Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/06/how-misogyny-shaped-the-electi.html
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How misogyny / fuckery / douchebagery shaped the election.
FIFY!
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Here is one opinion - mine. Misogyny played a role because she was a woman and some who didn’t like her would use misogynist attacks. That is to say, they didn’t not like her because she was a woman, they didn’t attack her because she was a woman - they did those things because she was Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. BUT, their attacks were misogynistic in nature because, well, she’s a woman and it is an easy target.
In another example, Chris Christie is often attacked because he is fat. These attacks range from “haha you’re fat” to “can a person with poor impulse control and lack of self discipline really be a good leader?” But if he was a Democrat, the people using his weight to attack him wouldn’t say one goddamn word about it, and the Republicans would be the ones skewering him.
And there is the crux of the issue. She is THEIR lady. God bless her, it seems like her chief skill is being a Republican. But the blind support she gets from the right shows that the misogyny can be completely over written if they are on the right “team”. There are many examples where the stereotypical weaknesses of women could be applied to Palin as they were to Hillary, but they aren’t. Well, at least not from the right. The left has no problem calling out her flaws. (Russia from her house, amiright?)
Conversely, the slut shaming of the new first lady is rather appalling from people who would normally be all for women’s rights and shout down anyone saying that a women shouldn’t dress (or undress) a certain way. Their normal views are completely overwritten because she is on the wrong “team”.
Which brings be back to my over arching point that too many people are just perpetuating their own ideas and values, no one is really listening to anyone else, and each side is just huddled together, bad mouthing the other side, and everyone is getting more and more divisive
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Nope. Still in Kubler-Ross stage 1/2.
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Not really. It just has her name underneath this image:
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Misogyny did not shape the election. A bad campaign on the Democrats’ part shaped it. They didn’t just lose the White House over the last few years, they lost the House, the Senate, and have far fewer governorships than Republicans. As the left keeps reminding the world, Hillary won the popular vote; so some notion that Americans weren’t giving a woman a chance is bunk.
The article is pure sophistry. Here is a woman who got things in her life because of the man she married — a man who had numerous affairs and she stood by him all these years all the same as she passionately defended him in public, ignoring reality — got her chance to run for president. She got it even though she talked all about glass ceilings, but she never bothered to choose a female running mate, as if no other woman also wanted to break a ceiling by being the first female VP, or that it was Bernie Saunders who was electrifying the next generation of voters, and you’d think she would get a clue, but she got the nomination because “it was time” for a woman to get in the White House, and the press pushed for her and the current reigning President stumped for her on an unprecedented level, and the A-list celebrities and robber baron tech lords all stumped for her and she was up against a newbie who was stepping in every cow flap in the field…
And she lost the election because she didn’t get it. She didn’t campaign in places where her rival did and while she won the popular vote, what she was doing was courting the redundant vote, and her rival went after the strategic vote and he won.
No one is to blame for that fiasco but the one who put her hat in the ring and then thought the strategy of shaming people to vote for a woman was going to work. There are women in Third World countries that are far more misogynisitc who ran without all those fabulous assists she had and they won. If misogyny didn’t serve as an obstacle for them, Clinton does not have that excuse, either.
Because the right feminist candidate would have served as an example of how to face misogyny and reach your goal all the same.
True equality means owning up to your mistakes and correcting them so that future generations have the map to overcoming obstacles.
You are always going to have opposition. That reality is a given and anything worth having you have to fight for understanding there will always be people who will never give you a chance because you are not 100% like them. You cannot make excuses based on that obstacle alone. Hillary didn’t win because she didn’t get it. The next woman who runs will not have the same advantages that Clinton did and she better be prepared to study the battleground with realism, use real strategy with confidence, and campaign like a frenzied general who fights to win — and knows how to be the life of the party because the candidate who looks like he knows how to be more fun at a shindig always wins the election.
This wallowing, passive, and defeatist victim-centred garbage is not healthy, and gives away power. Snap out of it because once you get sucked into self-pity and resignation, you get devoured, dragging everyone else in your lie. Grow a pair of ovaries, face reality, think about tomorrow, and get in the ring again.
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I hope someone comes along to write 1000 words about how Bernie would have won in a landslide without outright saying that Bernie would have won in a landslide.
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Misogyny against Hillary started decades ago and never let up. No woman would have won this election – neither R or D, nosirree, not after a black president – but especially not the number one enemy of the Republican party.
Her biggest crime was being the best man for the job.
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They find her to be hot and she isn’t a feminist. Liburl feminist women are the worst, in their view.
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This is pure BS. Like Clinton or not, the woman worked to get where she was. If anything Bill Clinton benefited from her smarts and hard work. He’d not be where he was if she hadn’t married him and I think if you asked him that, he’d say it’s the truth. You and I may not like the woman or agree with her, but to imagine she only got where she was because she married up is just rewriting history.
That being said, I agree that the democrats failed in not going into more rural, rust belt areas. They absolutely should have pushed harder on Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and maybe even come to some of the southern, purple states that some thought were in play.
And trying to explain and figure out where the hatred - yes, hatred of women, the objectifying, ignoring, name calling, passing over, BS that we all have to face at one time or another - comes from is part and parcel of “growing a pair of ovaries” and getting in there for the fight. Which, by the way, women are doing. There was a spike in women looking to run for office after this election, because they are interested in moving forward. That doesn’t negate trying to understand this stuff. Personally, I’d very much like my own daughter to not have to deal with misogynistic BS as she grows up. I have no doubt that she’ll over come it, because she’s strong. But that doesn’t mean she should be subject to it or that I’m weak for trying to combat it for myself and on her behalf.
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That’s one side of it, but there is also absolutely no way that any woman could have got the endorsement of either major party if she had even a fraction of Trump’s baggage.
A thrice-married woman who had five kids by three different men, publicly bragged about her serial infidelity including “grabbing men by the cock” without their consent, and on top of it all had zero record of public service? No way the Dems OR Republicans would let someone like that near the nomination.
Blatant, naked misogyny isn’t just what held Clinton down, it’s what held Trump up.
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A-fucking-men; with a big dash of racism, nativism, and impotent rage to boot.
This is what happens when a society is based upon a fallacy of ‘equality and opportunity’ which never actually comes to fruition.
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That’s basically the same as saying “Barack Obama was elected President, therefore black people can no longer claim that racism is an obstacle.” (Some people do seriously make this claim but I think they’re full of crap.)
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At one time I would have agreed with this. I’m not so sure now.
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Not directly, but essentially. Read the full article, paying attention to the parts about benevolent sexism in women and you’ll likely notice the congruences.
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Yep. Anytime anybody tries to analyze anything that went wrong, it’s only because of grief. It’s absolutely not because many people actually try to study and understand the world and society around them. And sexism, in particular, ended a long time ago when those uppity women got the vote.
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This is not a zero sum game. Both of these things happened. You don’t need to be reductive and ignore the complexities of reality to make the point that HRC’s campaigning was wonked, but to ignore the role that gender played in this election is just as blinkered as imagining that HRC’s campaigning was entirely adequate and it’s all Comey’s fault she lost. There’s a lot of things at work. This is a lot of mess. Fixing one thing wont’ fix the mess.
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