Oh Dalai Lama, you were meant to be the best of us. You’re supposed to be the spiritual leader whom people turn to for answers when things get tough, especially during times like these.
So it’s incredibly disappointing when you told BBC foreign correspondent, Rajini Vaidyanathan, that you’re open to a female successor but she would have to be attractive.
Then you somehow made it worse when you tried to justify it by saying that if a female Dalai Lama looked a certain way then people prefer not to see a “dead face”.
You had a very small window to take some of this back and you nearly did it when you agreed with Vaidyanathan that women might find your comment objectifying and that the female successor should be judged on character rather than their looks. Instead, you doubled down on your comment when you said, “Real beauty is inner beauty, that’s true. I think the appearance is also important.”
You can’t be Switzerland here. This is something where you can’t have your cake and eat it, Dalai Lama.
But sadly, we shouldn’t have expected anything more on this specific topic from you. We still haven’t forgotten that moment in 2015 when you told BBC journalist Clive Myrie that you’re happy for your successor to be female but she would have to be “very, very attractive” or there would be “not much use.”
It’s a great thing that you’re all for equality, women’s rights and equal pay in the workplace, but you have to realise that your comments about a female Dalai Lama needing to be attractive is not only upsetting to women, it undermines your stance on women’s rights.
What’s even worse is that if someone like you is saying things like this, you are showing us all just how much more work there needs to be done before equality is actually achieved.
But hey, let’s try and look on the bright side here. No one is disagreeing with your comment about Trump’s “lack of moral principle” so at least everything you said to Vaidyanathan wasn’t a flop.