I am just trying to understand a thread of conversation that I have been reading and hearing lately. A thread that sounds an awful lot like the mansplaining that women have been getting from misogynist tools for decades.
I have seen rank and file supporters denigrate millennial and gen-x women for choosing Bernie Sanders here and out in the world. Saying that “they don’t know what they really want”, or that they are “not informed enough to have a real opinion”. But, here is the thing… that is the same rhetorical method that has been used by men to belittle women ever since a woman stood up and demanded to be treated as an equal.
But, I can handle that a handful of people are not really embracing what feminism is… or how to speak to somebody and not talk down to them. I get that… we do not all speak and write as a way of living. We do not all have the practice of experience to be well spoken.
Which is why when I hear Gloria Steinem say that young women are only supporting Sanders to “meet boys” or when Madeline Albright says that there is a “special place in hell” for women who support Sanders… I am left dumbfounded. Have Clinton, Steinem, and Albright not undergone enough people trivializing their opinions and their thoughts, because of their gender, to understand that when they echo the same bullshit that they and every other woman has received over the decades… that they are making themselves part of the problem? Do they not see the sexism encased in their own words?
Secretary Clinton, when your surrogates are wielding the rhetorical weapons of sexism against women who don’t support you… you lose the moral strength of the argument of feminism. You cannot use sexism as a weapon in one breath and in the next claim...
We are still living with a double standard. I know it. Every woman I know knows it, whether you’re in the media as a woman, or you’re in the professions or business or politics.
Because you are correct… in this scenario we are living a double standard, one which you are perpetuating.
