Emotion Equality

In a relatively recent episode of “The Daily Show with John Stewart” he begins a discussion about women in politics. Now, when I first heard about the video I figured it was going to be degrading and when I read the title, “The Broads Are Crazy”, I was almost sure of it. When we began to get further into the video though, my reaction was different than what I had expected. At the beginning of the video he shows clips of news anchors putting Hillary Clinton down for getting emotional during a recent election while talking to the public. One news anchor even says, “We can’t have people that break down and start crying at the most difficult moments”, like what she did would be detrimental to her being a part of the government. For the rest of the video he makes sarcastic remarks about how women are not strong enough and have crazy mood swings, while showing clips of men struggling to keep it together in news conferences and in front of the public. He makes a lot of jokes about how females should not be able to run our country because of all of the emotions that we can’t hold back and then turns it around on men in a very comedic way. I think by doing this, he is trying to get a little bit of gender equality out there by showing both sides of the story from a male perspective. If a woman were doing what he did in this skit it would be looked over as her being a crazy, radical, feminist. I think he is trying to make us feel like we are unfair to women in the political system, that they are judged more harshly and that they should not be. He is portraying that when women get emotional about their country or their work they are labeled as weak but when men get emotional they are considered passionate, a strong leader, and a “mans-man”. With the video section on the mood swings I think he is trying to show us also that men are easily excitable and can get just as “girl-ish” with their angry or crazy outbursts. I personally think that he believes in this because he looks at the human race logically, he sees us as equals and that one person should not be looked down upon for their emotions any differently from another. We are all wired to have emotions and strong passionate feelings for certain things, and with work at something, this passion can come on even stronger, I think he is showcasing in this skit that women shouldn’t be judged for it, just because we are known to be more fragile. I strongly believe that sexism is still a problem today and that a lot of men think women are unsuitable for high government positions because they close-mindedly think that we are genuinely the weaker sex. John Stewart seems to put up a fight for women, and with his vulgar line at the end stating, “In politics, its okay to be a pussy as long as you have a dick.” it’s clear where he stands on the gender equality issue.