"She's brilliant and she's dedicated, she's tough... She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking Attorney General. It's true, c'mon!"This... is problematic. There are all sorts of reasons to believe Obama didn't mean this in any kind of subordinating way or in any way other than just as a friendly compliment to an ally of his. However. It is true, it is undeniably true, and in fact President Barack Obama has subsequently acknowledged it to be true that women who try to pursue a career in some sort of professional field (a set which increasingly resembles "women") get judged on their appearance, and it hurts them. Not the results of the judgment; no, that appears not to matter. Attractive women, unattractive women, whatever: being judged on their appearance hurts them. It makes sense, or at least it makes a positivist kind of sense in that it's not surprising: since historically women were considered not to have the "male" qualities of intelligence, competence, etc. that would make a good professional, and only really to be there to look pretty, anything that reminds us of a woman's appearance brings that antiquated view along with it. So Obama's comments were problematic, even though they weren't meant as part of an effort on the part of Men to oppress Women In The Workplace. Obama has apologized to Harris, and she's accepted his apology.
That's the end of the story, unless one wishes it weren't true that men can't ever compliment women (who aren't in the business of making money from their appearance, e.g. actresses or models or whatever) on their appearance in public. If one thinks this is a bad thing, and I'm certainly inclined to think it's not an ideal thing, one then needs to ask whose fault it is. But the answer is not, as Matt Yglesias jokingly tweeted, "feminazis." The point is not that men have just always been offering these innocent compliments and those horrible feminists, who don't think women should be sexy or something, are irrationally offended by it, those silly feminists. No, it's the reverse. An awful lot of men just don't know how to live in a world where half the people they meet are women, some of whom might be attractive and some of whom might not be. I'm reminded of the story from a few months ago of a woman who was fired explicitly because her boss found her so attractive that he felt tempted to have an affair with her, and felt it was hurting his marriage. This is not an acceptable thing to have happen. This thing where, once a man becomes away of a woman as a potential object of attraction (whether she is, in fact, attractive or not), he stops being able to think of her as a person, with an intellect and a personality and skills and an independent existence, just needs to stop. And if it stopped, if it really, really stopped, if it really became true that when considering, say, who to vote for for Senator, or Governor, or President, or whatever, men could be aware of the sexiness or lack thereof of a female candidate and not have it affect their voting behavior one bit, and similarly in various other circumstances, then it might be possible to say something like what Obama said in a non-problematic way. After all, Kamala Harris is pretty attractive (I imagine that, if she is nominated and confirmed for the post, she'd be the most attractive (to [straight] men) Supreme Court Justice ever). If observing that fact both was and was perceived to be genuinely unconnected from any consideration of her effectiveness as an Attorney General, or her potential effectiveness as Governor or President or Justice, then it would more closely resemble just a friendly compliment. But that can't happen until men, as a group, shape up, and get their act together. (I use the third-person because I'd like to think that I'm pretty decent on this score.)
Beautiful women, just like their attractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Unattractive women, just like their unattractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Or they can not be any of those things, just like men of various levels of attractiveness. In principle it should be true that one can compliment beautiful women without undermining them as workers or professionals or politicians (though the issue of implicitly insulting "less attractive" women, an admittedly very subjective category, would never go away), but that can only happen once everyone in society, and particularly men and particularly men in positions of power, recognize the above facts, and act accordingly. As with most things, if chauvinist men would stop being so damn chauvinist, the feminists would start having a lot fewer problems with their actions.
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