Lisa Schiffren offers support for Charlotte Allen’s thesis:
Does a certain type of man swoon and faint in the same way? I don’t know. But over a lifetime in and around politics I have seen the equally awful spectacle of the drippy, excrutiatingly earnest young man, defending his views and his candidate at painful and tedious length. All campaigns are stocked with these young men. They approach the candidate with extreme reverence, citing little known and generally irrelevant details about his or her life as if they were kabbalistic invocations. They trade received opinions about floor fights at political conventions held in their infancy as if those had been the high points of their own, personal lives. They have no sense of humor or distance whatsoever. Is this better than swooning?
So, this woman deems the male ability to focus – an aspect of male behavior that is indubitably connected to such things as technological advancement, entrepeneurialism and great guitar solos – is somehow equivalent to women fainting in sexual excitement over a politician? This is nothing more than the typical woman’s equalitarian response to criticism and conflict.