What If....?

No not The Watcher on Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, DoubleX is wondering what the world would be like if Hillary Clinton had won. Here's Hanna Rosin:

I had a twinge of regret, when I was reading that White House as frat house piece last week. It's not that I think Obama needs to play co-ed basketball, God forbid, or have more people who look like me in his inner circle, as Dee Dee Meyers boringly suggested. Obama seems perfectly familiar and postfeminist just like me and all my friends. It's just that there are laws of nature no amount of bean counting or feminist revival can change. And those include the fact that a pack of boys in the workplace will blithely interrupt their work day to play basketball, or watch soccer, and a pack of girls will routinely watch out for how each one is feeling every day, and that's just how it is. I know that now, because for the first time I work at a women's magazine. It's neither good nor bad, although I like it better, and it would have been surprising and cool to see it play out in the White House.

Not a bad impersonation of Uatu.

The "throw more women at the problem" idea struck me as unimaginative, also. There seemed to be something deeper at work. Anyway, that's kind of what I like about this comment. While eschewing, as Hanna says, a kind of "bean-counting" diversity, it points out that putting a women in charge would, almost necessarily, make some things different culturally. I think that's true of Obama--I just don't think you have poetry slams at the White House if Hillary wins.