White -- or frat -- House?

What have become known as "gender politics" are never far below the surface. Despite all the gains that have been made in women's rights, employment and status in the western world over the past 50 years, the possibility that women are not getting their due because of systemic attitudes and quiet, casual but formidable barriers still remains.

The whispers about the White House made the front page of The New York Times on Sunday. The accusation, which was discounted by Obama's male and female aides, was put harshly. "Does the White House feel like a frat house?" the lead paragraph stated.

Well, from time to time, the answer appears to be "yes." The president likes sports. While some of his senior advisors are women, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is a woman and his Supreme Court nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a woman, many of the people in his inner circle headed by his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel are men. When President Obama plays golf, he invites other men to play with him.

OK, so what?

Well, those that watch this stuff and look for the "optics" of how presidents and other leaders present themselves, are asking whether the golf, basketball and general male sports-buff attitudes produce an overall image that while women's views are sought, women themselves are not part of the inner-circle, not one of the "dudes," not part of a testosterone-fuelled, fist-pumping guy culture.

Hmmm.

President Obama himself when interviewed on television about whether the basketball indicated a guy culture said it was "bunk." Good for him. But the mere fact that critics are looking at the style of the White House, and the bright young men who help run it, speaks volumes about the touchiness of "gender politics" within Liberal circles.

Much has been written about how men have become increasingly confused about how they are supposed to behave and who they are supposed to be. On the one hand, movies, novels and popular culture still exalt "real men" -- actors like Hugh Jackman who plays the character Wolverine in the X-men movies -- still portray an archetype which would be recognizable at any time in the last 100 years.

That archetype, though, has been threatened for a long time by the more sensitive, less brawny types: John Cuzak in Say Anything, the most sensitive boyfriend ever and Shia LaBoeuf in the Transformer movies who everyone knows is a totally unlikely figure to capture the charms of the mega-hottie Megan Fox.

In gender politics, boys are only allowed to be boys to a certain extent. The challenge for leaders like Obama is to know where the line is between being a man that women admire and being, well, part of a frat house.

It's a question society in general is having problems with. Women may as yet not hold equal numbers of top business, political or academic posts with men, but in some ways they are leaving men in the dust.

Women now outnumber men in universities in Canada. They do better at school and score better in literacy and other tests. The concern that the school system favours girls so much that boys' education is being damaged, has led Toronto to consider a boys-only elementary school.

In the past, it was always argued that girls did better in single-sex schools where they could be themselves without the put-downs and raucous behaviour of boys.

Now that's being turned on its head. The worry is that boys are no longer allowed to be boys. In school, they are required to be more like girls: less noisy, less aggressive and pushy and more social. As a result, boys become bored and don't think they are appreciated or admired for who they are. They are being required to conform to an archetype that they don't know how to be and don't want to be either.

Somewhere in this topsy-turvy world there may yet be some common sense. Not every aspect of maleness is oppressive to women and boys should not have to behave like girls to do well at school.

To be blunt, from time to time we want boys to be boys whether it's Obama challenging himself and his friends physically in a basketball or golf game or it's boys jostling each other and giving teachers a hard time in class. Boys and men define themselves in a physically more aggressive manner than girls and women do. That's not to say, that from time to time, it wouldn't hurt for Obama to have mixed basketball and golf games: just not all the time.

Nicholas Hirst is CEO of Winnipeg-based television and film producer Original Pictures Inc.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 29, 2009 A14