Why the Right and Left Hates Hillary

[donquixote99]

Thoughtful analysis from back in January, from Rebecca Solnit in the London Review of Books.

A sample:

Clinton was constantly berated for qualities rarely mentioned in male politicians, including ambition – something, it’s safe to assume, she has in common with everyone who ever ran for elected office. It’s possible, according to Psychology Today’s headline, that she is ‘pathologically ambitious’. She was criticised for having a voice. While Bernie Sanders railed and Trump screamed and snickered, the Fox commentator Brit Hume complained about Clinton’s ‘sharp, lecturing tone’, which, he said, was ‘not so attractive’, while MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone, Bob Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’ and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said: ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but of course if she did that she would not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a woman, since power, in this framework, is a male prerogative, which is to say that the set-up was not intended to include women.

As Sady Doyle noted, ‘she can’t be sad or angry, but she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this one. Anything she does is wrong.’ One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. ‘No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,’ Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. ‘For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonised.’ Or as Mary Beard put it last year, ‘We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.’

Do not fail to read the comments section. Some of the contra arguments are not badly made....

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/rebecc...ing-to-leering