First let me give a proper hello and remind everyone that my snarky post wasn’t intended to target any specific individuals. I was completely fascinated by the article and the responses and read as many strings of responses as I could. After hours of reading I had to vent a little. I apologize for having a more judgmental us-vs-them tone in my post then intended. I can only say that sleep deprivation will indeed make you cranky. The majority of posts that I’ve read have been quite intelligently written and insightful.
Second, it really does no good to tell me about what other people have posted on the site in the past, because, as you have pointed out, I am new. You speak to me as if I’ve missed part of the conversation because I haven’t read all the other posts on the site from the last year. The story here on this page speaks for itself, so I saw no reason why I shouldn’t jump in with my two cents, despite having no prior history in this online community. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but there it is. I’m just as likely to forget about this site and never post here again.
This story was not about people’s justified skepticism of Hillary Clinton. It was about people (not) liking her.
It’s about how much heavier the scrutiny and judgement against Hillary Clinton (and other females in power) has been than it would be against a similar male politician. Perhaps I can explain my annoyance a little better: I think I could look at this issue differently if I had ever seen anyone make an actual personal acknowledgement that her gender is, at least in part, responsible for some tiny bit of their own dislike of her. I’d never expect to find this from people on the right, of course, but it’s rather sad to see that many people on the left are in such obvious denial. What we see is a lot of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.
"Well I know all of the perfectly legitimate reasons that I don’t like her, and none of them have to do with her gender. Here’s an article from Brietbart that tells you why!"
or one of my favorites : “I am allowed to dislike a female candidate without being accused of sexism. Its not my fault she’s so horrible!”
The vastly different way that she is treated from President Obama and Bernie Sanders is such a powerful example because she is running as some kind of amalgam of the two now, but then, this is bad because it shows how “inauthentic” she is, right? People don’t like her when she’s trying to be herself, but they don’t like her when she’s trying to be what they want her to be either. For months veryone says how much she needs to reach out to millennials, how its her responsibility to reach out to them . But how can she really when the many who have made up their minds against her simply don’t want to hear it.
I guess my point is that while many acknowledge the existence of this bias, few will own up to it and/or attempt to change. There has indeed been a whole lot of rationalizing by the people who dislike her to make the usual over-the-top negative emotional response to her seem justified. It is not. I am reminded of a study done on gender bias in fields of science, which are dominated by men, where it was shown that not only are the male scientists less impressed by the work of women in their fields, but they are also less inclined to give any credence to studies that suggest that such bias exists at all. That article can be found here: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13201.full
Anyway, sorry for the long post. Blah blah blah politics.
