“There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.” For a moment I thought I was reading the teleprompter from a nightline crime scene report, but no, it was Washington Post writer Robin Givhan’s opening line to an article about the outfit Hillary Clinton wore last Wednesday giving a speech on the senate floor. According to Givhan, Hillary’s cleavage, “registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch faced scrutiny was necessary.” If you’re looking back at the photo, scrunching your eyes, and wondering how this amount of cleavage could warrant more than two seconds thought let alone a whole article, you’re not alone. Unwittingly, Givhan goes on to pontificate about the world of meaning that there is in this “reveal” and depicts Hillary as a woman who is both ambivalent and amateur when it comes to displaying any feminine sexuality. With no clear reason why, Givhan excuses or affirms other public official’s displays of sexuality. British home secretary Jacqui Smith’s greater reveal of cleavage is interpreted as a mark of confidence in her womanhood and Giuliani’s shirt being unbuttoned a little too far is excused as being equivalent to catching a man with his fly unzipped, “Just look away!” Hillary is given no reprieve; she neglects to consider that perspiration could have caused her top to lower slightly or that more cleavage could be interpreted as tasteless instead of more confident. Ultimately, Givhan rests her conclusions about Hillary’s outfit on the assumption that for a woman, being perceived as a sexual person and being perceived as an intelligent person are generally mutually exclusive. Unless, the display of sexuality is done in just right the way, a way that the article fails to articulate sufficiently, that a woman can hint at sexuality and not let it overshadow her other qualities. It is in this capacity that Givhan sites Hillary as a failure. This type of scrutiny over Hillary’s neckline is reminiscent of the breast brouhaha surrounding Janet Jackson’s super bowl performance. But this is even worse, because at least in Janet’s case an actual breast was revealed, not a paltry quarter inch of cleavage. However, the real issue is that a piece like this reinforces the negative journalistic tendency to report much more heavily on women’s appearance than men’s which hurts women’s image overall. In a lexis-nexis search for Hillary, Barack, Rudy and Mitt and the word outfit in the same sentence in news for the last month, Hillary gets five times as many results as the other three. This kind of coverage (no pun intended) is indicative of an author who is at best, desperate for material that will gain attention and at worst, too stupid or politically driven to see that her points are completely void of substance.