Political pundits are saying that part of the appeal of newly elected Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is how little people knew about him. Seeing and hearing him for the first time on the abbreviated campaign trail to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts’ Senate seat, many voters were taken with the state senator’s average-guy pitch and appeal.
My question is, if Brown was a she instead of a he, would things have turned out differently?
Back in 1982, when Brown was a 22-year-old law student at Boston College, he posed nude for the centerfold of Cosmopolitan magazine. Electronic versions of the spread have been making their way around the Internet, eliciting interest but few protests.
But what if it had been his opponent, 56-year-old Martha Coakley, who posed nude in her college days? Certainly there would have been an uproar. Imagine if it had been Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, or Democrat Hillary Clinton in her bid for her party’s presidential nomination, what a ruckus would have ensued.
There is a double-standard for men and women and that is unfair. I could care less that Scott Brown showed it all off back in 1982, although I am curious about how he explained the Cosmo spread to his college-aged daughters.
But I am irritated that had a woman done the same thing, it would have been big news. Regardless of her party affiliation, age, or political positions, she would have been pilloried for it.
That’s not right.