JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

It happened again the other evening. A woman at dinner, accomplished and educated and refined and a friend, complained that Hillary Clinton was treated differently from a male presidential candidate.

And this was a woman who had voted for Barack Obama because he struck her as more the real deal.

All that talk about Clinton's hair and pantsuits and cackle and stridency was so unfair, the woman said, because a male candidate would not have been subjected to such objectifying based on appearance and gender.

I sat there as a man who once wrote that Bill Clinton ought to stop running around in those overly brief jogging shorts revealing those "ample, pasty thighs." I sat there as man who once wrote that John Edwards had a Ken-doll hairdo. I sat there as a man who once repeated a comedian's question -- why the long face? -- about John Kerry.

I sat there as one who had remarked over the years on Michael Dukakis' diminutiveness and Dick Gephardt's sparse eyebrows and Ronald Reagan's curiously non-graying hair and on the likelihood that America is not going to be electing any bald presidents.

But I always was afraid to say anything about the way Hillary looked.

Yet I was vulnerable. The woman at dinner said that my assessment of Clinton's seeming phoniness in public, which belied a private warmth and charm, also reflected a gender-driven bias.

The unfairness, she said, was that a woman gets judged by male standards and that Hillary had to try to adapt to a man's world. I countered ever so meekly that I'd cited the same kind of contradiction in regard to Al Gore, who was privately a cutup, but publicly stiff and over-managed.

So now we have The New Yorker magazine giving us a cover that parodies all these insane rumors about the Obamas -- that he's Muslim and that she is an Angela Davis-looking, Afro-ed black militant. It's not primarily a race-based parody, but a religious and cultural one, though race is undeniably there.

So Obama's campaign publicly deplores it and people fall over themselves to lament its horrific inappropriateness.

For goodness sake, it's a joke about the laughable pervasiveness of ignorance and absurd rumor. The illustration doesn't ridicule the Obamas, but our own fear and foolishness.

There is not one subscriber to that magazine -- and there aren't that many in the first place -- who fails to get it.

It's as if someone had taken all the crazed rumors about Bill Clinton -- that he'd had people murdered in Arkansas, that he'd run drugs through the Mena Airport -- and put them into a cartoon cover to spoof them, maybe with Clinton's bulbous, oversized nose taking an illegal narcotic hit.

It's as if someone had taken all these reports of John McCain's frightful rage -- a result of his captivity and torture, the whisperers speculate -- and put them into a cartoon illustration by which a mouth-foaming McCain would have grabbed Obama by the throat during a debate.

It's as if someone had taken all the image caricatures of Hillary and incorporated them into cartoon illustration by which she was -- uh, oh, stop me right there. I was about to venture into inappropriateness.

Here's when women and black people will be equal to white men in our society: When all in the public eye can be parodied freely, whether cleverly or in debatable taste, or, as is often the case, both. If it's universally tasteful, it may not make the point and it may not be funny.

There are limitations to the tastelessness, of course, and we all know the hate-filled slurs never to use.

We'll achieve healthiness and maturity in our respect for each other and our differences -- a genuine color blindness and genuine gender equality -- only when we can poke fun equally without inhibition or recrimination.

Obviously, we're not nearly there yet, as I suspect, people are getting ready to explain to me, again, perhaps a bit heatedly. It's all easy for a white male to say, some will point out.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.