There is no version of Hillary that won't be vilified.
It is impossible to ignore the specialized purity test that is applied to Hillary Clinton in her policy proposals, her political strategy, and her fundraising. Even though she operates in ways that are common to her peers in politics, she is singled out with a type of disdain and personal animus that is as careless as it is unexamined. This special ire is not in the neighborhood of advocacy or even raw politics. For a lot of people watching this Primary unfold, the attempts to undermine and delegitimize a thoroughly vetted, experienced, and popular Democratic candidate for President is impossible to not take personally.
Mind you, she can take it. She has been running this gauntlet for over 2 decades.
It’s the rest of us who support her who are viewing the belittlement and derision from supposed progressive sources with an increasing amount of alarm and anger. We are speaking out. “It’s a way, however small, to start shifting the cultural dialogue, to allow for a world where women aren’t suffocated or crushed by our expectations of them—a world where Hillary, and every future female president or presidential candidate, can focus on the tasks at hand, and not have to climb over a barbed-wire fence of hatred in order to change the world. “
As the stand up comedian Cameron Esposito noted, in a recent interview with Samantha Bee on Vulture, it makes her feel unsafe to hear the way it is common to talk about Hillary.
[CE] Well, the final thing I want to talk to you about, it's the most serious. I'm so stressed out about what's happening with Hillary. Do you feel the amount of misogyny on your end? Just being on the internet, being in the world?
[SB]I have been very surprised. I feel like I'm very cynical and I've just inhabited this world for a long time, and I am really shocked by how much people don't want a female president. It has really taken me by surprise. I'm gobsmacked by it.
[CE] I feel the same way. I think the way she's being talked about feels very personal to me. When I look at the words people use about her, and it's about her tone of voice, or just that she's a crazy bitch, which is not even language I thought people used anymore. After all these years of people asking what it's like to be a woman in comedy, I thought that we were in a different place than we are.
[SB] I'm shocked by how many reasonable people wouldn't vote for her for reasons that are so in their DNA that they're not even really aware that they're just reacting to her like she's their mom or something. It has really astonished me. We're gonna be covering Hillary a lot, and I'm really excited to do it.
[CE] I'm really glad that you're doing it. It's really important to have a woman weighing in. It's not even pro-Hillary, first of all, I fucking love her, but it's not even that, it's that people aren't even talking about what's actually happening, and I just think it's wonderful that you're doing the thing you're doing.
[SB]It's gonna be a wild year. I'm anticipating a lot of peaks and valleys.
[CE] You know what else? It also makes me feel unsafe in the way people are talking about her, because I'm so shocked by it, and then I'm like, "Oh, people really hate women. I thought people just hated women but people really hate women." And it had made me realize for the first time what black people have been going through for the last eight years. Obviously, I know racism is happening, but I don't think I realized.
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