No, Gloria, I'm Not Boy-Chasing

Hillary v. Bernie. As a registered Democrat in a state with a primary, I’ve been giving much thought to this decision. I have supported Hillary in the past; I supported her in the 2008 primary. I am aching to see a female president. I am frustrated that progressives’ new hope is another old white man. I want very much to believe that Hillary Clinton is the right candidate for president.

Over the last couple of weeks though, I have learned a lot. I have delved more deeply into each candidate’s history, evolution, and own words, and the more I learn and contemplate, the more I am reluctantly dragged into understanding that when it comes to the policies, Bernie Sanders is the far superior candidate for my worldview.

This weekend, Gloria Steinem informed me that suchevaluation is just a march to where the boys are, and Madeline Albrightinformed me that there’s a special place in hell for me.

Oh no, ladies. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to guilt-trip smart, thoughtful, legitimately conflicted women into supporting Hillary just because of her vagina. I certainly wouldn’t support a Fiorina or Palin candidacy; your comments suggest that I should.

I have tremendous respect for Hillary Clinton. I am well aware that the fight for true sex/gender equality is far from over. I understand, my own wishes for a non-gendered society notwithstanding, that we live in a culture which is much more difficult to navigate as a woman than as a man. She is impressive, and she is a role model for how to succeed within the system.

The problem is that the system is broken.

That is what the voices backing Bernie Sanders are saying. It’s not enough to take one step forward and two steps back all the time, pushing through policies that are solely for show, that don’t actually take any steps toward addressing the plight of the poor, of people of color, of the truly marginalized in our society. Some critics point out that even if Hillary Clinton is great for privileged straight cis white women, she has never been an advocate for the populations that suffer the most.

Ms. Steinem’s and Ms. Albright’s comments actually underscore what Hillary’s problem is in reaching progressive women. Both comments suggest that women who support Bernie are stupid, uninformed, or evil. I know I am neither, and I resent that suggestion. While I would never base my vote on being insulted by a third-party supporter of a candidate, these comments sure didn’t pull me any further into the fold. To these white women who have succeeded within the establishment, it is as plain as the nose on my face that obviously I should be supporting the female candidate. It’s a reflection of their business-as-usual mentality, and business-as-usual is exactly what we need to change.

Ms. Steinem “apologized” yesterday. I use quotation marks because her words don’t go anywhere near admitting that by suggesting that female Bernie Sanders supporters were all about the boys, she was engaging in the same kind of stereotypical assumptions that she has struggled to fight! She would do well to remember what she wrote last year when reflecting on the Clinton/Obama primary battle of 2008: “Soon, a person or a group’s choice of one candidate was assumed to be a condemnation of the other. I could feel fissures opening up between people who had been allies on issues for years. The long knives of reporters, plus a few shortsighted partisans in both campaigns, deepened those fissures until they bled.”

I agree, Gloria. That’s a bad thing. So stop doing it.