athena
athena's JournalMargaret Thatcher was not an American president.
Please don't pretend that the United States is not a more macho country than the U.K.
As for Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, neither of them ever got close to winning the presidency. Hillary was very popular when she was a Senator and when she was Secretary of State. It's when she campaigned for a new office that she became unpopular.
http://qz.com/624346/america-loves-women-like-hillary-clinton-as-long-as-theyre-not-asking-for-a-promotion/
We beg Clinton to run, and then accuse her of feeling entitled to win. Several feminist writers have analyzed the Clinton yo-yo. Melissa McEwan sees a deliberate pattern of humiliation, which involves building [Clinton] up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.
If you find this hypothesis unlikely, theres Ann Friedmans explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in the catch-22 of female ambition, Friedman writes: To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.
Its not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself. Yet it seems odd that even when Clinton ascends to ever-greater positions of powerfrom first lady to senator, from senator to secretary of statewe start liking her again once shes landed the job. Its not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself.
Misogyny is the reason why she lost.
Without misogyny, she would have won in a landslide.
Too many people in this country, male and female, are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of the most powerful country in the world being lead by a woman. We are not as advanced and open-minded as we think we are. We still see powerful women as witches. We still think something must be wrong with a woman who is ambitious. We still hate women. We still want to live in a world where women go out of their way to reassure all of us that they accept their second-class status; we all love women who make it clear that they are not interested in challenging the status quo.
Election day was a heart-breaking day for women everywhere. It has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that everyone, male or female, sees women as second-class citizens.
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