Outside the Beltway

The Strangest Thing I Have Read in a While (The Way Kagan Sits Edition)

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, May 23, 2010 · 2 comments

Now, anyone familiar with WaPo writer Robin Ghivan knows she can be biting in her commentary on fashion.  As James noted a while back, “This is, after all, the woman who gave us Dick Cheney’s Auschwitz parka, Condi Rice’s commanding boots, John Roberts’ Stepford Children, John Bolton’s Senate-defying haircut, and other follies.”

Now, in a piece criticizing Elena Kagan’s fashion sense (“Whether Kagan leans left or right in her judicial demeanor is for court observers to debate. But in matters of style, she is unabashedly conservative.”), she makes the following observation:

In the photographs of Kagan sitting and chatting in various Capitol Hill offices, she doesn’t appear to ever cross her legs. Her posture stands out because for so many women, when they sit, they cross. People tend to mimic each other’s body language during a conversation, especially if they’re trying to connect with one another. But even when Kagan sits across from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has her legs crossed at the knees, Kagan keeps both feet planted firmly on the ground. Her body language will not be bullied into conformity.

She does not cross her legs at the ankles either, the way so many older women do. Instead, Kagan sits, in her sensible skirts, with her legs slightly apart, hands draped in her lap. The woman and her attire seem utterly at odds. She is intent on being comfortable. No matter what the clothes demand. No matter the camera angle.

This strikes me as a rather odd set of observations, especially the critique of the lack of leg/ankle crossing.  It was made worse by the photo with the following caption:

Ghivan interprets all of this as Kagan not caring that the cameras are present.  I must confess, my first thought upon seeing the photo and caption (before reading the column) was that this was another attempt at a wink-wink/nudge-nudge on the sexual orientation question.   And while the piece does not make the direct connection between the leg-crossing (or lack thereof) and the sexual orientation question, it does note that “For Kagan, that means folks are using fashion as a limited tool for making sense of her sexual orientation”.

Still, that has to be one of the strangest captions in a mainstream newspaper I have read in some time.