Susan Matthews at Slate (2019) asks herself why she wasn’t very excited about Kirsten Gillibrand’s bid to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. Here are some excerpts from Matthews’s article:
Gillibrand … has staked her career on elevating and helping women. Her platform was centered on issues like paid family leave, reproductive rights, and fighting sexual harassment and assault. And yet, she never even caught on among women. …
One thing that stood out throughout her campaign was the way she refused to disguise or mask her femininity. Not only is she unmistakably blond, her voice consistently described as girlish, but she also showed up to both debates in brightly colored sheath dresses (no blazers) wearing sparkly earrings and (probably) fake eyelashes. … “Yep, I am a woman!” her self-presentation seemed to say. “A very feminine one! And I’m running on woman-centered issues! Is there a problem?” …
FiveThirtyEight … acknowledg[ed] her other major trouble: the conflict she seems to have caused within the Democratic Party over her call for Al Franken’s resignation. …
I docked her campaign for never quite distinguishing her agenda from the other candidates’, many of whom took similar aggressive stances on family leave and reproductive freedom. … I was annoyed that her debate performance felt a bit cloying—she seemed to be constantly interrupting other candidates and blowing through her allotted speaking time. …
Gillibrand spent 15 years as a Manhattan attorney, married a venture capitalist, and ran for Congress in the district where her grandmother had been a political powerhouse. …
Harry Reid called her the “hottest” member of the Senate. (Gillibrand responded with her standard, measured disapproval ….) She managed to pivot from being an upstate congresswoman with an A rating from the NRA to a lean-left senator in a span of less than 10 years ….
Gillibrand cited Hillary as her inspiration for getting into politics …. Then in 2017 she said she thought Bill Clinton should have resigned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. …
Sexual assault and harassment are issues of crucial importance …. They’re just nowhere near enough—as yet—to determine a president.
Relying on Matthews’s article, we might therefore summarize Gillibrand as follows:
Kirsten Gillibrand is a New York lawyer who supported the NRA when that was convenient (but then switched to a completely opposing viewpoint), jumped on the #MeToo issue when she saw that was gaining traction, and supported Hillary Clinton when she looked like the future (but then turned on Bill when #MeToo called for it). She defines femininity as the ability to make herself as sexually attractive as possible, and then disparage men for noticing — except, of course, the rich man she chose to marry. In an era when China is bidding to dominate the world and humanity is facing climate catastrophe, Gillibrand called on America to share her preoccupation with issues of particular concern to
national security and low-income workers andprivileged women. As such, she takes supposedly “courageous” stands calling for the removal of men from office without hearing their side of the story — even when other leading women recognize that as an abusive mentality.
In the FiveThirtyEight article to which Matthews refers, Thomson-Deveaux (2019) cites a poll (August 9-11, 2019, p. 7) finding that, among Democratic presidential candidates, voters considered Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders most qualified to address gender equality. Note that two of those three are male. After two televised debates among candidates, only 1% of those poll participants named Gillibrand. The same poll (p. 8) found that only 3% of voters (and, according to Thomson-Deveaux, only 5% of female Democratic voters) considered gender equality their top issue. And that’s after two years of a #MeToo movement hyped with extraordinarily distorted coverage in major media.
Matthews is presumably expressing honest puzzlement over her own reactions. On one hand, Gillibrand was a strong leader on important gender issues; and yet, on the other hand, Gillibrand just didn’t excite Matthews or, it seems, many other women. Matthews concludes that sexual harassment is “of crucial importance” and yet, somehow, is “nowhere near enough—as yet—to determine a president.” Those remarks contradict each other. Sexual harassment may be of crucial importance in the lives of individuals who have had deeply harmful experiences of sexual harassment. And there certainly are enough corrupt researchers who define “sexual harassment” to include as many different kinds of experiences as possible, so as to make their research look important. But after all these years of gross exaggeration, it develops that only a small fraction of voters, male or female, share Matthews’s belief that the topic of sexual harassment is “crucial” within the context of presidential politics.
When Democratic voters consider Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders more qualified to address issues of gender equality than any female candidate other than Elizabeth Warren, you begin to suspect that the media’s years of turning women against men have mostly succeeded among a small and (judging by Gillibrand) seemingly cynical set of people whose real problem may be that they just don’t like men. True, many friendships and business relationships have been poisoned by that hostility. But as often happens when extremists steer the discussion, the theories have departed from the general public reality.
The general public reality was expressed in the presidential election of 2016. Many factors worked against Hillary Clinton. A particularly noticeable factor was her belief in her entitlement to be president because she was a woman. That was apparently not enough. Hopefully it never will be. To be president, you should be extraordinary. Donald Trump is. And what’s even more extraordinary is that his way of being extraordinary would appeal to anywhere near 25%, let alone 50%, of Americans. But it did, and that’s what the Democratic Party will hopefully learn from at some point.
In a previous post, I criticized a post-election Slate article whose writer reflected on Hillary’s loss with these words, “In America, men have always ruled, and right now I wonder if they always will.” That writer made numerous remarkable statements. Consider this one, and my reaction:
“I never wore one of those T-shirts proclaiming ‘The Future is Female,’ but I came close to believing it.” That was a great slogan for Clinton to be associated with (and, post-election, to embrace explicitly), assuming she didn’t mind scaring post-Hecession men who were already worried about their futures. But you can see how it might appeal to people whose attitude was, “Who cares what men think?”
The writer of that earlier Slate article was evidently stunned to discover that all that pro-Hillary pseudo-feminist snark actually didn’t impress voters. I say “pseudo” because I am a real feminist, in this sense: I don’t think mentally healthy people equate “femininity” with being sexually attractive. Being “hot” did not make Gillibrand more feminine. Nor do I think that privileged women willing to do anything to achieve wealth and power are good examples of how women differ from men, or of anything special that women have to offer to the world.
The solution to Matthews’s puzzlement is that Gillibrand personifies neither femininity nor the change that Obama promised but was too timid to deliver. Elite women who marry up, as Gillibrand did, exemplify a mistaken belief that the best women are those who are comfortable in the political and economic conditions created largely by powerful and often exploitative men. That belief perpetuates that world. To defeat Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to be someone who can change it. Gillibrand was obviously not that person. Fake feminism fools few.
Ironically, Gillibrand does seem strong and intelligent enough to have achieved real change. She just didn’t seem to understand that the world involves more than her own apparent hostility toward men. It is understandable that a highly attractive woman might get sick of sexual attention — too much, and of the wrong kind. But most people don’t have that problem. We seem to think there are other things to worry about.
On Behalf of Men 