Mark Ames wrote this in 2008, and it’s still true: There are a lot of men who hate Hillary because she’s a woman, and they’re not even conscious of it. Every female blogger I spoke to in 2007-8 saw it, and most tried to address it, despite overwhelming attacks FROM DEMOCRATS. (There were some women who hopped on the bandwagon, though.) Attack her politics all you want. But this was gendered. It was insane, it was primal, and it was violent. Most women bloggers managed to separate their defense of Clinton from her policies, because Jesus, it had to be done. If you want to read more, get Eric Boehlert’s “Bloggers On The Bus,” because he wrote about it in great detail:
And then there’s the doomed co-star Hillary. Poor Hillary, no matter how sweetly she soups up her cheek implants or blonds up her gray roots, and no matter how blandly she tries to out-bland Barack with her her flat monotone voice, she just can’t break out of her character role as America’s Misogyny Magnet: she’s the bitchy-neighbor in the bad sitcom who always gets the live studio audience to crow “oooo”: the minute the camera focuses on her, most men feel a kind of unmediated hate that’s completely beyond their control, a strain of perfectly preserved, primal misogyny locked up deep inside of just about every voting-age male’s psyche (if you men claim you haven’t felt it, you’re either monstrous liars or else you’re wearing a leather head harness with an inflatable mouth gag as you’re reading this).
Sure she’s as bland as Obama, perhaps even marginally blander, but at the animal level, she triggers a neurochemical jet that sets off the very first hate most men feel when they encounter a powerful and threatening woman (like, say, I dunno, your 4th grade teacher Mrs. McManus? or the dean Ms. Mead, the wrinkled-mouth Episcopalian baboon who kicked you out of school and told you you’d never amount to anything?).
For years now American men have been trying to attach some sort of moral or political significance to their Hillary hatred, but safely out here in Eurasia, I can tell the simple plain truth about it: it’s a misogyny that they can’t control. They hate her because she’s the embodiment of every woman they’ve ever hated since the time they opened their eyes. It can’t be explained, which is why it’s such an ugly yet pure hatred, and why everyone burns the candle on both ends to justify the hate in moralistic terms, or political terms, or anything but raw misogyny. She’s been taking the misogyny heat for a good 25 years from roughly 150 million Americans, maybe more, and it’s transformed her into the perfect male-ego punching bag, with just about as much soul and sensitivity as a thick leather bag full of padded stuffing can possibly have.
Mark Ames claims that “150 million Americans” hate Clinton because they’re misogynists. If that’s true then every man in America is a misogynist, which isn’t true, or lots of females are misogynists. Self-hating Jews, self-hating whites, and now we’ve identified self-hating females. Someday nobody will hate anybody including themselves. In the meantime if the misogynists refuse to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a women…….oh well. Ask Eric Cantor how it feels to not get the votes of the “Jew haters.” All of that aside, Clinton is a poser who has really bad ideas and even worse solutions.
Yes to this post. A thousand time yes. And dear God do I get tired of it. Nor do they stop with Hillary. Every single female politician out there is not the Perfect Woman. If she was, then of course she’d be too fuckable to be taken seriously.
Did I mention I’m TIRED of it?
And that “primal hatred men feel” bullshit is a typical misdiagnosis. Women don’t have male adults who treat them badly? They do, and yet somehow they don’t have this reflexive viciousness. Vicious instant unreasoning contempt is the usual reaction of a privileged class to those they’re screwing. How else could you justify participating in that crap to yourself?
Women in America should thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in Saudi Arabia. Half empty—-half full. “It’s a man’s world,” according to Mr. Brown. 🙂
On behalf of all women, we feel much better now that at least we’re not being beheaded. What a silly thing to say.
I think this article overstates the problem. Yes, there are (vocal) men out there who viscerally HATE Hilary, because she’s a woman and because she’s associated with Bill.
Yet there are plenty of us men out there who are perfectly fine with women, and women leaders. I would love to have dinner with Hillary, but I disagree with her Third Way politics. Elizabeth Warren — three cheers! Lead the way!
All I can tell you is, there were a LOT of so-called progressive men who said really vicious, gendered things about Clinton and anyone who defended her. That’s all — you didn’t even have to support her, you just had to defend her from sexist attacks and you were slammed. I can tell you that female bloggers are not looking forward to reliving it.