[LINK] sadydoyle on the unusual likability of Hillary Rodham Clinton

[rfmcdonald]

Tumblr's sadydoyle recently posted an essay talking about how the author finds Hillary Rodham Clinton, currently front-runner for the Democratic nomination, likeble. She persists in the face of terrible, certainly misogynistic, criticism.

I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act. I spent much of this year working on a long project on how women are demonized in the media. Hillary Clinton was a fairly large part of that story – she had to be; if you want to talk “women that people hate,” she’s kind of unavoidable – and I spent a while sorting through Clintoniana, dating back to the early ‘90s, to find nasty things people had said about her, or common narratives about her personality. It wasn’t pretty – the worst stuff for Hillary was way worse than I’d expected, and there was way more of it than I expected to find – but it was also illuminating, in some key ways. I got a better sense of the pressures that she has to live with, and how they’ve informed her decisions.

I also realized that, unless you really take a look at those pressures, the narrative around Hillary Clinton’s “likability” is doomed to be inaccurate, in some way. She might even be very easy to dislike, if you weren’t looking at those narratives, or if you underestimated their severity. But, in my experience, trying to parse Hillary Clinton without also parsing Hillary-Hate is like trying to drink water without touching the glass. As long as you refuse to deal with the container, the actual substance tends to stay permanently out of reach.

For example: Female politicians are stereotyped as “soft” and incompetent when it comes to foreign policy and national security. It’s a basic, entrenched form of sexism: Only boys know how to fight, or play with guns. So, in order to be taken seriously, Hillary has to prove that she’s as tough as any man, or tougher. But she can’t actually be as tough as any man, or tougher; that plays into the stereotype that women are fonts of petty malevolence, prone to irresponsibly starting conflicts for no reason. (Here’s a joke I first heard from my father, and heard from many men throughout my lifetime: “Why can’t you elect a female President? Because, when she gets her period, she’ll launch the nukes.”) She has to look either “soft” and passive, or “hard” and aggressive. Either one is bad for her.

This plays out on the level of personal expression, too: Women are supposedly over-emotional, whereas men make stern, logical, intelligent judgments. So, if Hillary raises her voice, gets angry, cries, or (apparently) even makes a sarcastic joke at a man’s expense, she will be seen as bitchy, crazy, cruel and dangerous. (Remember the “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID” headlines after she raised her voice at a Benghazi hearing; remember the mass freak-out over her “emotional meltdown” when someone thought she might be crying during a concession speech.) She absolutely cannot express negative emotion in public. But people have emotions, and women are supposed to have more of them than men, so if Hillary avoids them – if she speaks strictly in calm, logical, detached terms, to avoid being seen as crazy – we find her “cold,” call her “robotic” and “calculating,” and wonder why she doesn’t express her “feminine side.” Again, she’s going to be faulted for feminine weakness or lack of femininity, and both are damaging.