An editorial from the Hamilton Spectator, published Oct. 26:
OK, OK, we get it. Justin Trudeau is hot. And, according to the international media (yes, international), he is not just plain hot, he's a "a smoking-hot syrupy fox" according to E!, and even, according to Popsugar, hipster hot. Yes, hipster hot (was it his hopefully ironic "Pirates of the Caribbean" soul patch?). Hold the presses.
Some of the reports that have swooned over him have playfully attempted to pay lip service to his election promises, such as this one:
"He's a Liberal, and plans to invigorate the economy by investing in infrastructure, and oh, f — k it, he's pretty hot — like actually hot, not just politician-hot," according to Gawker.
Others didn't even try: The feminist website Jezebel described Trudeau as "hot in the way a Disney villain is hot … but he is also sometimes hot the way a Disney prince is hot. His is an impressive versatility, to be sure."
Photos of his tatted biceps have been circulated to a drooling international web audience, as has the news he once gave a partial strip tease for charity.
All of this deep and meaningful analysis over his certifiable babeness has admittedly been quite entertaining.
So sorry to put a damper on things, but seriously, we need to give it a rest. Why? Because it is not OK to reduce a person to his or her looks. Because it is not OK to objectify anyone in this way. And because if this was the way we were talking about a woman who worked so hard to earn her place on the political stage (remember Belinda Stronach?), people would be completely outraged, and rightly so. If you replace his name with a woman's, suddenly the comments become pretty creepy. We do not want to give mixed messages to the misogynists of the world who will mistake our swooning over Trudeau for acceptance of this kind of behaviour.
Thankfully, there has been some push back in the media against this double standard, such as a writer for the Huffington Post who pointed out "we feminists hate it when we are expected to love unwanted attention, so why should men be expected to love it instead?"
It's nice that so much of the world's attention has turned to Canada. But let us hope that the next time there is so much fawning about the newly-minted Canadian prime minister, it is over something truly meaningful, like serious progress on climate change or his plan to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada by the end of the year. Now that would be hot.
And if we stop calling him a fox — a syrupy one at that — he will stand a much better chance of being taken seriously. And women — and men — of the world will stand less of a chance of being similarly objectified.
Cheryl Stepan
Cheryl Stepan, Hamilton Spectator, Hamilton Spectator
