By Emma Gilham 
The night of September 29, 2020, America witnessed the presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Candidate Vice President Joe Biden. Like many, I was a part of the population watching from my living room. Cozy in a blanket, I had little to no expectations for information or entertainment. Indeed, I would have rather re-watched NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” for the millionth time. Alas, the debate began, and I was tuned in. I won’t go into too much detail about the debate itself, as that has been widely addressed. With frequent interruptions, name-calling, and talking over one another, the candidates have been widely criticized for their breaking of standard debate decorum. In the end, I wondered how a womxn would have been treated had she been breaking as many rules as either debate candidates.
For this analysis, we can investigate into the not so distant past, to the 2016 election, Candidate Hillary Clinton. Tweets have revealed to us that Clinton often wanted to tell her opponent to “shut up”, as Biden did in his debate on the 29th. Clinton was assaulted with slews of nicknames and defamatory speech during her campaign, labeled “crazy”, “crooked”, and “heartless” just to name a few of the adjectives assigned to her by her opposition. It isn’t difficult to speculate how much worse these jibes could have been had she not held herself to a certain standard of conduct during public appearances.
I’m frustrated with the double standards womxn and minorities often face in the public’s eye. The pressure we place on the minority groups, of any arena, to be the absolute model is a tired trope. We must recognize that the traits, revered in our white, straight, men, are just as natural in our womxn. Leadership, dedication, boldness, anger, and frustration are traits all genders exhibit. No matter how you lean politically, it’s necessary that we acknowledge and amend the double standards placed on public figures, especially in politics.