I agree with that. Men I guess have the perk that being an asshole is a livable with trait. Misogyny certainly played a role in all this, but I don’t think it was the main factor.
That or people were willing to ignore his misogyny because, you know, he isn’t a Democrat. Including my very smart ex-wife. It is amazing what people will ignore in politics. Remember they elected a president way back in the day who killed a guy in a duel.
Misogyny was a factor in the election; it is factor every day in all our lives.
However the bulk of your critique is dead on accurate. The Vox article was both surprisingly in depth - even erudite - and stunningly manipulative. It started out about electoral politics, segued to a pseudo-lecture hall presentation of ‘standard types’ of misogyny (a handy tactic to stand above the Vulgar!) and wrapped up with intensely manipulative paragraphs on rape. As though there is an irrefutable connection between rape and the defeat of an Establishment candidate. Or because rape just.has.to.be.mentioned every time misogyny is. Because.
Because in fact, critiques of the article might gain traction if they aren’t snuffed out with a pre-loaded Godwin attack.
It was exemplary of everything damaging, inward-looking and wrong about educated ‘liberalism’ today. A lengthy, self-pleasuring vanity exercise, dressed up as a plea for inquiry.
You seem to be claiming that the article, when it starts out, is not about rape. That’s not how I read the article at all. The very first sentence is:
After leaked audio showed Donald Trump bragging in 2005 that he can “grab [women] by the pussy” and kiss them without consent because he’s “a star,” Trump’s campaign seemed done for.
The subheader is:
America’s president-elect is an alleged sexual predator. This theory of sexism explains how it came to this — and why even many women voted for Trump.
The entire article seems to be written starting with the question, “Why would Americans (especially women) vote for someone accused of sexual assault by so many?” Implying that rape is only relevant to the article because “rape just.has.to.be.mentioned every time misogyny is” is missing the entire point of the article.
I don’t know how you expect to read an article attempting to answer the question, “Why would women vote to elect an alleged rapist?” without discussing rape.
A sample consisting solely of Hillary Clinton is too small from which to generalize about why a woman could not be elected president.
Gosh I wonder why the sample size of women nominated for the office by a major party is so small.
Not as you see it. Although you may be wearing misogyny colored glasses,
Oh, I see you are wearing those glasses.
Why would she do that, a female VP would only have that chance because of her husbands success anyhow Riiiiiight?
Could have been that way, although I distinctly remember voting on this. But sure, maybe you’re right and some ineffable force related in some vague way to ‘time’ swayed the nomination tally, after the vote.
This fact checks out. Thought I should say, lest you think I am just here to pick on you.
One notable robber baron definitely did not stump for her, and a tech lord was running for the R nomination (and she was a woman… she must have married really well, too bad ‘time’ wasn’t on her side!)
For the 5th time. Trump has been a perpetual candidate, and that smell isn’t something he stepped in on the way over.
yes, the electoral college is hard to comprehend. Might be time to fix that.
Is “the right feminist candidate” a massive misogynist like you are?
Here is one more important note:
The number of people who voted for Trump is similar to the number of Republican voters in the previous two elections against Obama. So even if everyone who voted for Turmp is a Misogynist, they were most likely voting R anyway. So remembering this fact I would have to say that no, misogyny didn’t give Trump an apparent boost.
Hillary failed to get left leaning and moderate voters who voted for Obama in the past two elections to come out and vote this time. So either those who didn’t vote did so out of misogyny, or because they didn’t like her as a candidate. Though it is difficult to say what their motivations for staying home were.
That may be true, but it isn’t misogyny then. I think this sort of explanation for the election is (a) wrong (b) is going to cost us, with ‘us’ being people who like our planet unexploded and minimally drowned.
The people who refused to vote for Hilary largely didn’t do it because they just don’t think a woman can be president. They may have ultimately harmful views about women, certainly, but if we assume that this is the reason, then we are stuck. You can’t convince people out of misogyny. Especially not with the current mode of convincing which involves insults and yelling.
If it is misogyny then the rational thing to do is to not run a female candidate again: breaking ceilings is nice, but if the alternative is eight years of Trump then it’d be criminal to try. And this is terrible and also a stupid idea. If Warren had run, she would have won. Easy. Hilary wasn’t unpopular because she is a woman. She was unpopular because she was Hilary. The lesson to be learned is to not run a warmongering neoliberal again. Guy, gal, undecided, in-between, or other, it doesn’t matter, the Democratic base has made its wishes known. No more warmongering neoliberals who have tried to wash themselves of their past racism and misogyny with limited success.
It’s a shame it took a Trumpocalypse to make the lesson plain, but there you go. It’d be ruinous if it took something worse to finally ram the lesson home. And trust me, there’s plenty worse than Trump.
You are right; I re-read it and discussion of Trump’s sexual predation is present at the beginning of the article, interwoven with politics. The body of the piece is a distancing, textbook style discourse on “types of sexism”, and then the last few paragraphs directly discuss rape (rather than the predatory humiliation tactics that Trump is actually known to be guilty of, in keeping with the tactics he uses to diminish his male opponents).
The manipulation is as I described however:
In the first few paragraphs Trump’s documented crimes are enumerated. In the body of the piece, his voters are belittled with distancing language and patronizingly corralled for the readers’ viewing. In the last few paragraphs, crimes much greater than those he’s known to have committed are discussed in a way that conflates them in the reader’s mind with those he’s actually guilty of. People who believe he is evil incarnate can come away from reading this charged up with outraged. Suffused with righteous indignation, they can avoid thinking about how a candidate who spent her career doing Wall Street’s bidding might have damaged Democrats’ electoral chances. Or the distributed electoral decline that came before her run last year.
It’s a perfect micro-example of contemporary liberalism. It’s a perfect example of why heels like Trump keep winning.
Can we please put on the table just what the acceptable degree of sexual assault is?
grabbing a pussy is rape. If you’d like to argue about this, or what degree of sexual assault is too far for a rich man, then I hope you have all daughters.
Suffused with righteous indignation, they can avoid thinking about how a candidate who spent her career doing Wall Street’s bidding might have damaged Democrats’ electoral chances. Or the distributed electoral decline that came before her run last year.
Or how much more damage will be done while they flounce around online comments sections… luxuriating in their moral superiority while our world burns.
5 women have run for President since 1872.
“Adam Ruins Everything” had an election special that went over the past women who ran for President. Interesting enough was the tactic of harassment they received was similar to HRCs. They were all mostly referred to as devils plus some.
It’s def worth watching:
He also goes into the “Making America Great Again” slogan and how it has been used in the past a’la Regan and earlier.
Food for thought: HRC Being the Devil
(sadly my evangelical relative shared this with me cause he believed it)
I see this bandied about everywhere as a “reason” to write HRC off and it seems like a silly argument to me. Since when does the GOP NOT do the same thing. Isn’t the goal to win the election?
Political perks
Ritsch said the system is likely to remain for the foreseeable future - mostly because both Democrats and Republicans have benefited, leaving little will on either side to change it.
“Having a member of your party in the White House is a perk for any candidate in that party,” he said. “He comes with all the trappings of the president and you as a candidate really don’t have to pay for any of it.”
It’s as if people don’t feel “they” have glasses on. 
Again, I get a much different reading from that article than you do. You see it as demonizing Trump and Trump supporters. I see it as trying to ask, “How can someone be a good person and vote for a misogynist?” And the answer to that question is, “Because misogyny is not all about ‘women are bad,’ but also all of this other, supposedly positive stuff, that allows ‘good’ women to be treated well, and only ‘bad’ women to be mistreated.”
The mention of the rape stuff at the end seems more along the lines of “once you’re in that mindset, it’s easy to think of women who get mistreated as ‘bad,’ as opposed to the men doing the mistreating,” which goes back to the central thesis of how Trump got elected after doing horrible things.
The narratives aren’t mutually exclusive. Five Thirty Eight reported that if Clinton’s lead was 2 million votes more, she would have won. Either swinging one million Trump voters or energizing two million progressives would have won her the election. There’s room to work on both issues.
I’ll have to read it again. The distancing, lecturing language in the body of the piece was off-putting to me; it smacked of belittlement rather than simple explication. For example, this quote from the lecture section:
"while benevolent sexism may put women on a pedestal,[…] If women can be separated into good girls and bad, and only bad girls get punished, it justifies male dominance and absolves men of blame for treating women unfairly.
And it’s why Trump, despite the long list of sexist words and deeds to his name, can insist that “nobody respects women more” than he does — and why some people, including women, actually believe him."
It seems reasonable and merely descriptive until the final clause in the last sentence… when all the patronizing comes home at once. The writer’s disdain for them slips out beneath the calm, descriptive language there at the very end. Her assumption that some sort of stupidity or emotionalism is at the root of their decision for Trump is embedded in that phrase.
I’ve met quite a few die-hard Republican Trump voters. Very few to none of them believed Trump ‘respected’ women. They voted for him in spite of it. They voted for him to vote against Hillary Clinton. They had no illusions about his character (meaning lack thereof), despite the ‘benevolent sexism’ angle.
If everybody was in agreement that the candidate is a misogynist asshole who doesn’t respect women and they decided that wasn’t a deal-breaker then it’s pretty darn hard to argue that social acceptance of misogyny didn’t play a major force in the election.
No, it is not BS. It is reality. The irrational childishness over Clinton’s defeat is shocking. Some grown up behaviour would be more productive than all this boo-hooing that is keeping cowards in a vortex. You want change? Grow a pair of ovaries and fight, not whine. There are female prime ministers and presidents in less progressive places. If they can do it, then there is no excuse, but lately, the left loves to wallow in excuses. Enough is enough because it is dragging down everyone else in the bargain.
The only misogyny here is the offensive and mindless babbling on Vox. A postmortem kvetch about how a woman was fell by big bad villains is justifying a damsel-in-distress narrative, but that is precisely what happens when you to try to pass a powerful man’s little woman as a feminist.
A campaign is a fight. It is war. The end. War is binary. Yes, no, win, lose. You overthink, you lose. The left have gotten into a very dysfunctional habit of telling everyone else how deficient they are and what they are doing wrong without ever pondering the possibility they too have some serious self-examination and change to go through themselves.
In that, they are no better than the right, but then a pragmatist came along with a big needle to burst the left’s bubble, and though he also popped the right’s bubble by trampling on their golden boy sure-thing Jeb Bush, they at least are trying to make the most of the situation.
Where did the Clinton campaign go wrong?
The better question is how could someone snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
Everything was aligned for her. Corporate America knew she was coming, and in anticipation of it, got the ball rolling with all sorts of pseudo-feminist vibes, ad campaigns, social media stuff, and so on. Never has feminism been so posh as it has been for the last four years. What a great coronation. Hollywood was all on board with great shows like Veep and Madam Secretary, too, and eventually, when Bernie couldn’t secure the presidential nomination, journalists all got on board singing how wonderful Clinton would be if she got to be president. Yay!
The Bushes got on board, too, endorsing her as well many foreign media, dignitaries, and a laundry list of A-listers. No one in the history of election campaigning got that kind of push — not the white male rich opponent, but her. No one can complain about it being rigged against Clinton, she got the royal Real Housewives treatment of getting something because of the man she married, and they even snatched a feminist banner from the real deals to give to her to wave.
But then Trump ran the campaign she should have: he went crawling into holes and courted the poor and dispossessed, promising them a better life if they trusted him enough with their votes.
Did Clinton do the same? Not a chance. She didn’t kick off her campaign at a battered women’s shelter, rape crisis centre, or a sweatshop where women were exploited. She wore her pantsuits lecturing people in some very nice places.
Misogyny was an advantage, not a handicap here. In any given campaign, you have to prove you can stand up to opposition. Sexism is not some new, unknown threat. Women know that one cold; thus, standing up to it should be a breeze. You can plan an entire campaign on it, from rape culture on university campuses, sexual harassment and pay inequity at the workplace, domestic violence at home, and show how lousy all the stuff is on the economy for both men and women and then sell your vision of making it better for everyone with your platform. Let’s fund education; let’s have business grants for female entrepreneurs; let’s have policies for childcare and let’s finally get down to business dealing with the hands that rock the world.
If it were me, you can bet I would be crawling through every rabbit hole, finding every single woman who was wronged and retreated, and I would give her my word that she could trust me, and my word is my bond. I wouldn’t be coiffed and pressed as I stumped because you’re not there to vogue or impress people. I would be talking to everyone from disabled elderly women being abused and fleeced at the nursing homes, at daycares where harried single mothers were trying to get by, on the streets with hookers finding out what they need, in boardrooms seeing what female executives were dealing with and what they needed, putting the sexists on notice that I mean business and I eat sexists for breakfast.
Because my estrogen has no trouble standing up to testosterone.
But no, we have a woman who gets into a gladiatorial arena, thinking it is a place you go for a coronation. Don’t enter a place where the entire point is to prove you can get your butt whipped mercilessly, but you are stronger than the strongest blow the other guy can download on your face as you wipe the floor with his if you can’t hack it . That is the reason elections are supposed to be horrifyingly brutal — to give an electorate comfort in knowing what you are willing to endure to keep them protected. It is not the time or place to play out your Mary Sue fantasy. Having a glass ceiling to break? Where did she buy that empty and uninspired symbol? Hobby Lobby?
Clinton lost because she had a clueless campaign and now we have to endure some wallow on Vox about how terrible it is being deficient to an obstacle. Being president is nothing but dealing with resistance and obstacles from every corner imaginable, including from your allies. If you can’t handle a few cowardly and insecure sexists, you can’t handle the job.
You have to deliver when you arrive, and Clinton could not deliver, making it unnecessary for her to arrive at all.
And worst of all, she didn’t even have a concession speech and was taken completely unaware. Huh? That was beyond disgraceful, but it was disturbing. You are running for the most important position in your country and you had no Plan B?
I am certain if the shoe was on the other foot, the left would have done nothing but harp on Trump not having the courage or brains to have a concession speech ready for the rest of eternity. That was inexcusable.
Clinton blew an unprecedented advantage that no woman can expect to have ever again. The next woman cannot expect Hollywood, The Beltway, Madison Avenue, or Silicon Valley to all chip in with their 24k pompoms, telling the little people they are not cool if they don’t vote for their candidate. But that’s what happens when you don’t think things through.
But it is not a bad thing. May the next woman learn from the mistakes of Clinton and turn away the help to fight on her own — and fight with every grain of her being to get it. May she be someone who is no one’s daughter or wife, but is her own woman who makes them howl as she roars. Women do not have their own war manuals and it is about time that they stop being passive and work on it.
Blaming men for everything that goes wrong in a woman’s life insinuates that women are ineffectual and weak, and nothing could be further from them truth.
Clinton lost because she ran an inferior and inefficient campaign that did not allocate her resources properly. It was not misogyny, the FBI, the Russians, or fake news that lost it for her. She should have risen above it. You can always find an excuse because the world is nothing but a cacophony of things that can hold you back if you let it. The time for excuses is over.
Misogyny was not the sole reason for Clinton’s defeat. I don’t believe anyone here is claiming she was an otherwise perfect candidate. But misogyny was ABSOLUTELY enough of a factor to make the difference between a win and a loss.
Just because it’s POSSIBLE for a woman to get elected to high office doesn’t mean that misogyny doesn’t remain a serious obstacle to doing so. Again, do you believe that the election of Barack Obama means that black people no longer face racism as a serious obstacle, or that racism didn’t play a significant role in recent elections? I find it hard to believe you could be that naive.
