Rerunning the presidential debates with the sexes reversed

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Now this is really interesting. Some people at NYU took the Clinton/Trump presidential debates and got actors to re-enact them exactly, using the same words, movements, and gestures, except they got a male actor to play Hillary Clinton's role and a female actor to play Donald Trump's role.

The results were (for the left-leaning organizers and audience) surprising and disturbing:

Many were shocked to find that they couldn’t seem to find in [the male Clinton actor] what they had admired in Hillary Clinton—or that [the female Trump's] clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they’d remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out. For those Clinton voters trying to make sense of the loss, it was by turns bewildering and instructive, raising as many questions about gender performance and effects of sexism as it answered....

Based on the conversations after the performances, it sounded like audience members had their beliefs rattled in a similar way. What were some themes that emerged from their responses?
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate—you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience. There was someone who described Brenda King [the female Donald Trump] as his Jewish aunt who would take care of him, even though he might not like his aunt. Someone else described her as the middle school principal who you don’t like, but you know is doing good things for you.

What did you find most surprising?
...I was surprised by how critical I was seeing [Clinton] on a man’s body, and also by the fact that I didn’t find Trump’s behavior on a woman to be off-putting. I remember turning to Maria at one point in the rehearsals and saying, "I kind of want to have a beer with her!" The majority of my extended family voted for Trump. In some ways, I developed empathy for people who voted for him by doing this project, which is not what I was expecting. I expected it to make me more angry at them, but it gave me an understanding of what they might have heard or experienced when he spoke.

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publicat ... ersal.html

This post is useless without the video:



The likeness that comes through in the body language is positively eerie.

I hope they carry out the plan to replicate the full thing and show it to a wider audience (why the live stream is taken down I don't know.)

It is nice to see people seeing the stark reality of Hillary Clinton once you strip away her magic vagina. And the similar effect it has for Trump.

Maybe there'll be more interesting effects once you spread it beyond an audience of liberal academics.

I really recognized the Trump sneer on the women actress. I recognized a lot of the Trump women actress. The "man Hillary" was unrecognizable to me sans actual words.

Does this mean people are getting over the idea that Trump won because his opponent was a woman?

Imagine how differently the whole campaign would have played out with the genders reversed, "grab him by the balls" would have been the official Trump campaign slogan.