Ok, thanks. This comes the closest to answering my question.
I would be interested to see examples of what you are talking about.
In any field, not just flawless, they have to do 150 percent better than any male in any position. I was running 26 freaking machine shops, “Get me a coffee honey” from salesmen coming in trying to sell me supplies. My fucking ass. As if it wasn’t on the freaking file corporate gives out that the boss is female. I go to a LBGQ bar for dancing with friends, women hitting on me are gracious about taking no for an answer, walk into any straight bar, men get nasty if you tell them no.
Bitter? Fuck yes. Men controlled my education [until my MOM invaded the school board, and ultimately ended up running it] Men controlled my work - I honestly can say, I have never worked for a company that had women running jack shit. They may have been low level management - office manager at a single branch, but actually running anything? Nope. Men control my fucking uterus now. Well, they would if I had a womb any longer, so fuck you men who want to keep me barefoot and pregnant.
A lot of the misogynist groundwork for Hillary was laid down while she was First Lady, literally decades ago. I don’t think my experience is unusual: I’m a progressive GenXer who grew up in a conservative household and there was an unending stream of contempt for First Lady Clinton from the whole Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Contract with America days. They mocked her and insulted her. The whole Monica Lewinsky scandal was an extra chance to portray her as a harpy, a shrew. It was deeply misogynistic, rooted in “boomer humor” views of women. “Women, amiright?” stuff.
Long after I had grown away from my dad’s politics, I kept a kneejerk assumption that Hillary was terrible. It took me a long time to see it in myself.
I am not a mod, but I would ask that you please take this nonsense hijack elsewhere.
in that case that would be pretty much be the definition of bigotry, i.e. someone who hates a specific identifiable group just because they belong to that group. A denial of bigotry in that case wouldn’t hold water.
I didn’t say she was a horrible person, I said that many people think she is not a very decent person. I don’t know if there is a distinction worth making there but it isn’t what I said and I’d prefer you challenge me on what I actually said.
Are you honestly open to the fact that that non-misogynistic reasons for dislike of Hilary are possible? If so, I’m sure you can be given lots of reasons but it is pointless to do so if you are going to dismiss them all with a claim of “misogyny” anyway.
You seem to be starting from the position that anyone criticising Hilary Clinton needs to prove that they are not doing so from a position of misogyny or hypocrisy. I don’t think that is a reasonable demand.
I dislike Klobuchar because she throws staplers at her employees. I don’t think I’m holding her to a different standard than I would a man.
She is actually not. She comes off as a pretty higher than average person in terms of likability for a person of her age and position.
Public perception of her dislikability was built up over years and years of relentless blanketing propaganda.
Boom. That’s it for me. Her hawkishness, her assertions that there was only so much that could be done to advance progressive causes and folks on the left should just settle (especially when it came to the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell compromise), and her utter stiffness as a politician turned me off from her. That said, I’m Canadian and never had the chance, but I would have yanked that lever for her in 2016 with great urgency because while she was in the comprehensible spectrum of “disappointing but what are you gonna do?” politicians, the other option was horrific. I was also a big Klobuchar fan, and quite like Kamala Harris, and I think the latter has really gotten the shaft from this administration in terms of her portfolio.
I always felt that folks didn’t get about Hillary Clinton was that people, politician or not, can be two different and seemingly contradictory things at once. That she could be the caring, child-of-the-sixties, forward looking politician with a desire to break the glass ceiling for women, that would meet someone in a crowd of fans who asked her for help on some issue and she’d immediately task her staff with resolving some burning injustice. And at the same time, she could also be revealed on tape to be a money-grubbing shill for Wall Street interests, who would take a quarter million for a speech in which she laughingly tells a room of bankers that she can’t explain the public the kind of things she’s telling them right now, and she does have their interests at heart, don’t worry about it. Both people can exist in the same body, but many people will only see one of those and base their entire opinion on it.
As for forgiving her husband for his repeated infidelities…personally, that rankled me the most. I’ve been cheated on and I know how devastating it is, and I wouldn’t stay with someone who strayed, so I can’t totally get into her headspace. I also have a number of married friends who live a polyamorous lifestyle, so I know there exist open consentual marriages. While I don’t think she and Bill ever had that, I do think that at some point in the late seventies or early eighties there was a conversation that went something like this.
“Look Hil, I guess you know this about me, I’ve always been a dog. I can’t help it, it’s just the way I’m wired. I love you, and I love Chelsea, more than anything. But it’s just in my nature to dip my pen in the company ink any chance I get. I’d understand if you want to leave, though I know it’ll hurt both of us career-wise, you more than me. For that, I’m truly sorry.”
“Alright Bill. I get that, and I think I always knew. And I know, that especially here in the South, I’ll come out the worse for it. So here’s my deal. I understand that you’ll have your adventures. I don’t like it, but that’s reality. Unless you cross an insane line with public scandal, I’ll stay with you and play the loyal Christian forgiving wife to maintain what support we can among the bubbas and bubbettes. But in return, you’re going to go balls-to-the-wall for me in supporting my political career. I’m not stopping at First Lady, there are a lot of class ceilings to break, and you’re going to give me your undying support and lend your downright creepy charisma to my campaigns. There’s the deal.”
I have zero evidence that conversation ever happened, but I’m convinced there was some kind of deal between them. And as someone who can’t get with a non-monogamous lifestyle (but different strokes), that soured me on her as well.
I think anyone denying that there was severe misogyny against Hillary Clinton is wearing blinders.
The people on the right who didn’t like her could be waved away on the grounds that they’d hate anyone who looked like they could win elections for the Democratic Party, and misogyny was just their tool du jour, in much the same way they targeted Barack Obama with racism and ethnic hatred.
But the many leftish people who held their noses and didn’t vote for her and had reasons often described her in the most disparagingly sexist way. All kinds of adjectives that would also apply to damn near every male person who has ever sought the job, plus a handful that are only ever aimed at women, and a handful that, if they did not apply, would conjure up a different set of adjectives that would be aimed at any female person seeking the office to show why a woman can’t do the job. She’s power-hungry. She wheels and deals. She wants to win more than she wants to stand for something transcendental. She’s conniving. She’s hawkish and might use the military instead of being a pacifist. She’d work with Republicans, so we can’t trust her. She’d push her own agenda and do sneaky manipulative things to achieve her goals, so we can’t trust her. She’s evil and mean to her enemies. She’s arrogant and bossy.
The only negative I saw her tagged with that I thought was authentic and a real problem for her was that she isn’t charismatic and doesn’t connect with a big audience. That was true. She wasn’t Oprah and she wasn’t Bill Clinton either.
Sure wish she’d won.
Whatever you might think of her personality, she was clearly heads and shoulders better qualified than The Former Guy and I was amazed that anyone even thought about voting for him instead of her. (Or to put it another way, if both presented resumes for the position, who would you have hired?)
I thought the US voters were approximately 30% racists and imbeciles, so I figured she would win about 70% of the popular vote against Trump, whose only appeal was to racists and imbeciles. When people complained that she ran a terrible campaign (I didn’t think so) or that she insulted good Americans by calling them foul names-- “deplorables” applied only to deplorables. Everyone else was exempt from that insult, but deplorables apparently felt that it DID apply to them and they didn’t like it-- I reduced that figure down to 60%, or roughly LBJ 1964 or Reagan 1984 territory. I was surprised when she won only 52% or whatever her popular margin was, and have since upped my estimate of how many racists and imbeciles there are in this sad country.
[quote=“Novelty_Bobble, post:26, topic:975482”]
Are you honestly open to the fact that that non-misogynistic reasons for dislike of Hilary are possible? If so, I’m sure you can be given lots of reasons but it is pointless to do so if you are going to dismiss them all with a claim of “misogyny” anyway.[/quote]
Don’t see where you got that.
I don’t think you are reading for comprehension. And I’m still waiting for your specifics.
Come on, you think that in 1993 there was more to be done? They did what they did and they were still absolutely pummeled for being left-wing loonies and anti-family. I was there. What they did at the time was extraordinarily brave and supportive of the LGB community in a way that no government had ever done before.
The only time gay people were even mentioned by prior administrations was when reporters pushed them to make a statement about HIV and the administration accused them of being gay.
And their strategy in that point has proven out. By incremental steps in an extraordinary Hirt period of time, culture-wise, the entire society has turned around on the issue of not just gay people in the military but everything else. I am endlessly amazed by how fast that happened. And the Democratic strategy of supporting only the smallest step before advancing to the next worlds like a charm.
This is just frankly none of your business to judge her on. You’re not in her marriage. Statistics show that the majority of people who experience infidelity in a marriage actually stay together. You’re personal experience with this issue is simply not applicable to a person you don’t know except through the media. And she has zero obligation to make you understand her position.
Hell, people’s perception (including the Dope!) of their own susceptibility to advertising and propaganda is hilariously delusional. Combined with the very human dislike of being shown (not “being” but “shown being”) wrong, we get a lot of it
Yes, there naturally will be some number of people who were never going to like her. But take anybody else with her politics, voting record, etc, remove the decades of unrelenting attacks, make her a man, and you have somebody the general public may not love but would accept as just another average politician.
So was I, and no it wasn’t.
That said, I don’t hold Bill’s anti-gay policies against Hillary.
This has been answered many, many times.
The overwhelming reason for Clinton’s problems is not misogyny, but that the fact that she’s widely viewed as an untrustworthy, dishonest, sleazy, corrupt politician who changes positions to gain political advantage. She somehow managed to lose the 2016 election to Trump despite his sharing those qualities in spades, mainly because enough idiots saw him as a fresh face who’d “clean out the swamp”. Enabling Trump’s win is enough in itself to get her on many people’s shit list.
It’s ironic that HRC supporters and enablers keep dredging up the misogyny angle, when her record shows she’s willing to overlook sexual harassment when it suits her.
Because she won’t STFU and go away.
I still think the U.S. will elect a woman president in my lifetime, and while she won’t be an ideal person, she won’t be dragging around more than a fraction of the baggage Hillary has acquired. HRC is a dead weight on the Democratic Party.
Politics is the art of the possible. They did what was possible. And they took the blowback for it with full force. I can’t imagine what you think what else they could have done.
This is where concern about gay rights was in the 1980s:
On Oct. 15, 1982, at a White House press briefing, reporter Lester Kinsolving asked Press Secretary Larry Speakes about a horrifying new disease called AIDS that was ravaging the gay community.
“What’s AIDS?” Speakes asked.
“It’s known as the ‘gay plague,’ ” Kinsolving replied.
Everyone laughed.
“I don’t have it,” Speakes replied. “Do you?” The room erupted in laughter again. Speakes continued to parry Kinsolving’s questions with quips, joking that Kinsolving himself might be gay simply because he knew about the disease. The press secretary eventually acknowledged that nobody in the White House, including Reagan, knew anything about the epidemic.
“There has been no personal experience here,” Speakes cracked. The room was in stitches.
You must be some kind of political genius to believe someone in that position could have done better.
This is what i am trying to say. The “conventional wisdom” that she was distinctly, unusually unlikable was iconstructed in the early 1990s by conservatives looking to tar Hillary. No one was attempting to detail her future political career: they weren’t worried about that. It was more like the “manish, ape-like Michelle Obama” shit we heard so much of during the Obama administration: it was an attempt to insult Clinton by suggesting he had this shrewish feminist for a wife (and ugly dog for a daughter). It was intrinsically misogynistic. She was unfeminine, and so inappropriate as a first lady, further highlighting how poor Clinton’s judgment was and how unsuited he was for the president.
By the time Hilary developed her own political identity, the idea that her biggest liability was being an unlikable bitch was just the conventional wisdom. I don’t know that anyone who knew her before she was targeted by Rush et al would have described her that way.
I mean, she was never Bill levels of shmooozy, but that’s not the same as unlikable, or even uncharismatic.
I honestly have no clue what Mysogny is.
Now Misogyny, yes there was plenty of that. There was also some attempts to label criticism of her as misogynistic, so all in all fairly standard political hits and counters, politics is dirty, whatdayaknow.
Her biggest problem was one that wasn’t of her own making. No not her gender. It was the fact she had the bad luck to be directly associated with three of the most charismatic politicians I have ever seen Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Anyone would look uninspiring in front of any of them but dear God, all three.