It’s not that Heather Wilhelm opposes the idea of a woman in the White House. But an idea is one thing, while the reality of Hillary Clinton is another.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Hillary Clinton’s problem is not that she’s a woman. Hillary Clinton’s problem is that she’s, well, Hillary Clinton.
Personally, I’d be fine with a woman president, and I think most Americans would be as well. If there’s a fantastic woman candidate in the next election, hooray!
But let’s keep it real: I also don’t care if there is ever a woman president. We could have male presidents for the rest of my lifetime, one after the other, and I wouldn’t be bothered, as long as they were good presidents. After all, as the painful process of the last few months have shown, it’s hard enough to find a decent presidential candidate at all, regardless of gender. Also, it seems kind of sexist to judge people based on their sex, but what do I know?
This blows the minds of many feminists, both old-guard and new, who are so worked up about being gender blind they’ve become completely gender obsessed. There’s Madeline Albright, who condemned women to a “special place in hell” for not supporting Hillary—Albright also appears in Vogue’s Hillary profile, helpfully noting that “women are very judgmental about one another,” which makes me suspect she might not like women at all—and Gloria Steinem, who accused female Bernie Sanders supporters of being in it for the “boys.”
Albright and Steinem have since walked back their remarks, but Bernie Sanders— God bless Bernie Sanders, who continues to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the wobbly spokes of intersectional social justice activism—has been more than happy to feed the outrage machine. Recently he hosted a rapper, Killer Mike, who infuriated feminists by correctly pointing out that a uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president. Standing up for Killer Mike, Sanders went even further: “No one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.”
This seems like common sense to me, but ooh, boy, did it make people mad. Across the leftist Internet, swarms of bees dive-bombed proverbial uptight bonnets; NARAL issued a huffy press statement, as is their wont; various heads exploded. Bernie’s remark came “perilously close,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted, righteous and disapproving, “to ‘how come there’s no white history month’ territory.”
This is all fairly silly, as most knee-jerk social-justice activism tends to be. Sadly, it’s also just one part of an endless, exhausting, self-perpetuating cycle. Over at the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg reminded the world of just that: Even when we do manage to get a female president, she wrote, that female president—the commander in chief of the most powerful military on earth—will still be terribly oppressed.