it may appear that Indian female politicians are an exception. Isn’t it true that the Indian public forgives their failings? Some women have held real power for many years and still do.

I grew up in Tamil Nadu, where J. Jayalalithaa defeated powerful men and held on to power for long. That could happen, I believe, because her gender was not a factor in her political appeal. Women knew that they were voting for a woman, but men had to deify her, as someone more than just a woman, to grant her power over them.

As a politician, she was enormously popular at one point. But when the aura began to fade and her popularity began to slip, when she was faced with corruption charges and could not stave off her political adversaries, she fell faster and harder than men because suddenly she was revealed as a mortal woman, and questions of her mediocrity in ethics had a greater consequence.

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The bias against ordinary women exists only in roles that were traditionally held by men. For instance, the captain of a female football team will not be particularly vilified for her ordinariness. Nor a housewife for her ordinariness within the boundaries of what is expected of her in this role.