Wanted: Married white females with children 

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
October 27, 2008

Stephen Harper's Conservatives yearn for me. It was a shock to find out that I am part of their target demographic.

The Toronto Star ran a novella recently on Harper's failure to win a majority. In a piece headlined "How Harper Let It Slip Away," reporter Kenneth Kidd recited the prime minister's yearnings for particular slices of the Canadian people pie, based on socio-economic data and dressed up by marketing experts to breathe life into social segments.

"The Tories knew, for instance that they had an opening with married women who have children, but it was [a marketer] who dubbed them 'Heather,' as in 'Steve and Heather,' a married Protestant couple with three kids."

My name is Heather. But how did Steve Harper know I'm married? To a guy named Steve, no less? And that we have kids and are nominally Protestant?

How did he know that I am politically vulnerable in the sense that, as the years pass, I have come to despise the hard left (to be fair, the Canadian hard left despises me as well) and am a bit of a drifting voter? I haven't even told My Steve that yet.

My Steve

There are a lot of things I haven't told My Steve that That Steve has somehow sensed.

For instance, My Steve and Heather are against capital punishment but a little voice in Heather thinks it was a good thing for women and girls that Ted Bundy was electrocuted in 1989. I don't tell My Steve that — I would get a lecture on hard cases making bad law.

But That Steve gets my nascent lack of principles. He has seen my dark heart.

That Steve also understands that becoming a mortgage-free homeowner was a high point of my life. That Steve knows that My Steve would secretly like to own a Taser, if only for squirrel-hunting.

That Steve knows that I think David Ennis (formerly Shearing) who killed a family of campers in the B.C. interior in 1982, shooting the grandparents and parents but keeping two little girls alive for six days for sexual torture, should not have had a parole hearing in Alberta last week. Twenty-five years is not enough. We Heathers don't forget.

But I understand that That Steve has a broader brush. I take it that Protestant is code for white, that married is code for socially biddable and that having boring names like Steve and Heather are code for plodding personalities, my dull doppelgangers who live lives marked by incuriosity and a hostility to public transit.

Chuck the Teacher

You can divide voters into groups. But it's odd to start with individuals — defining voters with first names and a quick, callous guess at income level, and working outwards.

The Republicans are doing this right now. It began with Joe the Plumber who turned out to be (a) not Joe but Samuel and (b) not a licenced plumber or even (c) a Republican.

Then Team McCain couldn't stop. It started in on "Ed the Dairyman" (that shows McCain's age: what is a dairyman?), "Rose the Teacher," "Phil the Bricklayer," "David the Dentist," and "Joe the Florist."

Sarah Palin picked up the habit. Last week, she was all "Wendy the Waitress, Jane the Engineer, Molly the Dental Hygienist, Chuck the Teacher," all people who'll be living in their cars, by the way, if McCain wins.

It's embarrassing how badly she and her running mate reprise those roles, like casting a play. A smart Republican would go with Townsend the Stockbroker, Cluke the Rancher and Griffy the Baptist, plus some of the Fox-viewing "angry pajamas" who are my readers. That's the base right there.

Is this a North American thing, or do they do it in other countries? In Austria, is it Josef the Dungeonmaster or Joerg the Goosestepper or Stefan the Boyfriend? I suppose every nation has its own types, some more populated than others.

Steve's marketing men jumped to absurd conclusions. I call my husband by his nickname and when I need him to do something masculine like waterproofing masonry or spin-barbecuing animals whole, I call him "Husband." I didn't want to marry; the children requested it; and in the early years I referred to myself as "Itty Bitty New Wife."

If I were a Tory Heather, I would accept $100 a month in child-care grants, but would still be insulted each month to be reminded of how little That Steve understands about the actual cost of child care.

No Zoe zone

I never wanted to be a Heather, and indeed I've had some helpful suggestions that I shouldn't be. I once had a boss slowly stroke my back and run his fingers up and down my spine while holding a damning evaluation letter in front of my face.

He told me I was so exotic-looking I shouldn't be named Heather but Petronella or Clothilde or some damn thing. "I can change this letter and you'll be hired," he told me, his beady little eyes blinking wetly at me.

It was one of the defining moments of my life. I left the building, never to return, and realized that that was ethical Heather-type behaviour. I was proud.

The Star's Ken Kidd reports that That Steve has no interest in "Zoe," a single twentysomething university student who eats organic food, does yoga and lives in a downtown apartment. In other words, my children repel him.

That's a mistake, Steve! Zoes are young. They don't have families now, but they will later and they don't suddenly morph into Steves and Heathers; they're as snarky and unpredictable as their parents.

As for stereotypes, Republican Red State and Democratic Blue State have worked magnificently for years now.

But That Steve thinks he wants Steve the Doughnut and Heather the Hausfrau. His problem is that people morph. They vote other than they were intended to. They're not as they seem.

What is it to be one self? Ibsen asked in Peer Gynt. (It was the core question of the AMC drama Mad Men this week, since you ask. That Mad Men, so upmarket.) In our authentic selves, maybe Steve and Heather are really Bonnie and Clyde, and you wouldn't want us then. Or maybe we're Steve and Steve. Heather and Heather even.

We're unknowable.