Double Standards in Every Direction
I enjoy the new Amazon commercial, “Double Shot Dad,” which depicts an exhausted stay-at-home dad with an infant and a professional wife, who manages to persevere only by purchasing a series of caffeinated jolts from Amazon. Until, at the end, his wife gives him the knowing eye and he eagerly trails her out of the kitchen, presumably to the bedroom. The ad won’t induce me to buy anything new from Amazon, but it’s witty and delightful. It’s also completely sexist, albeit in the opposite direction our society accepts these days.
Can you imagine an ad portraying an exhausted stay-at-home mom who’s excited about the prospect of her husband tossing her a come-hither look? That might have sold a percolator in 1964, but in 2024 it wouldn’t make it past an initial screening, let alone become part of the standard rotation of ads at every NFL telecast.
What’s business as usual in one era, becomes comic fodder in another, and verboten in another. We can count on Madison Avenue to generate ads that land right on target with the times.
Less generous are the double standards on display in the current snarl down in Georgia.
Fani Willis, Fulton County Georgia’s elected District Attorney, hired Nathan Wade as the Special Prosecutor to assist in the case to determine whether former President Trump and 18 others broke any laws when they tried to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Then, she slept with him. Or maybe she slept with him first. Either way, whether or not their relationship is an illegal act, it is certainly an unethical one.
We may never know why Ms. Willis felt compelled to announce in a television interview during her 2020 campaign, “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me, let me just say that.” Except perhaps to fulfill the Shakespearean prophesy that she doth protest too much.
Now, we are faced with pair of unsavory double standards. Fani and Nathan are spewing a bunch of damage control over the media, picking at fine points of who paid for what, proclaiming nothing was illegal, when in fact the entire relationship is inappropriate. Can you imagine the uproar if Fani Willis was a man and Nathan Hale a woman? It would be slam-dunk, you deserve to get booted out-of-office you dirty DA. If we’re going to damn the men who diddle the girls they hire, we have to apply the same stand to the woman who diddle their male underlings.
Of course the much worse outcome of this debacle is the inherent double standard of being a Democratic rather than a Republican. A standard the Democrats fail to grasp again and again. Democrats uphold, at least in words, a high moral code, while Republicans have long discarded any morals. You can’t condemn someone for violating a moral code they don’t embrace, but you sure as heck can condemn someone who espouses virtue and then fails. That’s why when Gavin Newsom throws a party during COVID, or Stacey Abrams visits an elementary school without a mask, they are eviscerated, but it’s business as usual when President Trump holds a Rose Garden party in which dozens of people are infected. It’s why Democrat Al Franken had to resign from the Senate while Representative Matt Gaetz remains in the House.
Many say it is not fair to hold Democrats to a higher standard, but I disagree. If you preach a higher standard, then you must live up to it.
Fani Willis needs to own that what she did was wrong, unethical, and she needs to fix it. Perhaps even to the tune of replacing Nathan Wade or resigning herself. The Georgia trial of former President Trump is too important to be tarnished by the unethical conduct of a powerful woman acting in a way that is no longer acceptable — at least among Democrats — for powerful men.
For years women and minorities have — justly — accused white men in power of double standards. Thanks to legal parity, #MeToo, and other cultural shifts, more women and minorities are achieving a larger voice in our world. That shift can provide fodder for funny TV commercials. But when real women achieve real power, the same penalties used to bend the behavior of inappropriate men toward equity must be applied them as well. Sorry, Fani, but what you did is not okay.
